Digby: Telcom Buddy System

They're debating FISA on C-SPAN right now. Kit Bond, one of the biggest neanderthals in the Senate, is telling America that they should trust the intelligence committee to protect their rights. No need for that pesky constitution.

The FISA Follies, Redux

The Senate (reportedly still under Democratic control) seems determined to help President Bush violate Americans’ civil liberties and undermine the constitutional separation of powers. Majority Leader Harry Reid is supporting White House-backed legislation that would expand the administration’s ability to spy on Americans without court supervision and ensure that the country never learns the full extent of Mr. Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA — which Mr. Bush decided to ignore after 9/11 — requires a warrant to intercept telephone calls and e-mail messages between people in the United States and people abroad.

Tomgram: Nick Turse, From the Missing Archives of a Lost War

On January 30-31, 1968, the Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF, known to Americans as "the Vietcong") struck at five of the country's six largest cities, 34 provincial capitals, 64 district capitals, and numerous military bases. NLF sappers even briefly captured part of the heavily fortified American embassy compound in the center of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon.

Vietnamese government troops allied to the Americans were badly bloodied and American casualties were high. Fighting continued in parts of Saigon for three weeks and in Hue, the old imperial capital, for almost a month until, as with Fallujah in Iraq in November 2004, most of its buildings were destroyed. To retake major urban areas, air power was called in. In perhaps the most infamous phrase of the Vietnam War, an anonymous U.S. major said of the retaking of Ben Tre, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

Donald Rumsfeld: Still There

By Spencer Ackerman 01/23/2008

Remember Donald Rumsfeld? He seems like a bad dream. And yet here he is, popping up in Washington to talk about how the U.S. needs a Ministry of Propaganda. Here’s what he told Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s Danger Room:

What About the Needy?

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, January 25, 2008; 1:26 PM

Is the economic stimulus package announced yesterday really a bipartisan victory? Both sides are certainly calling it that. But it's also a testament to how far President Bush has skewed Washington's political climate to the right.

Democrats and Republicans agreed last week that this would be a good time for the government to give away vast sums of money.

Bloody Reality and the Delusions of Bush

By Robert Fisk, Independent UK
Posted on January 26, 2008, Printed on January 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74585/

Twixt silken sheets - in a bedroom whose walls are also covered in silk - and in the very palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies of his administration nor the warning which he has been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel is their enemy.

The President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly monarch yesterday, enthroned in what looked suspiciously like the kind of casual blue cardigan he might wear on his own Texan ranch; he had even received a jangling gold "Order of Merit" -- it looked a bit like the Lord Chancellor's chain, though it was not disclosed which particular merit earned Mr Bush this kingly reward. Could it be the hypocritical merit of supplying yet more billions worth of weapons to the Kingdom, to be used against the Saudi regime's imaginary enemies.

Digby: They Are One Entity

You all remember Grover Norquist's Reagan Legacy Project? Well, here's the Bush Legacy Project, brought to you by some smart progressives who have learned that if you don't define it, they will.

Here's one of their actions:

For seven years, President Bush's allies in Congress helped push forward his failed Conservative agenda.

How About Everyone Agree With Me Instead?

In light of the anniversary of Roe, you'll be excited to know that William Saletan has an exciting idea for advancing the abortion debate. The solution is: everyone should just concede that William Saletan is right about everything!

To pro-choicers: Talk about abortion the way you've been talking about teen sex, embracing an ideal number of zero. To pro-lifers: Accept that the best way to advance toward zero is through voluntary prevention.

On the latter point, I suppose it would be nice if American "pro-lifers" were more concerned about protecting fetal life than regulating female sexuality, but alas you go to war with the reactionaries you have.

