Thursday, July 31, 2008
Kidding ourselves about high price of debt
by Gene Lyons
Credit cards, as most people theoretically understand, can turn into the 21 st century equivalent of sharecropping. First, you borrow from The Man to get your cotton planted (or maybe to buy that new flat-screen HDTV ). Comes picking time (or the warranty runs out ) and you're likely to discover, in the words of an old country song, that you "owe your soul to the company store." Not to mention late fees and a big jump in the interest rate. Meanwhile, you're getting letters daily offering you a new card at temptingly low rates for the first six months. Why not double down ? Hey, your 15-year-old's being offered a platinum card with the logo of his high school's mascot. Shoot, I've got a Charolais calf named Layla who's probably eligible for EZ-Credit today. Basically, anybody who can walk and chew cud at the same time can end up owing a half-dozen company stores. But why worry ? Money ? They're practically giving it away. And if the payments get too steep, what with $ 4-a-gallon gasoline and $ 5 milk, all you've needed to do over the past dozen years or so, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, is borrow more to "make the pie higher." Refinance with an adjustable rate mortgage, pull some cash equity out of your house, pay off a couple of credit cards and then repay the home loan with tax-deductible cash. Sweet. See, you're going to trade the dump in on a fancier house to borrow against before the interest rate resets anyway, pushing your monthly payment into the stratosphere. Because as everybody used to know, real estate can't go anywhere but up.
Until recently, spending money you didn't have was your patriotic duty. Wasn't it the same George W. Bush who advised Americans to respond to the 9 / 11 terrorist massacres by heading to the mall ? When the going gets tough, everybody laughed, the tough go shopping.
Never mind that it was also Bush who inherited a $ 128 billion budget surplus and turned it into a $ 482 billion deficit—an estimate, incidentally, that leaves out the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're off the books, a bit like Enron's money-losing "partnerships." In retrospect, the Enron collapse clearly predicted the fiscal consequences of Bushism.
Facing questions, Edwards evades reporters
On Wednesday, however, the former U.S. senator and 2004 vice presidential nominee was eager to duck the press when the questions took a tabloid turn.
About a dozen reporters and photojournalists attended a speech Edwards gave to an AARP Foundation symposium on poverty and aging in Washington. Afterward, he avoided most of the waiting reporters, at least some of whom wanted to question him about recent reports in the National Enquirer that alleged an inappropriate relationship with a former campaign videographer.
Citing unnamed sources, the Enquirer published a story in October claiming that Edwards was having an affair with a woman who filmed a series of campaign videos. The story resurfaced last week in the online version of the Enquirer, which claimed that Edwards had visited the woman and their "love child" July 21 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif.
In October, the woman posted an online statement denying the first story. In December, an Edwards campaign worker claimed to be the father of the woman's then-unborn child.
On Wednesday, Edwards apparently ducked out a side area used by the kitchen staff in the fourth-floor ballroom of Washington's historic Hotel Monaco. Edwards emerged from a lower-level handicap ramp near the rear of the hotel with two men. When approached by a Charlotte Observer reporter, Edwards said, "Can't do it now, I'm sorry" and quickly walked past.
Asked what he was doing at the Beverly Hilton last week, Edwards said "sorry" and got into a waiting car with the other men.
No photographs or video of the alleged California hotel incident have been released by the Enquirer, which described in its online story its reporters' attempts to chase down Edwards. The tabloid reported he hid in a restroom to elude them.
Turning Weapons into Things of Beauty in Gaza
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by Philip Rizk
On March 19, Israeli forces rounded up Assad Salach and his sons, Fahmi and Salach, and Assad's brother Sa'id and his son Ghassan -- along with more than 300 men age 16 and above -- along its northern border with the Gaza Strip. It is not the first time Israel has arrested the male members of the Salach family.
These days when militants launch homemade Qassam rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, they are usually launched from within the cities, not these border areas. Thus, it makes little sense for these men to be arrested solely for security purposes. Rather, it seems to be a method of pushing the families inhabiting the border areas into the cities and deserting their only source of income, their land. Israel is successfully destroying the potential of the fruit basket of the densely populated Strip. The once-luscious green land is now reduced to an arid no-man's-land, easily overseeable by Israel's security towers and drones overlooking it all. The economic crisis caused by this ongoing, intentional de-development of Gaza's economy is destroying the society's makeup.
The Salach's main family home was destroyed in 2001. Eight Israeli bulldozers crossed the nearby border and flattened the fields. Shortly thereafter, they came back and flattened the home with some family members still inside. That day Abu Assad, the Salach family grandfather, had a stroke, and he and his wife, Om Assad, were taken to the hospital. By the end of the day, Om Assad had lost her husband, her home, and the trees that had adorned the family's fields. She moved half a kilometer down the road to her other son's home. Today, Israel has taken him as well.
Despite a cease-fire, five of the Salach family members remain imprisoned without even a court case. Their fields still lie in ruin as the Israeli army fires at them when they try and approach it. Their old home remains demolished while the memories of the past continue to haunt them daily.
