David Neiwert: Right-wing sugar daddies

One of the questions that always hovers over hate groups and radical-right organizations is: Where do they get their money? We know that what they're able to collect through memberships and fund-raising devices is only a pittance in the context of the kind of cash flow they seem to generate; and there are many questions about the large startup sums they often have. What we've known, in fact, is that many of these groups have wealthy conservatives -- often building-and-development magnates, or ideologues with inherited wealth -- quietly underwriting their work.

One of the more noteworthy of these is a Seattle-area-based rocket scientist named Walter P. Kistler, whose activities in this regard have just been thoroughly exposed in a pull-back-the-covers report from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

An accomplished rocket scientist has become the sole donor to the Pioneer Fund, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The West’s Weapon of Self-Delusion

There are gun battles in Beirut –- and America thinks things are going fine

by Robert Fisk

So they are it again, the great and the good of American democracy, grovelling and fawning to the Israeli lobbyists of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), repeatedly allying themselves to the cause of another country and one that is continuing to steal Arab land.

Will this ever end? Even Barack Obama — or “Mr Baracka” as an Irish friend of mine innocently and wonderfully described him — found time to tell his Jewish audience that Jerusalem is the one undivided capital of Israel, which is not the view of the rest of the world which continues to regard the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem as illegal. The security of Israel. Say it again a thousand times: the security of Israel — and threaten Iran, for good measure.

Wealthy Americans Under Scrutiny in UBS Case

By LYNNLEY BROWNING

One afternoon in April, six dozen wealthy Americans were entertained at a luncheon party in Midtown Manhattan, along with a special guest from Paris: Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre.

The host of the exclusive gathering was the Swiss bank UBS, whose elite private bankers built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires. As the wine flowed and Mr. Loyrette spoke of the glories of France, UBS bankers courted their affluent guests.

But now, as the federal authorities intensify an investigation into offshore bank accounts, the secrets of this rarefied world are being dragged into the open — and UBS’s privileged clients are running scared.

Government Probes at Least 7 Defense Contracts for Charities

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 7, 2008; D01

The federal investigation of contracting arrangements between the Pentagon and tax-exempt defense firms in Pennsylvania includes multiple deals that go as far back as 2002 and involve more money than was previously known, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The FBI and the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service issued subpoenas two months ago seeking information about a small intelligence firm called Commonwealth Research Institute, or CRI, and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies. Both firms are registered nonprofit charities based in Johnstown, Pa.

Cristina Page: The fight to stop contraception

Like lawn ornaments in summer, protesters outside the local abortion clinic are fixtures in many places.

Their presence and message have long been so predictable that, without looking or listening, people believe they understand the point. So you might not notice that the protest taking place outside your local clinic has fundamentally changed.

It is no longer about abortion. Saturday, June 7, is the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that granted married people the right to use contraception. To mark the day, anti-abortion groups will take to their normal posts outside clinic entrances not to convince Americans to oppose abortion but rather to stop using contraception.

Glenn Greenwald: David Broder: Embodiment of Beltway values

No matter how many times one sees it, it will never cease to amaze that the exact same media mavens who righteously strutted around demanding that Bill Clinton be impeached or forced to resign because the "honor" of our political system demanded that, continue casually to dismiss every crime of the last seven years as nothing more than a garden-variety, good faith "policy dispute" which only shrill rabble want to see "turned into a criminal or impeachable affair." So the Senate issues a report documenting that the President and Vice President repeatedly made false statements to induce the citizenry to support a war against another country that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead for no reason -- added on to the piles of outright lawbreaking under this administration -- and to David Broder, those are just mere "policy disputes" which (unlike Bill Clinton's grave crimes) merit no punishment.

CNN, Fox News falsely suggested Senate report finding Bush administration "misled Americans" about Iraq-Al Qaeda link was approved only by Dems

Summary: CNN's Carol Costello and Ed Henry, and Fox News' Brit Hume falsely suggested that only the Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence approved the committee's June 5 "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information." In addition to the committee's Democrats, Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe endorsed the report and stated that it "accomplished its primary objective."

In June 5 reports on CNN's The Situation Room and Fox News' Special Report, CNN correspondent Carol Costello, CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry, and Special Report host Brit Hume falsely suggested that only the Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence approved the committee's June 5 "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information." In fact, the report had bipartisan support: Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel (NE) and Olympia Snowe (ME) endorsed the report and stated that it "accomplished its primary objective."