Six Questions for Mark Crispin Miller, Author of ‘Fooled Again’

No Comment

BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED January 24, 2008

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of culture and communications at New York University. He’s also a man on a mission: to make the case for electoral reform. Miller climbs into the minutiae of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections-voter caging in Florida, ballot stickers in Ohio, and lots of unseemly details in between. The core of his argument unfolded in “None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press” which appeared in the August 2005 issue of Harper’s. It evolved into Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform in 2005. And in the end, he tells us that notwithstanding the reassurances of the mainstream media, we have no reason to be confident in the formally reported results of those two elections. The paperback edition came out earlier this year, with an extensive afterward and much updated material. No Comment puts six questions to Harper’s contributor, author and media critic, Mark Crispin Miller, about his book, the mainstream media, and the art of political persecution in America today.

1. One of the most striking things I saw in your book was on the fly page, where you very cleverly juxtapose quotations from Tom Paine, T.W. Adorno and Tom DeLay–all of them are on the topic of truth and power, it seems to me. But the Adorno quote is particularly fascinating, it’s taken from an essay he wrote at the end of World War II, in which he’s drawing a very important lesson: that the totalitarian states the Allies were battling had mastered the technique of using power to generate their own truth, and to make anything inconsistent with it seem a lie. And this is precisely the same point that George Orwell and Victor Klemperer made, both writing the same year. Of course, as I read your book, your point is not that America has become a totalitarian state, but rather that political forces within the country are making rather more subtle use of the same techniques. Am I reading this correctly?

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, Bush & Co.’s vast inversions of the truth–distortions infinitely larger than mere lying–are the product of a conscious and deliberate “technique,” as you put it. And yet, they’re also, at the same time, a ferociously sincere expression of the way these mad authoritarians perceive reality. In other words, when Bush and Cheney and their cohorts say that up is down and black is white, they are not just dispassionately following a certain set of rules for doing propaganda. Such fierce untruthfulness comes to them naturally, because their world-view is completely paranoid.

Bush plan for Iraq would be a first

No OK from Congress seen; Constitutional issues raised

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 25, 2008

WASHINGTON - President Bush's plan to forge a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could commit the US military to defending Iraq's security would be the first time such a sweeping mutual defense compact has been enacted without congressional approval, according to legal specialists.

After World War II, for example - when the United States gave security commitments to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and NATO members - Presidents Truman and Eisenhower designated the agreements as treaties requiring Senate ratification. In 1985, when President Ronald Reagan guaranteed that the US military would defend the Marshall Islands and Micronesia if they were attacked, the compacts were put to a vote by both chambers of Congress.

GOP Attack Group Bamboozles With Fundraising "Census"

Freedom's Watch, the billionaire-fueled and highly-connected conservative attack machine, is trying to increase its membership and their funds. But they're doing it in a funny way -- through a mailing labeled "Confidential Census Document."

Like FBI, CIA Has Used Secret 'Letters'

Friday, January 25, 2008; A17

For three years, the Bush administration has drawn fire from civil liberties groups over its use of national security letters, a kind of administrative subpoena that compels private businesses such as telecommunications companies to turn over information to the government. After the 2001 USA Patriot Act loosened the guidelines, the FBI issued tens of thousands of such requests, something critics say amounts to warrantless spying on Americans who have not been charged with crimes.

Environmental pollution and diabetes may be linked

Scientists call for more research into neglected area

Cambridge scientists are advocating additional research into the little understood links between environmental pollution and type 2 diabetes.

In the most recent edition of the Lancet, Drs. Oliver Jones and Julian Griffin highlight the need to research the possible link between persistent organic pollutants (POPs, a group which includes many pesticides) and insulin resistance, which can lead to adult onset diabetes.

Paul Krugman: Stimulus Gone Bad

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

Those are harsh words, so let me explain what’s going on.

Amazon's rescue reversed

Space imaging gives the lie to Brazil's recent 'great achievement' of halting rainforest destruction

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Friday January 25, 2008
The Guardian

In a world of climate change and general environmental degradation, it was one ecological disaster that had apparently been averted.

After decades of steady obliteration, the tide appeared to have turned against the illegal deforestation that has disfigured the world's largest tropical rainforest. Brazil's president, Lula da Silva, went on the radio in August to trumpet the breakthrough. His environment minister, Marina Silva, hailed "a great achievement for Brazilian society".