Assad and Sa'id used to collect the tank shells, things of ugliness, which Israel fired on them as they tended to their goats and fields. They would paint them, fill them with flowers, and turn them into vases -- things of beauty. "The day they started doing that the Israelis almost completely stopped firing at us," Assad's wife told me. As soon as the media spread pictures of their act -- turning death into life, ugliness into beauty -- the shells stopped falling. When the men were detained, so were the vases.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/07/turning-weapons-into-things-of.html
China's economic 'bargaining chip'
Four years ago, when the foreign-exchange reserves of China totaled about $450 billion and the value of China's holdings of U.S. securities was about $300 billion, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned about the emergence of a global "balance of financial terror."
Mr. Summers and others worry that U.S. consumption and investment levels are becoming dependent on "the discretionary acts" of other governments. Foreign governments and investors are accumulating huge pools of dollars by virtue of the massive trade deficits the United States has been running. What these governments decide to do with their rapidly growing dollar reserves could have a huge effect on the U.S. economy.
"There is surely something odd about the world's greatest power being the world's greatest debtor," Mr. Summers told the audience gathered at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
"It surely cannot be prudent for us as a country to rely on a kind of balance of financial terror" that exists today, he said.
Since Mr. Summers' March 2004 speech, the United States has racked up an additional $1.2 trillion in budget deficits and about $3 trillion in trade deficits, including more than $900 billion in merchandise trade deficits with China alone.
China's currency reserves have kept growing since 2004, in tandem with its ever-expanding trade surpluses and foreign direct investment, which has built many of China's export-generating factories. So-called "hot money" has also been pouring into China seeking to reap the gains from its slowly appreciating currency.
Not surprisingly, China's foreign-exchange reserves have soared, quadrupling from $450 billion in early 2004 to more than $1.8 trillion today. The International Monetary Fund expects China's currency reserves will exceed $2.4 trillion by next year.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/27/chinas-economic-bargaining-chip/print/
7-square-mile ice sheet breaks loose in Canada
EDMONTON, Alberta - A chunk of ice spreading across seven square miles has broken off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic, scientists said Tuesday.
Derek Mueller, a research at Trent University, was careful not to blame global warming, but said it the event was consistent with the theory that the current Arctic climate isn't rebuilding ice sheets.
"We're in a different climate now," he said. "It's not conducive to regrowing them. It's a one-way process."
Mueller said the sheet broke away last week from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's far north. He said a crack in the shelf was first spotted in 2002 and a survey this spring found a network of fissures.
The sheet is the biggest piece shed by one of Canada's six ice shelves since the Ayles shelf broke loose in 2005 from the coast of Ellesmere, about 500 miles from the North Pole.
Formed by accumulating snow and freezing meltwater, ice shelves are large platforms of thick, ancient sea ice that float on the ocean's surface. Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080730/ap_on_sc/canada_arctic_ice_shelf
Caught on tape: Army recruiters threaten high school students
It's a problem that was supposed to be fixed, but is it?
A Golden Parachute With a Silver Lining
 | By Darryl Robert Schoon |
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AN ESCAPE ROUTE IN A TIME OF DISASTER
Only those who have gone too far know where the limits should have been
Money served throughout history as a medium of exchange and as a storehouse of value. But when gold and silver coins were replaced by paper currencies, money no longer was the same. Paper money, no longer having intrinsic value, now functions only as a medium of exchange, a function that degrades over time.
The value of paper money continually loses value because the constant printing of paper money constantly dilutes the value of previously printed money. The more paper money printed, the less paper money is worth; and today, money is being printed at a faster rate than at any time in history.
In fiat paper money systems, today's paper money will be worth less than tomorrow's and will be worth less the day after ad infinitum. This constant degradation of paper money is known as inflation. When the process rapidly speeds up, it is known as hyperinflation. Remember that word.
For the first time in history, all money, all currencies are now fiat which means money no longer has intrinsic value. This is not because intrinsic value was deemed unnecessary for a functioning currency. The real reason is far less reasonable.
All money is now fiat because between 1949 and 1970 the US overspent its entire 21,775 ton hoard of gold and could no longer convert its currency to gold as agreed under the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1944.
Note: What gold remains in US custody today remains only because in 1971 the US refused to transfer the remaining gold owed to others; as its obligations were far greater than its capacity to settle.
Because at the time the gold-backed US currency anchored all world currencies, when the US dollar became fiat, all currencies also became fiat. For the first time in history, no currency was backed by either gold or silver including the international reserve currency, the US dollar. The destructive consequences of that act have remained contained for 35 years. They are no longer.
Let's Speak the Truth About Afghanistan
By Eric Margolis
During his triumphant European tour, Senator Barack Obama again urged NATO's members to send more troops to Afghanistan and called the conflict there, "the central front in the war on terror." Europe's response ranged from polite evasion to downright frosty.
It is unfortunate that Obama has adopted President George Bush's misleading terminology, "war on terror," to describe the conflict between the United States and anti-American groups in the Muslim world. Like many Americans, he and his foreign policy advisors are sorely misinformed about the reality of Afghanistan.
One understands Obama's need to respond with martial élan to rival John McCain's chest-thumping about "I know how to win wars." Polls put McCain far ahead of Obama when it comes to being a war leader. But Obama's recent proposal to send at least 7,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and his threats to attack Pakistan's territory, and warnings about Islamabad's nuclear forces, show poor judgment and lack of knowledge.
