TPM: Coming around on gay marriage

Good words from Talking Points Memo--Dictynna

I think there's a pattern here for conservatives and their social attitudes. They don't mind restrictions on free speech, until they have something provocative to say. They want to restrict reproductive rights, until someone close to them has an unwanted pregnancy. They want to break down the church-state wall, until they feel like their faith is in the minority. They want to treat embryos as people, until they suffer from an ailment that could benefit from stem-cell research.

And they balk at the idea of equal rights for gay people, until it's their daughter who is looking for equality.

The key to social change in this country seems fairly straightforward: wait for conservatives to have more life experience.--Steve Benen

Exclusive: Petraeus' Sectarian Death Count Methodology Revealed

By Spencer Ackerman - September 21, 2007, 4:44PM

In the debate over the surge, there have been a number of questions raised within the government about an important metric for understanding whether the U.S. military's strategy is succeeding -- how Multinational Force-Iraq calculates sectarian violence.

Earlier this month, David Walker of the Government Accountability Office testified that he could not "get comfortable" with General David Petraeus' methodology for determining sectarianism, considering it too inferential to be reliable. His report, echoing objections from senior intelligence officials, instead tabulated the pace of attacks on civilians and found the surge didn't appear to have a significant effect on civilian-targeted violence. However, relying on data interpreted through the MNF-I methodology, Petraeus testified that sectarian violence had fallen in Iraq to mid-2006 levels.

Glenn Greenwald: Giuliani's proposal for endless Middle East wars

In London this week, Rudy Giuliani proposed what is probably the single most extremist policy of any major presidential candidate, certainly this year and perhaps in many years:

Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to include Israel and warning that if Iran's leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power "we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years." . . . .

While Giuliani did not explicitly address the implications for Iran of adding Israel to NATO in his speech, his aides later highlighted a 2006 Heritage Foundation paper by Nile Gardiner, a former Thatcher aide who was announced as a new Giuliani adviser yesterday.

Paul Krugman: Health Care Hopes

All the evidence suggests that it has finally become politically possible to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have: guaranteed health insurance. The economics of universal health care are sound, and polls show strong public support for guaranteed care. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of that around.

PM Carpenter: My conservative epiphany

September 22, 2007

Kimberley Strassel, a Wall Street Journal editorial fiction writer, yesterday produced a fine piece of outrage that managed, in a mere 1000 words, to encapsulate modern conservatism's fundamentalist fiscal philosophy: "Trillions for defense, but not a sixpence for homefolks."

Ms. Strassel's precise target was, of course, the horrifying State Children's Health Insurance Program bill -- bipartisan legislation that recognizes that lower middle-class children without healthcare nevertheless shall remain healthcare-less despite their demographic status, unless something is done. Imagine that.

Blackwater's 'Drug War' Bonanza

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater, Oil and the Colonial Enterprise

John Nichols
Fri Sep 21, 2:49 PM ET

The Nation -- Blackwater USA's mercenary mission in Iraq is very much in the news this week, and rightly so. The private military contractor's war-for-profit program, which has been so brilliantly exposed by Jeremy Scahill, may finally get a measure of the official scrutiny it merits as the corporation scrambles to undo the revocation by the Iraqi government of its license to operate in that country. There will be official inquiries in Baghdad, and in Washington. The U.S. Congress might actually provide some of the oversight that is its responsibility. Perhaps, and this is a big "perhaps," Blackwater's "troops" could come home before the U.S. soldiers who have been forced to fight, and die, in defense of these international rent-a-cops.

Feds Target Blackwater in Weapons Probe

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C.

Katha Pollitt: Don't Like Noam Chomsky? Try Alan Greenspan

Remember Michael Ignatieff's "Getting Iraq Wrong," the New York Times Sunday Magazine essay in which he explained that he supported the war in Iraq because he was a sensitive academic prone to big dreams? Ignatieff managed to admit that he had been wrong while attacking the people who'd been right all along: "Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology," he wrote. "They opposed the invasion because they believed the President was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong." Not very gracious, that.

Columbia U. to let Iran president speak

By AMY WESTFELDT, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 25 minutes ago

Columbia University planned Friday to go forward with a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while the city mobilized security to protect him from protests during his New York visit.