Climate change poses a huge threat to human health

Climate change will have a huge impact on human health and bold environmental policy decisions are needed now to protect the world's population, according to the author of an article published in the BMJ today.

Responding to Jonah

Thursday, January 24, 2008
-- by Dave

Some of you may recall that when Jonah Goldberg first noticed my review of Liberal Fascism in TAP Online, he dismissed it (without having read it) as "shallow, cliche ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff," and then, upon having actually read it, confirmed in a broader response his view that it was "shallow, cliche ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff."

Well, irony of ironies, after I'd fully responded and eventually called him out for failing to honestly engage my arguments, he finally came forward with a response that (beyond being shallow and cliche-ridden, not to mention breathtakingly dishonest) is nothing if not a textbook attack on the messenger -- a theme that continues in his follow-up post. Ad, meet hominem.

Digby: It's Baaack

It looks like we're going to party like it's 2002. Again. An unnecessary national security vote is being forced down the throat of a Democratic congress by the otherwise totally obstructionist Republicans, and the Democrats are anxious to sweep it under the rug so they can avoid being called cowards. Election year greatest hits: give them what they want so we can move on to "our issues." Get ready to hear this stale old tune a lot.

Glenn Greenwald: Your Harry Reid-led Senate in action

Harry Reid -- who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush's demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster -- went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned "retreat," and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.

Digby: Yuk[s] Factor

Gross...--Dictynna

It's a little bit rusty, hasn't been out for a spin since 2004, and needs a few springs and belts replaced. But the old machine looks like it's up and running.

The Muck is featuring this lovely story today about Roger Stone, one of the original Dick Nixon dirty tricksters, and his latest project:

So what's Stone up to? Fortunately, he laid the whole scheme out to The Weekly Standard.

It's this simple: it's all about the group's acronym, which, used in conjunction with Hillary Clinton, is supposed to be irresistibly humorous.

Digby: Da Man

Hey, here's a treat to read on a cold winter's night: a profile of our brilliant pal Rick Perlstein in The Chicago Reader:

In Before the Storm, the 2001 history that made his reputation, Rick Perlstein put his readers inside the skin of a pimply college freshman cast adrift on a sprawling concrete campus in the 1960s. “Wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy,” the imagined student is buying his required texts in the campus bookstore when he happens on a slim book with big type. He flips it open and “standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend the individual against the encroachments of the mass.”

Existing single-family home sales drop

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
1 hour, 40 minutes ago

Sales of existing single-family homes plunged in 2007 by the largest amount in 25 years, closing out an awful year that saw median prices fall for the first time in at least four decades.

The National Association of Realtors reported Thursday that sales of single-family homes fell by 13 percent last year, the biggest decline since a 17.7 percent drop in 1982. The median price of a single-family home fell to $217,800 in 2007, down 1.8 percent from 2006.

It marked the first annual price decline on records that the Realtors have going back to 1968. Lawrence Yun, the Realtor's chief economist, said it was likely the country has not experienced a decline in home prices for an entire year since the Great Depression.

Desperately Seeking Stimulus

by BARBARA EHRENREICH

[posted online on January 22, 2008]

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you'd think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge--and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race--is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush's stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX and the curiously named FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again. In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates--except to families earning less than $40,000 a year. This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism," in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.

Stealing Our Future: Conservatives, Foresight, and Why Nothing Works Anymore

By Sara Robinson
January 22nd, 2008 - 12:50pm ET

Brad DeLong once said that "'Nobody could have foreseen ______' is the Bush administration's version of 'The dog ate my homework.'" It does seem to be their handy-dandy Swiss Army Knife, all-purpose explanation for the various disasters that have happened on their watch.

We first heard this excuse all the way back in May 2002, when Condoleezza Rice blithely dismissed Congressional queries about 9/11 by saying, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

Net body issues plea for liberty

The overseer of the net's addressing system has asked the US government to be freed from official control.

Icann made the plea in a lengthy report sent to the US Department of Commerce.

The report will be the focus of a meeting to consider Icann's progress on objectives the US government set it in preparation for independence.

10 Reasons Why the Fight for Reproductive Justice Is Still Essential

By Jill Filipovic, AlterNet
Posted on January 22, 2008, Printed on January 24, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74633/

Also posted at Feministe and the Huffington Post.

35 years after Roe v. Wade solidified American womens' right to abortion, reproductive rights remain in limbo. And while abortion rights are crucial to women's health and autonomy, they are hardly the end-all be-all to reproductive justice -- even if the constant attacks on those rights (and on the people who provide women with them) have forced the pro-choice movement to remain on the defensive about abortion in particular.

Roe at 35 is in bad shape. But there are plenty of forward-looking, positive steps to be taken. It's worth raising a glass to Roe today -- but even more importantly, it's time to get out and fight. Here are a few reasons why:

New Antarctic ice core to provide clearest climate record yet

DURHAM, N.H. - After enduring months on the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth, researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.

Working as part of the National Science Foundation’s West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians, and students from multiple U.S. institutions have recovered a 580-meter (1,900-foot) ice core – the first section of what is hoped to be a 3,465-meter (11,360-foot) column of ice detailing 100,000 years of Earth’s climate history, including a precise year-by-year record of the last 40,000 years.

Ellsberg Hits U.S. Media, Congress for Ignoring Nuclear Secrets Story

Legendary whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg has written an Op-Ed shaming the American media for failing to report the shocking story of Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI translator who was recruited after 9/11, Edmonds has accused the agency of covering up evidence of a complex web of foreign governments, U.S. officials and nuclear secrets.

---

Ellsberg in a Brad Blog commentary:

And this is the time for those who have so far creditably leaked to the Times of London to come forward, accepting personal risks, to offer their testimony --- and new documents --- both to the Congress and to the American press. I would say to them: Don’t do what I did and waste months of precious time trying to get Congressional committees to act as they should in the absence of journalistic pressure. Do your best to inform the American public directly, first, through the major American media.

But perhaps today the alternative media and the international press are a necessary precursor even to that. It shouldn’t be true, but if it is, it’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971. They printed them then. Would they today?

Who Will Take On the Banks?

Posted on Jan 22, 2008

By Robert Scheer

It was smart of the top Democrats to cut presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich out of that South Carolina debate, where they lamely attempted to deal with the dire consequences of the banking meltdown without confronting the banks. They made all the proper concerned noises about millions of folks losing their retirement savings and homes, but none was willing to say what Kucinich would have said: Bankers are crooks who will steal from the public unless the government holds them accountable.

How do I know Kucinich would have said that? Because I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times back when he was mayor of Cleveland and the banks foreclosed on his city after he refused to sell the public power plant. Others can talk a populist line, but Kucinich lived it. He was forced out of office that time, but voters realized 10 years later that Kucinich had been right. Thanks to the public power alternative that Kucinich refused to sacrifice, Cleveland had cheap power, and he was elected to the Ohio Legislature and then to Congress as his reward.

The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing

Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

Bush Becomes Supplicant for Saudi's Aid to Help Avoid Recession

By Janine Zacharia

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The Saudi monarchy once depended on the U.S. to protect its reign and its oil from foes like Saddam Hussein. These days, President George W. Bush needs the world's biggest exporter of crude more than it needs him.

With oil at about $90 a barrel, the U.S. economy at risk of sliding into recession and American banks trying to raise cash to ride out the subprime-mortgage crisis, Bush has become a supplicant for Saudi financial help. He also needs the kingdom to get behind his Palestinian peace push, to keep Iran at bay and to support political stability in Iraq.

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, How to Sink America

Within the next month, the Pentagon will submit its 2009 budget to Congress and it's a fair bet that it will be even larger than the staggering 2008 one. Like the Army and the Marines, the Pentagon itself is overstretched and under strain -- and like the two services, which are expected to add 92,000 new troops over the next five years (at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion per 10,000), the Pentagon's response is never to cut back, but always to expand, always to demand more.

