09 August 2008

Postmodern John McCain: the presidential candidate some Arizonans know — and loathe

By Amy Silverman
published: August 07, 2008

I once stood in John McCain's kitchen and watched Cindy cook eggs for their kids. It was still dark outside when I arrived at the McCains' north-central Phoenix house on a winter day in early 1994. I remember terra cotta tile and overstuffed plaid couches and wondering whether Mrs. McCain regularly got up before dawn to make breakfast.

I was following her husband around for the day, for a story I was working on about his role in Arizona Republican politics. I'd been gathering examples of McCain's strong-arming, and I needed some face-time with the senator, to ask about that and also to describe his personality. That day, we drove to Tucson so McCain could sit in as guest host on a local talk-radio show.

Democracy Now: The Wrecking Crew: Thomas Frank on How Conservatives Rule

Columnist and author Thomas Frank joins us to talk about his latest book, The Wrecking Crew. Frank writes, “Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction.” [includes rush transcript]

Big Business Is Making Sure It Wins the Presidency

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on August 9, 2008, Printed on August 9, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/94334/

Remember the total, hideous, inexcusable absence of oversight that has been the great hallmark of George Bush's America for almost eight years now? Well, now we're getting to see that same regulatory malfeasance applied to yet another cornerstone of our political system. The Federal Election Commission -- the body that supposedly enforces campaign-finance laws in this country -- has been out of business for more than six months. That's because Congress was dragging its feet over confirmation hearings for new FEC commissioners, leaving the agency without a quorum. The commission just started work again for the first time on July 10th under its new chairman, Donald McGahn, a classic Republican Party yahoo whose chief qualifications include representing Tom DeLay, the corrupt ex-speaker of the House, in matters of campaign finance.

Apart from the obvious absurdity of not having a functioning election-policing mechanism in an election year in the world's richest democracy, the late start by the FEC makes it almost impossible for the agency to do its job. The commission has a long-standing reluctance to take action in the last months before a vote, a policy designed to help prevent federal regulators from influencing election outcomes. Normally, the FEC tries to root out infractions and loopholes -- fining campaigns for incomplete reporting, or for taking shortcuts around spending limits -- in the early months of a campaign season. But that ship sailed way too long ago to take the stink off the 2008 race.

08 August 2008

Murray Waas: U.S. Attorney Scandal Probe Enters White House Circle

The Justice Department investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress, according to numerous sources involved in the inquiry.

The widened scope raises the possibility that investigators will pursue criminal charges against some administration officials, and recommend appointment of a special prosecutor if there is evidence of criminal misconduct.

Extreme appeal: voters trust extreme positions more than moderate ones, study finds

Appealing to middle not best political strategy

Trying to appear moderate is not always the best strategy for capturing votes during an election, reveals a new study. Extreme positions can build trust among an electorate, who value ideological commitment in times of uncertainty.

"The current political advantage of the Republican Party stems from the ability of its candidates to develop 'signature ideas.' This strategy is rewarded even when the electorate has ideological reservations," says University of Southern California economist Juan Carrillo, adding that this poses a challenge for the Democrats.

In the current issue of The Economic Journal, Carrillo and Micael Castanheira of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), show that voters who are unsure about the quality of a policy can be swayed by indications of trustworthiness.

Sara Robinson: Why We Don't Shoot Back

Drew Westen and Mike Lux both have cogent and persuasive posts up that deftly explain — and raise the alarm about — the timidity that's recently settled into Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Sen. John McCain's shooting live rounds now; and, as usual, the Democrats are refusing to fire back. If that doesn't change — this week, before the Olympics starts — this could all too easily turn into Dukakis-all-over-again.

Progressives have been picking at the whys and wherefores of this pattern ever since Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. (One of my favorite explanations came from Paul Rosenberg, who dug into the psychology of both sides in this excellent series last year at Open Left.) But there's one fairly simple and glaring factor that I'm increasingly convinced plays at least some role in this — and since I've never seen it discussed anywhere else, I'm going to propose it here.

Paul Krugman: Know-Nothing Politics

So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.

And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

Corporate America Prepares for Battle Against Worker Campaign to Roll Back Assault on the Middle Class

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on August 8, 2008, Printed on August 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/94004/

There is nothing more terrifying to corporate America than the prospect of dealing with its workforce on an even playing field, and, along with allies on the Right, it's pulling out all the stops to keep that from happening. At stake is much more than the usual tax breaks, trade deals and relentless deregulation; corporations are gearing up for a fight to preserve a status quo in which the largest share of America's national income goes to profits and the smallest share to wages since the Great Depression -- in fact, since the government started tracking those figures.