Ahmadinejad, who is to arrive in New York on Sunday to address the United Nations General Assembly, is scheduled to speak at a Columbia question-and-answer forum on Monday. His request to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center site was denied and condemned by Sept. 11 family members and politicians.

Arctic sea ice minimum shatters all-time record low

Scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center said today that the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its minimum for 2007 on Sept. 16, shattering all previous lows since satellite record-keeping began nearly 30 years ago.

The Arctic sea ice extent on Sept. 16 stood at 1.59 million square miles, or 4.13 million square kilometers, as calculated using a five-day running average, according to the team. Compared to the long-term minimum average from 1979 to 2000, the new minimum extent was lower by about 1 million square miles -- an area about the size of Alaska and Texas combined, or 10 United Kingdoms, they reported.

Stop Blaming The Baby Boomers

Submitted by Dean Baker on September 20, 2007 - 11:49am.

Guest blogger Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Over the last two decades, there has been an effort by the enemies of Social Security and Medicare to demonize the baby boomers as a threat to country’s prosperity and the well-being of our children and grandchildren.

They have repeatedly warned of the enormous projected cost of Social Security and Medicare and called on the current or future elderly to sacrifice their benefits under these programs for the common good. We heard endless tales of $70 trillion dollar-plus deficits and how our children and grandchildren would face crushing tax burdens unless the greedy soon to be geezers accepted large cuts in their Social Security and Medicare benefits.

We Have Seen the Enemy — And Surrendered

Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront – the American private health insurance industry.

With the courageous exception of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic candidates have all rolled out health “reform” plans that represent total, Chamberlain-like, appeasement. Edwards and Obama propose universal health insurance plans that would in no way ease the death grip of Aetna, Unicare, MetLife, and the rest of the evil-doers. Clinton – why are we not surprised? – has gone even further, borrowing the Republican idea of actually feeding the private insurers by making it mandatory to buy their product. Will I be arrested if I resist paying $10,000 a year for a private policy laden with killer co-pays and deductibles?

Attytood: More proof "the surge is working"

There's been a lot going on this week -- so much that I haven't been able to comment on maybe the biggest story of all, and that is the uproar surrounding the U.S. security firm Blackwater USA and its alleged shooting up of civilians in Baghdad. It's the biggest story because Iraqis are so angry over this, it may be the final tipping point in their relationship with their self-proclaimed liberators.

Tonight I see that Matt Drudge -- the man who "rules our world" in the DC politico-journalism complex -- has decreed that the right-wing version of what went down with Blackwater in Baghdad is the storyline that needs to get out there. And so he's done something he only does in a pinch and linked not to a mainstream news org but to the conservative Pajamas Media, and its correspondent Richard Miniter.

U.S. ramps up pressure on Iran

Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: September 18, 2007 07:42:20 PM

WASHINGTON — One year after the United States launched an intensified global economic campaign against Iran with the stated aim of halting Tehran’s nuclear work, the Bush administration is counting its successes — and calling for still more pressure.

In recent months, once-reluctant European countries have joined the effort, which some are calling a financial war, with more vigor.

Dan Froomkin: What's Bush's Big Secret?

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, September 21, 2007; 1:56 PM

President Bush knows lots more nimble ways to dodge a question than snapping "no comment." So what was so hush-hush about Israel's recent bombing raid that he couldn't come up with anything to say about it -- or even find an elegant way to explain his silence?

Do Not Call Listings Aren't Forever

By JENNIFER C. KERR
Associated Press Writer
2:32 PM CDT, September 21, 2007

WASHINGTON

The cherished dinner hour void of telemarketers could vanish next year for millions of people when phone numbers begin dropping off the national Do Not Call list.

The Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the list, says there is a simple fix. But some lawmakers think it is a hassle to expect people to re-register their phone numbers every five years.

Self-Declared Liberals Have Nothing to Be Afraid of

By Greg Colvin, AlterNet
Posted on September 21, 2007, Printed on September 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63169/

I often think it's comical -- Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive -- Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la! —Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan, 1882

Hillary Clinton: "... So I consider myself a proud modern American progressive, and I think that's the kind of philosophy and practice that we need to bring back to American politics." Anderson Cooper: "So you wouldn't use the word liberal, you'd say progressive?" Hillary Clinton: [nods] --CNN-YouTube presidential primary debate, July 23, 2007

It is time for a fresh look at how we label political viewpoints in America.