After all, there are those disastrous Afghan and Iraqi wars still eating taxpayer dollars as if there were no tomorrow. Then there's what enthusiasts like to call "the next war" to think about, which means all those big-ticket weapons, all those jets, ships, and armored vehicles for the future. And don't forget the still-popular, Rumsfeld-style "netcentric warfare" systems (robots, drones, communications satellites, and the like), not to speak of the killer space toys being developed; and then there's all that ruined equipment out of Iraq and Afghanistan to be massively replaced -- and all those ruined human beings to take care of.

CBO sees $250B federal budget deficit

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jan 23, 1:46 PM ET

The deficit for the current budget year will jump to about $250 billion under Congressional Budget Office figures released Wednesday, as a weaker economy and lower corporate profits weigh on the government's fiscal ledger.

And that figure does not reflect more than $100 billion in red ink from an economic stimulus measure in the works.

"After three years of declining budget deficits, a slowing economy this year will contribute to an increase in the deficit," the CBO report said.

Study: False statements preceded war

By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jan 23, 6:43 AM ET

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

Digby: True History

On this particular Martin Luther King day, Rick Perlstein's piece from last year is an important and timely reminder:

Day of Reckoning

Conservatives still don't get Martin Luther King.

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: "Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation's interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest--that nation can and shall and will overcome." Richard Nixon called King "a great leader--a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation." Even one of King's most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president's call to unity by terming the murder "a dastardly act."

Digby: Sharpening Their Shivs

I'm sure a lot of people enjoyed this when they read it:

Prominent Democrats are upset with the aggressive role that Bill Clinton is playing in the 2008 campaign, a role they believe is inappropriate for a former president and the titular head of the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, both currently neutral in the Democratic contest, have told their old friend heatedly on the phone that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Sen. Barack Obama, according to two sources familiar with the conversations who asked for anonymity because of their sensitive nature. Clinton, Kennedy and Emanuel all declined to comment.

I know, it's great fun to think about Rahm and Teddy telling Bill to STFU.

Digby: Fasten Your Seatbelts

Global stock markets extended their shakeout into a second day Tuesday, plunging amid worries that a possible U.S. recession will cause a worldwide economic slowdown.

The dramatic declines in Asia and Europe were expected to spread to Wall Street, where stock index futures were already down sharply hours before the trading day began.

Japan's Nikkei 225 index, the benchmark for Asia's biggest bourse, was down 5.1 percent in afternoon trading after dropping 3.9 percent Monday.

Is Global Warming Caused by Water Vapor?

How to think about the No. 1 greenhouse gas.

By Brendan I. Koerner

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 11:16 AM ET

Every week, you blather on and on about carbon dioxide and methane. Yet you never mention a single word about the most important greenhouse gas of all, water vapor, which accounts for 98 percent of the greenhouse effect. Doesn't this inconvenient truth wholly discredit your little global-warming charade?

Variations on this question appear in the Lantern's inbox every few days, occasionally accompanied by family-unfriendly slurs. For folks who doubt that human activity is causing global warming, citing water vapor's role in the greenhouse effect is a common retort. Though such enviroskeptics are technically correct to some extent, the water-vapor argument by no means proves that anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming is a fiction.

Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

by GARETH PORTER

[posted online on January 18, 2008]

Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."

This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

Clinton, Obama Come to Blows; Edwards Wins

Mon Jan 21, 10:47 PM ET

The Nation -- In the edgiest debate of the Democratic presidential race, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeatedly engaged on Monday night in bitter and at times personal exchanges with one another.

And John Edwards effectively pointed to the heated squabbling between the two frontrunners in anticipation of Saturday's South Carolina Democratic primary as a deviation from the issues that matter.

Clinton accused Obama of doing legal work for a Chicago slumlord and charged that her opponent "did the bidding of the insurance companies" when health care was debated in the Illinois legislature.

Obama told Clinton he was fighting to help workers in Chicago when "you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart."