There will be many heated legislative battles if 2008 shakes out with larger Congressional majorities for Democrats and an Obama White House -- fights over war and peace, energy policy, health care reform and immigration. But it may be a bill that many Americans have never heard of that sparks the most pitched battle Washington has seen since the Civil Rights Act. It's called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) -- a measure that would go a long way toward guaranteeing working people the right to join a union if they so choose -- and it has the potential to reverse more than three decades of painful stagflation, with prices rising and paychecks flat, for America's middle class and working poor.

07 August 2008

Conflict of Interests

Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics—or constitute it?

Nicholas Lemann
August 11, 2008

Pundits like Thomas Frank deplore the role of interest-group lobbying, but aren’t we all part of some interest group or other?

In a year saturated with political conversation, can there be any topic that has not yet been discussed? Well, here’s one: 2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced by an American—“The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures,” by Arthur Fisher Bentley. The reason its big anniversary hasn’t been celebrated is that “The Process of Government” is an ex-classic, now sunk into obscurity. The reason it should be celebrated is not just that it deserved its former place in the canon but also that it is uncannily relevant to this Presidential election.

Arthur Bentley was the son of a Midwestern banker. He was born in 1870 in Freeport, Illinois, graduated from high school in Grand Island, Nebraska, and, after working briefly for his father, attended Johns Hopkins, which was then making itself into one of the first American research universities, on the German model. After graduation, he went to the University of Berlin and studied with Georg Simmel and other late-nineteenth-century giants of political theory. The work he did there became the basis for a Ph.D. from Hopkins.

Berwyn Heights mayor asks for investigation into raid

By Doug Donovan
Sun reporter
4:44 PM EDT, August 7, 2008

Berwyn Heights' mayor today asked federal officials to investigate possible civil rights violations stemming from last week's raid of his Prince George's County home by police officers who shot and killed his two dogs, his attorney said.

Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, asked for a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry during a 2 p.m. news conference today outside their Berwyn Heights home, said Timothy Maloney, their attorney.

The Forgotten War

Four-star General Calls Afghanistan Conflict "Generational"

By Spencer Ackerman 08/07/2008

As U.S. military casualties mount in Afghanistan, a retired four-star Army general, who just returned from reviewing the six-plus-year war effort, said the country "is in misery" and describes the war as "a 25-year campaign."

In a memo written for the Social Sciences Dept. at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on July 30, Barry McCaffrey, a division commander during the 1991 Gulf War and drug czar under President Bill Clinton, writes that there is "no unity of command" -- either among U.S. and foreign coalition troops, or even among U.S. troops. Political and economic contributions to nation-building efforts are an additional source of disunity. Unity of command, in which all forces report to a single commander, is a basic principle of military strategy, without which military campaigns are rarely successful. McCaffrey writes that U.S. forces have two regional commands: European Command, which is also the NATO military command, and Central Command, which directs U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia.

After suicide, prosecutors reveal circumstantial anthrax case

WASHINGTON — A top Justice Department official said Wednesday that investigators are confident that government scientist Bruce Ivins, who behaved erratically and was treated for mental illness before committing suicide last week, "was the only person involved" in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people and terrorized the nation.

With the public disclosure of hundreds of pages of documents, the FBI and the Justice Department hoped to quell a week of media speculation about whether Ivins, 62, a former microbiologist at the U.S. Army's biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Md., was the culprit and whether they had sufficient evidence to prove it.

The Hamdan Case: Don’t Shoot the Driver

How the Bush administration botched the 'war on terror' by overreaching.

Michael Hirsh
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 4:46 PM ET Aug 6, 2008

The Bush administration needed a big win in the Salim Hamdan case at Guantánamo. It didn't get one. By convicting Osama bin Laden's former driver—the first "terrorist" to be tried under the first U.S. war-crimes tribunal since World War II—only of "material" support for terrorism, and absolving him of conspiracy to commit terrorism, the military judges provoked questions about what Hamdan was doing there in the first place. Is driving a car a war crime? The appeals court may decide not—in which case even this meager verdict could be thrown out.

