Digby: Compromising Blowhards

So, I hear that Bush dog Democrat Dan Boren of Oklahoma is supporting Huckabee's regressive fair tax. I can't say that surprises me. Being a vacuous blowhard evidently runs in that family.

Just in case anyone's forgotten or are too young to remember --the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and current Unity 08 poobah, David Boren, is an egomaniac who stabbed Bill Clinton in the back repeatedly when he was trying to pass his economic plan in 1993.

Digby: Partisan Bickering

Via the Sideshow and C&L

More about partisan bickering here, here and here.

Update: I'm getting tired of constantly being accused by Obama supporters of trying to hurt him if I write anything about the foibles of bipartisanship. I'm not crazy about his stump speech on the subject, but it's not really about that.

I'm actually trying to help all the candidates, by shining a light on how the villagers seize the political agenda with their tiresome insistence on "unity" and bipartisanship as the highest of political virtues. I'm trying to give readers a bit of perspective on what we're up against. This is about Broderella and the sell-out Bush dogs and the VRWC and how they manipulate things to keep the status quo. It's analysis, not advocacy.

Digby: Culture 'O Life

I'm finally getting around to watching the Republicans debate from yesterday and listened to all of them (except for Ron Paul) enthusiastically sign on to the Bush Doctrine and war without end against the islamofasciterrorists and anybody else who looks at America sideways.

Pollution shrinks foetus size: Brisbane study finds

Exposure to air pollution significantly reduces foetus size during pregnancy, according to a new study by Brisbane scientists.

Queensland University of Technology senior research fellow Dr Adrian Barnett said the study compared the foetus sizes of more than 15,000 ultrasound scans in Brisbane to air pollution levels within a 14km radius of the city.

George McGovern: Impeach Bush and Cheney

Posted on Jan 6, 2008

One-time presidential candidate, World War II hero and former Sen. George McGovern penned a bombshell of an Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, trotting out a list of impeachable offenses that he said President Bush and Vice President Cheney have committed and asserting that the case for their impeachment “is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election.”

---

McGovern in The Washington Post:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

Paul Krugman: From Hype to Fear

The unemployment report on Friday was brutally bad. Unemployment rose in December, while job creation was minimal — and it’s highly likely, for technical reasons, that the job number will be revised down, showing an actual decline in employment.

It’s the latest piece of bad news about an economy in which the employment situation has actually been deteriorating for the past year. It’s no longer possible to hope that the effects of the housing slump will remain “contained,” as one of 2007’s buzzwords had it. The levees have been breached, and the repercussions of the housing crisis are spreading across the economy as a whole.

US 'almost opened fire' on Iranian ships

Map: where the ships clashed

James Orr and agencies
Monday January 7, 2008

Guardian Unlimited

US warships came close to opening fire on Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, the Pentagon said today.

The incident followed a series of "aggressive" provocations by five boats believed to belong to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.

US officials told CNN the boats were "attack craft" which had approached US vessels in international waters on Saturday.

Oil prices rose about 30 cents to more than $98 (£50) a barrel following the incident, with traders citing increased risk of possible disruptions to oil shipments.

U.S. Rep. Frank to scrutinize housing and credit cards

By John Poirier
Fri Jan 4, 6:35 PM ET

The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee will this year scrutinize the mortgage lending industry and draft new consumer protections for credit card holders, he said on Friday.

Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, also said he will fiercely defend his plan to create a government-funded program that would boost the country's supply of housing for low-income families.

"I think the lack of affordable housing is now clear to everyone as a contributing factor to the subprime crisis," Frank said in an interview with Reuters. "If people want to make that a fight, I think we win."

Frank Rich: They Didn’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

AFTER so many years of fear and loathing, we had almost forgotten what it’s like to feel good about our country. On Thursday night, that long-dormant emotion came rushing back, like an old dream that pops out of the deepest recesses of memory, suddenly as clear as light. “They said this day would never come,” said Barack Obama, and yet here, right before us, was indisputable evidence that it had.

