New Deal Revisionism

Submitted by Conceptual Guerilla on Wed, 2007-06-13 22:54.

As George Orwell once explained, whoever controls the past, controls the present. This accounts for a number conservative proclivities, which would appear to be contradictory. On the one hand, conservatives are big defenders of mythological George-Washington-and-the-cherry-tree history. Except of course, for when they aren't. That would be whenever history -- even well accepted, well documented history -- conflicts with their ideology.

So it is with the New Deal. Even before it was "history," while the New Deal was in full swing, cheap labor conservatives had no use for it. They claimed that the depression would cure itself, and anyway, it wasn't the government's business to concern itself with millions of unemployed. Just the other day, right on the pages of the Wall Street Journal -- where else? -- appeared an article entitled How To Think About The 1930's.

O’Hanlon, Pollack stop sticking to the president’s script

The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack certainly know how to raise a fuss. On Monday, their op-ed on the war in Iraq appeared in the NYT and immediately became The Most Important Opinion Piece Ever, at least as far as Bush and his supporters are concerned.

The two, who recently returned from an eight-day visit to Iraq, argued that U.S. forces are “finally getting somewhere in Iraq.” O’Hanlon and Pollack added that they were “surprised by the gains” they saw, and now believe there’s a potential for “sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”

Democrats take home few victories

By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers

Democrats promised voters a lot in exchange for winning back the majority in Congress this year: a change of course in Iraq, a return to old-school bipartisanship and a broad domestic agenda. As lawmakers return to their home states for the annual August recess, the results are mixed.

Paul Krugman: A Test for Democrats

It’s been a good Democrats, bad Democrats kind of week. The bill expanding children’s health insurance that just passed in the House makes you want to stand up and cheer. Reports that Senator Charles Schumer opposes plans to close the hedge fund tax loophole make you want to sit down and cry.

Let’s start with the good news: The House bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says would provide coverage to five million children who would otherwise be uninsured.

Markets Fall as Lender Woes Keep Mounting

By VIKAS BAJAJ

Published: August 4, 2007

Stocks tumbled yesterday on fears that the worsening ills in the mortgage and debt markets could soon take a significant toll on consumers, businesses and the overall economy.

The latest decline capped a volatile two weeks on Wall Street in which the stock market has swung wildly from day to day, reflecting rising uncertainty about the outlook for markets and the risks plaguing the economy. The biggest moves lately have often occurred shortly before trading closed.

A Big Win Against Corporate Control of Water

By Megan Tady, In These Times
Posted on August 4, 2007, Printed on August 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58589/

Bill Lokyo never expected to find himself embroiled in a six-year battle over water with a multinational corporation and city officials in Stockton, Calif.

"We all thought this would only be a one-year fight," Lokyo says.

But Lokyo and the group Concerned Citizens Coalition of Stockton (CCOS) felt compelled to challenge a rushed deal that turned the city's publicly owned water system into a for-profit venture. This month, their perseverance paid off when the city finally sent privatization packing.

California Severely Limits Electronic Voting

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on August 4, 2007, Printed on August 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58852/

Saying California's touch-screen electronic voting machines can not prevent hackers or partisans who want to alter vote counts, Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced late Friday that she will remove thousands of the machines from use in California's new early 2008 presidential primary next Feb. 5. Southern California - from San Diego to Orange County to Los Angeles - will most seriously affected.

Bowen issued a series of directives that will allow individual California precincts to use only one touch-screen machine manufactured by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems, if those manufacturers make security improvements well before next year's presidential primary. Even with those improvements, Bowen said those brands were not secure enough to be fully outfit a precinct, which typically use a half-dozen or more of the same voting machines. Instead the lone machine will primarily be used by disabled voters, who in surveys, say they prefer the touch-screen machines.

The Last Days of Democracy

Posted on Aug 2, 2007

Truthdig speaks with Elliot Cohen, author of “The Last Days of Democracy,” who argues that the United States is in political and cultural decline, with media and telecommunications giants engaged in “a well-organized effort to hijack America.”

Click here to listen to this interview.

Transcript:

James Harris: Welcome to another edition of Truthdig. This is James Harris sitting down with Josh Scheer. On the phone we are talking to Elliot Cohen, the author of “The Last Days of Democracy.” Elliot, let’s start with your theory. For the most part, you’re saying that our government in the United States is coming to an end. And that we are headed toward a dictatorship, toward authoritarian rule. The idea that we will one day be like Nazi Germany was ... is hard for a lot of Americans to swallow. Why do you believe it to be true?

