Digby: The Village Social Tabbies Hiss And Yowl

Mrs Tim Russert has a new article in Vanity Fair this month about the Village hostesses. Apparently they are very upset. Nobody seems to have good dinner parties any more.

It all started with Carter who refused to serve drinks. Luckily, Reagan came in and brought back the glittering social life these people know they deserve. But it wasn't to last:

Lea Berman: I remember at the end of the Reagan years we got Democrats in Congress, and it really got ugly at dinner parties. We were just under siege the whole dinner. I told my husband, “I am not going to go through that again.” People of different parties weren’t really friends.

The Bush Sr administration was pretty good because they entertained a lot of foreign leaders and those were simply wuuunderful parties.

Reid Allowed Vote On Mukasey In Exchange For Military Funding Bill

By Greg Sargent - November 9, 2007, 6:00PM

Here's some more on what exactly happened in the negotiations that led up to the rushed confirmation of Michael Mukasey yesterday.

According to sources inside and outside the Democratic leadership, Harry Reid allowed a vote on Mukasey because in exchange the Republican leadership agreed to allow a vote on the big Defense Appropriations Bill, which contains $459 billion in military spending but doesn't fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reid had wanted to get this bill passed before the end of this week, and in fact, the defense bill did come up for a vote late last night and was passed after the Mukasey vote.

Glenn Greenwald: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?

Every time Congressional Democrats failed this year to stop the Bush administration (i.e., every time they "tried"), the excuse they gave was that they "need 60 votes in the Senate" in order to get anything done. Each time Senate Republicans blocked Democratic legislation, the media helpfully explained not that Republicans were obstructing via filibuster, but rather that, in the Senate, there is a general "60-vote requirement" for everything.

How, then, can this be explained?

The Senate confirmed Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general Thursday night, approving him despite Democratic criticism that he had failed to take an unequivocal stance against the torture of terrorism detainees.

The 53-to-40 vote made Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge, the third person to head the Justice Department during the tenure of President Bush . . . Thirty-nine Democrats and one independent [Bernie Sanders] opposed him.

Beyond that, four Senate Democrats running for President missed the vote, and all four had announced they oppose Mukasey's confirmation. Thus, at least 44 Senators claimed to oppose Mukasey's confirmation -- more than enough to prevent it via filibuster. So why didn't they filibuster, the way Senate Republicans have on virtually every measure this year which they wanted to defeat?

The Nuclear Bombshell That Never Went Off

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Say you’re a member of Congress, and a Pentagon expert tells you that top officials are secretly letting Taiwan go nuclear, to contain China’s emerging threat.

Do you: (1) start an investigation, with an eye toward hearings to grill officials on the facts, or (2) drop it and stand aside as officials run your whistleblower out of town?

In the real-life case of Pakistan and nuclear weapons, the answer from Congress has been (2). Twenty years ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee learned that officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations were looking the other way while Pakistan acquired U.S. technology for its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Later, the United States allowed Pakistan to tweak its U.S.-supplied F-16s to carry nuclear bombs over India.

Katha Pollitt: Dowd v Clinton, Chapter 3465

Is Maureen Dowd obsessed with Hillary Clinton or what? Last week, she complained that Hillary spoke "girlfriend to girlfriend" to women voters while refusing to share the pain of being married to a sexually exploitative monster who had made her violate all her beliefs and principles, as Caitlin Flanagan opined in the Atlantic. This week, Dowd accused Hillary of "playing the woman-as-victim card" because her campaign put out a humorous video portraying the last debate as a masculine pile-on (never mind that Hillary herself said she was the focus of tough questioning because she was the front-runner): "If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn't it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now."

Buyout Firms, Hedge Funds Look to Senate, Bush to Beat Tax Rise

By Alison Fitzgerald and Ryan J. Donmoyer

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Private-equity firms and hedge funds may lose their first legislative skirmish when the U.S. House votes today on a proposal to raise their taxes. They will find friendlier territory ahead in the Senate and the White House.