What felt good was not merely the improbable and historic political triumph of an African-American candidate carrying a state with a black population of under 3 percent. It was the palpable sense that our history was turning a page whether or not Mr. Obama or his doppelgänger in improbability, Mike Huckabee, end up in the White House. We could allow ourselves a big what-if: What if we could have an election that was not a referendum on either the Clinton or Bush presidencies? For the first time, we found ourselves on that long-awaited bridge to the 21st century, the one that was blown up in the ninth month of the new millennium’s maiden year.

Shocking Allegations From London: Corrupt U.S. Officials Sold Nuclear Weapons Secrets

By , The Times of London UK
Posted on January 6, 2008, Printed on January 7, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/72851/

A whistleblower has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office.

Oil futures fall on economic concerns

By JOHN WILEN, AP Business Writer
Mon Jan 7, 3:32 PM ET

Oil futures fell sharply Monday, extending their retreat from $100 as investors sold on concerns that a cooling economy will curb demand for oil and gasoline.

Comments by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Monday suggesting there is no simple fix for the nation's housing crisis added to worries about the economy raised by last Friday's Labor Department jobs report; the government's data showed that employers added far fewer jobs last month than expected.

Traders seemed to shrug off news of a confrontation Sunday between U.S. and Iranian warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Southern Strategist

By RICK PERLSTEIN

In the small Southern town that produced Harry Dent, the future Nixon White House political aide, Dent’s great-uncle John (The Baptist) Prickett edited the newspaper. One day, an outraged reader called Prickett a “Republican S.O.B.” Prickett, who like everyone else in South Carolina was a Democrat, laid him flat with a punch. The baffled reader, upon recovering, asked what was the matter with calling him an S.O.B. “But you called me a Republican S.O.B.,” Prickett answered — and thereby hangs the tale of why Harry Shuler Dent is such an important figure in American history. He was the behind-the-scenes player who did the most to turn the South from a region that despised Republicans into a Republican bastion.

Digby: Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong

Matt Stoller reports that he's hearing tons of stuff on the radio in Iowa about the alleged thirst for bipartisanship among the voters (which I also wrote about the other day in a post called "Bipartisan Zombies.") I hear it too, from a lot of non-political junkies, who are persuaded that the government is broken because of all the partisan bickering. It's a difficult conversation to have because they're half right. The government is broken, but it's not because of some sort of partisan war in which each side refuses to budge. The government is broken because one party has adopted a take-no-prisoners scorched earth philosophy and the political establishment continues to hold the victims equally responsible for the carnage.

Revolutionary air car runs on compressed air

BBC News is reporting that a French company has developed a pollution-free car which runs on compressed air. India's Tata Motors has the car under production and it may be on sale in Europe and India by the end of the year.

Analysis: Iowa votes for change

Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: January 04, 2008 01:03:30 AM

DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa sent the country a message Thursday night: We want change!

New faces. New voices. A new approach to politics.

The voters' message was clear in both parties, but boldest in the Democratic Party. Young people, independents and first-time voters surged into precinct caucuses in record numbers to vote for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, rejecting the establishment's choice, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

First-ever study to link increased mortality specifically to carbon dioxide emissions

A Stanford scientist has spelled out for the first time the direct links between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in human mortality, using a state-of-the-art computer model of the atmosphere that incorporates scores of physical and chemical environmental processes. The new findings, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, come to light just after the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent ruling against states setting specific emission standards for this greenhouse gas based in part on the lack of data showing the link between carbon dioxide emissions and their health effects.

While it has long been known that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change, the new study details how for each increase of one degree Celsius caused by carbon dioxide, the resulting air pollution would lead annually to about a thousand additional deaths and many more cases of respiratory illness and asthma in the United States, according to the paper by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Worldwide, upward of 20,000 air-pollution-related deaths per year per degree Celsius may be due to this greenhouse gas.

Paul Krugman: Dealing With the Dragon

On both Wednesday and Thursday, the price of oil briefly hit $100 a barrel. The new record made headlines, as well it should have. But what does it mean, aside from the obvious point that the economy is under extra pressure?