"I would be very surprised if any of this conviction stands at the end of the day," says Scott Horton, a law professor specializing in human rights at Columbia University. "He was convicted of things that are not war crimes by a tribunal that has the power only to prosecute war crimes."

A Drilling Plan Full of Holes

Touring America’s oil rigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he will produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself. So strongly does his current rhetoric smell of methane, the gas emanating from manure, that he might even qualify for a renewable energy tax incentive.

The former straight talker, who could not help telling the truth, has found the voice of the demagogue within him. As Senator McCain seeks to exploit public anger over the price of gasoline, first with his dubious “gas tax holiday” and now with his campaign for offshore oil drilling, the thoughtful legislator who defied his own party on issues such as global warming and Alaskan oil leasing has been replaced by that much more familiar Congressional figure—a rented mouthpiece for the energy industry.

Vote for Bush? Pay up

Did you help put America's worst prez into power? Time to make amends

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Sure, you could start with an open-palmed apology, a profoundly contrite on-your-knees sort of thing, maybe an open letter in your local paper or a heartfelt speech at your next dinner party whereby you stumble though some sort of "I don't know what the hell I was thinking" or "I must've been blind" or "Wow, that mescaline sure was potent" type of defense for your unfortunate and reprehensible choices.

But the fact is, that's not really gonna cut it.

Pepe Escobar: Old Wrinkly's Roverian cancer

NEW YORK - How mud-wallowingly deep may a multi-millionaire US presidential campaign go? Way deep - deeper and deeper. And this is only early August.

Republican Senator John McCain's presidential campaign's strategic decision is now all too obvious. Swift-boating Democratic Senator Barack Obama is the only way to go.

The McCain-painted Obama is emerging as a US-hating, terrorist-friendly, deeply suspicious, radical, vapid black celeb - Puff Daddy with a Harvard degree. This "new bogeyman" picture travels well in those vast swathes of flyover US territory where urban hipness not only evokes envy and contempt but is regarded as a mortal sin.

06 August 2008

Syria Succeeds by Doing Nothing

By Robert Fisk

Originally printed in The Independent.

President Bashar al-Assad is once more one of the “triple pillars” of the Middle East. We may not like that. George Bush may curse the day his invasion of Iraq helped to shore up the power of the Caliph of Damascus. But Mr Assad’s latest trip to Tehran—just three weeks after he helped to toast the overthrow of the King of France beside President Nicolas Sarkozy—seals his place in history. Without a shot being fired, Mr Assad has ensured anyone who wants anything in the Middle East has got to talk to Syria. He’s done nothing—and he’s won.

The Europeans like to think—or, at least, M. Sarkozy likes to think—Mr Assad was in Tehran to persuade President Ahmadinejad not to go nuclear. Even Sana, the official Syrian news agency, was almost frank about it. The purpose of the Assad visit was “to consult on the nuclear issue and the right of states to peaceful enrichment” and “exchange ideas aimed at clarifying Iran’s commitment to all international agreements”. Mr Assad was M. Sarkozy’s point-man.

Americans Demand Action on the Economy

The Politics

“We’re in a recession, and Washington is doing nothing about it.” According to recent survey research, that’s one of the most powerful arguments progressives can make right now. The White House says “we have avoided a recession.” [Market Watch] But Americans overwhelmingly disagree. They describe the economy as in recession and support an economic growth package—for good reason.

The Facts

America is rapidly losing jobs. The U.S. Labor Department reported that employers cut 51,000 jobs in July, the seventh straight month in which more jobs were lost than created. Our country has lost 463,000 payroll jobs so far this year. The unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, the worst jobless rate in four years. Nearly 9 million Americans are now unemployed; 1.6 million lost their jobs in the last 12 months. [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

FBI said to have stalked Ivins' family

Diane Sweet
Published: Wednesday August 6, 2008

Did FBI cross the line in anthrax probe?

Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.

Kansas politician who crusaded against abortion loses big

For the second time in two years, voters in Kansas have handed a stinging defeat to Phill Kline, an anti-abortion crusader who made his reputation by attempting to prosecute the state's abortion providers, first as state attorney general, and then, after he lost re-election to that post, as a district attorney in suburban Kansas City.

With all of the vote counted, Steve Howe trounced Kline by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent in unofficial returns to select the Republican candidate for district attorney in Johnson County, Kan., a well-off suburb of Kansas City. Howe garnered 33,260 votes to Kline’s 22,188, according to final unofficial returns.

The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century

The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East

John Pilger
The Guardian Wednesday August 6 2008

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

Scientists a step closer to producing fuel from bacteria

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have shown how bacteria could be used as a future fuel. The research, published in the journal Bioinformatics, could have significant implications for the environment and the way we produce sustainable fuels in the future.

Like all living creatures, bacteria sustain themselves through their metabolism, a huge sequence of chemical reactions that transform nutrients into energy and waste.

Defining Obama 24/7

Conservatives try to make presidential race about Democratic nominee, painting him as unreliable

As Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trekked toward the final Democratic primaries, and it looked inevitable that Obama would be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, conservative pundits and cable television talk-show hosts, a host of blogs, and a number of newly formed organizations began intensifying their attacks on Obama, embarking on the early stages of one of Karl Rove's most effective political strategies: Directly attack the opponent's strengths. In the case of Obama, this means turning his very popularity into a negative, defining him as effete and more interested in celebrity before the Democrat can introduce and define himself to the larger nation.

Doubts Remain About Anthrax Story

By Stephen Kiehl, The Baltimore Sun
Posted on August 6, 2008, Printed on August 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/94043/

Survivors of the 2001 anthrax attacks and relatives of those killed by the deadly powder said yesterday that they want a full accounting from the FBI of its investigation to date, and they are not yet convinced that Bruce Ivins, the government scientist who killed himself last week, was responsible. Federal authorities are expected to meet this week with the victims' families in Washington to discuss their investigation, after which the FBI could close its nearly seven-year-old anthrax case and publicly release its findings. But with reports emerging that the case against Ivins is largely circumstantial, some wonder if real closure will ever come.

"I don't know whether this is the right person or not," said Maureen Stevens, the widow of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, who was the first killed in the fall 2001 attacks. Stevens said she has gone to Washington twice before for meetings, but nothing came of them. She said she received an e-mail from the FBI informing her of this week's meeting.

Thomas Frank: Captives of the Meatpacking Archipelago

History records that Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, used to present himself as a soul-brother to the American worker. In his heyday he railed against the "elitist upper class" and established his bona fides by saying, "I come from a poor district of working-class people."

Writing in the Washington Times last week, Mr. Weyrich was back in his old rhetorical neighborhood. The subject was Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and Mr. Weyrich was writing to celebrate "the best record of accomplishment of anyone in the Bush administration." Read closely, and you get the impression that Ms. Chao's the best secretary of Labor ever. After all, as Mr. Weyrich notes, she has applied stricter regulations to labor unions and has held the line against card-check unionization, which would allow workers to organize a union by signing cards instead of casting ballots.

05 August 2008

Katha Pollitt: Stealth Assault on Reproductive Rights

When pro-choicers accuse anti-choicers of being anti-contraception they're often taken as crying wolf -- even though no anti-choice organization explicitly endorses birth control and despite the prominent anti-choice role of the Catholic Church, which explicitly bans contraception. After all, goes the complacent point of view, most women, and most couples, use some form of birth control. Opposition to it seems like something out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel whose futuristic vision of women's subjection to rightwing Christian patriarchs no less a shrewd social critic than Mary McCarthy found preposterous when she reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986.

The Bush Administration seems bent on giving Atwood material for a sequel. Last month, Health and Human Services issued a draft of new regulations which would require health-care providers who receive federal funds to accept as employees nurses and other workers who object to abortion and even to most kinds of birth control. This rule would cover some 500,000 hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities-- including family planning clinics, which would, absurdly, legally be bound to hire people who will obstruct their very mission. To refuse to hire them, or to fire them, would be to lose funds for discriminating against people who object to abortion for religious or --get this -- moral beliefs.

The Perils of Privatization

Social Security Privatization Cuts Lifetime Benefits; Makes Senior Citizens Vulnerable to Poverty

By Eric Lotke, Institute for America's Future
August 04th, 2008

An idea to radically change Social Security that has already been soundly rejected by the American people—privatization—is being resurrected. If its proponents succeed, 8.6 million older Americans would lose a safety net that keeps them from falling into poverty, according to research released by the Institute for America's Future.

Three years ago, President Bush declared that Social Security faced a financial crisis, and his solution was privatization — taking payroll taxes we all pay into the system and investing a portion of those funds in private stock market accounts.