The House is poised to adopt a $78.3 billion measure that would alleviate the impact of the alternative minimum tax this year. The measure offsets lost revenue by more than doubling the tax rate on so-called carried interest, the payment that executives at buyout and venture-capital firms, and real-estate and oil and gas partnerships, receive for managing investments.

Paul Krugman: Health Care Excuses

The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured.

You might think that these facts would make the case for major reform of America’s health care system — reform that would involve, among other things, learning from other countries’ experience — irrefutable. Instead, however, apologists for the status quo offer a barrage of excuses for our system’s miserable performance.

IRD Advisor to Be Nominated as U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican

By Frederick Clarkson, Tue Nov 06, 2007 at 11:55:12 PM EST

I recently referenced Andrew Weaver's report of last year in Media Transparency, which detailed the role of neoconservative Catholics close to the Bush administration in the leadership of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. IRD is, of course, the Washington, DC-based organization that busies itself trying to disrupt and dismantle the major denominations of mainline Protestantism in order to, according to its own internal documents, "discredit and diminish the Religious Left's influence" (as Max Blumenthal reported on Salon.com a few years ago.) Weaver, a Methodist minister, called the role of leading neoconservative Catholics in IRD

"...the most grievous breach in ecumenical good will between Roman Catholics and Protestants since the changes initiated by Vatican II."

Imagine the outcry from Catholic leaders, a fully justified response, if a highly influential group of Protestants obtained a million dollars a year from left-wing sources to generate a propaganda campaign against the leadership of the Catholic Church over the issues of the ordination of women and divorce. Moreover, this Protestant-directed group constantly sought to undermine Catholic leaders and missions through twisted and demeaning distortions of what they said, while seeking no reforms in their own communions. This is exactly the situation we have at IRD.

Tomgram: Susan Faludi, Hillary Clinton and the Rescue Card

Whatever fears Americans have at the moment -- and with oil heading into the once unimaginable $100-a-barrel range and the housing market in freefall, fears are not unreasonable -- they do not add up to Fear with a capital "F," as in the days and weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. They do not add up to the kind of abject fear that proved so useful to the Bush administration as it prepared to launch its Global War on Terror and future invasion of Iraq by scaring Americans into passivity.

As Mark Danner wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, war is a godsend for politicians, "for glowing at its heart is that most lucrative of political emotions: fear. War produces fear. But so too does the rhetoric of war." Right now, that rhetoric -- specifically the fear of terrorism -- is not much at the forefront of American minds. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a modest 17% of Republicans and a vanishingly small 3% of Democrats put "terrorism" among their top two concerns. This may be one reason why the leading Republican candidates, with little to offer and saddled with seven years of George Bush, are so over the top on potentially fear-inducing subjects like war with Iran.

Clinton Announces Support for NAFTA Expansion

By David Sirota on November 8, 2007 - 8:28pm.

Under intense pressure from opponents in the 2008 presidential race and a building national fair trade movement, Sen. Hillary Clinton tonight finally disclosed her position on a Bush administration-backed bill to expand the NAFTA trade model that passed the U.S. House today and is now moving to the U.S. Senate. Reuters is reporting that Clinton says she will vote for the Peru Free Trade Agreement - the first agreement in a package of corporate-crafted agreements to vastly expand the NAFTA trade model.

Clinton is citing the Peru deal's labor standards as justification for her support, despite the fact that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has told reporters it has received "assurances" that those labor standards are "unenforceable," and despite a Columbia University report showing how the Peru deal could actually weaken labor law enforcement.

Who's Afraid of a Falling Dollar?

By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNet
Posted on November 8, 2007, Printed on November 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67307/

What do policy-makers in China, Japan, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, the European Union and many other countries understand that ours don't? It seems they know that if the value of their currencies rises too much, it can hurt their economy. But for a number of reasons it hasn't quite sunk in here.