Elliot Cohen: We are not saying things off the top of our heads; we do have the operations and secret prison camps in Europe, we torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. This regarding the Geneva Conventions and the NSA spying programs warrantlessly. Bush is issuing signing statements, which is tantamount to nullifying congressional lawmaking powers. Cancellation of habeas corpus, enabling individuals as enemy combatants just by virtue of whether the president deems that hostile to U.S. interests. I mean this goes on and on for individual facts as to why one might say that America is becoming a dictatorship. And as far as the issues of the media and how the media is being controlled, I think there’s many insiders who admit the same facts that I’ve stated, in fact, they come from such—, I mean, the issue here is not that the media is somehow an ideologue in cahoots with the government for ideological purposes. It’s rather that the media is a moneymaking machine and is being controlled by the purse-strings—through the government.

Death rate for U.S. children falls

Frank Greve | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: August 03, 2007 07:11:39 AM

WASHINGTON — Things are looking up for Dr. Catherine Webb, a pediatric cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. "When I was in training in the `80s, this was a pretty depressing specialty," she said. "But it's not anymore."

True enough. The death rate from heart disease among children is about half what it was in 1980, according to a compendium of federal child-health statistics released last month.

Ceramic tubes could cut greenhouse gas emissions from power stations

Engineers urge governments to make their new technology attractive via carbon credit economy

Greenhouse gas emissions from power stations could be cut to almost zero by controlling the combustion process with tiny tubes made from an advanced ceramic material, claim engineers today (3 August 2007).

The material, known as LSCF, has the remarkable property of being able to filter oxygen out of the air. By burning fuel in pure oxygen, it is possible to produce a stream of almost pure carbon dioxide, which has commercial potential for reprocessing into useful chemicals.

European heat waves double in length since 1880

The most accurate measures of European daily temperatures ever indicate that the length of heat waves on the continent has doubled and the frequency of extremely hot days has nearly tripled in the past century. The new data shows that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heat wave events in western Europe by approximately 30 percent.

Paul Della-Marta and a team of researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland compiled evidence from 54 high-quality recording locations from Sweden to Croatia and report that heat waves last an average of 3 days now—with some lasting up to 4.5 days—compared to an average of around 1.5 days in 1880. The results are published 3 August in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The researchers suggest that their conclusions contribute to growing evidence that western Europe's climate has become more extreme and confirm a previously hypothesized increase in the variance of daily summer temperatures since the 19th century.

Bush's Secret Spying on Americans

By Robert Parry
August 2, 2007

The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury when he parsed words about George W. Bush’s warrantless surveillance program misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to avoid tough questions.

On July 27, for instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow fended off reporters who asked about apparent contradictions in Gonzales’s testimony by saying:

“This gets us back into the situation that I understand is unsatisfactory because there are lots of questions raised and the vast majority of those we’re not going to be in a position to answer, simply because they do involve matters of classification that we cannot and will not discuss publicly.”

Discussion closed.

Karl Rove's Immunity

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, August 2, 2007; 1:24 PM

The presidential aide who acts with such impunity now has the ultimate protection: absolute immunity from congressional oversight, at least in the judgment of White House Counsel Fred Fielding.

White House political mastermind Karl Rove had been subpoenaed to testify this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the investigation into last year's still-unexplained firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

Fox News Gets Big Tax Subsidies, Then Questions Whether We Should Fund Anti-Poverty Efforts

As you can see from the YouTube clip above, last Saturday (7/28), I appeared on Fox News' business show Bears & Bulls to address the question, "Is one of the government's job to end poverty?" The show was pegged to John Edwards (D-NC) efforts to use his presidential campaign to champion an anti-poverty agenda.

Setting the Stage for More Katrinas

By Michael Grunwald

Once again, it's President Bush against just about everyone else. This time, he's vowing to veto the Water Resources Development Act, a wildly popular collection of 940 Army Corps of Engineers projects, including $3.5 billion for post-Katrina Louisiana and $2 billion for the Florida Everglades. The House passed it Wednesday night in a 381-40 squeaker, and the Senate vote should be similar; archliberal Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer of California and archconservative ranking Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma can't agree on the color of the sky, but they're both pledging to override a veto.