Deleted photo sparks fears DEA hiring mercenaries

When a California medical marijuana dispensary, Organica Collective, was raided last Thursday by agents of the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency and local police, the Los Angeles Times ran a dramatic story on the incident, accompanied by a set of photographs showing the raid and its aftermath.

[...]

However, one particular photograph from the Times story has drawn more attention than anything else. That picture, which has now been widely reproduced at blogs, shows a long-haired man, wearing a Blackwater tshirt and with a pistol at his belt, passing a box marked "DEA Evidence" to other agents participating in the raid.

Enron setbacks could hurt other white-collar prosecutions

WASHINGTON — Almost seven years after the energy giant Enron collapsed, a series of court decisions has opened the door to new trials for some of the convicted corporate executives and threatened to hobble the Justice Department's efforts to pursue future corporate-fraud cases.

In the wake of the scandal, prosecutors pursued executives for covering up the company's financial bleeding and unloading millions of dollars in stock. The Bush administration was under pressure to hold the company's executives accountable for what at the time represented the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. More than 4,000 Enron employees lost their jobs, and investors lost billions.

Anthrax Mystery: Questions Raised over Whether Government Is Framing Dead Army Scientist for 2001 Attacks

The FBI’s prime suspect in the October 2001 anthrax letters case died last week in an apparent suicide. Bruce Ivins was an elite government scientist at the biodefense research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He was among the nation’s top experts on the military use of anthrax. But many of his colleagues have expressed deep skepticism over the FBI’s claims. We speak to anthrax expert Dr. Meryl Nass and blogger Glenn Greenwald.

Media Matters reviews of anti-Obama books

Unfit for Publication: Corsi's The Obama Nation filled with falsehoods

Summary: In its preface, Jerome Corsi compares his new book, The Obama Nation, to his 2004 book Unfit for Command. The comparison seems apt: Just as Unfit for Command contains false attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service, a Media Matters review finds that The Obama Nation similarly contains numerous falsehoods about Sen. Barack Obama.

Misinformation in Freddoso's anti-Obama book comes early

Summary: The introduction and first few pages of David Freddoso's forthcoming book, The Case Against Barack Obama, are marked by false and misleading assertions about Obama, accompanied by dubious citations.

Big Coal's Campaign of Lies

While its fuel cooks the planet, the coal industry uses its clout to dupe consumers and delay change

JEFF GOODELL
Posted Aug 07, 2008 11:08 AM

It took Congress more than three decades to consider a major initiative to ward off global warming, but only a few days to kill it. In June, the Senate rejected the Climate Security Act, which would have put America on track to slash greenhouse-gas emissions by 71 percent by 2050. The bill was specifically crafted to soften the blow to the nation's coal industry — coal generates more than a third of all carbon-dioxide pollution — by providing coal-burning power companies with $300 billion in subsidies and outright giveaways. But the lavish incentives did nothing to prevent Big Coal from going all out to defeat the measure; one industry-funded TV ad implied that if Congress passed the bill, "we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life." In the end, virtually every senator from a state where coal is mined or burned voted against the measure.

US distractions let in 'foes'

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - More than five years after invading Iraq as a first step towards "transforming" the Middle East, the administration of US President George W Bush seems to have lost its footing - let alone its unquestioned domination - throughout the region.

The talk of "democratizing" the region has almost entirely disappeared from the administration's rhetoric as Washington has had to sacrifice whatever pressure it had been willing exert on "friendly authoritarians" among Arab states to bolstering their rule against popular sentiment that has become considerably more hostile toward the US than before the invasion.

Freddie Mac chief disregarded warning signs: report

Tue Aug 5, 4:17 AM ET

U.S. mortgage market giant Freddie Mac's chief executive dismissed internal warnings that could have protected the company from some of the financial problems now engulfing it, the New York Times said, citing more than two dozen current and former high-ranking executives and others.

In 2004, Chief Executive Richard Syron received a memo from Freddie Mac's chief risk officer warning him that the firm was financing questionable loans that threatened its financial health, the paper said.

Though the current housing crisis would have undoubtedly caused problems at both companies, Freddie Mac insiders say Syron heightened those perils by ignoring repeated recommendations, the NY Times said.