Leading Dems Miss the Boat on Health Care

By John P. Geyman, Tikkun
Posted on January 22, 2008, Printed on January 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74039/

As we face the 2008 presidential campaigns, the stakes have never been higher for health care reform. Health care is pricing itself beyond the reach of lower-income and middle-class Americans with no cost containment yet on the horizon. Seniors with Medicare are paying much more out-of-pocket for their medical care now than when Medicare was enacted in 1965.

We already have a perfect storm as the U.S. health care "system" falls apart, and many public polls put access to affordable health care at the top of our domestic agenda.

How to Pull Out of a Recession: the Ethical Way, Not the Bush Way

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
Posted on January 22, 2008, Printed on January 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/73763/

Even Bush has finally figured out that the economy is facing "some challenges," as he so delicately put it.

As a solution, he is sure to propose making permanent the tax breaks for the rich that he's already put in place.

But there are two problems with this: one ethical, the other economic.

God's Profits: Faith, Fraud and the GOP Crusade for Values Voters

By Sarah Posner, PoliPoint Press
Posted on January 22, 2008, Printed on January 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74440/

The following is excerpted from Sarah Posner's new book, God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters It is reprinted here courtesy of PoliPoint Press. Photo credit for front page image associated with this article: Nina Berman. See more at Ninaberman.com.

Inside the Trinity Christian Church in Irving, Texas, a crowd starts gathering in the afternoon for a Victory Healing and Miracle Service that is to begin at 7 p.m. that evening. People have traveled from as far away as Ohio and Arkansas and Georgia to participate. Most are waiting in the perimeter lobby of the church, camping out with pillows and Bibles, ordering pizza, and waiting for an event that has been hyped on Christian television for months. I approach one woman, an African American member of televangelist Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. Judging from her clothes, the woman could scarcely afford the plane ticket she bought to see a performance of the preaching phenomenon whose services she can attend three times a week at home in Columbus. She's almost in a trance, barely able to focus on me or what I am asking her, and she brushes me aside as I inquire about her journey. People are waiting to see healings and miracles; Parsley claims a quarter of a million people have mailed in prayer cloths (and money) so that he could put his "anointing" on them. Once returned to the donor, the prayer cloths can be used to heal anything in a broken life, from depression to cancer to joblessness to debt.

Fed Cuts Interest Rates by 75 Bps

Tuesday January 22, 6:27 pm ET
By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer Fed Cuts Interest Rate Amid Global Stock Sell-Off and Fears of Recession WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve unexpectedly slashed a key interest rate by a bold three-fourths of a percentage point on Tuesday, responding to a global plunge in stock markets that heightened concerns about a recession. The Fed signaled that further rate cuts were likely.

The reduction in the federal funds rate from 4.25 percent down to 3.5 percent marked the biggest reduction in this target rate for overnight loans on records going back to 1990. It marked the first time that the Fed has changed the funds rate between meetings since 2001, when the central bank was battling the combined impacts of a recession and the terrorist attacks.

Who Goes Nazi?

-- by Sara

In 1939, Time magazine named Dorothy Thompson the second most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt. The first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany -- and still then the wife of Sinclair Lewis -- she was one of the country's leading voices against fascism. She'd seen it up close in Europe, and was furiously outspoken about its creeping influence in America.

In the August 1941 issue of Harper's, Thompson wrote a short piece, based on her long European experience, outlining which Americans at any given dinner party might be expected to "go Nazi." It's still in Harper's archives, and it's as insightful and prescient now as it was on the eve of America's entry into World War II:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

How to Out A Sundown Town

-- by Sara

Dave and I refer often to James Loewen's research on "sundown towns" -- American towns that once had small African-American communities -- which, at some point, simply up and vanished.

The historical fact is that if you're a middle-class white American living in the north or west of the country, the odds are overwhelmingly good that the town you live in, right now, is a sundown town -- or was one at some point in the not-so-distant past.

The View From the Overton Window

-- by Sara

Over the past week or two, several events have occurred that show just how radically the range of acceptable political and media discourse has changed in the past eight years.

First, the New Republic finally got the Minneapolis Historical Society to cut loose its store of old Ron Paul Reports, put them online, and thus verified -- once and for all -- our repeated contention that Ron Paul's benign good-doctor pose was hiding a noxiously hateful and racist past.