The United States is no longer "fighting terrorism" in Afghanistan, as Bush, Obama and McCain insist. The 2001 U.S. invasion was a legitimate operation against al-Qaeda, a group that properly fit the role of a "terrorist organization." But, contrary to the White House's wildly inflated claims that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was a worldwide conspiracy, it never numbered more than 300 hard core members. Bin Laden and his jihadis long ago scattered into all corners of Pakistan and elsewhere. Only a handful remain in Afghanistan.
Today, 80,000 U.S. and NATO troops are waging war against the Taliban. Having accompanied the mujahidin fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980's, witnessed the birth of Taliban, and penned a book about the Afghan struggle, "War at the Top of the World," I can attest that Taliban is not a terrorist organization as the U.S. and its allies wrongly claim.
The new consensus on Iraq
By BRIAN KATULIS
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This past week represented a watershed moment in the Iraq policy debate: A pragmatic consensus for a phased redeployment of U.S. troops within a specified timeframe emerged in the United States and Iraq. As Iraqis head toward the next round of elections in their country — provincial elections and national elections sometime in the next 18 months — it's not at all surprising that Iraq's leaders would increasingly assert their own sovereignty. The idea of an extended and extensive U.S. presence in Iraq remains deeply unpopular among the majority of Iraqis, and Iraqi leaders of all sectarian, ethnic, and political backgrounds have become vocally opposed to a U.S. troop presence without limits and with no end in sight. This past week, a range of leaders in the Iraqi government made clear that they support withdrawing U.S. combat troops by 2010. "We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq," said Ali al-Dabagh, the spokesman for Iraq's prime minister, confirming Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's repeated statements on this subject. Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president of Iraq, concurred by saying that Iraqi leaders shared a common interest in scheduling the withdrawal of U.S. troops. |
What has 18 wheels and two smokestacks?
Help Clean Up California's Dirty Diesel Trucks
While sitting in traffic, have you ever wondered about the pollution billowing out of big-rig trucks? California's heavy duty trucks are the state's largest source of toxic diesel pollution—burdening Californians with serious health impacts and billions in healthcare costs. These trucks also belch more than seven percent of all of California's global warming pollution. This October, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) will vote on a pair of proposals to clean up California's dirty diesel trucks, but many in the trucking industry are fighting the state's proposed cleaner standards.
Please sign our petition to CARB supporting the proposals to protect truckers and families from toxic diesel pollution and curb global warming pollution from big-rig trucks.
Diesel trucks and buses on the road represent the largest source of toxic diesel emissions in California. These toxic diesel emissions are responsible for causing approximately 2,300 premature deaths and more than 38,000 asthma attacks annually in the state. Truck drivers, children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems are especially vulnerable to the health risks of diesel pollution. The loss of life, health care costs, and lost work and school days cost an estimated $18 billion each year, far more than the cost to clean up the trucks.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) must develop an effective, health protective In-Use Truck and Bus rule in order for California to meet its federal commitments to reduce ozone and particulate pollution, benefit truckers' health, lessen the health impacts of toxic diesel pollution, and save lives.
Additionally, CARB must adopt a strong Heavy-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Measure to reduce the truck pollution that causes global warming and meet our commitments under the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).
What's At Stake:
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is proposing to adopt new regulations to clean up pollution from diesel trucks in October 2008. The rules would require reductions of particulate matter (soot), nitrogen oxide emissions that contribute to smog, and global warming pollution.
Over the last decade, CARB has taken significant steps to clean up diesel pollution from sources such as buses, garbage trucks, harbor craft, and construction equipment, but trucks remain the largest source of unregulated diesel emissions in the state. CARB's proposed rules would require trucks to clean up through retrofits or upgrade to newer trucks. Incentive funding is also available to help truck owners retrofit or replace their trucks. This regulation is critical for public health and improving air quality in California, and to help us address global warming.
Thar She Blows: The Last Hurrah for the Banking System
The Bush administration will be mailing out another batch of "stimulus" checks in the very near future. There's no way around it. The Fed is in a pickle and can't lower interest rates for fear that food and energy prices will shoot to stratosphere. At the same time, the economy is shrinking faster than anyone thought possible with no sign of a rebound. That leaves stimulus checks as the only way to "prime the pump" and keep consumer spending chugging along. Otherwise business activity will slow to a crawl and the economy will tank. There's no other choice.
The daily barrage of bad news is really starting to get on people's nerves. Most of the TV chatterboxes have already cut-out the cheery stock market predictions and no one is praising the "impressive powers of the free market" anymore. They know things are bad, real bad. A pervasive sense of gloom has crept into the television studios just like it has into the stock exchanges and the luxury penthouses on Manhattan's West End. That same sense of foreboding is creeping like a noxious cloud to every town and city across the country. Everyone is cutting back on non-essentials and trimming the fat from the family budget. The days of extravagant impulse-spending at the mall are over. So are the "big ticket" purchases and the "go-for-broke" trips to Europe. Consumer confidence is at historic lows, disposal income is a thing of the past, and all the credit cards are at their limit. The country is drowning in red ink.