Book says White House ordered forgery

Mike Allen
Tue Aug 5, 12:23 AM ET

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

04 August 2008

Digby: The Jackie Robinson Rules

It turns out that a majority of Americans think that Obama was racist for saying what he said but McCain's ads weren't. It would seem that the most recognizable form of racism for most people is from those who "play the race card from the bottom of the deck." I suppose that's progress of a weird sort.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

Digby: David Broder Sets The Table

I've said it before and I'll say it again: for the past fifteen years we've seen the Republicans act like a bunch of crazed Visigoths sacking Rome and David Broder uttered nary a peep of protest. Now that they've worn themselves out and are fat and tired from slurping at the public trough, the Democrats are called in to clean up their mess. And still, although they suddenly decry "ideological extremism" it's quite clear that for people like David Broder, the marauding VisiGOP is far less terrifying than the prospect of a progressive majority:

Twists and Turns in the Anthrax Case

by dday

There is a very coordinated push to leak details about the late Bruce Ivins to certify that he is the "lone nut" anthrax killer, details which don't entirely hold up upon scrutiny. There's definitely a desire on the part of the government to make this an open and shut case seven years after the fact, but it doesn't completely hold together. In fact, the media reports are almost all contradictory.

The LA Times is claiming that Ivins stood to make money off of an anthrax panic, because he invented some bioterror vaccines, but inside the article it's made clear that we're talking about not much more than $10,000. A social worker who worked as a therapist with Ivins was reportedly scared to death of him and claimed that he tried to poison people in the past, but the social worker, Jean Duley, has her own checkered past, with a long rap sheet, and apparently knew about the grand jury investigation, as it's in her restraining order against Ivins:

Ted Rall: News Does Not Want To Be Free--Three Cures for Ailing Newspapers

PORTLAND--"I feel I'm being catapulted into another world, a world I don't really understand," Denis Finley told the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Finley, editor of the Virginian-Pilot, isn't the only newspaper executive who can't come up with a plan for the future. "Only 5 percent of [newspaper editors and publishers]," finds Pew's latest analysis of the nation's 1217 daily newspapers, "said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now."

Newspapers are in trouble. More people read them than ever, but most of them read them online, for free. Unfortunately online advertising rates are too low to make up for declining print circulation. A reader of The New York Times' print edition generates about 170 times as much revenue as someone who surfs NYTimes.com. (This is because print readers spend 47 minutes with the paper. Online browsers visit the paper's website a mere seven minutes--some of which they might not even be sitting in front of their computers.)

The Battle for a Country's Soul

By Jane Mayer

A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic," replied the Doctor, "if you can keep it."


—Papers of Dr. James McHenry, describing the scene as they left the Federal Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia

Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.

In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world. These warnings came not just from political opponents, but also from experienced allies, including the British Intelligence Service, the experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI, and, perhaps most surprisingly, from a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administration itself. The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America's ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring.

The Democrats & National Security

By Samantha Power

Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security
by J. Peter Scoblic, Viking, 350 pp., $25.95

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias, Wiley, 251 pp., $25.95

1.

Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership."

Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism."

Katha Pollitt: Flocking to Faith

In the old days politicians would slip preachers some hundreds under the table, and preachers would deliver the flock on election day. It was borderline illegal, but at least it left the Constitution alone. The same could not be said of the Bush Administration's faith-based initiative, a political bribe to the religious right that put a hole in the First Amendment big enough for Christ himself to walk through. Given the dismal results of the initiative--millions wasted, many lawsuits, embarrassments like special Christians-only prison units and Faith Works, which aspired to bring "homeless addicts to Christ"--you would think getting rid of federal handouts to churches for social services would be one change we'd all be ready to believe in. But no. As he announced earlier this summer, Barack Obama plans to open the spigot even wider, beginning with half a billion dollars for summer classes for 1 million poor kids and presumably moving on to help for prisoners, addicts and other unfortunates. Perhaps worn down by years of being bashed as elitists ignorant of the real America, many liberals and progressives seem prepared to go along. Difficult as it is to dissent from the feel-good community spirit in which Obama casts his proposals--who wants to be the curmudgeon while people are in obvious need?--this is a major failure of nerve.

Paul Krugman: A Slow-Mo Meltdown

A year ago, as the outlines of the current financial crisis were just becoming clear, I suggested that this crisis, unlike a superficially similar crisis in 1998, wouldn’t end quickly.

It hasn’t.

The good news, I guess, is that we’ve been experiencing a sort of slow-motion meltdown, lacking in dramatic Black Fridays and such. The gradual way the crisis has unfolded has led to an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate among economists about whether what we’re suffering really deserves to be called a recession.

