Easter Lemming Liberal News

Growing GOP Dissent on Iraq

GOP and Talking Heads Criticizing Iraq Policies

The foundation of the president?s reelection campaign is the portrayal of Mr. Bush as the steady commander in chief successfully fighting the war on terror (the war in Iraq being one and the same to the Bush White House). Republicans questioning Mr. Bush's leadership in that war adds more fodder to Sen. Kerry's larger critique of the president.

A Pew Research Center national survey conducted this week shows that the majority of Americans now disapprove of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. Adding to the GOP dilemma, on Election Day there is more at stake for Republicans than the White House alone.

"For the first time in this election cycle there is some doubt about whether the Republicans will be able to hold onto the Senate," Cook said, adding his own critique of the Iraq war effort.

Conservative columnist George Will wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday, "U.S. forces in Iraq are insufficient."

The White House continues to claim that most Iraqis support the American presence. But even some ardent conservative backers of the president are voicing skepticism.

"I'm not buying this 'Iraqis are on the American side' right now," Fox News? Bill O?Reilly said on the Tuesday night broadcast of "The O?Reilly Factor." The leading conservative commentator repeatedly called the current conflict a "second war in Iraq."

O'Reilly added, "I think Rumsfeld has got a lot of explaining to do here. There's a lot of mistakes that are now killing American soldiers."

Fellow conservative pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough of MSNBC was even more critical in his broadcast Tuesday.

Scarborough: "Do we need more troops in Iraq? Hell, yes, we do. ... Should June 30 handover date to the Iraqis be extended? You can bet your life on it ... because creating this false deadline in time for a presidential election is no way to win a war."

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

War Is A Racket

Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

More from a speech here: I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket

Another site

Google

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Fox News Attempts Linking Air America Liberal Radio to Racism!

Air America Radio

Randi Rhodes Show

Other liberal radio:

WJNO audio link West Palm Beach.

www.radioleft.com

KPFT Pacifica Houston Real Audio, MP3 Stream

KPFA Pacifa Berkeley, CA m3u

Progressive Talk Radio Stream includes Thom Hartman Show.

See also Political Strikes, MakeThemAccountable.Com, and DemocraticTalkRadio.Com. (archives).

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Geo-Demographics - Bird of a Political Feather Flock Together

Bishop has been able to demonstrate that the United States isn't merely separated by Red (Republican) and Blue (Democratic) states; it's also separated, increasingly, by Red and Blue counties. The likelihood that you will ever argue politics with your neighbor is diminishing rapidly, because it's less and less likely that, politically, you and your neighbor will ever disagree.

Everybody (including Chatterbox) has blamed the blowhard nature of contemporary political discourse on talk radio and cable news shout-shows. But maybe Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and their aspiring opposite numbers on the new Air America have been framed. Maybe the vulgarization of the American political sensibility predated the media trend. Maybe it arose from people no longer having any friends who could challenge their political beliefs.

...skipping lot of good stuff...

Bishop blames this heightened partisanship on the proliferation of "landslide counties." He defines a landslide county as one in which the presidential nominee of one party receives at least 60 percent of the vote. In 1976, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties. By 2000, that proportion had nearly doubled, to 45.3 percent.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

US Military in 135 countries

Almost every country in the world. (pdf) from Empire Notes.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

When you are in trouble who do you turn to? Liberal Lawyers!

Liberal lawyers at bat for Limbaugh.

Lawyers for conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh argued before the Fourth District Court of Appeals this morning that state investigators violated his constitutional right to privacy when they seized his medical records to investigate whether he violated drug laws when he purchased prescription painkillers

An unlikely team of defenders, including the liberal-minded ACLU, has sided with Limbaugh, calling it a battle for "every Floridian's fundamental right to privacy.''

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Another Iraq Blog - Bush Uniting Iraq

Empire Notes - As we were driving back from Kadhimiyah (a Shi'a district), we passed through Aadhamiyah. In front of the Abu Hanifa mosque (the same area where Saddam was shown walking around last April 9 -- Aadhamiyah is still a Saddamist stronghold), we noticed a major traffic snarl and hundreds of people milling around.

It was a massive volunteer relief effort for Fallujah and Ramadi. Coordinated from mosques around the city, which told people to go to Abu Hanifa if they wanted to give for Falluja and Ramadi, the hours-old effort had already collected five truckloads of food and supplies, as well as substantial amounts of money. They were bringing staple foods -- flour, potatoes, dates, oil -- and also a staggering number of burial shrouds.

Even more remarkable, doctors from Baghdad's central blood bank (located in Aadhamiyah) had come to the mosque and literally thousands of people lined up to donate blood. The doctors had only 500 blood bags and it was a mob scene as people fought to be the ones to give blood. One man told me he had had a heart attack but he was still going to give blood.