Which is too bad, because we've lost more than three million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. since 2001, and much if not most of this job loss is due to the dollar being overvalued. This is bad news not only for the people who lost those jobs, but for the tens of millions more whose wages are depressed by the displacement of these workers - and arguably for the nation as a whole, as America's manufacturing base continues its process of "hollowing out."

Can Green Jobs Save the American Middle Class?

By Brita Belli, E Magazine
Posted on November 9, 2007, Printed on November 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67138/

The American middle class -- of which some 80 percent of Americans claim to be a part -- is getting anxious. While there is no carved-in-stone edict about what it means to be middle class, it's the term that Americans hang their dreams on.

It suggests earning enough to get by without struggling; being able to afford health care, college costs and the occasional trip to Disney World. The middle-class ideal is tied to earning power, and it's there that confidence is eroding. Over the last five years, while most workers' incomes have increased slowly or not at all, costs have reached record levels. Housing costs are up 23 percent, college costs up 44 percent and health insurance costs up 71 percent.

America's Shocking Nuclear Hypocrisy

By Tad Daley, AlterNet
Posted on November 9, 2007, Printed on November 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67368/

Some call it "America's nuclear hypocrisy." Others call it the "nuclear double standard," others still our "nuclear narcissism." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoing the phrase used by Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh at the time of his own country's nuclear tests in 1998, often calls it "nuclear apartheid." But it has rarely been expressed as baldly as it was during the last days of October 2007.

It started with two passings. Paul Tibbets, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces B-29, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, that killed at least 80,000 people, and Randall Forsberg, the genius behind the 1982 Central Park nuclear freeze rally, which the New York Times, in her obituary, called the largest political demonstration in American history, both died -- with exquisite irony -- within just a few days of each other.

U.S. Aid to Musharraf is Largely Untraceable Cash Transfers

By Spencer Ackerman - November 7, 2007, 5:05PM

After Pervez Musharraf declared martial law this weekend, Condoleezza Rice vowed to review U.S. assistance to Pakistan, one of the largest foreign recipients of American aid. Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse. But, perhaps unsure whether Musharraf's days might in fact be numbered, Rice contended that the explosion of money to Islamabad over the past seven years was "not to Musharraf, but to a Pakistan you could argue was making significant strides on a number of fronts."

UCLA research shows dramatic savings for Medicaid when head start parents learn to care for kids

Health literacy training reduced ER and clinic visits and boosted parents' confidence

LOS ANGELES, Calif., Nov. 7, 2007 – New research proves that a “dose” of hands-on health care training can transform parents’ abilities to care for common childhood ailments at home – and save Medicaid millions of dollars annually.

Tracking 9,240 Head Start families enrolled in a health literacy program – and impacting nearly 20,000 children in 35 states – researchers found that visits to a hospital ER or clinic dropped by 58 percent and 42 percent, respectively, as parents opted to treat their children’s fevers, colds and earaches at home. This added up to a potential annual savings to Medicaid of $554 per family in direct costs associated with such visits, or about $5.1 million annually, according to the UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute for Head Start, which conducted the study.

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup.

by Joseph E. Stiglitz | December 2007

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

15,000 want off the U.S. terror watch list

By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — More than 15,000 people have appealed to the government since February to have their names removed from the terrorist watch list that delayed their travel at U.S. airports and border crossings, the Homeland Security Department says.

TERROR WATCH: List swells to more than 755,000

The complaints have created such a backlog that members of Congress are calling for a speedier appeal system that would help innocent people clear their names so they won't fall under future suspicion. Among those who have been flagged at checkpoints: toddlers and senior citizens with the same names as suspected terrorists on the watch list.

"they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States"

Here’s my transcript:

My name’s Mark Klein; I used to be an AT&T technician for 22 years.

What I figured out when I got there [AT&’s secret room at 611 Folsom Street, SSan Francisco] is that they were copying everything flowing across the Internet cables, and the major Internet links between AT&T’s network and other company’s networks, and it struck me at the time that this is a massively unconstitutional, illegal operation.