Well, one thing it means is that we’re having the wrong discussion about foreign policy.

Almost all the foreign policy talk in this presidential campaign has been motivated, one way or another, by 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Yet it’s a very good bet that the biggest foreign policy issues for the next president will involve the Far East rather than the Middle East. In particular, the crucial questions are likely to involve the consequences of China’s economic growth.

US jobless figures up as economy suffers severe downturn

Shares went into sharp retreat on both sides of the Atlantic today as gloomy jobs data from the United States heightened fears over prospects for the global economy.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled more than 180 points, taking it below the 13,000 level. In London, earlier gains were wiped out, with the FTSE 100 index trading more than 140 points down towards the close.

Trees absorbing less CO2 as world warms, study finds

· Shorter winters weaken forest 'carbon sinks'
· Data analysis reverses scientists' expectations

The ability of forests to soak up man-made carbon dioxide is weakening, according to an analysis of two decades of data from more than 30 sites in the frozen north.

The finding published today is crucial, because it means that more of the CO2 we release will end up affecting the climate in the atmosphere rather than being safely locked away in trees or soil.

Why the era of cheap food is over

Corn, milk, bread, and other farm products hit record high prices in 2006 – and will likely keep rising in 2008.

Food prices worldwide hit record highs in 2006, and all the signs are that they will go on rising this year, and for the foreseeable future. The era of cheap food, the experts say, is over and we are going to have to get used to it. This is easier said than done for millions around the world, as evidenced by protests in Mexico over the cost of corn tortillas, and in Italy last September about the price of (wheat) pasta. Staff writer Peter Ford looks at why.

The Unease Factor

It would be grossly unfair to charge that Hillary Clinton is endeavoring to stir up the same kind of fear that George Bush did four years ago. But there is little question that she is trying to make voters feel unsettled.

Paul Waldman | January 3, 2008

It seemed like this day would never come: Americans are about to actually start voting in the presidential primaries. And as the clock wound down, the policy differences, small as they were to begin with, receded into the background. While the Republican race is a factional contest pitting different arms of the GOP coalition against each other, the Democratic race has become, as Mark Schmitt so astutely argued, the "theory of change" primary. Hillary Clinton's talking point -- "Some people think you hope for change. Some people think you demand it. I believe you work for it" -- is a reasonably fair summation of the three candidates' perspectives, even if none of them have actually told us anything in particular about how they'd go about overcoming opposition to enacting things like health-care reform. When Clinton says she'll work really hard and bring her experience to bear, what exactly does that mean? When John Edwards says he'll "fight" the insurance companies, what sort of fight is he talking about, with what kinds of weapons? When Barack Obama says he'll bring people together to solve problems, how is he going to overcome the opposition of people who simply don't want to go along? No one knows.

DNA tests get man freed after 27 years

A man who contended throughout his 26 years in prison that he never raped a woman who lived five houses down from him was freed Thursday after a judge recommended overturning his conviction.

Charles Chatman, 47, was released on his recognizance as several of his eight siblings cheered. He was freed on the basis of new DNA testing that lawyers say proves his innocence and adds to Dallas County's nationally unmatched number of wrongfully convicted inmates.

US shares slump on work worries

US shares fell sharply on Friday after the country's unemployment rate rose to a two-year high in December, raising fears about a possible recession.

The Dow Jones index slumped 256.54 points, 2% to close at 12,800.18 while the tech-heavy Nasdaq plunged 98.03 points, 3.8% to 2,504.65.

The US Labor Department said employers added 18,000 jobs to their payrolls, far below economists' forecasts.

What Obama's Iowa Win Means for Everyone

By Arianna Huffington, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on January 4, 2008, Printed on January 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/72596/

Even if your candidate didn't win tonight, you have reason to celebrate. We all do.

Barack Obama's stirring victory in Iowa -- down home, folksy, farm-fed, Midwestern, and 92 percent white Iowa -- says a lot about America, and also about the current mindset of the American voter.