Senate Passes Children’s Health Bill, 68-31

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: August 3, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — The Senate defied President Bush on Thursday and passed a bipartisan bill that would provide health insurance for millions of children in low-income families.

The vote was 68 to 31. The majority was more than enough to overcome the veto repeatedly threatened by Mr. Bush. The White House said the bill “goes too far in federalizing health care.”

Ruling Limited Spying Efforts

Move to Amend FISA Sparked by Judge's Decision

By Carol D. Leonnig and Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 3, 2007; Page A01

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

Is John Edwards Setting the Agenda for the Democratic Nomination?

By Jason Horowitz, New York Observer
Posted on August 3, 2007, Printed on August 3, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58414/

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- John Edwards may not be leading in the polls. But, he would like to stress, he is leading on the issues.

"I don't need to read a poll, I don't need to see a focus group and I don't need to see what the other candidates are saying," said Mr. Edwards, sitting next to his wife in a blue van pulling away from Kitty's Fine Foods in Charleston. "I know exactly what I would do as president and that's why I have been leading on these issues. And it is exactly the kind of leadership I will provide as president."

Today Is D-Day for Electronic Voting Machines

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on August 3, 2007, Printed on August 3, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58720/

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. -- Friday, August 3, is a day that will likely live in political infamy for election integrity activists across the country.

California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a newly elected, reform-minded Democrat, will decide whether or not the largest state will use electronic voting machines in its new, early presidential primary next February. No matter what Bowen decides, she will make waves from Capitol Hill to county election offices.

Praise For EPA's Eco-Cops

Frank O'Donnell, TomPaine.com

August 02, 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.

It didn't make headlines, but a report last week by EPA's inspector general was noteworthy for what it didn't say. The report, a review of EPA's enforcement activities, made no recommendations for improvement—a real rarity since most reports of this sort come with a laundry list of suggested changes.

And therein lies a tale.

Insurers Claim Global Warming Makes Some Regions Too Hot to Handle

As the nation braces for an active hurricane season, private insurers jump ship, leaving federal and state governments liable for ever increasing payouts

By Victoria Schlesinger and Meredith Knight

In the wake of skyrocketing insurance claims due to natural disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, blizzards and the like—insurers have been imposing steep rate hikes and, in some cases, fleeing high-risk areas, leaving consumers out in the cold. It's gotten so out of hand, consumer advocates say, that insurers now are even crying climate change as a factor in raising premiums or dumping clients.

As the crisis mounts, hard hit states such as Florida and Louisiana are increasingly stepping up as insurance companies check out, providing coverage for residents dropped by their insurers. And signs are things will get worse before they get better: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that this year's hurricane season—which officially began June 1—will be "very active," with three to five major hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Lean Left: Bridge Status Discrepencies

By now you have heard about the horrible tragedy in Minneapolis. As of now, eight have been confirmed dead and twenty to thirty are listed as missing.The search for what went wrong is, as it should be, already taking place. In that vein, I noticed two things that, taken together, are disturbing. First, the Gov. of the state said this:

Governor Pawlenty said the bridge had an unusual design and was inspected in 2005 and 2006. No structural deficiencies were detected, he said.

The Daily Muck

By Will Thomas - August 2, 2007, 9:52 AM

Next stop, the Senate. The Senate leadership is expected to bring a vote on ethics reform this afternoon, which, if passed, would leave only a Presidential signature to make reform official. (USA TODAY)

Chiquita Banana has been in trouble recently for hiring a Columbian paramilitary group -identified by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization - to provide protection for the company. Chiquita has argued that, though they knew their actions were illegal, they would be unable to operate in Columbia without local protection. They are now justifying the decision by pointing to a series of meetings with government officials, including Michael Chertoff, that led Chiquita executives to believe the government would allow them to continue paying the paramilitaries. Chertoff allegedly sympathized with the position of Chiquita execs and told them he would inquire on the issue and get back to them, but never did, which the company took as de facto approval. (Washington Post)

TPM Muckraker: Today's Must Read

By Paul Kiel - August 2, 2007, 10:30 AM

Even as Congress seeks to determine whether Alberto Gonzales lied under oath about the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, the Democrats have been negotiating with the administration to update the surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

US has been covertly arming Gulf States since 2004, officials say

08/02/2007 @ 2:58 pm
Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna

$20b arms sale to Saudi Arabia ‘done deal’

A recently disclosed US agreement with Saudi Arabia for a 10-year, $20 billion dollar arms sale is a “done deal,” according to intelligence officials and experts familiar with the negotiations.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a rare joint visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with members of the monarchy, as well as representatives of other Gulf States including the United Arab Emirates, to discuss a $20 billion dollar arms deal to deliver weapons, training, and weapons systems upgrades to Saudi Arabia over the next ten years. Although officially the meeting is to negotiate an agreement, sources have confirmed to RAW STORY that the deal has already been approved.