It affects not only AT&T’s customers, but everybody, ‘cause these links went to places like Sprint, Qwest, a whole bunch of other companies, and so they’re basicallly tapping into the entire Internet.

CREW is launching Governmentdocs.org, an online database to revolutionize research of government documents

Tomorrow, CREW, in conjunction with a coalition of government watchdog groups, is launching a new online government document database, governmentdocs.org. We'll be previewing the new site in a tele-news conference, tomorrow, Thursday, November 8 at 11:00 AM.

The call-in number is 866.211.5938.

We are very excited about this new program, which truly revolutionizes and facilitates research of government documents. The database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind.

Reagan library can't fully account for 80,000 artifacts

A 'near universal' security breakdown left items open to theft by insiders, an audit says.

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Catherine Saillant, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
November 8, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is unable to find or account for tens of thousands of valuable mementos of Reagan's White House years because a "near universal" security breakdown left the artifacts vulnerable to pilfering by insiders, an audit by the National Archives inspector general has concluded.

Inspector General Paul Brachfeld said that his office was investigating allegations that a former employee stole Reagan memorabilia but that the probe had been hampered by the facility's sloppy record-keeping.

Bernanke says US economy to slow

Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke has warned that the US economy will slow noticeably before the end of the year.

He blamed the slowdown on the credit crisis, which has made it harder for banks and individuals to borrow money.

He said that there was likely to be more "financial restraint on economic growth as credit becomes more expensive and difficult to obtain".

Preparing for Life After Oil

By Michael T. Klare, The Nation
Posted on November 8, 2007, Printed on November 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66625/

This past May, in an unheralded and almost unnoticed move, the Energy Department signaled a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. The department stopped talking about "oil" in its projections of future petroleum availability and began speaking of "liquids." The global output of "liquids," the department indicated, would rise from 84 million barrels of oil equivalent (mboe) per day in 2005 to a projected 117.7 mboe in 2030 -- barely enough to satisfy anticipated world demand of 117.6 mboe. Aside from suggesting the degree to which oil companies have ceased being mere suppliers of petroleum and are now purveyors of a wide variety of liquid products -- including synthetic fuels derived from natural gas, corn, coal and other substances -- this change hints at something more fundamental: we have entered a new era of intensified energy competition and growing reliance on the use of force to protect overseas sources of petroleum.

Veterans make up 1 in 4 homeless in US

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer
12 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

Congress running out of time to patch the AMT

Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: November 06, 2007 08:18:03 PM

WASHINGTON — For the first time since 2001, it’s not clear that Congress will pass an annual temporary “patch” in time to prevent the creeping Alternative Minimum Tax from forcing up tax payments for millions of unsuspecting middle-class taxpayers.

In addition, if Congress doesn’t “patch” the AMT tax within 10 days — and it appears highly unlikely to do so — then the partisan bickering among lawmakers could delay tax refunds next year for tens of millions of Americans.

Climate Change Could Diminish Drinking Water More Than Expected

COLUMBUS , Ohio -- As sea levels rise, coastal communities could lose up to 50 percent more of their fresh water supplies than previously thought, according to a new study from Ohio State University.

Hydrologists here have simulated how saltwater will intrude into fresh water aquifers, given the sea level rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC has concluded that within the next 100 years, sea level could rise as much as 23 inches, flooding coasts worldwide.

Scientists enhance Mother Nature's carbon handling mechanism

Taking a page from Nature herself, a team of researchers developed a method to enhance removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and place it in the Earth's oceans for storage.

Unlike other proposed ocean sequestration processes, the new technology does not make the oceans more acid and may be beneficial to coral reefs. The process is a manipulation of the natural weathering of volcanic silicate rocks. Reporting in today's (Nov. 7) issue of Environmental Science and Technology, the Harvard and Penn State team explained their method.