These days, the terms left and right, liberal and conservative, are most often applied to ideas, groups, and individuals by those aiming to discredit them. Not a very reliable way of understanding what the words mean.

Jesus' General: A true family values candidate enters the race.

This is satire, for those who are new to the General.--Dictynna

Alan Keyes
GOP Presidential Candidate

Dear Mr. Keyes,

Like many god-fearing Americans, I answer the Values Voters Debate organizer's call to fast in order "to let God know we're serious about restoring righteous leadership to our land. Pray He uses the V² Debate to reveal His choice." I see today's news that you've entered the presidential race as God's response to the many bags of Cheetos and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon I've forgone this week.

Until now, I haven't seen a presidential candidate I can fully support. Sure, they're all good on values issues like finding new, more painful ways to torture people, but by God, as far as I know not a single one of them have blamed 911 on abortion or spoken out against the abomination of allowing people to elect their senators. You're the only one.

And by God, no candidate, not even Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee, has stood up for family values by disowning one of their own children for being a homosexual. I thank you for it. A candidate can't get any more family values than that.

Paul Krugman's New Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

September 18, 2007, 11:45 pm

Introducing This Blog

“I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”

That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.

I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts – although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues, from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns; I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page – especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.

Are Democrats planning still worse FISA capitulations?

The enactment in August by the Democratic Congress of new eavesdropping powers for the President was one of the worst, if not the single worst, acts of capitulation to the Bush White House. The only comparable disgrace was the Democrats' complete failure even to attempt a filibuster of the Military Commissions Act, largely due to their decision to allow John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham to speak for them so that they did not have to participate in the debate. Once those three GOP Senators predictably blessed the MCA, Democrats had no strategy and thus actively enabled the abolition of habeas corpus along with the other abuses that Act legalized.

The FISA capitulation, though, was probably even worse. It occurred when they supposedly control the Congress. They enlarged the President's powers under the very law that he has been violating for years. They gave the Bush White House what it demanded even though the White House continues to provide them with no meaningful information about what was done during all those years when they eavesdropped on Americans in secret. And Democrats passed the law in a frenzy, under the crassest and most transparent exploitation of the Terrorist Threat ("a Terrorist attack is about to happen in DC and the blood will be on your hands unless you pass the bill we dictate").

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor

Last Updated: 8:39am BST 20/09/2007

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

Alan Greenspan: The Fraud

By William Greider, TheNation.com
Posted on September 20, 2007, Printed on September 20, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63055/

Alan Greenspan has come back from the tomb of history to correct the record. He did not make any mistakes in his eighteen-year tenure as Federal Reserve chairman. He did not endorse the regressive Bush tax cuts of 2001 that pumped up the federal deficits and aggravated inequalities. He did not cause the housing bubble that is now in collapse. He did not ignore the stock market bubble that subsequently melted away and cost investors $6 trillion. He did not say the Iraq War is "largely about oil."

Check the record. These are all lies.

Top Military Recruitment Lies

By Aimee Allison and David Solnit, Seven Stories Press
Posted on September 20, 2007, Printed on September 20, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62945/

Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War and Build a Better World published by Seven Stories Press, August 2007. Reprinted here by permission of publisher. Copyright © 2007 Aimee Allison and David Solnit

Top military recruitment facts

1. Recruiters lie. According the New York Times, nearly one of five United States Army recruiters was under investigation in 2004 for offenses varying from "threats and coercion to false promises that applicants would not be sent to Iraq." One veteran recruiter told a reporter for the Albany Times Union, "I've been recruiting for years, and I don't know one recruiter who wasn't dishonest about it. I did it myself."

2. The military contract guarantees nothing. The Department of Defense's own enlistment/re-enlistment document states, "Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay allowances, benefits and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document" (DD Form4/1, 1998, Sec.9.5b).