Brown Clouds Boost Global Warming

Aerosols over Asia incriminated in Himalayan glacial melting.

Daniel Cressey

Tiny particles of pollution may be causing as much warming as greenhouse gases over southern Asia. The clouds of aerosol particles are contributing to the potentially devastating melting of Himalayan glaciers, say researchers.

Using data from unmanned aircraft flying through 'brown clouds' of aerosol pollution over the Indian Ocean, US researchers found the zone of the atmosphere containing the clouds is warming by 0.25 ºC, compared with 0.10 ºC per decade at ground level.

'Sunshade' for global warming could cause drought

• 08:13 02 August 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Catherine Brahic

Pumping sulphur particles into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of a large volcanic eruption has been proposed as a last-ditch solution to combating climate change – but doing so would cause problems of its own, including potentially catastrophic drought, say researchers.

Sulphur "sunshades" are just one example of a "geo-engineering" solution to climate change. Such solutions involve artificially modifying our climate to counteract the effects of human greenhouse gas emission. Other examples include space mirrors and iron fertilisation of the ocean (see also Sunshade for the planet.

Local campaigns are building transnational movements, but global citizenship remains a challenge

The Internet and other communications technology are helping to speed up international mobilisation to causes and campaigns and are contributing to changes in governance structures.

A new booklet entitled From local to global, published today by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), examines the implications for civil society organisations and other activists. It was produced following the fifth in a series of special seminars entitled ‘Engaging Citizens’, organised by the ESRC in collaboration with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO).

A very private war

There are 48,000 'security contractors' in Iraq, working for private companies growing rich on the back of US policy. But can it be a good thing to have so many mercenaries operating without any democratic control? Jeremy Scahill reports

Wednesday August 1, 2007
The Guardian

It was described as a "powder keg" moment. In late May, just across the Tigris river from Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, a heavily armed convoy of American forces was driving down a street near the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They were transporting US officials in what is known widely among the occupation forces as the "red zone" - essentially, any area of Iraq that does not fall inside the US-built "emerald city" in the capital. The American guards were on the look-out for any threat lurking on the roads. Not far from their convoy, an Iraqi driver was pulling out of a petrol station. When the Americans encountered the Iraqi driver, they determined him to be a potential suicide car bomber. In Iraq it has become common for such convoys to fire off rounds from a machine gun at approaching Iraqi vehicles, much to the outrage of Iraqi civilians and officials. The Americans say this particular Iraqi vehicle was getting too close to their convoy and that they tried to warn it to back off. They say they fired a warning shot at the car's radiator before firing directly into the windshield of the car, killing the driver. Some Iraqi witnesses said the shooting was unprovoked.

Why Bush Won't Ax Gonzales

If cabinet members were perishable goods, Alberto Gonzales would have passed his "sell by" date sometime last spring. Since January, when he first faced sharp questioning over the firing of U.S. Attorneys, the Attorney General has earned disastrous reviews for his inconsistent testimony and poor judgment and for appearing to place loyalty to the White House above service to the public. By June it was hard to find a Republican willing to defend him. Now Gonzales' dissembling testimony about a controversial domestic-spying program has raised suspicions about what he is hiding and fueled new calls for him to go. Senate Democrats have called for a special prosecutor to investigate his activities as Attorney General, and a group of moderate House Democrats has called for the House to weigh impeachment proceedings against him.

The Right's Hate Site Hypocrisy

Posted by Guest Blogger on August 2, 2007 at 4:39 AM.

This post, written by Phoenix Woman, originally appeared on FireDogLake

The nameless fellow(s?) and good friend of Michelle Malkin's behind the right-wing blog aggregator Volunteer Opinion Journal thinks he's caught us all being naughty. Pretty mild stuff, compared to what his comrades were and are saying about Scott Thomas Beauchamp (for more, go here and here), but hey, you work with the "hate speech" you have, not the hate speech you wish you had -- such as what regularly issues from the posts and comments over at Michelle Malkin's shop.