The anger that came through when people spoke to me as palpable -- I could literally feel it on my skin as people yelled in my face so fast that I had no hope of keeping up as I took notes. Women in hijab yelled at me that they would go and fight in Fallujah.

Although the relief was going to the Sunni areas of Fallujah and Ramadi (and Aadhamiyah is overwhelmingly Sunni), many people made a point of saying that if Kufa or Najaf, Shi'a towns, were under siege they would give for them too (Kufa is Moqtada's stronghold). One woman who gave her name only as Umm Saif (mother of Saif), said, "We are all united against the Americans."

Well, Bush is proving himself as a uniter, not a divider. If the siege is not lifted soon, however, the people of Fallujah and Ramadi will pay a heavy price for that.

No permalink - not archived yet.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

GOTV Will Be Big Push

After decades of playing poor relation to television advertising, grass-roots politics has become a campaign star this year, as many political pros predicted it would be in the aftermath of the Bush-Gore face-off of 2000. And today it ranges from old-fashioned shoe leather to Web technology that can make a precinct captain of anyone with a computer.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Top VP Names Now

Gov.Vilsack, Gov. Richardson, Rep. Gephardt, Sen. Edwards, and Gen. Clark. Dark horse - Sen. McCain.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

The Blog Universe In A Nutshell

The Onion - one year ago

The Left ...And what exactly is our endgame here? Do we really believe that we can install Gen. Tommy Franks as the ruler of Iraq? Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one's own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.

A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster.

The Right ...You are completely wrong.

Trust me, it's all going to work out perfect. Nothing bad is going to happen. It's all under control.

Why do you keep saying these things? I can tell when there's trouble looming, and I really don't sense that right now. We're in control of this situation, and we know what we're doing. So stop being so pessimistic.

Look, you've been proven wrong, so stop talking. You've had your say already.

Be quiet, okay? Everything's fine.

You're wrong.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

How the GOP Organized The Big Lie

Change for America: The Big Lie -- Part I

You, [the GOP] have become as powerful as any political party since the New Deal Democrats in the early 1930’s, but unlike FDR’s populists, your members are not forever in pitched battle with powerful plutocrats and aristocrats – they are your allies. That’s not the triumph, though. What is truly amazing is how you have convinced large portions of the working and middle classes to vote again and again for the party which is stripping them of their protections and eliminating the very measures which built the American middle class in the first place. You have become the populist party, and you have remained the party of the aristocracy. You control all three branches of government on the federal level, and in many state and local governments as well. And you owe it all to the façade you painstakingly and patiently erected. You spent years in building up The Front.

The Front is a distraction, the Great and Powerful Oz designed to divert American eyes from the man behind the curtain. It is what you publicly stand for, what America believes it is voting for when it pulls the lever for a Republican. It is an amalgam of cultural issues, “values,” whether preceded by the words “family” or “small-town” or just plain “American.” It is these “values” which have made the poorest states in the union the linchpin of your electoral lock. These values are barely-disguised reactionary politics, and the fact that they sometimes contradict themselves is of little importance. They work because they make Americans afraid of Democrats, afraid of those who associate themselves with the Democratic Party – because you have associated the Democratic Party with things that Americans are afraid of.

The Front is almost entirely rhetorical, though, which is the beauty of it. It is not a walk, but a talk. Because the truth is, The Front is not where you’re focusing your actual attention, policy-wise. There will never be an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage. Prayer will never return to public schools. Our borders will remain just as porous as they always have been when it comes to illegal immigration, and television and radio will continue corrupting our children with images of sex and violence peddled by some of your most loyal contributors. It would be absurd to focus on these things, in fact – imagine a crime family devoting its resources to bettering the Laundromat chain that exists on paper as its phony source of income. It would be ridiculous. The Laundromat is the front. Everyone knows that the real money is in racketeering.

As Thomas Frank writes in the April issue of Harper’s, “The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”

In Part I of The Big Lie, we focused on The Front - the collection of cultural "values" issues that the Republican Party uses to distract voters from its other pursuits. In Part II, we take a look at the quieter goals and successes of the Republican Party in the last 40 years.

All politics in America is about economics, even when it is not - when a politician's hand is on the Bible, his other hand is most likely on someone's wallet. That wallet isn't yours, though, since you're on the winning team; that same politician can't wait to rob the working Peter to make Paul fatter.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Tiger Force - When A Secret Elite Unit Gets Out of Control

It was an elite fighting unit in Vietnam - small, mobile, trained to kill. Known as Tiger Force, the platoon was created by a U.S. Army engaged in a new kind of war - one defined by ambushes, booby traps, and a nearly invisible enemy. Then it went on a killing spree that was covered up for years - slaughtering scores of unarmed civilians. