Frank Rich: Kiss This War Goodbye

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.

But if we were titillated that Sunday, it wasn’t immediately clear that this internal government history of the war had mass appeal. Tricia Nixon’s wedding in the White House Rose Garden on Saturday received equal play with the Pentagon Papers on The Times’s front page. On “Face the Nation” the guest was the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, yet the subject of the papers didn’t even come up.

That false calm vanished overnight once Richard Nixon, erupting in characteristic rage and paranoia, directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to enjoin The Times from publishing any sequels. The high-stakes legal drama riveted the nation for two weeks, culminating in a landmark 6-to-3 Supreme Court decision in favor of The Times and the First Amendment. Ellsberg and The Times were canonized. I sold my first magazine article, an Ellsberg profile, to Esquire, and, for better or worse, cast my lot with journalism. That my various phone conversations with Ellsberg prompted ham-fisted F.B.I. agents to visit me and my parents only added to the allure.

A Neocon Re-write of American History

By Robert Parry
July 31, 2010

On Friday, the Washington Post offered up its typical balance on the “Washington FORUM” page – two articles by former Bush administration officials (Hank Paulson and Michael Gerson) and two articles by prominent neocons (Robert Kagan and Max Boot). But Boot’s opinion piece – advocating never-ending largesse for the U.S. military – was perhaps the most insidious.

Boot constructed what purported to be a historical narrative demonstrating why it was always a mistake for the U.S. government to trim back its standing army, arguing that such cutbacks caused troubles from the Whiskey Rebellion after the Revolutionary War to George W. Bush’s botched occupation of Iraq.

The lesson, according to Boot, is to maintain a very large military even after a major conflict ends and to view the current defense budget – which is approaching nearly half of what the entire world spends on military costs – as “a bargain considering the historic consequences of letting our guard down.”

That Big Sucking Sound in the Economy Is the Threat of Serious Deflation

By William Greider, The Nation
Posted on July 30, 2010, Printed on July 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147694/

The economic specter stalking Barack Obama is not the nonsense debate that captivates deficit hawks and witless political reporters. It is the threat of a full-blown monetary deflation that would truly put the US economy in ruin. In a general deflation, everything falls--prices, output, wages, profits. Unchecked, this can lead to another Big D--the Depression Obama claims he has avoided.

Depression was the fate that befell Herbert Hoover after 1929 and the outlines of this larger catastrophe are present again. It is easy to dismiss deflation warnings from curbstone critics, including from me. But it is more significant--and truly scary--when senior policy makers of the Federal Reserve begin to express the same fear, as the New York Times reported today [1]. The Fed has done quite a lot in the last two years to prevent this disaster from unfolding, but some officials are now worried the Fed hasn't done enough.

Reports of BP disaster’s death are greatly exaggerated

In a contrarian take, Time Magazine's Michael Grunwald wrote a preemptive post-mortem impact of BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, saying that it "does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage." Grunwald believes that Rush Limbaugh "has a point" because the right-wing radio host spent weeks dismissing the disaster. New York Times reporters Justin Gillis and Campbell Robertson wrote that the "oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected." The Associated Press's John Carey believes "the oil slicks that once spread across thousands of miles of the Gulf of Mexico have largely disappeared." The narrative of the disappearing disaster has been promoted by Politico's Mike Allen and the Drudge Report.

Obama Starts Race War to Win Election: An Inquiry Into Conspiracy Theories, Part II

By Sara Robinson

Created 07/29/2010 - 5:11pm

The beat goes on.

In the nearly two weeks since I wrote Part I of this series [1], an armed gunman was arrested en route to assaulting an obscure progressive foundation in San Francisco -- one that's often been at the center of Glenn Beck's blackboard (which has become Conspiracy Theory Ground Zero for 2010). Also, this just in [2]: President Obama is attempting to foment a race war, complete with New Black Panthers in the streets, in order to win the November elections.

I know. It's just so hard to keep up.

In the last post, I defined a conspiracy theory as "any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others -- even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended." And I talked about the cultural conditions that soften up people's skulls and predispose them to accepting these baroque works of storytelling rather than simply accept what the evidence shows.

This post moves from outside influences to what goes on inside our heads. What's going on internally that makes conspiracy stories appealing to us as individuals? As before, I'm drawing heavily on David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theories in Shaping Modern History [3] as one of the better guides out there to all the factors at play when we willfully choose to believe the unbelievable.

Republicans Block Bill to Aid Small Business

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Thursday rejected a bill to aid small businesses with expanded loan programs and tax breaks, in a procedural blockade that underscored how fiercely determined the party’s leaders are to deny Democrats any further legislative accomplishments ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The measure, championed by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, had the backing of some of the Republican Party’s most reliable business allies, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business. Several Republican lawmakers also helped write it.