Katha Pollitt: Maternity Fashions, Junior Size

[from the January 21, 2008 issue]

Teens getting pregnant: bad. Teens having babies: good. If this makes no sense to you, wake up and smell the Enfamil. It's 2008! The hot movie is Juno, a funnyquirkybittersweet indie about a pregnant high school hipster who gives her baby up for adoption. The hot celebrity is Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old sister of Britney and star of Nickelodeon's Zoey 101, who's pregnant and having the baby because she wants to "do what's right." The teen birthrate, after falling for fourteen years, is up 3 percent, a phenomenon perhaps not unrelated to the fact that abstinence-only sex ed, although demonstrably ineffective at preventing sexual activity and linked to higher rates of unprotected sex, is the only sex ed taught in 35 percent of our schools. (Although maybe teens are having babies for the same reasons grown women are--the birthrate for adults is up, too.)

Return of the Swift Boaters

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES

[posted online on January 2, 2008]

More than three years after John Kerry's bitter defeat, at the dawn of what looks like a far more promising campaign cycle for the Democrats, the party is still haunted by the specter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Once upon a time, "Swift boat" denoted an obscure military vessel, but thanks to the activities of this group it has come to represent movement conservatism's penchant for ruthlessly (and effectively) smearing any and all political opponents, from a sitting senator and war hero to an 11-year-old boy with a cranial fracture.

Research by The Nation into Federal Election Commission records of the group's top twenty donors reveals that they've been remarkably active in this cycle, contributing and bundling nearly $200,000 to presidential candidates. This does not bode well. During the last presidential campaign, the wealthy backers of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--now rebranded as Swift Vets and POWs for Truth--didn't do their real dirty work until the general election, where as a tax-exempt 527 group they operated outside the restraints of direct campaign contributions. We may wish we were done with the Swift Boaters, but they aren't done with us.

Bonus payments frozen

By Jim Tice - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Jan 3, 2008 7:47:39 EST

The Army has temporarily halted bonus payments for more than 20 enlistment, re-enlistment and service extension programs pending enactment of authorizing legislation.

President Bush, to the surprise of Congress and the Defense Department, vetoed the fiscal 2008 Defense Authorization Act on Dec. 29 after months bargaining with House and Senate leaders.

What’s Your Consumption Factor?

By JARED DIAMOND

Los Angeles

TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.

How Bush Took Us to the Dark Side

Journey to the Dark Side

The Bush Legacy (Take One)
By Tom Engelhardt

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

-- Emma Lazarus, 1883

If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

Bush's Final Year

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, January 2, 2008; 12:38 PM

As President Bush begins his final year in office, the White House is aiming for one last major domestic legislative triumph: permanent expansion of government spy powers, including retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that assisted in warrantless surveillance.

In an impromptu briefing aboard Air Force One, as Bush returned to Washington from his Texas vacation yesterday, White House counselor Ed Gillespie told reporters that an administration-supported bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is Bush's top priority.

Unsupported and Untrue

WSJ lacks evidence to support a sweeping, front-page claim against mortgage borrowers

By Dean Starkman
Wed 2 Jan 2008 01:33 PM

The lead story in a recent Wall Street Journal says that borrower fraud “goes a long way toward explaining why mortgage defaults and foreclosures are rocking financial institutions, Wall Street and the economy.”

In other words, some significant share for the blame mortgage crisis rests not just on borrowers, but on dishonest, even criminal borrowers.

No more Nice Guy

Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, January 2, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/212492/

Nobody asked, but if I were a congressional Democrat, I’d have two New Year’s resolutions. One: No more Mr. Bipartisan Nice Guy. Two: Less substance, more political theater. If you haven’t noticed, 2008 is an election year. Also, Democrats hold small majorities in both houses. Hence, mewling cries are being heard that ugly partisan wrangling is preventing Americans from joining together in one big joyous hootenanny and solving our problems.