Something has gone terribly wrong with the economy, but no one knows what it is? In the last three months bank credit has shrunk faster than any time since 1948. The banks aren't lending and people aren't borrowing; that's a lethal combo. When credit-creation slows, the economy falters, unemployment rises and the misery index soars. That's why Bush will have to mail out more stimulus checks whether he wants to or not; his back is against the wall. He'll try to make it look like the economy is still breathing on its own and just needs a spell on the respirator before resuming its normal activities. But Bush is wrong; we've reached Peak credit and the blood-transfusions won't work anymore. The vital signs have shut down and rigamortis is already setting in. Our goose is cooked.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
What would Richard Nixon do on Cuba? He would end the embargo.
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China reneges on 'open' pledge
by Jacquelin Magnay, Beijing
CHINA'S vow to open itself to the world through the Olympic Games was in tatters last night.
It limited access to websites and implemented a plan to spy on the web usage of hotel guests — prompting an apology from the International Olympic Committee.
IOC probes China 'censorship'
The International Olympic Committee is looking into reports of internet censorship for journalists covering the Olympics.
Senior IOC member Kevan Gosper apologised to the world's media for misleading them about access to the internet.
Mr Gosper revealed that "some IOC officials had negotiated with the Chinese to have some sensitive sites blocked". Mr Gosper said he had been unaware of the deal while telling the world's media for months they would have unfettered freedom to report while in China.
http://www.theage.com.au/world/china-reneges-on-open-pledge-20080730-3nh6.html
Woman fired for honoring the wishes of dead soldiers' families
"Had I not put my foot down, had I just gone along with and not said regulations were being violated, I'm sure I would still be there. It's about doing the right thing."
-- Gina Gray, American Hero
-- Gina Gray, American Hero
Who is Gina Gray and why does she make us all proud?
While our quisling Congress was busy donning knee pads to service the whims of George, the pretender, Gina Gray was busy defending the rights and honor of those who deserve better leadership. However, for Gina Gray there were no applause, no accolades, no letters of commendation. For her unwavering adherence to the seven virtues essential for effective soldiering - loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honour, integrity, and personal courage - Gina Gray was accorded the only recognition these pretenders have to offer someone of her caliber. She was fired.
Until recently, Gina Gray was public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery. She had held that position for about three months - most of them tumultuous.
Just 10 days on the job, she was handling media coverage for the burial of a Marine colonel who had been killed in Iraq when she noticed that Thurman Higgenbotham, the cemetery's deputy superintendent, had moved the media area 50 yards away from the service, obstructing the photographs and making the service inaudible. The Washington Sketch column on April 24 noted that Gray pushed for more access to the service but was "apparently shot down by other cemetery officials."
That was just the beginning. Apparently the article was brought to the attention of Robert Gates, the successor to the man who previously desecrated the position of Secretary of <s>Defense</s> War. It turns out the decision to hide the dead... to pretend they never existed ... to erase them from memory ... to defile their sacrifice with an official act of Ars Oblivionalis is still the policy of this government.
The harrassment became official shortly after the article appeared. Her supervisor, Phyllis White, sent her a one-line e-mail stating "Gina, when you leave the building let me know." Next, she was instructed not to work overtime without written approval. Then she was instructed to demote herself from public affairs director to public affairs officer. Then she was directed to remove the Marines poster in her cubicle. The list goes on... and I won't repeat it here because it is an embarrassment to all of us that cowards and quislings serve the whims of people who are unworthy of licking the boots of people like Gina Gray.
quote of the day
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
- H. L. Mencken -
Sucking up to the bankers
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| AP photo / Jae C. Hong |
| Sen. Barack Obama meets with his economic advisers Monday in Washington. From left: former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Obama, Service Employees International Union Chair Anna Burger, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine. |
This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them. Yet both of our leading presidential candidates are scrambling to enlist not only the big-dollar contributions but, more frighteningly, the "expertise" of the very folks who advocated the financial industry deregulations at the heart of this meltdown.
Republican candidate John McCain even appointed as his campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm, who went from being chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, where he sponsored disastrous legislation that empowered the banking bandits, to becoming one of them at UBS Warburg. Gramm was forced to resign from McCain's campaign only after he went public with his contempt for the financial concerns of ordinary Americans, calling them "whiners" and perpetrators of a "mental recession."
But Gramm and the Republicans couldn't have done it without the support of leading Democrats. The most egregious of Gramm's legislative favors to the financiers took the form of legislation named in part after him—the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law only after then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin prevailed upon President Clinton to sign the bill. The bill's immediate major effect was to legitimize the long-sought merger between Citibank and insurance giant Travelers. Rubin's critical support for the bill was rewarded with an appointment, within days of its passage, to a top job at Citibank (later Citigroup) paying more than $15 million a year.