Glenn Greenwald: Limitless wrongness

Here is a review of what we learned last week from the right-wing noise machine and their enabling media puppets: Americans trust Gen. Petraeus and do not want his credibility questioned. The week was a big win for President Bush and his Iraq policy. The MoveOn newspaper ad, like 9/11, was Going to Change Everything -- it was a devastating event for Democrats, a transformative moment that would embolden Republicans and revitalize support for the war.

A new CBS poll, comparing the views of Americans Before Petraues (B.P.) and After Petraeus (A.P.), demonstrates that all of that was completely wrong:

Most Americans continue to want troops to start coming home from Iraq, and most say the plan President Bush announced last week for troop reductions doesn't go far enough, according to a CBS News poll released Monday. . . .

Racism's cognitive toll: Subtle discrimination is more taxing on the brain

While certain expressions of racism are absent from our world today, you do not have to look very hard to know that more subtle forms of racism persist, in schools and workplaces and elsewhere. How do victims experience these more ambiguous racist messages" Are they less damaging than overt hostility" And what are the mental and emotional pathways by which these newer forms of discrimination actually cause personal harm"

Psychologists have some theories about how the experience of racism plays out in the brain—and what that means today compared to before. All human beings are driven by a few core needs, including the need to understand the world around us. When people do things to us, we must know why, and if we are uncertain we will spend whatever cognitive power we have available to diagnose the situation.

Webb's Righteous Amendment

Submitted by Digby on September 18, 2007 - 10:07pm.

The best thing about the grey eminence John Warner finally leaving the Senate is that he will no longer be around to play Lucy pulling the football away from the Democrats at the last minute any more. For some reason, the political establishment persists in seeing him as some sort of independent player when he has actually been one of the more destructive forces in the Congress, using his status as elder statesman to give cover over and over again to the worst excesses of the GOP.

Last fall the Democratic leaders in the Senate allowed Sens. Warner, Lindsay Graham and John McCain to negotiate the Destroy Habeas Corpus Act (also known as the Military Commissions Act) with the White House. High-fives were exchanged all around at what a brilliant idea it was to have the great and good Warner, the torture victim McCain and the always reasonable Graham stand up to the White House and force an internecine battle to save the Constitution on behalf of decent people everywhere. Except, as any sentient person could have predicted (and did!) Warner, McCain and Graham "caved." And the result was one of the lowest points in modern congressional history. (Senators Dodd and Leahy are going to try to get it restored this week.)

Interest rates slashed to help economy

Fed's dramatic action lowers target on key short-term rate for the first time in 4 years - to 4.75% - and signals more cuts could be coming.

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large

September 18 2007: 5:03 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Federal Reserve cut the target on a key short-term interest rate by half of a percentage point Tuesday to 4.75% in a bold acknowledgement that the central bank is concerned the mortgage meltdown plaguing Wall Street and Main Street could hurt the economy.

The Fed also indicated that more rate cuts could be on the way, news that investors cheered.

Military Sued Over Religious Freedom

(09-18) 16:35 PDT FORT RILEY, Kan. (AP) --

A soldier whose superior prevented him from holding a meeting for atheists and other non-Christians is suing the Defense Department, claiming it violated his right to religious freedom.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., alleges a pattern of practices that discriminate against non-Christians in the military. It was filed Monday to coincide with the 220th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution.

NYT Editorial: Considering Mr. Mukasey

Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee to be attorney general, is being promoted as a “consensus choice,” which is meant to signal the Senate that it should be grateful and confirm him without delay. Mr. Mukasey is clearly better than some of the “loyal Bushies” whose names had been floated, but that should not decide the matter. The Senate needs to question him closely about troubling aspects of his record, and make sure he is willing to take the tough steps necessary to repair a very damaged Justice Department.

Mr. Mukasey has attributes that could make him a good attorney general. He has been a lawyer and federal district court judge in New York, where he enjoys a good reputation. Although he is not divorced from politics (he is on an advisory committee to Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign), it is unlikely that he would run the Justice Department as an adjunct of the White House, or a booster of the Republican Party, as Alberto Gonzales did.

Pentagon, State Department Debunk Bush Fabrications on Iran

By Gareth Porter, IPS News
Posted on September 19, 2007, Printed on September 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62937/

In his prepared statement to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, General David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shi'ite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."

But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had in essence left Iraq. "The Quds Force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity."

Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death to Paul Bremer's Order 81

By Nancy Scola, AlterNet
Posted on September 19, 2007, Printed on September 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62273/

Anyone hearing about central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides, where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.

Why Bremer? Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding themselves caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically modified and patented agriculture -- the same farming model that Bremer introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the "new Iraq" in its chaotic early days.

Digby: General Heretic

Let's see if the right maintains its reverence for the every utterance of Iraq war commanders when they get a load of this:

Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran, a recently retired commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Monday.

John Abizaid, the retired Army general who headed Central Command for nearly four years, said he was confident that if Iran gained nuclear arms, the United States could deter it from using them.

A Surge, and Then a Stab

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 14 September 2007

To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."

Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."

Alternative methods proposed to detect pesticides and antibiotics in water and natural food

- Research carried out by the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the UGR has developed new systems to achieve sensitive detection of pesticide and antibiotic residues in water, vegetables, milk and meat. The systems are based on techniques not much used nowadays

- Presence of antibiotics in foods of animal origin or fresh water can cause bacterial resistance or allergic reactions to the consuming population, as well as industrial problems in fermentation processes.

Spy Chief Seeks More Eavesdropping Power

Tuesday September 18, 2007 4:31 PM

By PAMELA HESS

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The top U.S. intelligence official is telling Congress it shouldn't succumb to pressure to roll back a new law that enhances the government's eavesdropping capability on terrorists as well as more traditional potential adversaries.

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, says China and Russia are aggressively spying on sensitive U.S. facilities, intelligence systems and development projects, and their efforts are approaching Cold War levels.

Wife Of Victim From Michael Moore’s Sicko Responds To Stossel Hit Piece

By: Logan Murphy on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 6:38 AM - PDT

ABC News, the same network that neo-cons use to further their agenda, decided to look at the question of Universal Health Care in the US. Who better to investigate it than John “The Free Market Trumps All” Stossel? As is evident from the promo from last Friday’s Good Morning America, Stossel’s program looks like little more than a way to demonize Michael Moore

U.S. home foreclosures soar in August

By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer
Tue Sep 18, 3:12 PM ET

The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month more than doubled versus August 2006 and jumped 36 percent from July, a trend that signals many homeowners are increasingly unable to make timely payments on their mortgages or sell their homes amid a national housing slump.

A total of 243,947 foreclosure filings were reported in August, up 115 percent from 113,300 in the same month a year ago, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday.

Rice apologises for US security firm shootings

· Move to prevent Iraq government expulsions
· Blackwater guards blamed for deaths of eight civilians

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Guardian

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, apologised to the Iraqi government yesterday in an attempt to prevent the expulsion of all employees of the security firm Blackwater USA.

The ministry of interior yesterday took the decision to expel Blackwater after eight Iraqi civilians were killed and 13 wounded in Baghdad when shots were fired from a US state department convoy on Sunday.

America's Addiction to Debt Finally Crashes the System

By John F. Ince, AlterNet
Posted on September 18, 2007, Printed on September 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62787/

We have to deal with the fundamental reality that Americans are addicted to debt. Debt today in the United States is at an all-time high in each of the three primary sectors: public, corporate and consumer debt. The national debt last week topped $9 trillion, up from approximately $5 trillion when George Bush took office.

To put this in perspective, the government of Bush & Co. has borrowed almost as much as the governments of all the other presidents of the United States combined. Consumer credit is now at scary levels almost: $2.5 trillion, and analysts are beginning to speculate that credit card debt could be the next bubble to burst. Corporate debt has reached astronomical levels through highly leveraged private equity deals, and no one knows just how how much froth is still in the system.

International team shows mercury concentrations in fish respond quickly to increased deposition

A joint Canadian-American research team have, for the first time, demonstrated that mercury concentrations in fish respond directly to changes in atmospheric deposition of the chemical. The international team's research began in 2001 at the Experimental Lakes in Northern Ontario and is featured in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tomdispatch Interview: James Carroll, American Fundamentalisms

American Exceptionalism Meets Team Jesus
A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll

He's a man who knows something about the dangers of mixing religious fervor, war, and the crusading spirit, a subject he dealt with eloquently in his book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. A former Catholic priest turned antiwar activist in the Vietnam era, James Carroll also wrote a moving memoir about his relationship to his father, the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll essentially grew up in that five-sided monument to American imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was "the largest playhouse in the world" and he can still remember sliding down its ramps in his stocking feet, as he's written in the introduction to his recent, magisterial history of that building and the institution it holds, House of War.