Daily Kos: Why the Blogosphere Went for Edwards

by BooMan23

Wed Jan 02, 2008 at 10:48:26 PM PST

[From the Frog Pond]

I feel like writing this now, before any caucus or primary results, while my feelings are uninfluenced by events that right now remain uncertain. I don't think the mainstream media or the people that work inside the Beltway really understand the blogosphere at all. We may not fully understand them either, but we have a better grasp of what makes them tick than they have of what makes us tick. We're fighters. Fighting is pretty much all we do.

Iowa: Clearing My In-Box

I have to admit I experienced a bit of Iowa Caucus overload yesterday, and as I'm not in Des Moines with every political reporter in the Western World, I went off the grid for a bit and spent much of the day yesterday with family. As such, my mental "in-box" has filled to overflow with thoughts about what the last round of polls are telling about the Iowa Caucuses. What follows is an attempt to sum up and empty the in-box:

1) We Have No Idea Who Will Win. Yes, despite tens of thousand of interviews, polls of every shape, size and method and our own fancy charts featuring regression-derived trend lines of varying degrees of sensitivity, the only thing we can say with confidence is that the Democratic and Republican races are close. It is hard to know much more than that given the small margins and, more importantly, the huge variations in the kinds of likely caucus goers sampled.
link

Single trader behind oil record

The man behind the record rise in oil prices to $100 a barrel was a lone trader, seeking bragging rights and a minute of fame, market watchers say.

A single trader bid up the price by buying a modest lot and then sold it immediately at a loss, they claim.

Doctors Without Borders: Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2007

Displaced Fleeing War in Somalia Face Humanitarian Crisis

Tens of thousands of Somalis are living in camps like this one, north of the capital Mogadishu, suffering from a lack of water, food, shelter, and access to medical treatment.

As violence in Somalia escalated this year to some of the worst levels in over 15 years, both assistance for and attention to one of the most challenging and acute humanitarian situations in the world seemed to wane. Ethiopian troops and Transitional Federal Government forces, supported by international partners such as the United States and the European Union, clashed with a range of armed groups, including remnants of the Islamic Courts Union. The fighting caused an unknown number of civilian casualties and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the capital, Mogadishu.

Glenn Greenwald: Oligarchical decay

A new lengthy article in this morning's New York Times purports to set forth "new details about why the [CIA interrogation] tapes were made and then eliminated." Written by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti (who broke the original story), what the article primarily does is rely on anonymous sources to assign principal responsibility for the tapes' destruction to mid-level CIA official Jose Rodriguez. But in doing so, the article identifies, in passing, the critical question that remains unanswered: what was the involvement of George Bush and Dick Cheney in the videos' destruction?

Echidne of the Snakes: Gearing For The Primaries

Do you have a hard time deciding how to assign your vote in the Democratic Primaries? Don't worry, you can ask Maureen Dowd about the details that might matter. Here she explains whether you should vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama:

Has Hillary truly changed, and grown from her mistakes? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask her off-putting and self-sabotaging qualities better? If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom? She is speaking in a soft, measured voice in these final days, so that, as with Daisy Buchanan, you have to lean in to listen. But is she really different than she was in the years when she was so careless about the people around her getting hurt by the Clinton legal whirlwind that she was dubbed the Daisy Buchanan of the boomer set?

Digby: Divisive Dems

This just makes me sad:

I got yapped at the other day by the Obama campaign after wondering if Sen. Barack Obama was unfavorably comparing Sen. John Edwards to Sen John Kerry, regarding being easily painted as a flip-flopper.

On Monday Obama suggested that Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore were divisive.

Digby: Kids Today

...are awesome:

One of the biggest capital punishment cases to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in a generation was put together largely by a young, fresh-out-of-law-school member of Kentucky's overworked and underpaid corps of public defenders.

David Barron, 29, filed an appeal on behalf of two Kentucky death row inmates, arguing that the three-drug cocktail used in lethal injections across the country can cause excruciating pain, and thus amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

Digby: The New Religious Right

From Eve Fairbanks at TNR:

How come the most authentic anti-illegal candidates -- the ones who have been advocating a big fence and no amnesty for years -- were so hopeless? My own views are more liberal on this, so I'm tempted to believe it's because building the fence and deporting millions of people simply isn't what people want to do.