That is the same Rubin with whom Democratic candidate Barack Obama met, along with other influential advisers, on Tuesday to figure out what to do about the sorry state of our economy. But what in the world did he expect to learn from Rubin? And why did he appoint Rubin's protégé, Jason Furman, who ran the Rubin-funded Hamilton Project, to be the Obama campaign's economic director? Hopefully, during their encounter Tuesday, Rubin offered himself as a contrite model of everything that the candidate of change needs to change.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080729_sucking_up_to_the_bankers/
Senators call for EPA chief's resignation
Testimony
Four senators call for perjury investigation of EPA chief's testimony
Four senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee have called for the resignation of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and have asked the U.S. attorney general to investigate whether Johnson lied to Congress in a hearing about California's greenhouse-gas emissions waiver. In a letter to the attorney general, the senators wrote, "[W]e believe that there is significant evidence to suggest that Mr. Johnson has provided statements that are inconsistent with sworn testimony and documents provided in connection with an investigation conducted by this committee." In that testimony, given earlier this year, Johnson claimed he alone made the decision to deny California's requested waiver. "[T]his was solely my decision based upon the law, based upon the facts that were presented to me," he said. However, former EPA official Jason Burnett recently testified that Johnson was set to issue a partial waiver until he changed his mind amid pressure from the White House. The senators also accused Johnson of succumbing to White House pressure to delay the decision on whether greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health or welfare.
sources: Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal
Change We Can Believe In - An Open Letter to Barack Obama
Dear Senator Obama,
We write to congratulate you on the tremendous achievements of your campaign for the presidency of the United States.
Your candidacy has inspired a wave of political enthusiasm like nothing seen in this country for decades. In your speeches, you have sketched out a vision of a better future--in which the United States sheds its warlike stance around the globe and focuses on diplomacy abroad and greater equality and freedom for its citizens at home--that has thrilled voters across the political spectrum. Hundreds of thousands of young people have entered the political process for the first time, African-American voters have rallied behind you, and many of those alienated from politics-as-usual have been re-engaged.
You stand today at the head of a movement that believes deeply in the change you have claimed as the mantle of your campaign. The millions who attend your rallies, donate to your campaign and visit your website are a powerful testament to this new movement's energy and passion.
This movement is vital for two reasons: First, it will help assure your victory against John McCain in November. The long night of greed and military adventurism under the Bush Administration, which a McCain administration would continue, cannot be brought to an end a day too soon. An enthusiastic corps of volunteers and organizers will ensure that voters turn out to close the book on the Bush era on election day. Second, having helped bring you the White House, the support of this movement will make possible the changes that have been the platform of your campaign. Only a grassroots base as broad and as energized as the one that is behind you can counteract the forces of money and established power that are a dead weight on those seeking real change in American politics.
Members of Congress Demand An End To Pot Possession Arrests
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Iraq on the Edge
by Robert Dreyfuss .
While everyone's looking at Iraq's effect on American politics -- and whether or not John McCain and Barack Obama are converging on a policy that combines a flexible timetable with a vague, and long-lasting, residual force -- let's take a look instead at Iraqi politics. The picture isn't pretty.
Despite the Optimism of the Neocons, which has pushed mainstream media coverage to be increasingly flowery about Iraq's political progress, in fact the country is poised to explode. Even before the November election. And for McCain and Obama, the problem is that Iran has many of the cards in its hands. Depending on its choosing, between now and November Iran can help stabilize the war in Iraq -- mostly by urging the Iraqi Shiites to behave themselves -- or it can make things a lot more violent.
There are at least three flashpoints for an explosion, any or all of which could blow up over the next couple of months. (Way to go, Surgin' Generals!) The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq's Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa ("Awakening") movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).
Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity on accused shooter's reading list
4-page letter outlines frustration, hatred of 'liberal movement' 
Knoxville Police Department officers lead Jim David Adkisson to a squad car Sunday. Adkisson has been charged with first-degree murder after a shooting at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church
Police found right-wing political books, brass knuckles, empty shotgun shell boxes and a handgun in the Powell home of a man who said he attacked a church in order to kill liberals "who are ruining the country," court records show.
Knoxville police Sunday evening searched the Levy Drive home of Jim David Adkisson after he allegedly entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children's musical.
Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still requested the search warrant after interviewing Adkisson. who was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.
Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jul/28/church-shooting-police-find-manifesto-suspects-car/
The Donna Brazile - Karl Rove Connection
A shot of Brazile (center) and the DNC rules and bylaws committee above Florida election returns on CNN.
In order to "save" the Democratic Party, Brazile resolved back in 2003 that she might have to destroy it first. And who better to help her in this lofty pursuit than her new best friend, the man neoconservatives call "The Architect".
BY ROSEMARY REGELLO
It's not every activist politico who gets to write a post in the Washington Times that begins like this: "As I sat by my window and staring out at the wonderful Washington, D.C., landscape, my office announced a phone call from Air Force One."
Evidently, Donna Brazile was reminding all the little people on Capitol Hill that she had friends in high places. In the summer of 2007, Karl Rove wasn't answering any subpoenas from Congress, but he didn't mind talking to her. From his perch at 20,000 feet, seated beside the President, Rove informed Brazile that it was time for him to get out of Dodge.
"Mr. Rove's resignation is not a retirement," the Democratic strategist reassured readers of the right-of-center newspaper. "It's just another opportunity for him to create that lasting Republican majority he envisioned years ago and to spend his waking days doing what he so enjoys — beating Democrats in the alleys and gutters. Just ask Sen. Hillary Clinton, Mr. Rove's target when he called in to speak to Rush Limbaugh. He couldn't help it. Mr. Rove just had to take one last shot before riding out of town. More to come, Team Clinton."