As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when George W. Bush referred briefly to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the country to warn against the consequences of launching a war against Afghanistan in response to those attacks -- now just another of the President's missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print. ("The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?") His stirring columns on the early years of our President's attempt to bring "freedom" to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful, moral voice from -- to use a very American phrase -- the (media) wilderness until much of our American world finally caught up with him.

‘Giving’ and Taking

Posted on Sep 17, 2007
By Chris Hedges

Bill Clinton has written a new book. It is called “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.” He will give a portion of the proceeds to charity. Giving, the former president informs us, gives us fulfilment in life and is “the fabric of our shared humanity.”

His book is the political equivalent of “Marley & Me” It is filled with a lot of vapid, feel-good stories about ordinary and wealthy Americans setting out to make the world a better place. It smacks of the philanthropy-as-publicity that characterized the largesse of the robber barons—the Mellons and the Rockefellers—and has become a pastime for our own oligarchic elite. Clinton’s call for charity is the equivalent of well-scrubbed prep school students spending a day in a soup kitchen, doling out food to the people whose jobs were outsourced by their mommies and daddies. It does little to alleviate suffering. But it is a balm to the conscience of the oligarchic class that profits handsomely from the impoverishment of the working class, globalization and our anti-democratic corporate state. The rich love to dine out on their own goodness.

Private Powell

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on September 15, 2007 - 1:25pm.

Here's a bizarre new interview with Colin Powell. He simultaneously warns against a "terror-industrial complex"—"an industry that only exists as long as you keep the terrorist threat pumped up"—and goes on to defend blithely defend the outsourcing of security and combat positions to Blackwater and other private contractors.

War profiteering goooood; just not too much.

Study Claims Pollution Causes 40% of Deaths

August 31, 2007 - 12:00am
By Megan Potter

A recent Cornell research project concluded that pollution deserves a place alongside heart disease and cancer on the list of leading causes of death worldwide. Contamination of water, air and soil leads to 40 percent of the planet’s death toll, according to a study conducted by Prof. David Pimentel, ecology and evolutionary Biology.

“In the United States alone, 76,000 people are in the hospital each year, with 5,000 deaths, just due to pollution of air, food or water. Cancers are increasing in the U.S., and AIDS is on the rise,” Pimentel said.

Paul Krugman: Sad Alan’s Lament

When President Bush first took office, it seemed unlikely that he would succeed in getting his proposed tax cuts enacted. The questionable nature of his installation in the White House seemed to leave him in a weak political position, while the Senate was evenly balanced between the parties. It was hard to see how a huge, controversial tax cut, which delivered most of its benefits to a wealthy elite, could get through Congress.

Then Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Senate Budget Committee.

Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead. The U.S. State Department said it plans to investigate what it calls a "terrible incident."

In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, an Iraqi official said.

Who’s the Boss?

Forget neocons and theocons. It’s the money-cons who really run Bush’s Republican Party.

By Kevin Drum

Missionary or mercenary? Put more plainly, what is George Bush at his core: a creature of the Christian right or a dutiful retainer of the millionaire’s boys club? Jon Chait, a senior editor at the New Republic, takes on this question in The Big Con, but only to dismiss it almost immediately. George Bush, he says, is an avatar of the modern Republican Party, and Chait has little doubt what today’s GOP really cares about:

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane ... The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda.

Why Health Care Is a Losing Issue for the GOP

September 12, 2007 | web only
Paul Waldman
The Republicans candidates' love affair with free-market fundamentalism has prevented them from addressing the health care crisis. The Democrats should take full advantage of that.

American Prospect Special Report on Amazonia

Tomorrow's Amazonia
ROGER D. STONE
An introduction to the Prospect special report on the how the earth's last great forests are being used an abused, and the ongoing effort to protect them.