"The technology involves selectively removing acid from the ocean in a way that might enable us to turn back the clock on global warming," says Kurt Zenz House, graduate student in Earth and planetary sciences, Harvard University. "Essentially, our technology dramatically accelerates a cleaning process that Nature herself uses for greenhouse gas accumulation."

Social Security disability backlog

Every two weeks the federal government takes money out of your paycheck for insurance, in case you ever become too sick to work. It's called Social Security Disability Insurance.

The system is so backlogged it takes years to receive the benefits.

Imagine being diagnosed with a devastating illness, losing your job, going through your savings, then your retirement and finally losing your home.

Digby: The Right-Wing Relativists

There was a time when conservatives used to commonly insult liberals with an accusation that they were empty "pomo relativists." Lynn Cheney, in particular, made a point of it when she was the chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities and even wrote a book about it called "Telling The Truth," if you can believe that.

CHENEY: It's postmodernism, the notion that there is no such thing as truth. There's only your version of events and my version and Charles' version and Harry's version, and the one that prevails will be that of whoever is the most powerful. This seems to fly in the face of the way scholarship has proceeded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

It takes your breath away, doesn't it? The exposure of the conservative movement as extreme epistemic relativists has been one of the most fascinating (and frustrating) stories of the Bush years.

Tomgram: William Astore, If We Lose Iraq, You're to Blame

You know there's trouble ahead when Iraq, in its present state, is the good news story for Bush administration policy. While various civilian and military officials from the President on down have been talking up "success" in Iraq and beating the rhetorical war drums vis-à-vis Iran, much of the remainder of the administration's foreign policy in what the neocons used to call "the arc of instability" began to thoroughly unravel.

In the Horn of Africa, U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops are bogged down in a disastrous occupation of the Somalian capital, harried by a growing Islamist insurgency. Despite endless shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration's Middle East peace conference, to be held at Annapolis, is already being dismissed as a failure before the first official invitations are issued. Meanwhile, the Turks are driving the administration to distraction by threatening to invade and destabilize the only moderately successful part of the new Iraq, its Kurdish region (while the Iraqi government in Baghdad calls on Iran for help in the crisis).

Fear, Hate and Hand Grenades: Extremists' Unrelenting Assault on Immigrants

By Tara McKelvey, The American Prospect
Posted on November 7, 2007, Printed on November 7, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67031/

It was a May afternoon in Washington's meridian Hill Park. Forty-year-old Ricardo Juarez Nava was at a rally in support of immigrants when he saw a neatly dressed man approaching the group. As it turned out, the man, Tyler J. Froatz Jr., was protesting the rally and had brought along an anti-immigration flyer (a crudely drawn illustration of border officers firing on an immigrant with the caption, "THE ONLY WAY TO STOP A FLOOD ..."), and a back- pack with a claw hammer, a Taser, and pepper spray inside. Froatz, who is 24 and a New Jersey native, also had a fully automatic M1 carbine rifle in the trunk of his car.

Pat Robertson endorses Giuliani

By LIBBY QUAID, Associated Press Writer
55 minutes ago

Televangelist Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, endorsed Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday.

"It is my pleasure to announce my support for America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, a proven leader who is not afraid of what lies ahead and who will cast a hopeful vision for all Americans," Robertson said during a news conference with Giuliani in Washington.

Combating Muslim Extremism

All the major Republican presidential candidates have bought into George W. Bush's rhetoric of a central struggle against Muslim extremism and have thus committed themselves to a generational, often self-generating war. By foregrounding this issue, they have ensured that it will be pivotal to the 2008 presidential race. The Democratic candidates have mostly been timid in critiquing Bush's "war on terror" or pointing out its dangers to the Republic, a failing that they must redress if they are to blunt their rivals' fearmongering.

Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani in his recent Foreign Affairs article complains that the United States has been on the "defensive" in the war on "radical Islamic fascism" and says with maddening vagueness that it must find ways of going "on the offensive." He promises that "this war will be long." Giuliani is being advised on such matters by Representative Peter King, who has complained that "unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country"; by Daniel Pipes, who has questioned the wisdom of allowing American Muslims to vote; and by Norman Podhoretz, author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Combining the word "Islam" with a European term like "fascism" is profoundly offensive; a subtext of anti-Muslim bigotry pervades Giuliani's campaign, a sop to the Christian and Zionist right.

Deadliest year for US troops in Iraq

The U.S. military announced six new deaths Tuesday, making 2007 the bloodiest year for American troops in Iraq despite a recent decline in casualties and a sharp drop in roadside bombings that Washington links to Iran.

With nearly two months left in the year, the annual toll is now 853 — three more than the previous worst of 850 in 2004.

But the grim milestone comes as the Pentagon points toward other encouraging signs as well — growing security in Baghdad and other former militant strongholds that could help consolidate the gains against extremists.

Paper or Plastic … or Neither

Will vegetable-based, biodegradable bags replace plastic and paper at the supermarket?

By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007, at 7:37 AM ET

I've heard that both paper and plastic shopping bags are pretty dreadful for the environment—the former because they require so many trees, the latter because they suffocate animals and last for centuries. I remember a lot of talk in the late 1990s about biodegradable bags composed of vegetable matter—whatever happened to those?

You can find them at a few tony stores, but they're still nowhere cheap enough for the local Piggly Wiggly. Standard polyethylene bags cost retailers around 2 cents each, while paper bags might be a penny or two more expensive. But so-called bioplastic bags, made from natural starches or oils, cost in the neighborhood of 7 or 8 cents—a lot for stores that hand out millions of bags per year. American shoppers are issued more than 100 billion polyethylene bags annually, so a nickel-per-sack premium would add up to an extra $5 billion in business costs.

As crude-oil price soars, prepare to pay more to stay warm

WASHINGTON — With the price of oil approaching all-time highs, the cost of home heating this winter is expected to soar. Experts say it's not a question of whether it will be a bad winter for consumers, just how bad.

Even before oil breached the $90-a-barrel barrier last week and began racing toward $100, the Energy Information Administration had forecast higher prices. But those forecasts Oct. 9 now seem low.

Alaskan youth testifies on the Hill — and draws Limbaugh's ire

WASHINGTON — Charlee Lockwood has never heard of Rush Limbaugh or listened to his radio program, and perhaps it's just as well.

On Monday, the talk radio king told listeners that Democrats were exploiting the 18-year-old Yupik Eskimo, and that her emotional testimony that day in front of a U.S. House committee on global warming made him "really want to puke. I just want to throw up."

INTERVIEW: Rep. Phil Hare On the Fight to Stop the NAFTA Expansion

Submitted by David Sirota on November 6, 2007 - 10:20am.

Democrats this week are expected to attempt to ram the Peru Free Trade Agreement through the House, in an inexplicable effort to expand the NAFTA trade model just months after they won Congress promising to reform America's trade policies. The move is causing great consternation among rank-and-file Democrats on Capitol Hill, as the Hill Newspaper reports this morning.

I was in Washington last week and had a chance to sit down and chat with Illinois Rep. Phil Hare (D), who is helping to lead the opposition to the NAFTA expansion. You can listen to excerpts of my interview with Hare here.

Flier gives wrong Election Day

FORT WORTH, Texas — The Tarrant County District Attorney's Office was investigating the distribution of a bogus election flier that told people to vote Saturday.

The flier in English and Spanish featured the county logo and was marked "Official Notice."

Bush Could Get Access to Private Hillary Files -- Will He Use Them in the Election?

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on November 6, 2007, Printed on November 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67037/

An unspoken political vulnerability of Sen. Hillary Clinton is that she is the first presidential candidate to have both her and her spouse subject to regular, long-term surveillance by an Executive Branch under the control of an opposing political party.

Since they left the White House in 2001, Bill and Hillary Clinton -- as the former President and First Lady -- have been under the protection of the Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department. Records are maintained showing where they go and, to an extent, whom they meet.