Katha Pollitt--Thank You, Hillary, for Opening the Door for Other Women

Hillary Clinton came this close. In fact, as of this writing, she hasn't formally conceded. Nobody really understands why: why she stuck it out this long, given the math, and why she gave such a grudging, graceless version of her stump speech after the South Dakota primary clinched the nomination for Barack Obama. Suggestions I've heard are not very flattering: she hopes to whittle down her multimillion-dollar campaign debt with donations from the deluded die-hards screaming Denver! Denver! She wants the number-two spot. She's a crazy narcissistic rhymes-with-rich. Maybe she's just ticked off because pundits have been trying to hustle her off the stage ever since her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

Air Force Chief, Secretary Resign

The Air Force's top civilian and uniformed leaders are being booted out of the Pentagon. Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley has resigned. Secretary Michael W. Wynne is next.

The move, initially reported by Inside Defense and Air Force Times, isn't exactly a shocker. The Air Force has come under fire for everything from mishandling nukes to misleading ad campaigns to missing out on the importance of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Most importantly, the Air Force's leadership has been on the brink of open conflict for months with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. That's because in the halls of the Air Force's chiefs, the talk has been largely about the threats posed by China and a resurgent Russia. Gates wanted the service to actually focus on the wars at hand, in Iraq and Afghanistan. "For much of the past year I’ve been trying to concentrate the minds and energies of the defense establishment on the current needs and current conflicts," he told the Heritage Foundation. "In short, to ensure that all parts of the Defense Department are, in fact, at war."

Leaked Report: ISP Secretly Added Spy Code To Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers

An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd been infected with adware.

The January 2007 report (.pdf) -- published Thursday by the whistle blowing site Wikileaks -- demonstrates the hazards broadband customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology similar to what's described in the BT document.

What Divides the Democrats Now

By Sara Robinson

Created 06/04/2008 - 10:58am

Summary:

As of this election year, the vast and rising tide of Millennials is arriving in numbers big enough to swamp the Boomers and set the whole American conversation on a whole new heading. And it is this, it can be argued, is what the Barack-versus-Hillary showdown was really all about.

It's over, at long last. The Democrats have a nominee.

And now the other hard part begins—the part where Democrats try to patch up the party and try to keep a lot of disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters on board.

On the Presence of the Past

By Rick Perlstein

Created 06/04/2008 - 11:58am

Summary:

"Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements?" I wrote in "Nixonland." "It would be hard to argue they do not." In a review of my book, Elizabeth Drew responded, "Well, I, for one, don't find it so hard." Between the time she wrote those words and the time they were published, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's brain tumor was announced.

This past Sunday I received a review in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Drew [1] which, while kind and thoughtful, contained at least one empirical falsehood (actually, at least two empirical falsehoods: Richard Nixon did buy a townhouse on Fifth Avenue, not 65th Street, after his forced retirement).

The Meaning of Box 722

By Rick Perlstein

Created 06/05/2008 - 9:53am

For at least six months now I've been planning, and putting off, this post. The imminent occasion of the first African American major-party nominee forces my hand. It's time for me to help give a sense of just how far we have come.

When I started researching NIXONLAND [1] I knew the congressional elections of 1966 would form a crucial part of the narrative. They'd never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now.

The Truth About the War

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

Paul Krugman: Bits, Bands and Books

Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.

Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money — although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud. After that came the oil shock and the food shock, grim reminders that we’re still living in a material world.

So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.

Adviser Says McCain Backs Bush Wiretaps

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Fitzgerald indicates he may be ready to testify on Rove’s efforts to push him out.»

In the past, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has refused to answer questions about whether officials such as Karl Rove tried to push him out during his investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity. He cited a “trial ongoing in the Northern District of Illinois.

Vote on climate bill is blocked in Senate

By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jun 6, 2:40 PM ET

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a global warming bill that would have required major reductions in greenhouse gases, pushing debate over the world's biggest environmental concern to next year for a new Congress and president.

Democratic leaders fell a dozen votes short of getting the 60 needed to end a Republican filibuster on the measure and bring the bill up for a vote, prompting Majority Leader Harry Reid to pull the legislation from consideration.

Biggest jobless jump since '86 — Wall Street sinks

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer
Fri Jun 6, 4:17 PM ET

Pink slips piled up and jobs disappeared into thin air in May as the nation's unemployment rate zoomed to 5.5 percent in the biggest one-month jump in decades. Wall Street swooned, and the White House said President Bush was considering new proposals to revive the economy.

Help-wanted signs are vanishing along with jobs, so the unemployment rate is likely to keep climbing, a government report indicated, underscoring the toll the housing and credit crises are taking on jobseekers, employers and the economy as a whole.

Adding to the pain, oil prices soared to a new record high, while the value of the dollar fell.

Oil surges $11 to record $138

Crude skyrockets on a sliding dollar, geopolitics and a Wall Street report predicting $150-a-barrel oil.