These people are the Republican base, and as TRex points out, this is precisely why the Republicans don't dare do a YouTube debate in which their base has any sort of say: It would hand the presidential election to the Democrats the same way that Pat Buchanan's Republican-pleasing froth-at-the-mouth speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention guaranteed that Bill Clinton would be our next president.

Frankenforests: GE Trees Threaten Ecosystem Collapse

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2007, Printed on August 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58477/

In China, over a million poplar trees have been planted since 2002 to combat deforestation. But the move has not been widely applauded by everyone. The poplars, which are genetically engineered, are China's first foray into the world of transgenic forestry -- or "frankenforests" -- and other countries are not far behind.

As the biotech industry continues to lay the groundwork for genetically engineered crops -- poorly tested, widely debated and yet plugged as a technological wonder -- a potentially greater threat to biodiversity has begun to emerge. Pushed forward by biotech and the multibillion-dollar timber industry, genetically engineered trees are the latest invention.

Particle emissions from laser printers might pose health concern

Certain laser printers used in offices and homes release tiny particles of toner-like material into the air that people can inhale deep into lungs where they may pose a health hazard, scientists are reporting. Their study is scheduled for the August 1 online issue of the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T), a semi-monthly journal.

Lidia Morawska, Ph.D., and colleagues in Australia classified 17 out of 62 printers in the study as “high particle emitters” because they released such elevated quantities of particles, which the researchers believe to be toner, the ultrafine powder used in laser printers instead of ink to form text and images. One of the printers released particles into an experimental chamber at a rate comparable to the particle emissions from cigarette smoking, the report stated.

Neoconservatism Is Dead (Brent Budowsky)

@ 3:42 pm

Charles Krauthammer, not content with having been proven deadly wrong in his worldview of many years, learning nothing from the bloody disasters of the policies he so aggressively promoted, now attacks Barack Obama for suggesting America should talk with enemies as well as friends.

Our first and last neoconservative president, George W. Bush, is the lead witness for the prosecution in the case whose verdict is the death of neoconservatism.

PAUL KRUGMAN: An Immoral Philosophy

When a child is enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic. For example, after asthmatic children are enrolled in Schip, the frequency of their attacks declines on average by 60 percent, and their likelihood of being hospitalized for the condition declines more than 70 percent.

Regular care, in other words, makes a big difference. That’s why Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand Schip, which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who would otherwise lack health insurance.

The NYT's New Pro-War Propaganda

By Robert Parry
July 30, 2007

No need to wait until September. It’s already obvious how George W. Bush and his still-influential supporters in Washington will sell an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Iraq – just the way they always have: the war finally has turned the corner and withdrawal now would betray the troops by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

At one time, the Iraq story line was how many schoolrooms had been painted or how well the government security forces were doing. Now there are new silver linings being detected that will justify a positive progress report in September – and the U.S. news media is again ready to play its credulous part.

President Bush signaled the happy-news judgment of his hand-picked commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in a round of confident public appearances over the past two weeks. With his effusive praise of “David,” as Bush called the general at a White House news conference, the President acted like a smug student arriving for a test with the answers tucked in his pocket.

Tomgram: Chip Ward, How Efficiency Maximizes Catastrophe

It's true that no single incident or development -- no matter how out of the ordinary or startling -- can straightforwardly be attributed to climate change. Nonetheless, it seems strange that the massive flooding in England, of a sort last seen more than 60 years ago, led the TV news and made front pages here with hardly a mention of global warming. You certainly won't see a headline like this one from the British Telegraph: "Floods show global warming is here."

And yet this has been "the wettest May to July period for England and Wales since records began in 1766." The recent "Great Flood of July" in southern England followed a somewhat similar June event in the north. As parts of the country are still submerged in the wake of torrential, tropical-style deluges (a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours), while record extremes of heat "roast" central and southern Europe, the subject of climate change is certainly on European minds -- and a group of scientists are evidently going to release a study in the journal Nature this week that claims "more intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming.