Housing Lenders Fear Bigger Wave of Loan Defaults

The first wave of Americans to default on their home mortgages appears to be cresting, but a second, far larger one is quickly building.

Homeowners with good credit are falling behind on their payments in growing numbers, even as the problems with mortgages made to people with weak, or subprime, credit are showing their first, tentative signs of leveling off after two years of spiraling defaults.

The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.

Lawyer: Lott ‘Initiated Contact With People Surrounding’ Insurance Fraud Lawsuit

During a deposition last week, Jim Robie, an attorney for State Farm Insurance, alleged that former Mississippi senator Trent Lott had “urged witnesses to give false information in a Hurricane Katrina lawsuit.” Questioning Lott’s nephew, Zach Scruggs, Robie asked if it had been his “custom” to have Lott “contact and encourage witnesses to give false information.” Scruggs refused to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment.

A Bad Electronic Voting Bill

Congress has stood idly by while states have done the hard work of trying to make electronic voting more reliable. Now the Senate is taking up a dangerous bill introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, that would make things worse in the name of reform. If Congress will not pass a strong bill, it should apply the medical maxim: first, do no harm.

Voters cannot trust the totals reported by electronic voting machines; they are too prone to glitches and too easy to hack. In the last few years, concerned citizens have persuaded states to pass bills requiring electronic voting machines to use paper ballots or produce voter-verifiable paper records of every vote. More than half of the states now have such laws.

03 August 2008

Digby: Oiled Up And Ready To Go

One of the points I probably failed to adequately make on my Netroots Nation panel with Perlstein, Atrios and Krugman about the media's relationship with the right is the fact that the professional right wing noise machine exists on a number of different levels and is at its most effective when it operates in opposition to power. It's an industry that exists across all communications fields and operates on its own logic. They don't even have to talk to each other. They have a synergy built in, a common worldview and vocabulary that enables them to work in tandem without actual coordination.

Sonar does affect whales, military report confirms

Animals stopped vocalizing and foraging for food during marine exercises.

Whales subjected to military sonar will neither dive nor feed, according to an unpublished 2007 report from the UK military, obtained by Nature after a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The impact of sonar on whales has become an increasingly fraught issue in recent years, with submarine exercises being linked to several high-profile mass strandings. The US Navy has admitted concerns over sonar’s effects on marine mammals, although actual evidence for harm has been in short supply.

Commentary: A top general says more troops aren't the answer in Afghanistan

There's military slang that seemingly applies to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan today. The operative acronym is FUBAR - Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. That first letter doesn't really stand for "Fouled," and the R sometimes stands for Repair.

One of the sharper military analysts I know has just returned from a tour of that sorrowful nation, which has been at war continuously since the Soviet Army invaded it in late 1979.

Dockum sit-in resonates

BY CHRISTINA M. WOODS
The Wichita Eagle

Joan S. Williams never talked about the changes that resulted after she sat at Wichita Dockum Drugs store's segregated lunch counter in July 1958. But in those 60 minutes of her life, she helped make history.

Williams said her mother died without knowing that she and other Wichita Branch NAACP youth group members desegregated the Dockum lunch counter and all Rexall drug store lunch counters across Kansas.

To recognize the sit-in's 50th anniversary, national NAACP leaders are planning to come to Wichita on Aug. 9 to march in honor of the event, which is expected to draw national media attention. About 1,500 people are expected to march, according to the local NAACP branch.

Toxic drugs, toxic system: Sociologist predicts drug disasters

Study says harm from prescription drugs growing, cites fatal flaws in drug testing, approval and marketing

BOSTON — Americans are likely to be exposed to unacceptable side effects of FDA-approved drugs such as Vioxx in the future because of fatal flaws in the way new drugs are tested and marketed, according to research to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

"Drug disasters are literally built into the current system of drug testing and approvals in the United States," said Donald Light, the sociologist who authored the study and a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. "Recent changes in the system have only increased the proportion of new drugs with serious risks."

Time, Finally, for Real Fuel Economy

The political landscape is littered with squandered opportunities to avert the $4-a-gallon gasoline mess we find ourselves in now. Americans would be using far less gas — and consumers and the automobile industry would be much better off — if Congress had summoned the wisdom and political courage 20, 10, even five years ago to impose tough fuel economy standards on the nation’s transportation fleet.