The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet
Posted on November 3, 2007, Printed on November 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66823/

In the weeks after 9/11, novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that closed with these words, "The mortal citizens of a planet are praying right now that we will bear in mind ... that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred." She was promptly vilified by Rush Limbaugh and a slew of other right-wing commentators. Shortly afterward, the Los Angeles Times received a letter, among many others, from a collection agency owner who called Kingsolver's op-ed "nothing less than another act of terror."

This is just one of many episodes that Susan Faludi recounts in her new book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. In this scathing critique of the media's response to 9/11, Faludi turns her critical eye to how, in the wake of the powerlessness many Americans felt on 9/11, a myth was spun -- one that stretches back to the time of America's first English settlers.

The Partisan

By Michael Tomasky

The Conscience of a Liberal

by Paul Krugman

Norton, 296 pp., $25.95

Difficult as it is to remember now, there was a time in the United States, as recently as fifteen or so years ago, when we were not engaged in constant political warfare. In those days Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in a war, would not have been visually equated with Saddam Hussein in a television ad, something the Republicans did to him in 2002. The release of a declaration by, for example, the National Academy of Sciences was for the most part acknowledged as legitimate, and not attacked as a product of so-called liberal bias as its 2005 report on global warming was.^[1]

We can regret, as it is customary to do, the loss of civility in political discourse (although such laments tend to assume a golden era that wasn't quite as civil in reality as it is in the memories of those who mourn its passing).

Knee-Capped By Kissinger

During the Nixon presidency, National Security Adviser (and, later, Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin held regularly scheduled secret meetings and frequent phone conversations outside normal diplomatic channels. For Kissinger, a major reason to keep the talks secret was that he didn't want his bureaucratic rival, Secretary of State William Rogers, to butt in. Over the past decade, records of these once-classified "back channel" meetings have been released by the U.S. government. Last month, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs returned the favor and, in collaboration with our State Department, released Dobrynin's side of the story in a bound and footnoted volume of English translations of the ambassador's cables home under the title, Soviet American Relations, The Détente Years 1969 – 1972.

One of Dobrynin's memos illustrates the strenuous lengths that Kissinger went to in order to keep Rogers out of the loop.

The Freedom Agenda Fizzles

How George Bush and Condoleezza Rice made a mess of Pakistan.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 7:18 PM ET

---

Now we've really got problems.

The state of emergency in Pakistan signals yet another low point in President George W. Bush's foreign policy—a stark demonstration of his paltry influence and his bankrupt principles. More than that, the crackdown locks us in a crisis—a potentially dangerous dynamic—from which there appears to be no escape route.

For much of last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top U.S. officials had been urging Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not to declare martial law. He not only ignored these pleas; he defied them.

Firedoglake: Message Control

By: Christy Hardin Smith

After a fantastic Book Salon with Susan Faludi yesterday afternoon, I settled in to watch some Bill Moyers’ Journal regarding the consolidation of media control across the spectrum of print and broadcast reporting. The intersection of the two was fascinating. Susan Faludi in yesterday’s comments:

As someone who has worked at many newspapers over the course of a career in journalism, I feel the same way. It was a depressing aspect of my book tour last month that as I traveled around and saw old friends at many of those papers, I kept hearing horror stories about cutbacks, layoffs, elimination of investigative reporting, proliferation of meaningless consumer “lifestyle” sections, and demands for stories that get a lot of clicks instead of stories that have actual import.

Experts: No firm evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons

WASHINGTON — Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush's point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

Political Scientists Examine Voter Confidence in Electoral Administration, Make Recommendations

APSA Press Release

For Immediate Release
CONTACT: Bahram Rajaee, 202-483-2512

Political Scientists Examine Voter Confidence in Electoral Administration, Make Recommendations

Washington, DC—A new study by political scientists examines voter confidence in the local administration of U.S. elections and finds the quality of voters’ experience with the voting process is key to bolstering confidence in the election system—along with the casting a ballot on Election Day and the use of voting machines with verifiable results.