Congress To Finally Probe Massive 2002 Klamath Fish Kill

For Immediate Release: July 30, 2007
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

Water Levels Halved by Cheney and Political Appointees over Scientists’ Objections

Washington, DC — Brushing aside scientific analyses, Bush administration appointees drastically reduced water flows in the Klamath River leading to the largest fish kill in the history of the Pacific Northwest, according to testimony released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In the wake of press reports about the involvement of Vice President Dick Cheney, Congress is now asking how high up the orders came to cut water flows in the Klamath.

Exposed: The Truth Behind Popular Carbon Offsetting Schemes

By Martin Hickman, Independent UK
Posted on July 31, 2007, Printed on July 31, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57976/

A television documentary has uncovered flaws in a series of carbon offsetting schemes intended to make good the global warming gases emitted by flights and other polluting activities.

An episode of the British show Dispatches aired "The Great Green Smoke Screen," which revealed how academics and environmentalists are questioning the ethics and impact of offsetting -- and suggesting that offsetting schemes have not been effective as claimed.

Chomsky: There Will Be a Cold War Between Iran and the U.S.

By Noam Chomsky, City Lights
Posted on July 30, 2007, Printed on July 31, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58243/

The following is an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's new book Interventions published by City Lights Books. The excerpt first appeared in Z Magazine.

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important.

As was the norm during the Cold War, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush send s more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq -- a country otherwise free from any foreign interference, on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

Why Democrats May End Up on the Wrong Side of the Social Security Privatization War

By Lori Wallach and Todd Tucker, AlterNet
Posted on July 31, 2007, Printed on July 31, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58089/

"Congress rejected Social Security privatization in 2005 and should reject it again in 2007 -- whether it's for Americans, Peruvians or Canadians. The promise of a secure retirement shouldn't stop at America's borders."

This was the reaction of William McNary, a leading Social Security activist, after finding out that some Democrats are supporting a Bush NAFTA expansion for Peru that would give Citibank, a major Democratic donor, the right to sue the country if it reverses its failed Social Security privatization.

Huffington Post: Marty Kaplan--After the Next 9/11

Americans are stupid about risk, me included. It's nuts to fear plane crashes more than car crashes; loopy to be more afraid of online sexual predators than of lightning; irrational to pay more attention to shark attacks than to climate change. Doubtless there's something about our lizard brain stems that accounts for our poor choices in boogeymen, and thus for the media's pandering to our catastrophilia. But no vestigial pathway in our panic-hardwiring is an excuse for the Bush administration's current ramping up of its shameless exploitation of our fears.

Each of the 95 times President Bush mentioned Al Qaeda in his South Carolina speech last week, and each of the innumerable times in coming days that his disciplined minions will push the Iraq-is-about-Al-Qaeda button, the real message is, of course, 9/11. If we don't win in Iraq, the Bush case goes, the terrorists will kill you and your children in the air, at the mall and in your bed.

Global warming forces Forest Service to reconsider strategy

Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: July 30, 2007 06:40:39 AM

WASHINGTON — It was a monster fire — 175,000 acres of tinder-dry timber just south of the Canadian border in north-central Washington state. In places it burned with an intensity rarely seen, crowning through stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa and lodgepole pine that had been weakened by a bark beetle infestation.

“It was clearly a firestorm,” said David Peterson, a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab in Seattle.

Frequency of Atlantic hurricanes doubled over last century, climate change suspected

BOULDER--About twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, according to a new statistical analysis of hurricanes and tropical storms in the north Atlantic. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase.

The study, by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, will be published online July 30 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

"These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes," says Holland.

Wider buffers are better

When protecting wetlands from nitrogen pollution, an EPA study points to wider, vegetated borders around streams as most effective

MADISON, WI, JULY 26, 2007- Excess nitrogen caused by fertilizers, animal waste, leaf litter, sewer lines, and highways is responsible for contaminating groundwater. It can also cause human health risks when found in drinking water and oxygen depleted water bodies endangering animals that drink from them. Establishing Riparian buffers is considered a best management practice (BMP) by State and Federal resource agencies for maintaining water quality, and they may be especially critical in controlling amounts of human produced nitrogen.

New Research on Achievement Test Scores Slow Under No Child Left Behind Reforms

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2007 – As Congress reviews federal efforts to boost student performance, new research published in Educational Researcher (ER) reports that progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared with the four years following enactment of the law.