But as Tancredo pointed out, now all the GOP candidates push these same ideas! Really, immigration hardlining is just a new religion. Its early disciples are the weirdos, those harrowed souls chased in their dreams by the specter of Mexicans scurrying across rivers, whose very fervency marks them as people not to be taken seriously.

Glenn Greenwald: 9/11 Commission: Our investigation was "obstructed"

The bi-partisan co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, jointly published an Op-Ed in today's New York Times which contains some extremely emphatic and serious accusations against the CIA and the White House. The essence:

[T]he recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes -- and did not tell us about them -- obstructed our investigation.

More strikingly still, they explicitly include the White House at the top of their list of guilty parties

Evolution education is a 'must' says coalition of scientific and teaching organizations

17 organizations report on national survey to determine public views of evolution education

A coalition of 17 organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Science Teachers Association, is calling on the scientific community to become more involved in the promotion of science education, including evolution. According to an article appearing in the January 2008 issue of The FASEB Journal, the introduction of “non-science,” such as creationism and intelligent design, into science education will undermine the fundamentals of science education. Some of these fundamentals include using the scientific method, understanding how to reach scientific consensus, and distinguishing between scientific and nonscientific explanations of natural phenomena.

“In an age when people have benefited so greatly from science and reason, it is ironic that some still reject the tools that have afforded them the privilege to reject them,” says Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal.

Stonewalled by the C.I.A.

By THOMAS H. KEAN and LEE H. HAMILTON

Washington

MORE than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account of the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001” — and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks. Soon after its creation, the president’s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission.

The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

The Possibly Not Coming Storm

Ross Douthat previews the next great conservative crack-up:

It's true that the current conservative intelligentsia, forged in the crucible of Ronald Reagan's successes, is heavily invested in keeping the triple alliance intact - hence the Thompson bubble, the anti-Huckabee crusade, and the "rally round Romney" effect. And it's true, as well, that if the Republican Party recovers its majority in the next election the alliance will be considerably strengthened. But such a recovery is unlikely,

[...]

To which I say: Maybe!

Americablog: Pelosi's First Year

by John Aravosis (DC) · 1/01/2008 12:57:00 PM ET · Link

AP does an interesting analysis of the boom and bust of Pelosi's first year as Speaker.

Nancy Pelosi crashed through a glass ceiling when she became the first female House speaker a year ago. That turned out to be the easy part.

The reality of leading a bitterly divided Congress at odds with a Republican White House is that victories are difficult and disappointments many. Chief among them for the liberal San Francisco Democrat was failure to deliver on her biggest goal: ceasing U.S. combat missions in Iraq and getting troops on their way home.

I'm really terribly divided on the issue of Pelosi and Reid and whether they are to blame for the past year's losses. Their staff will tell you (and they are correct) that's it's very hard to get conservative southern Dems on board a lot of progressive legislation.

TPM´s Great List of Scandalized Administration Officials

By Paul Kiel - December 31, 2007, 11:20AM

Boy, was it time for an update.

Late last year we decided to take stock of all the Bush Administration officials who'd been accused of corruption and/or resigned in the face of scandal. Although we had fun doing it, we altruistically started the project in order to help our friends at Powerline, who professed an inability to think of any Bush officials beset by scandal.

Defaults on Insured Mortgages Rise 35% to Record

By Josh P. Hamilton and Erik Holm

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Defaults on privately insured U.S. mortgages rose 35 percent in November to a record, an industry report today showed, adding to evidence the U.S. housing slump is deepening.

The number of insured borrowers falling more than 60 days late on payments jumped to 61,033 last month from 45,325 in November 2006, according to data from members of the Washington- based Mortgage Insurance Companies of America. The missed payments, often a prelude to foreclosure, represented a 2.9 percent increase from October.