Digby: Are Democrats over 45 Racists?

Apparently, some people think so. Here's a headline on CBS:

Obama's Age Gap: Is It Race?

CBS's Dick Meyer Says Older Americans Have So Far Proven Unwilling To Vote For Barack Obama

How about young voters have so far proven unwilling to vote for an older person? Is it ageism? Really, this is ridiculous.

Paul Krugman: Stimulus issues

The big problem with attempts to provide temporary economic stimulus is how to ensure that the money gets spent. As Milton Friedman pointed out 50 years ago, consumers tend to base their spending on “permanent income” — the income they expect to have over the long run — rather than their income in any given year. So an $800 check from the Treasury tends, other things equal, to be mostly saved rather than spent.

How does one get around this?

Businesses want a say in global-warming bill

Posted on Mon, Jan. 21, 2008

Businesses want a say in global-warming bill

Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: January 17, 2008 08:16:29 PM

WASHINGTON — U.S. businesses are betting that the federal government soon will put mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and they're making sure they have a say in shaping a vast new regulatory system.

Some of the country's biggest businesses support a cap and trade system, the approach that Congress is considering. Under cap and trade, the government gives or sells companies allowances to emit certain amounts of greenhouse gases, and companies may sell unused allowances to other companies.

While it may sound simple, the details would be complex and the plan would affect the entire economy and require monitoring for decades.

Email missing from Cheney's office on day White House told to preserve documents in CIA leak

01/21/2008 @ 8:56 am
Filed by Nick Juliano

New report shows archives gone on several key days in Plame investigation

Among the sixteen days for which email are missing from Vice President Cheney's office is Sept. 30, 2003, the same day the day the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced they were investigating who outed former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

That morning, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered the president and the vice president's staff to "preserve all materials that might be relevant" to an inchoate Justice Department probe.

Katha Pollitt: The Weepy Witch & the Secret Muslim

The media are hopelessly sexist and relentlessly trivial. So much we've learned from the mass hysteria over Hillary Clinton's "emotional moment" in New Hampshire. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert L. Jamieson: "She morphed into a 'compassion brand'--like, irony of ironies, Kleenex"; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?") Even Southern charmer John Edwards couldn't resist observing that a commander in chief needed "strength and resolve"--a view echoed by Fox commentator Dick Morris ("There could well come a time when there is such a serious threat to the United States that she breaks down") and given full misogynous display by nationally syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant's "Madam President Meets the Bad Guys," portraying a dumpy, tearful Hillary surrounded by Osama, Kim Jong Il and similar. All this fuss over a welling of the eyes so brief that if you blinked your own you'd miss it. I have moments like that every day! This was the Dean Scream all over again: a nano-nothing whipped into a self-congratulatory media typhoon.

Paul Krugman: Debunking the Reagan Myth

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

How the Mega-Rich Treat Our Treasury Like a Buffet (And Stick You with the Bill)

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on January 21, 2008, Printed on January 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74389/

Amy Goodman: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston has been closely tracking the nation's income gap in the pages of the New York Times. David Cay has just published a new book. It's called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill). Explain the wealth transfer.

David Cay Johnston: We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs -- a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden -- that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

The FBI has been accused of covering up a file detailing government dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets.

The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency’s investigation of the network.

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

Frank Rich: Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead

CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat.

Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.)

Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl. Then Republicans in Michigan reconstituted their party’s election-year chaos by temporarily revivifying yet another candidate, Mitt Romney, who had been left for dead.

Juan Cole: Iraq is Still a Bad Bargain

Andrew Bacevich eviscerates the Iraq War party with this passionate and clear-sighted essay on 'the Surge to Nowhere' in WaPo. He points out that the real motivation behind last year's troop escalation was to avoid popular outrage building in the US electorate to the point where the troops were pulled out. He observes that the argument for the 'success' of the 'surge' is purely a tactical one. When viewed from the vantage point of grand strategy, the Iraq War is as much a failure as it has always been.