The article “Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind?” is authored by Bruce Fuller, Joseph Wright, Kathryn Gesicki, and Erin Kang, and is one of four featured works published in the current issue of ER—a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the American Educational Research Association.

NY Methodists to IRD: Cease and Desist!

By Frederick Clarkson

I just learned that earlier this summer, an annual conference of the United Methodist Church in New York, overwhelmingly passed a resolution that calls on the nefarious neoconservative agency, the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy to cease and desist it's "deceptive and divisive tactics"; that Methodist affiliates of IRD decouple; that Methodists not support IRD in any way; and that IRD itself "disband" its Methodist program.

This is a dramatic and important step for the mainline churches, which have generally been loath to acknowledge the externally financed and directed attacks on their communions, and to address the complicity of some of their members.

Jonathan Falwell on the march

Kicking it into high gear after his father's death, Falwell defends Ann Coulter, and appears at a historic evangelical Christian/Muslim meet-up in Washington

The Rev. Jonathan Falwell appears to be picking up from where his father, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, left off. In his first contribution as a regular weekend columnist for the conservative online publication, WorldNetDaily, Falwell issued a dad-like attack on the liberal media while making a spirited defense of best selling author/provocateur Ann Coulter. Falwell accused the traditional media of consistently distorting her remarks. Volunteering his support for the embattled Coulter, Falwell wrote: "As long as you continue to contradict the policies of the mainstream ... you will carry a target on your back. This is a truth my dad, Jerry Falwell, experienced almost daily throughout his 51 years in ministry."

Scientists’ Tests Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines in California and Elsewhere

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

Glenn Greenwald: The really smart, serious, credible Iraq experts O'Hanlon and Pollack

What is the most vivid and compelling evidence of how broken our political system is? It is that the exact same people who urged us into the war in Iraq, were wrong in everything they said, and issued one false assurance after the next as the war failed, continue to be the same people held up as our Serious Iraq Experts. The exact "experts" to whom we listened in 2002 and 2003 are the same exact establishment "experts" now.

Hence, today we have yet another Op-Ed declaring that We Really Are Winning in Iraq This Time -- this one in the NYT from "liberal" Brookings Institution "scholars" Ken Pollack and Mike O'Hanlon. They accuse war critics of being "unaware of the significant changes taking place," proclaim that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms," and the piece is entitled "A War we Might Just Win."

NYT Editorial: Mr. Gonzales’s Never-Ending Story

Published: July 29, 2007

President Bush often insists he has to be the decider — ignoring Congress and the public when it comes to the tough matters on war, terrorism and torture, even deciding whether an ordinary man in Florida should be allowed to let his wife die with dignity. Apparently that burden does not apply to the functioning of one of the most vital government agencies, the Justice Department.

Americans have been waiting months for Mr. Bush to fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who long ago proved that he was incompetent and more recently has proved that he can’t tell the truth. Mr. Bush refused to fire him after it was clear Mr. Gonzales lied about his role in the political purge of nine federal prosecutors. And he is still refusing to do so — even after testimony by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, that suggests that Mr. Gonzales either lied to Congress about Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping operation or at the very least twisted the truth so badly that it amounts to the same thing.

Exclusive: Gangs Spreading In The Military

(CBS) U.S. Army Sgt. Juwan Johnson got a hero's welcome while home on leave in June of 2004.

"Not only did I love my son - but my god - I liked the man he was becoming," his mother, Stephanie Cockrell, remembers.

But that trip home was the last time his family saw him alive.

Fear and Loathing in Middle America

By Sasha Abramsky, The American Prospect
Posted on July 30, 2007, Printed on July 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57490/

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

Reviewed: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant (Crown, 288 pages)

Every so often, you pick up a book and two pages in your nose is glued to it. Not necessarily because of the subject matter per se -- though good subject matter certainly helps -- but because the prose is so damned electric.

Usually, I've found, when it comes to reportage like this, the book's author has a single name: Hunter S. Thompson. Recently, though, I've added another name to my stuck-nose lexicon, having been utterly ensnared by Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Why the White House Keeps Hiding Behind General Petraeus

By Frank Rich, The New York Times
Posted on July 30, 2007, Printed on July 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58246/

There was, of course, gallows humor galore when Dick Cheney briefly grabbed the wheel of our listing ship of state during the presidential colonoscopy last weekend. Enjoy it while it lasts. A once-durable staple of 21st-century American humor is in its last throes. We have a new surrogate president now. Sic transit Cheney. Long live David Petraeus!