But Republican leaders filibustered after fighting for days with Democrats over the number of amendments they would be able to offer. A last-ditch offer by Democrats to allow three was refused by the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Paul Krugman: Curbing Your Enthusiasm

Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?

These questions were inspired by the ongoing suspense over whether President Obama will do the obviously right thing and nominate Elizabeth Warren to lead the new consumer financial protection agency. But the Warren affair is only the latest chapter in an ongoing saga.

Mr. Obama rode into office on a vast wave of progressive enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was bound to be followed by disappointment, and not just because the president was always more centrist and conventional than his fervent supporters imagined. Given the facts of politics, and above all the difficulty of getting anything done in the face of lock step Republican opposition, he wasn’t going to be the transformational figure some envisioned.

And Mr. Obama has delivered in important ways. Above all, he managed (with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi) to enact a health reform that, imperfect as it is, will greatly improve Americans’ lives — unless a Republican Congress manages to sabotage its implementation.

A Trove of FDR's Papers Finally Available to the Public

Wednesday 28 July 2010

by: Tish Wells | McClatchy Newspapers | Report

Washington — President Franklin D. Roosevelt never kept a diary. He never gave lengthy interviews to historians. He died before he had a chance to write a memoir. Yet he held the nation's top office at a time of amazing tumult and transition.

Now historians have a new set of documents to help piece together the details of the nation's longest presidency — and one of its most momentous.

The Grace Tully Archives, a collection of papers preserved by Roosevelt's longtime secretary, were unveiled on Wednesday, weeks after legislation took effect that moved them from private hands to the National Archives.

Glenn Beck's Incendiary Rhetoric Is Dangerously Close to Having a Body Count

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Posted on July 27, 2010, Printed on July 29, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147647/

On his Monday radio show, Glenn Beck highlighted claims that before he started targeting a little-known, left-leaning organization called the Tides Foundation on his Fox News TV show, "nobody knew" what the non-profit was.

Indeed, for more than a year Beck has been portraying the progressive organization as a central player in a larger, nefarious cabal of Marxist/socialist/Nazi Obama-loving outlets determined to destroy democracy in America. Beck has routinely smeared the low-profile entity for being staffed by "thugs" and "bullies" and involved in "the nasty of the nastiest," like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a "mass organization to seize power."

As Media Matters reported, the conspiratorial host had mentioned (read: attacked) the little-known progressive organization nearly 30 times on his Fox program alone since it premiered in 2009, including several mentions in the last month. (Beck's the only TV talker who regularly references the foundation, according to our Nexis searches.)

White House pushes for warrantless access to Internet records

By Muriel Kane
Thursday, July 29th, 2010 -- 11:30 am

Attorney speculates data could include Facebook friend requests

The White House has asked Congress to make it possible for the FBI to demand that Internet service providers turn over customers' records in cases involving terrorism or other intelligence issues without first obtaining a court order.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act currently states that companies are required to provide basic subscriber data to the FBI, but lists only the four kinds of information that might be found on phone bills -- customer's name, address, length of service, and toll billing records.

Just say no to fake Net neutrality

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See S. Derek Turner's bio below.

The debate in Washington over Net neutrality--the fundamental principle that keeps the Internet open and free from discrimination--is coming to a head. That means that the wheeling and dealing is under way, and consumers need to watch out.

There are currently closed-door meetings taking place between phone and cable behemoths, and the biggest Internet companies, to craft a "compromise" deal that could carve up the Internet for them and leave consumers and smaller competitors behind. If the fix is in, it won't be long before they launch a PR campaign presenting this scheme as some kind of middle ground far from the "radical fringe." But buyer beware: This could be fake Net neutrality.

The job machine grinds to a halt

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, July 28, 2010; A15

Ain't no hiring. And ain't likely to be any for a good long time.

The problem isn't merely the greatest downturn since the Great Depression. It's also that big business has found a way to make big money without restoring the jobs it cut the past two years, or increasing its investments or even its sales, at least domestically.

In the mildly halcyon days before the 2008 crash, the one economic outlier was wages. Profit, revenue and GDP all increased; only ordinary Americans' incomes lagged behind. Today, wages are still down, employment remains low and sales revenue isn't up much, either. But profits are the outlier. They're positively soaring.

Before the CIA, there was the Pond

By RANDY HERSCHAFT and CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writers
Thu Jul 29, 2:27 pm ET

NEW YORK – It was a night in early November during the infancy of the Cold War when the anti-communist dissidents were hustled through a garden and across a gully to a vehicle on a dark, deserted road in Budapest. They hid in four large crates for their perilous journey.

Four roadblocks stood between them and freedom.

What Zoltan Pfeiffer, a top political figure opposed to Soviet occupation, his wife and 5-year-old daughter did not know as they were whisked out of Hungary in 1947 was that their driver, James McCargar, was a covert agent for one of America's most secretive espionage agencies, known simply as the Pond.