The research, conducted by Lonna Rae Atkeson (University of New Mexico) and Kyle L. Saunders (Colorado State University), is entitled “The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence: A Local Matter?” and appears in an election reform symposium in the October issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. The full symposium is available online at /content_47809.cfm.

Postal Service Says Killing Small Periodicals Is a "Win-Win"

Elijah Cummings was angry. The Democratic congressman from Baltimore represents a district that is home to the Afro-American Newspaper, a weekly publication that is in jeopardy of going out of business due to the United States Postal Service's recent rate hike on small periodicals. Cummings' testiness showed when a House subcommittee heard testimony on the rate increase from a host of postal officials earlier this week.

"If these small publications go out of business, is that a win-win?" Cummings asked James Miller, chairman of the USPS's Board of Governors, the entity that approved the rate hikes, during one tense exchange.

Paul Krugman: Wobbled by Wealth?

At just about every stop I’ve made so far on my book tour, what I’ve come to think of as The Question comes up. I talk about the origins of the long right-wing dominance of American politics, and the reasons I believe that dominance is coming to an end. Then someone asks, “How can you be optimistic about the prospects for progressive change, when big money has so much influence on politics?”

It’s a good question.

The public wants change. “If Americans have ever been angrier with the state of the country,” begins a new strategy memo from the polling organization Democracy Corps, “we have not witnessed it.”

Seven Bad Assumptions We Make About Iran

By Trita Parsi, The Nation
Posted on November 5, 2007, Printed on November 5, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66847/

Iran will be the top foreign policy challenge for the United States in the coming years. The Bush Administration's policy (insistence on zero enrichment of uranium, regime change and isolation of Iran) and the policy of the radicals around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (unlimited civilian nuclear capability, selective inspections and replacing the United States as the region's dominant power) have set the two countries on a collision course. Yet the mere retirement of George W. Bush's neocons or Ahmadinejad's radicals may not be sufficient to avoid the disaster of war.

Blackwater's Owner Has Spies for Hire

Ex-U.S. Operatives Dot Firm's Roster

By Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 3, 2007; Page A01

First it became a brand name in security for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it's taking on intelligence.

The Prince Group, the holding company that owns Blackwater Worldwide, has been building an operation that will sniff out intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations and global political developments for clients in industry and government.

Legal challenge on electoral change

Democrats say initiative violates U.S. Constitution and vow a suit to fight it. By Kevin Yamamura - kyamamura@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, November 2, 2007

California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres vowed Thursday to challenge a proposed initiative to change how the state's electoral votes are counted if it qualifies for the ballot.

Torres insisted the initiative would be illegal because the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the power to determine their presidential electors. The proposal being circulated by Republican consultants would assign California's electors on a district-by-district basis rather than award the statewide winner all 55 electoral votes.

Frank Rich: Noun + Verb + 9/11 + Iran = Democrats’ Defeat?

WHEN President Bush started making noises about World War III, he only confirmed what has been a Democratic article of faith all year: Between now and Election Day he and Dick Cheney, cheered on by the mob of neocon dead-enders, are going to bomb Iran.

But what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.

Making Up Jobs

Today’s employment report is mediocre at best. But to understand that, you have to look past the headline numbers.

Those numbers say that the government’s survey of employers showed a gain of 130,000 private sector jobs, on a seasonally adjusted basis, in October. That seems to be better than in recent months.

I don’t believe it. Most of those jobs — 103,000 of them, before seasonal adjustment — were added by the statisticians, not reported by employers. (It should be noted that, before seasonal adjustment, there were 201,000 jobs added, so this is just more than half.)

With Services Being Privatized, is America Developing a Two-Tiered System for Responding to Disaster?

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on November 3, 2007, Printed on November 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66743/

I used to worry that the United States was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax -- the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses -- but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatized disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.

Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group -- but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units" -- racing around in red fire-trucks -- even extinguished fires for their clients.