It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus's remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commander's name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has cited him more than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53 in May alone.

Wrong on the Right

Submitted by Robert Borosage on July 26, 2007 - 5:36pm.

The corporate wing of the Democratic Party - the Democratic Leadership Council—will meet in its "National Conversation" this weekend in Nashville. The press is already noting that while all of the Democratic presidential hopefuls will appear at the YearlyKos progressive blogger gathering in Chicago, not one is slated to join the DLC in Nashville.

DLC head Al From suggests this is because the candidates have "tunnel vision," and, focused on the Iowa caucuses, are chasing liberal activists. But From is certain that the party's nominee will turn to the DLC and drift to the right when it comes to the general election. "It's sort of like you play on one end of the field to win the nomination," From said, "but if you want to win the game, you've got to play on both ends."

TPM: Data Mining

As you can see, we now have the first hint of what was at the center of the Ashcroft hospital room showdown. According to the New York Times, what the White House calls the 'terrorist surveillance [i.e., warrantless wiretap] program' originally included some sort of largescale data mining.

I don't doubt that this is true as far as it goes. But this must only scratch the surface because, frankly, at least as presented, this just doesn't account for the depth of the controversy or the fact that so many law-and-order DOJ types were willing to resign over what was happening. Something's missing.

TPM: NYT: Impeach Gonzales

Not that he should be fired. The Times editorial in tomorrow's paper says he should be impeached if Paul Clement, who for a complicated set of reasons is acting AG in this matter, doesn't appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales' numerous and increasingly overlapping bad acts.

Leave it to President Bush to take us down so many unexplored and untrodden cul-de-sacs and byways of the US Constitution. Judges have been impeached with relative frequency, if we consider the two-plus centuries of history under the US Constitution. And this makes sense since there are quite a few federal judges, no one can fire them, and they have lifetime tenure; they can only be impeached.

Defeat Without Disaster

The least bad plan for leaving Iraq.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007, at 2:45 PM ET

Peter Galbraith's article in the current New York Review of Books, "Iraq: The Way to Go," is one of the most bracing essays written on the subject lately—a provocative but logical case for a U.S. withdrawal (though not a total withdrawal) that still manages to achieve a few of the war's original goals.

I don't agree with every plank of Galbraith's proposal (more on that later), but anyone seeking a solution to this disaster needs at least to contend with his arguments.

As Rice and Gates travel to Middle East, air of futility pervades

By Nancy A. Youssef and Warren P. Strobel

Before the Iraq war, Washington had strong ties with the gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government and the rise to power of Iraq’s majority Shiites shifted the balance in the region. With an unstable Iraq and their own Shiite minorities politically awakened, many governments feel U.S. actions have weakened their grip on power.

NYT Editorial: Still Waiting for Farm Reform

Published: July 28, 2007

Doling out last-minute benefits as only a speaker can, Nancy Pelosi managed to kill a progressive farm bill on the floor of the House. The House then passed a bill that further enshrined an outdated and excessively costly system of guaranteed subsidies. It is now up to the Senate, which will address the issue in September, to devise a new and improved bill that eliminates the old subsidies and uses the savings for food stamps, conservation and other causes worthier than making big farmers even richer.

Official: Consumer safety agency at risks

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Consumer Product Safety Commission could soon shrink to the point where it can't effectively protect the public, veteran Commissioner Thomas Moore says.

Many employees at the agency responsible for overseeing the safety of many thousands of consumer products are looking for other jobs because "they have no confidence the agency will continue to exist — or will exist in any meaningful form," Moore said in a statement Thursday.

"The commission can either continue to decline in staff, resources and stature to the point where it is no longer an effective force in consumer protection," said Moore, "or with the support of Congress it can regain the important place in American society it was originally designed to have."

Bush Aide Blocked Report

Global Health Draft In 2006 Rejected for Not Being Political

By Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 29, 2007; Page A01

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

The True -- and Shocking -- History of the CIA

By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 28, 2007, Printed on July 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58164/

This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).

The American people may not know it but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA's approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly $44 billion-$48 billion or more spent on "intelligence." This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with the Agency and hardly the most serious one either.

There are currently at least two criminal trials underway in Italy and Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to "disappear" into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the U.S. without any form of due process of law.