Brazile's breezy account confirms what many have long since suspected - that Rove's claim to be sitting out the 2008 race is hogwash. The mastermind of today's unraveling U.S. Constitution is in no position to kick back, down gin fizzes and watch the country collapse under a regime he put into office twice. The list of crimes that Bush's top henchman could potentially be charged with - everything from fraud to war crimes - should be enough to keep him and his fellow Sopranos in hair-trigger mode until the next president gets sworn in. And the notion that he'd leave the choice of commander-in-chief in less capable dirty hands than his own requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief. It requires medication.
That's why the Rove-Brazile tryst merits further exploration. They first hooked up some time in 2002, according to the New York Times. The connection might have been a means for Brazile to expand her clientele, but she dismissed that angle in an interview, implying she had bigger fish to fry.
http://www.thecityedition.com/Pages/Archive/Summer08/BrazileRoveConnect.html
Who is doing real journalism?
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter has an article this week filled with all the standard anti-blogger "pajama" platitudes (along with some praise) and, along the way, Alter writes this:
But we're finding [blogging] works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It's a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.Leave aside the question of how much "real reporting" bloggers do as compared to newspapers. If one looks at most of the vital disclosures of the last seven years -- whereby concealed, legally dubious behavior of one of the most secretive administrations of the modern era is exposed -- one finds that such exposure comes overwhelmingly from two sources: (1) conscientious whistle-blowers inside the Government, and (2) advocacy groups such as the ACLU, which have tirelessly waged one litigation battle after the next in order to unearth the Bush administration's secret, improper conduct.
Today, the ACLU (with whom, as I've previously disclosed, I consult on various matters) released three formerly secret Bush administration memos -- two from the CIA to the Office of Legal Counsel inside the DOJ, and one from OLC to the CIA -- which set forth, in a revoltingly clinical tone that is by now all-too-familiar, extremely permissive standards for what constitutes (and what does not constitute) "torture." Raw Story's Nick Juliano has an excellent summary of the memos' lowlights, including the assertion that treatment of detainees does not constitute "torture" as long as there is no "specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," and the claim that interrogators are free to inflict mental harm as long as it falls short of "harm lasting months or even years after the acts were inflicted upon the prisoners."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/24/journalism/index.html
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The U.S. Department of Media
By David Swanson
Last Friday one of two things indisputably happened. Either a dozen senior Congress members and several well-known expert witnesses went certifiably and collectively insane, or charges of the most extreme executive abuses of power ever heard in the history of this nation were backed up by overwhelming evidence during a six-hour hearing of the House Judiciary Committee focused on the possible need to impeach the President and the Vice President. Either way, a nation with a public communications system worthy of a democracy would have learned the news.
What we actually have in this country is a news media conglomerate that functions as a part of the executive branch of the federal government. Call it the United States Department of Media. But "branch" is not the right word, since the executive branch is all that remains of our government (aside from whatever Dick Cheney is). The legislative and judicial branches have been eliminated. Or, rather, they are constantly and effectively being shut out of the government, in no small part by the Media Department. But "department," too, is not the right word if one imagines any degree of independent decision making. None of the so-called departments and agencies in the executive government are any longer empowered to make significant decisions independent of the president (and whatever Dick Cheney is). And the Media Department is no exception.
One project of the U.S. Department of Media is the Cover Nothing Network (CNN) on which associate deputy undersecretaries of Media Campbell Brown and Erica Hill reported on Friday that there is not enough time for impeachment and that if the Democrats led the way to impeachment voters would punish them, and that therefore the hearing was a waste of money that could have been better spent publicizing the president kissing babies. I'm not making any of this up. Here's video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bzx6ttmbTbs
But My Neighbor Has a Cell Phone …
Finally, a sensible way to measure poverty.
Seebohm Rowntree was the son of wealthy Quaker businessman Joseph Rowntree but was acutely aware of the poverty that surrounded him in late-Victorian York, England. In 1899 he set himself the task of defining a "poverty line" by working out how much it would cost to supply basic food, housing, and clothes. Anyone who couldn't afford to buy those basics—including a helping of pease pudding with bacon on Sunday—was below the poverty line.
The idea of a poverty line has stayed with us, but the candidates have multiplied. The World Bank has two poverty lines: $1 a day and $2 a day (strictly, those are 1985 dollars adjusted for inflation). In the United States, the poverty line is $29.58 a day for a single adult under the age of 65. All these are absolute income standards, just as Rowntree's was.
Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency, takes a different approach: It defines the poverty line as 60 percent of each nation's median income. (The median income is the income of the person in the middle of the income distribution.) This has an unfortunate consequence: Poverty is permanent. If everyone in Europe woke up tomorrow to find themselves twice as rich, European poverty rates would not budge. That is indefensible. Such "poverty" lines measure inequality, not poverty, and they do so clumsily.
On the other hand, absolute standards of poverty are creepy, reliant as they are on expert definitions of a nutritionally balanced diet. (Rowntree was a Victorian philanthropist, so we're willing to make allowances.) The U.S. definition dates back to early 1963 and the efforts of a Social Security Administration researcher called Mollie Orshansky. Lacking decent statistics, she based her poverty line on government nutritional advice. It was a decent estimate given the limited resources of the time, yet the threshold has changed only to take account of inflation.