Two Crises Wasted

Washington's perverse refusal to grapple with the energy crisis or to genuinely reform Wall Street.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, July 27, 2010, at 10:04 AM ET

The past news week was dominated by the Shirley Sherrod saga, a miserable episode that involved political operatives masquerading as journalists distorting fact in order to promote pre-existing bias, followed by a rush to judgment on the part of those too weak or fearful to exercise independent thought. A casualty of the Sherrod story's domination of the news is that it obscured the whimpering end of two of the largest crises of the past several years: the signing of the Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill and the plugging of the BP well.

Paul Krugman: Ma! He’s Looking At Me Funny!

That’s basically the thrust of Mort Zuckerman’s op-ed accusing Obama of “demonizing” business.

The op-ed contains the usual — false claims that Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis, false claims that fear of government policy — as opposed to weak demand — is holding back investment and hiring.

Latest 'green' packing material? Mushrooms

Packing foam now entering the marketplace is engineered from mushrooms and agricultural waste

A new packing material that grows itself is now appearing in shipped products across the country.

The composite of inedible agricultural waste and mushroom roots is called Mycobond™, and its manufacture requires just one eighth the energy and one tenth the carbon dioxide of traditional foam packing material.

And unlike most foam substitutes, when no longer useful, it makes great compost in the garden.

The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs

by Robert Reich

Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they're making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.

So with all this money and profit, they'll start hiring again, right? Wrong - for three reasons.

US withdraws 'heat ray' gun from Afghanistan

By Dan Cairns
Newsbeat reporter

A heat ray gun developed by the US military has been withdrawn from Afghanistan, army chiefs have confirmed.

The Active Denial System (ADS) is a non-lethal weapon that heats up the skin "intolerably" but, according to tests, causes no permanent damage.

Its invisible beam is designed to repel enemies and disperse violent crowds, causing anyone targeted to immediately move away.

They Cast Out Demons & Burn "Witchcraft Items," and They're Taking Over Entire States

[editor: This story is about a radical right wing movement in charismatic Christianity that claims to fight demons but, leaving demonology aside, is demonstrably close to seizing the reigns of power in entire US states.]

They claim to be able to raise the dead and cause miracles, such as the multiplication of Thanksgiving turkey dinners. They burn "witchcraft items" and "idols." They hold mass exorcisms to cast out alleged evil spirits they say cause lust, pornography, addiction, homosexuality, bisexuality, and perversion. They claim to be able to heal HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis C, Glaucoma, and cancer, and to break "generational curses" and "witchcraft curses." Who are they? Here are a few overviews (1, 2, 3.)

WikiLeaks Bombshell Docs Paint Afghan War as Utter Disaster -- Will We Finally Stop Throwing Money and Lives at This Catastrophe?

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News
Posted on July 26, 2010, Printed on July 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147636/

The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks posted 75,000 reports written mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period from January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material -- published under the title “Afghan War Diaries” -- is not in doubt.

Audit: US cannot account for $8.7B in Iraqi funds

By TAREK EL-TABLAWY, AP Business Writer – Tue Jul 27, 6:09 pm ET

BAGHDAD – A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.

The $8.7 billion in question was Iraqi money managed by the Pentagon, not part of the $53 billion that Congress has allocated for rebuilding. It's cash that Iraq, which relies on volatile oil revenues to fuel its spending, can ill afford to lose.

On a power failure and a failure of power

A 15-hour outage caused by a storm in DC? The shocking truth: it wouldn't happen if the government gave people work

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 July 2010 18.00 BST

I was late with my column this morning. It was the first time I'd missed a deadline since I started college. This made me angry, not just because I hated to see a 34-year streak end, but more importantly, because of the reason I was late.

Sunday afternoon, a storm hit Washington. It knocked out the power not only in my house, approximately 3 miles from the White House, but also in large chunks of the city and suburbs. Fifteen hours later, we still don't have power.

Since temperatures were predicted to get into the 90s today, we can expect that people will die. Sick and elderly people who cannot get into an air-conditioned facility will have great difficulty surviving in such heat.

WikiLeaks and the War

Among the ninety-one thousand or so documents from the Afghan war released by WikiLeaks Sunday is an incident report dated November 22, 2009, submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus. It describes how a convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.” What could be scarier than that?

Maybe what the soldiers found out next: these weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two- or three-thousand-dollar bribe per truck; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of (and has denied) earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.”

UK diplomat: ‘Deep state’ bureaucracy blocking Iraq inquiry

By Daniel Tencer
Sunday, July 25th, 2010 -- 2:43 pm

Former KGB spy claims evidence that whistleblower David Kelly didn't commit suicide

Britain's public inquiry into the country's instrumental role in the Iraq invasion is being thwarted by "deep state" bureaucrats who are intimidating witnesses and withholding documents, says a former Iraq expert for the UK government.

Paul Krugman: Who Cooked the Planet?

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.

Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

Frank Rich: There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’

THE glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don Draper. So you don’t really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad news. “The world is so dark right now,” she says. “One of the boys killed in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman — he’s from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him from summer camp.” Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she fills in the dead air. “Is that what it takes to change things?” she asks. He ventures no answer.

This is just one arresting moment — no others will be mentioned here — in the first episode of the new “Mad Men” season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don’t say and can’t say. “Mad Men” is about placid postwar America before it went smash. We know from the young woman’s reference to Goodman — one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 — that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can’t imagine the full brunt of what’s to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.

Seeing vs. Doing

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

“WHAT did they know, and when did they know it?” Those are questions investigators invariably ask when trying to determine who’s responsible for an offense or a misdeed.

But for the Wall Street banks whose financing of the subprime mortgage machine placed them at the center of the credit crisis, it’s becoming clear that a third, equally important question must be asked: “What did they do once they knew what they knew?”

As investigators delve deeper into the mortgage mess, they are finding in too many cases that Wall Street firms did nothing when they learned about problem loans or improprieties in lending. Rather than stopping practices of profligate originators like New Century, Fremont and Ameriquest, Wall Street financiers, which held the purse strings for these companies, apparently decided to simply look the other way.

John C. Bogle: Financial Reform: Will it Forestall a Future Crisis of Ethic Proportions?

The financial reform act that was signed into law this week -- while imperfect -- represents an important first step in attempting to preclude or mitigate future financial collapses. But increased regulation and oversight alone will be insufficient to prevent a recurrence of the recent financial crisis.

The causes of the collapse are no secret. While it is often claimed that "victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan," the defeat suffered by investors in our devastating financial crisis seems to have, figuratively speaking, a thousand fathers. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long after the 2000-2002 stock market crash, and failed to impose discipline on mortgage bankers. Not only did our commercial and investment banks design and sell trillions of dollars worth of incredibly complex and risky mortgage-backed bonds and tens of trillions of dollars worth of derivatives (largely credit default swamps) based upon those bonds, they were also left holding the bag, with many of these toxic derivatives held on balance sheets that were highly leveraged -- sometimes by as much as 33 to one or more. Just do the math; a mere three percent decline in asset value wipes out 100 percent of shareholder equity.

John Bolton Needs To Be Stopped (Again)!

Howie Klein
Down With Tyranny
Posted: July 24, 2010 06:29 PM

John Bolton, the man who makes your garden variety neo-conservative look like Dennis Kucinich, is attempting a political comeback.

As you'll recall, Bolton is the guy who said it wouldn't be a big deal if we lopped off ten stories of the U.N. Secretariat building in New York City. So, of course, President Bush nominated him to be U.N. Ambassador. His confirmation hearings didn't go so well:

In 2005 Time Magazine took a stab out of explaining who Bolton is and why Bush nominated him to represent our country in the UN.

In the seven weeks since Bush named him, Bolton has been getting reacquainted with some of those people he offended during a 24-year career in the Federal Government. They are, among others, the two intelligence analysts who claim that as a senior State Department official during Bush's first term, Bolton tried to have them fired or reassigned when they disagreed with him; the foreign-aid worker who says Bolton, then a private attorney, chased her down a Moscow hotel hallway in 1994 in an effort to intimidate her; and the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea who complained that Bolton had misled the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by suggesting that the ambassador had approved an incendiary speech Bolton made about North Korea in 2003.

...Bolton's pattern of intimidation, they claim, was also aimed at distorting vital intelligence. Government sources tell Time that during President Bush's first term, Bolton frequently tried to push the CIA to produce information to conform to--and confirm-- his views.

The Fight to Protect Social Security

By Kevin Zeese
July 22, 2010

Editor’s Note: The Washington press corps often assesses how “serious” a politician is by whether he or she is ready to slash the benefits going to Americans via Social Security and Medicare, clearly the way to impress on “Meet the Press.”

President Obama’s center-right-dominated fiscal commission is currently pondering its own recommendations for how deeply to slash those programs, while showing a lot less interest in cutting military spending or raising taxes on the wealthy, as Kevin Zeese notes in this guest essay:

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which was created by President Barack Obama earlier this year, is using exaggerated rhetoric to heighten deficit fears at a time when many economists say more government spending is needed to spur hiring and avert a second dip in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The commission – co-chaired by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles – is talking about cuts to Social Security, Medicare and middle-class benefits like the home mortgage deduction rather than focusing on three key causes of the deficit: massive war and weapons spending, giant tax cuts for the wealthy, and the faltering economy.