Biodiversity in Jeopardy
MICHAEL GOULDING AND PAULO MOUTINHO
There are more life forms in Amazonia than anyplace else. But by the end of this century, there may be many fewer.

Deforestation and Poor Amazonians
MARY ALLEGRETTI
Brazil's forest dwellers, often its best stewards, are trying hard to make a living from the standing forest.

Orcinus: Albion's Seed I: The Puritans 1620-1640

--by Sara

Though earlier groups tried to settle the Chesapeake several decades earlier (and failed, for reasons we'll see in the next post), the first group of English settlers to make a go of it were the Puritans, who came from East Anglia to settle up New England between 1620 and 1640.

From East Anglia to New England
The Puritans were middle-class Calvinist mercantilists in the Dutch Reformed model -- not surprisingly, since East Anglia looks directly across the Channel onto the Netherlands, and many of the Puritans had family and business ties there. Though they'd been comfortably settled in the region for generations, that all changed between 1630 and 1641, the "eleven years' tyranny" when Charles I tried to rule England without a Parliament. This led to economic and social chaos across England, which worsened in East Anglia when the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to deal with the upheaval by stepping up persecution of the region's Puritan heretics. During those 11 years alone, over 80,000 Puritans pulled up stakes and moved on. One-quarter of these eventually landed in the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts, safely beyond the reach of the Anglican menace.

US Mortgage Crisis Goes International

by Steven D
Sun Sep 16th, 2007 at 12:40:29 PM EST

A run on a bank by its depositors? That's the sort of thing that hasn't happened since the Great Depression, right? Well, it's happening right now in the United Kingdom to a bank, Northern Rock, whose business is centered around mortgage lending:

People with accounts at the Northern Rock have withdrawn almost £2bn since Friday, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston has learned.

And the firm is bracing itself for more withdrawals in the coming days. [...]

Firedog Lake: The People of the Lie

By Phoenix Woman on Sat Sep 15, 2007 at 06:02 pm

These three stories have resonated with me lately:

– Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is now admitting — no, boasting — that he lied to Congress when he claimed a few weeks ago that the new Constitution-trashing FISA legislation helped thwart a terrorist plot.

– ABC correspondent Alexis Debat, much in demand in Beltway media circles as an expert on the Middle East, has been exposed as a fake who used lies (and bogus interviews-that-never-happened with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Kofi Annan) to do things such as promote the Bush White House’s planned attacks on Iran.

– The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen tries to pretend that major right-wing player and zampolit Ted Olson is just this innocent widdle bunny rabbit being picked on by those mean ole partisan donkeyheads: “Olson is the latest in an array of potential candidates, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who have drawn early objections from Democrats. The Washington Post reported last week that Olson had emerged as a leading contender, but many Democrats view him as a sharply partisan figure with alleged ties to a conservative magazine’s investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s.”

Glenn Greenwald: One-sided rules of political debate

Now that it is inescapably clear to everyone (rather than just bloggers) that we will remain in Iraq in full force through the end of the Bush presidency, and now that, according to a Fox News report this morning, "'everyone in town' is now participating in a broad discussion about the costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 months," what has attracted the righteous fury of Time's leading "liberal" pundit Joe Klein, who helped sell the Iraq invasion to the country in the first place?

James Wolcott: Future President of Petticoat Junction Seeks Florida Fun

Sopping up gravy wherever he goes, Republican hopeful Fred Thompson pays his respects to the good people gathered around the filling station.

"It's good to be back among neighbors," he said. "You know, in Tennessee, every time I had a day or two I always would try and find an excuse to get down to Florida. Well, it looks like I found a pretty doggone good one. I'm going to be down here a whole lot."

One wonders why the former Senator from Tennessee was always itching so bad to get down to Florida.

Daily Kos: Chris Dodd's "Letters from Nuremberg"

by SusanG Sun Sep 16, 2007 at 07:30:58 AM PDT

Letters from Nuremberg
My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice
By Sen. Christopher J. Dodd with Lary Bloom
Crown Publishing
New York, 2007

I feel that we are doing something so important that it is awesome—it is almost purifying. It has a deep religious meaning, of that I feel certain. Surely it is God’s wish that men not wage wars of aggression. The proof here is absolutely overwhelming. I would never have believed that men could be so evil, so determined on a course of war; of murder; of slavery; of dreadful tyranny. Never before has such a record been written and men will read it for a thousand years in amazement and wonder how it ever happened.