So, the U.S. definition of poverty is stuck in the 1960s. Had Seebohm Rowntree been working for the U.S. government, perhaps it would now have a poverty standard that was based on the price of pease pudding and that assumed that electricity and indoor plumbing were luxuries. This cannot be right.
Political Humor Sites: 10 Web Sites To Make You Laugh
by you
Just another Joop.ro weblog
As author of my own political humor site, I thought Id compile a list of my favorite political humor sites as a reference for others. If you like funny, side-splitting political humor from every range on the ideological spectrum, then rest assured youll love these sites:
Political Humor Sites: My Favorites
Scrappleface (www.scrappleface.com): Pure political humor at its best, this site is a compilation of fairly unbalanced news stories written by Scott Ott. With a daily array of wildly original and funny news stories, the genius of Scrappleface is compounded by the fact that its a one-man operation Quite simply one of the best political humor sites youll ever see. Highly recommended.
The Onion (www.theonion.com): The ten-thousand-pound gorilla of political humor sites is The Onion, an almost endless treasure trove of fun and hilarity. Its fake news stories are legendary, and if you havent yet seen The Onion in at least one form of media, then youve been living in a cave. Check it out.
JibJab (www.jibjab.com): Home to the world famous Flash cartoons This Land is Your Land and I Wish I Were in DC that reached cult status during the 2004 presidential election. A fun site to visit for political humor.
Ironic Times (www.ironictimes.com): An awesome political humor site cut from the same mold as Scrappleface and The Onion. In fact, its the only other site I can find that approaches the same level of hilarity. Everything on this site is funny!
Todays Best Political Cartoons (cagle.msnbc.com): Each day, Daryl Cagle provides a fresh update of the best professionally penned political cartoons. If you love political cartoons, this site is one-stop shopping for all your needs.
Doonesbury (www.doonesbury.com): The classic cartoon of the same name brandishes its trademark brand of political humor from a site filled with archives and brilliant Flash content. After all these years, its still one of the best sources for political humor.
Slick Times (www.slick.com): Its similar to Scrappleface, The Onion, and Ironic Times, but not yet reaching elite status. Slick Times resembles a real newspaper, but its content is a whole lot funnier. Make sure you check out How a Bill Becomes a Law by Coach John Madden.
Cracked News (crackednews.com): Constructed in the template of an alternative news source similar to the Slick Times. Theres some funny stuff here thats worth checking out.
Bartcop (www.bartcop.com): A no-holds barred political humor site with a liberal slant to it, Bartcop has been entertaining liberals for over a decade. One warning though: due to language, some content may not be appropriate for children.
The Capitol Steps (www.capsteps.com): Fresh political humor content drawn from the stage and musical act of this talented group of former congressional staffers. My personal recommendation is to go see their act in person. You wont be disappointed
http://youpl.joop.ro/2008/07/26/political-humor-sites-10-web-sites-to-make-you-laugh/
Love child and mistress claims hit Edwards
Fresh allegations of cheating on his sick wife rock former White House hopeful
John Edwards was fighting for his political future yesterday as America's mainstream media began reporting a colourful scandal involving his alleged mistress, a disputed "secret love child", and an altercation at a Beverly Hills hotel in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The married former Democratic presidential candidate, who is among leading contenders to be Barack Obama's running mate, saw his private life given more attention than he would like when Fox News claimed to have "independently verified" details of last week's National Enquirer story headlined: "John Edwards caught with mistress and love child." Reporters from the supermarket tabloid had confronted Mr Edwards at 2.40am on Tuesday in the corridors of the Beverly Hilton, as he was leaving the bedroom of Rielle Hunter, a divorcee whom he was rumoured to have made pregnant last year.
Amid scenes more suited to a Benny Hill sketch than the corridors of a luxury hotel, two journalists and a photographer chased Mr Edwards – whose wife Elizabeth is battling incurable cancer – around the building for several minutes. He eventually went to ground in the men's lavatory for a quarter of an hour, before being escorted from the premises by security staff.
The incident was reported in lurid detail by The Enquirer, and followed up in dozens of America's influential political blogs and news websites, which claimed that Mr Edwards and Ms Hunter were filmed entering the hotel room at 9.30pm.
What Bush and Batman Have in Common
By ANDREW KLAVAN
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."
![[What Bush and Batman Have in Common]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uOqsd_ueex0GxK9OXOPC45hQj_eUBV1iW6CqO7PoVrhlowaPAxIeEahl_KoDvlTZ1nGtoszIW9_TtQI0YF08UbFJaWGj8hwc4G5_YfpsuOoV3TWSe_ZW6pW9EB5RUikj1esqLjrmSXXploSFRQ=s0-d) |
| Warner Bros. Pictures |
There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.
"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121694247343482821.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_topbox
Clashing Quotes
"I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president, but that's a judgment that Obama and the American people will make."
- John McCain, criticizing Barack Obama for making a speech in a foreign country, Link
- John McCain, criticizing Barack Obama for making a speech in a foreign country, Link
"A month ago, McCain traveled to Canada and gave a speech at the Economic Club of Toronto. Apparently, John McCain doesn't remember that. Because today he's criticizing Obama for giving a campaign speech in another country."