By Catherine Clifford and Ben Rooney, CNNMoney.com staff writers
Last Updated: June 6, 2008: 4:41 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices shot up nearly $11 a barrel and settled Friday at a record $138.54 on geopolitical jitters, a dollar decline and a forecast that oil would hit $150 by July 4.

Friday's spike in the July contract for light crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange marks the largest singe-day increase in oil prices on record. The contract hit an intraday record of $139.12, breaking the previous trading record of $135.09.

Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

By John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that a small group of Pentagon officials who'd collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the group's activities after only a month, and Pentagon officials never followed up on investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The toxic 'wonder plant' that split world food summit

By Peter Popham in Rome
Thursday, 5 June 2008

It's no beauty queen – the stems are long, scrawny and leafless and the pods dangle from the twigs like scorched testicles. Untreated, the seeds are so poisonous that as few as three can kill, while even a small amount induces nausea – hence the jatropha plant's nickname, "black vomit nut".

Despite its unprepossessing appearance, jatropha, whose pods contain inflammable oil, is one of a range of plants being intensively cultivated as biofuels. As it can grow in impoverished soil, requires little water and is inedible, its supporters claim that it cannot be said to be taking the place of food crops.

But now all biofuels, even the humble jatropha, are in the firing line. At the UN's world food summit in Rome yesterday it became clear that the responsibility of biofuels for soaring food costs that have sparked riots in 40 countries is the biggest point of contention. The US, which subsidises farmers to grow corn for ethanol production, claims biofuels account for less than 3 per cent of the 43 per cent rise in food costs over the past year. But the International Food Policy Research Institute said that they contributed 30 per cent to the rise between 2000 and 2007, while the International Monetary Fund says the figure is between 15 and 30 per cent.

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control

Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors

By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 5 June 2008

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

Gates ousts Air Force leaders in historic shake-up

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
16 minutes ago

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the Air Force's top military and civilian leaders Thursday, holding them to account in a historic Pentagon shake-up after embarrassing nuclear mix-ups.

Gates announced at a news conference that he had accepted the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne — a highly unusual double firing.

Gates said his decision was based mainly on the damning conclusions of an internal report on the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads. And he linked the underlying causes of that slip-up to another startling incident: the flight last August of a B-52 bomber that was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Olbermann: 'McCain's top guy on the economy made it easier for bin Laden'

Last week, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann revealed that the co-chair of Senator John McCain's presidential campaign, the fiercely pro-deregulation Phil Gramm, had been lobbying for a Swiss bank this spring to head off relief for victims of the mortgage crisis at the same time that he was acting as a leading McCain economic advisor.

Excerpt by 'The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule'

By Thomas Frank

Introduction: Follow This Dime

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past; that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

Thomas Frank: Obama Needs a Better Reading List

June 4, 2008; Page A19

Whether by accident or as a signal to voters of a certain intellectual attainment, Sen. Barack Obama allowed himself to be photographed a few weeks ago carrying a copy of "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria. By the looks of it, Mr. Obama is taking this celebrated young author seriously – in the photo he appears to be marking his place about a third of the way through. Mr. Obama was in Montana that day, and you got the idea he was going to kiss a few babies, deliver the usual bromides about "change," and then get back to plumbing Deep Thoughts about our troubling Global Situation.

Collateral Damage

What It Really Means When America Goes to War

by Chris Hedges

Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations.” Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.

New satellite photos show Amazon rainforest shrinking

New satellite photographs show that the destruction of Brazil's fragile Amazon rainforest has exploded this year, fueling fears that the government's efforts to stop deforestation have been fruitless. That's raised red flags among environmentalists, who say that soybean farming, cattle production and illegal logging are destroying the world's largest rainforest.

Newest McCain official: President has "near dictatorial powers"

Bill Kristol today proudly announces that one of his Weekly Standard staff members, Michael Goldfarb, was just named the Deputy Communications Director of the McCain campaign. Last April, this newest McCain official participated in a conference call with former Senator George Mitchell, during which Mitchell advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Afterwards, this is what Goldfarb wrote about what he thinks are the powers the President possesses in our country:

Mitchell's less than persuasive answer [to whether withdrawal timetables "somehow infringe on the president's powers as commander in chief?"]: "Congress is a coequal branch of government...the framers did not want to have one branch in charge of the government."

True enough, but they sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.

Webb's Vision for Defense

By Spencer Ackerman 06/02/2008 | 5 Comments

Everywhere Sen. Jim Webb goes, someone's asking him if he wants to be vice president.