Booman Tribune: Impeach or It's Armageddon

by BooMan
Sun Sep 16th, 2007 at 12:50:38 AM EST

Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London:

Some cynics argue that George Bush is playing a small, domestic game of keeping the ordeal [Iraq] going so that the next Democratic president can be accused of losing Iraq – not him. But this theory, while not totally implausible, does not quite fit with the messianic ambitions of the president and apocalyptic fears of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Okay, so Andrew Sullivan doesn't have any special insight. But the word has definitely gotten out that Dick Cheney is frothing at the mouth to make more evil. There's not a constant amount of evil in the world, you know. It's not a zero-sum game. Cheney makes evil where evil did not previously exist. And his brush-clearing sidekick is too eager to go along. Here's the news coming out today.

Jane Smiley: The Shock Doctrine

Posted September 13, 2007 | 02:07 PM (EST)

You might have read the piece in Salon the other day where John Dean laments the passing of the Republican Party as a positive, or, even, a non-damaging force in American life. The party he has known for forty years, and the party he says that his friends now know, is a hateful, entirely corrupt, and self-interested body composed of those who take revenge and those who fear having revenge taken upon them. Every current candidate for the presidency is "authoritarian" in an extreme and unAmerican way that Dean thinks would have in earlier decades been "corrected" by the political system, but the Republicans, according to Dean, have broken the political system precisely so that it won't correct them. Sounds like the financial markets, doesn't it?

Greenspan Concedes Mortgage Dilemma

By JEANNINE AVERSA – 2 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledges he failed to see early on that an explosion of mortgages to people with questionable credit histories could pose a danger to the economy.

In an upcoming interview, Greenspan said he was aware of "subprime" lending practices where homebuyers got very low initial rates only to see them later jacked up, causing severe payment shock. But he said he didn't initially realize the harm they could do.

"While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late," he said in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview to be broadcast Sunday. "I really didn't get it until very late in 2005 and 2006," Greenspan said.

It Came From Planet Bush

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, September 14, 2007; 1:12 PM

In the alternate universe that President Bush occupies, he gave a smashing speech last night.

Over there, the people of Iraq need our help to save them from the al Qaeda terrorists who intend to overthrow their brave and united government on the way to attacking America. It's a battle of good versus evil. We have 36 countries fighting alongside us. And the fight is going very well indeed. Ordinary life is returning to Baghdad.

The Next War

It's always looming. But has our military learned the right lessons from this one to fight it and win?

By Wesley K. Clark
Sunday, September 16, 2007; B01

Testifying before Congress last week, Gen. David H. Petraeus appeared commanding, smart and alive to the challenges that his soldiers face in Iraq. But he also embodied what the Iraq conflict has come to represent: an embattled, able, courageous military at war, struggling to maintain its authority and credibility after 4 1/2 years of a "cakewalk" gone wrong.

Petraeus will not be the last general to find himself explaining how a military intervention has misfired and urging skeptical lawmakers to believe that the mission can still be accomplished. For the next war is always looming, and so is the urgent question of whether the U.S. military can adapt in time to win it.

Frank Rich: Will the Democrats Betray Us?

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.

Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil

Graham Paterson

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

Oh! What a Lovely War on Terror - it's the number the arms dealers love

The biggest threat to our freedoms comes not from al-Qaida but from the security bureaucrats and their cronies

Simon Jenkins
Friday September 14, 2007
The Guardian

I admit it is a grim question for a fine autumn weekend, but is liberty in decline? Have we taken the old girl for granted so long that we cannot see her lined face, frayed garments and sagging bosom? The swimming pool in Baghdad's Green Zone may be Liberty Pool and American chips Freedom Fries, but the glory days are over. Sex appeal these days has passed from liberty to power.

Anyone currently visiting the Royal Docks in London's East End will see an extraordinary display. Sleek grey warships nestle close to the vast Excel exhibition of weapons of mass destruction and repression. Hidden away from the heart of the capital, arms buyers from three dozen nations show why Britain is the world's second biggest defence exporter after America.