- Josh Orton, asking a fairly obvious question that McCain can't answer, Link
McCain's embarrassing assertions on the Iraq surge
Even military leaders involved in last year's troop escalation agree that the prospect of U.S. withdrawal is the main reason violence has ebbed. 
By Joe Conason
CBS screen shot of Sen. John McCain
"The surge worked."
So insistently do the media's mainstream and conservative commentators repeat the Iraq success meme -- echoing the mantra of George W. Bush and John McCain -- that to probe its premises and assumptions is not permitted. To question the success of last year's troop escalation supposedly implies a negative assessment of the performance of American soldiers and Marines and may even imperil their morale, creating a frame that stifles dissent. But now McCain himself has inadvertently reopened real debate on the subject by claiming that strategies and tactics used to quell the Sunni insurgency long before the surge troops arrived in Iraq should nevertheless be attributed to the surge. Indeed, the surge is so brilliant and so powerful, according to McCain, that it makes things happen in the past as well as in the present and the future.
That must be what passes for "maverick" thinking, although there are certainly other names for it. For those of us who remain tethered to reality, however, the success of the surge must be measured in a context that accounts for many other factors -- as must the simple assertion that we are winning the war in Iraq as a result of the escalation.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/07/25/mccain_and_iraq/index.html?source=rss
Monday, July 28, 2008
Torture Memo Shields Interrogators
Government Memo Says Even Brutal Actions OK if Done in 'Good Faith'
Illustration by: Matt Mahurin
One of the most important building blocks in the Bush administration's apparatus of torture became public Thursday.
An Aug. 1, 2002 memorandum from the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency instructed the agency's interrogators on specific interrogation techniques for use on Al Qaeda detainees in its custody. Most of the 17-page memo is blacked out and unreadable. But at least one of those techniques is waterboarding, the process of pouring water into the mouth and nostrils of a detainee under restraint until drowning occurs.
"This is a critical piece of the story," said Jameel Jaffer, head of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the memorandum under a Freedom of Information Act filing. "This is the most explicit statement out there that the CIA waterboarded prisoners becaused the Justice Dept. authorized them to do so."
Illustration by: Matt Mahurin
Herman Schwartz, professor of law at American University, said the legal advice on display in the memorandum amounted to "out-and-out-fraud."
Today, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who has been adjudicating the ACLU's extensive declassification lawsuit against the U.S. government for the past four years, ordered the memorandum released. Signed by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, the memorandum is heavily influenced by the legal theories of Bybee's then-subordinate, John Yoo. Torture-watchers have long referred to the memo, which congressional inquiries identified years ago, as "Yoo-Bybee II."
That's because Yoo-Bybee I, written around the same time as this document, contended that it would only be illegal for interrogators to inflict pain upon detainees equivalent to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." Anything short of that standard, that memo argued, was legal under the Federal Torture Statute. This newly declassified memo was an attempt at practicality: given the legal standard laid out in the first memo, Yoo-Bybee II advised the CIA on specific interrogation techniques that were now permissible.
Al Franken Attacked by Republican Hypocrite Opponent — And It’s Bad
by Trish
Say you're Al Franken. Your idol was Sen. Paul Wellstone, a man who exemplified what was right with America and with America's Democratic system of government. But Paul Wellstone died, and his alter-ego from hell took his seat: a man whose only ideas are those placed in his head by the Bush neocons, who voted with Bush on everything — especially everything Iraq-related — but the surge. And he probably only voted against that because he was looking at re-election and knew the subject of the ongoing occupation, which he facilitated at every turn, might come up.
Bad incumbents through the ages have used the same tactic when they have only a poor record of their own (except for bringing back hockey, but that's another subject) on which to run: ATTACK! It doesn't get much worse than this ad from Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman:
Coleman's going the old, "It doesn't have to be true, it just has to sound like it is," one better by keeping his smears so vague it's hard to even know what the ad is really saying, let alone how to refute it. But it gives people the impression that Al Franken has done some very bad things, especially if your preferred source of news is porky white guys in shirts from three different bowling leagues.
We all know Al Franken had a career before he ran for office. We also know, from listening to him on Air America, that he gets it, and that he could help Congress reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government.
The funny thing is, until 1996, Norm Coleman was a Democrat. When he was 20, Coleman celebrated his birthday at Woodstock. His college roommate, lawyer Norman Kent, recently took Coleman to task for hypocrisy on his past pot-smoking after Coleman toed the Republican line about the war on drugs.
My friend Norman,
Coleman during a Vietnam War protest
Years ago, in a lifetime far away, you did not oppose the legalization of marijuana…
Sure, we had to tape the doors shut, burn incense and open the windows…yet we grew up okay, without the help of the Office of National Drug Control Policy's advice.
We grew up to become lawyers. Our other friends, as you go down the list, are doctors, professors, parents, political consultants and professionals. No one ever got cancer from smoking pot or diabetes from using a joint.
You never said then that pot was dangerous. What was scary then, and is as frightening now, is when national leaders become voices of hypocrisy, harbingers of the status quo, and protect their own position instead of the public good…
How about standing up and saying: "I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969." That "I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal." How about saying: "I was able to responsibly integrate my prior pot use into my life, and still succeed on my own merits."
How about standing up not only for who you are, but who you were?