The freshman Virginia senator's appearances on "Meet The Press" typically end with an attempt by the host Tim Russert to elicit a categorical statement of whether or not he'd like to be Sen. Barack Obama's running mate on the Democratic ticket. Webb usually tries his best to demure. "I've never had a conversation with Barack about any of this, so it’s really out of line to speculate," he told Deborah Solomon in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday.

Paul Krugman: A Return of That ’70s Show?

Which decade is it, anyway?

Not long ago it seemed as if everyone watching the carnage in financial markets was drawing scary parallels with the 1930s.

This time, however, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve did what their predecessors failed to do during the banking crisis of 1930-31: they acted forcefully to avert a collapse of the financial system. And their efforts seem, provisionally, to have worked. While things are far from normal in the financial markets, over the last few months the sense of panic has been gradually subsiding.

House Launches "Fighting Contracting Abuse" Caucus

CongressDaily is reporting ($) that a few members of the House of Representatives are forming the "Smart Contracting Caucus" to pursue what Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) called "thoughtful federal procurement reform." But Dan Friedman at CongressDaily isn't buying the spin:

Davis was a contracting lawyer and is the House's top backer of government contractors concentrated in his suburban Virginia district.

Going Their Own Way in The Mideast

By David Ignatius
Sunday, June 1, 2008; B07

What happens when a superpower becomes preoccupied by a costly war and loses some of its ability to coerce friends and enemies toward the outcomes it favors? We're seeing a demonstration of that change now in the Middle East, as Arabs and even Israel reckon with the limits of American power -- and begin to cut their own deals.

The new power dynamic is clear in two developments over the past several weeks -- the Lebanon peace deal brokered by Qatar on May 21 and the Israel-Syria peace talks, with Turkish mediation, that were announced the same day. Both negotiations could help stabilize the region, albeit not on the terms the United States might prefer.

Manufacturing a Food Crisis

By Walden Bello
May 15, 2008

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

Presidential Bloodlust

The Movie-Made War World of George W. Bush
By Tom Engelhardt

Here's a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father in a movie house off New York's Times Square -- one of the slightly seedy theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple feature B-westerns or war movies. We were catching some old oater which, as I recall, began with a stagecoach careening dramatically down the main street of a cow town. A wounded man is slumped in the driver's seat, the horses running wild. Suddenly -- perhaps from the town's newspaper office -- a cowboy dressed in white and in a white Stetson rushes out, leaps on the team of horses, stops the stagecoach, and says to the driver: "Sam, Sam, who dun it to ya?" (or the equivalent). At just that moment, the camera catches a man, dressed all in black in a black hat -- and undoubtedly mustachioed -- skulking into the saloon.

My dad promptly turns to me and whispers: "He's the one. He did it."

Stocks down after tepid economic data, bank woes

By MADLEN READ, AP Business Writer

2 hours, 56 minutes ago

Wall Street retreated Monday on more signs of economic weakness and executive shake-ups at two major banks — reminders of the ongoing fallout from the credit crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 130 points.

Two key economic reports indicated that the economy is still struggling. As expected, the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index for May showed its fourth straight monthly decline, while the Commerce Department said construction spending dipped in April for the sixth time in seven months due to a drop in home building.

Payrolls Probably Fell for Fifth Month: U.S. Economy Preview

By Shobhana Chandra

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. lost jobs for a fifth month in May and manufacturing contracted, signaling the economy is stagnating, economists said before reports this week.

Payrolls probably dropped by 60,000 workers, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News before the Labor Department's June 6 report. Figures tomorrow may show the Institute for Supply Management's factory index fell to 48.5 in May.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Indefensible Spending

by Robert Scheer

What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago?

You wouldn’t know it from the most-exhausting-ever presidential primary campaigns, but the 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars) to defeat a ragtag band of terrorists than it spent at the height of the Cold War fighting the Soviet superpower and what we alleged were its surrogates in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Frank Rich: McCain’s McClellan Nightmare

THEY thought they were being so slick. When the McCain campaign abruptly moved last Tuesday’s fund-raiser with President Bush from the Phoenix Convention Center to a private home, it was the next best thing to sending the loathed lame duck into the witness protection program. John McCain and Mr. Bush were caught on camera together for a mere 26 seconds, and at 9 p.m. Eastern time, safely after the networks’ evening newscasts. The two men’s furtive encounter on the Phoenix airport tarmac, as captured by a shaky, inaudible long shot on FoxNews.com, could have been culled from a surveillance video.

But for the McCain campaign, any “Mission Accomplished” high-fives had to be put on hold. That same evening Politico.com broke the news of Scott McClellan’s memoir, and it was soon All Bush All the Time in the mediasphere. Or more to the point: All Iraq All the Time, for the deceitful origins of the war in Iraq are the major focus of the former press secretary’s tell-all.