Another such opportunity is fast approaching, and it would be foolish to miss it. On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — the federal agency that sets fuel standards — will hold hearings on a timetable that it has proposed for meeting the new fuel economy standards established in the 2007 energy act.

Black Sites

By ALAN BRINKLEY

THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
By Jane Mayer.
Illustrated. 392 pp. Doubleday. $27.50.

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.

In fairness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, who could not have imagined the worst and contemplated extraordinary efforts to prevent it? But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.

Barren Spring

Author Claire Hope Cummings dishes the dirt on genetically modified food

By Bonnie Azab Powell
01 Aug 2008

One of the most encouraging things about the sustainable-food movement is how effortlessly it crosses traditional political-party, religious, ethnic, and other lines. The right to good, clean, and fair food, to borrow Slow Food's shorthand, seems to unite people who'd never otherwise find themselves chatting at the same party: Home schoolers and dreadlocked hippies, libertarian DIYers and heartland moms.

But there are little pockets of polarization where brawls can break out. One of them is the so-called elitism of such food. The biggest hot-button issue by far, though, is that of transgenic crops. The food movement's Christian wing opposes it for religious reasons, the Berkeley brigade for dogmatic ones, the moms out of health fears. Those with science or technology backgrounds, however, tend to see genetically modified organisms as just another tool in the how-we-are-going-to-feed-the-world toolbox -- and tend to get pretty impatient with those who fear them.

America's house price time bomb

By Michael Robinson
BBC World Service

With the American housing market in its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Bush is authorising new legislation to pave the way for massive new government intervention designed to slow the slide.

The intervention would come as a little known quirk of US law threatens to drive down house prices even faster.

Want High-Quality Universal Health Coverage? Fix Medicare First and Use It as a Model

By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat
Posted on August 2, 2008, Printed on August 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/93357/

This article originally appeared on Health Beat.

Thanks to the unbridled rise in health care prices, Medicare is going broke. As I mentioned in a recent post, four years ago the Medicare trust fund that pays for hospital stays started to run out of money. In 2004 the fund began paying out more than it takes in through payroll taxes.

"Since then, the balance in the fund, combined with interest income on that balance, has kept the fund solvent. But in just 11 years, it will be exhausted," the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) reported in March. "Revenues from payroll taxes collected in that year will cover only 79 percent of projected benefit expenditures." And each year after 2019, the shortfall will grow larger.

Electric Cars Are the Key to Energy Independence

By David Morris, AlterNet
Posted on August 2, 2008, Printed on August 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/93609/

Al Gore's heroic speech challenging us to make our electrical system 100 percent renewable promised it would simultaneously address three major crises: the weak economy, catastrophic climate change and the dire national security problems inherent in our dependence on imported oil.

He got two out of three right. A crash renewable electricity initiative would provide an immediate boost to our economy and could slow climate change, since electricity accounts for about a third of our overall greenhouse gas emissions.

One Million Homes Lost and Counting: How to End the Foreclosure Crisis Now

By Fred Moseley, Dollars and Sense
Posted on August 2, 2008, Printed on August 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/93055/

Over one million U.S. homeowners have already lost their homes due to foreclosures since the mortgage crisis began last summer. Another one million homeowners are 90 days past due on their mortgages (foreclosure notices usually go out after 90 days) and two million more are 30 days past due, so three million more households may face foreclosure in the months ahead. If current policies do not change, it is estimated that up to five million homeowners would lose their homes due to foreclosure over the next few years. Five million is roughly 10% of the total number of homes with mortgages. This is clearly the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, and will wreck havoc in the lives of millions of families unless something is done. A high foreclosure rate also has a deteriorating effect on surrounding neighborhoods, further depressing housing prices and quality of life.

Tarnished 'truth': The New Paradigm for Financial Markets by George Soros

Reviewed by Nicholas Kiersey

"Wall Street got drunk," or so says President George W Bush. But blaming America's recent credit crisis on Wall Street and its "fancy financial instruments" is a little too simplistic. For it is an analysis that speaks neither to the radically neo-liberal regulative framework that permitted such instruments to develop nor the insurmountable challenges now facing America's homeowners.

Ironically, for this sort of analysis, we could do worse than turn to George Soros's new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: the Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means. A financial speculator, Soros has made and lost more money than most can. He writes, too, and is a sometimes philosopher.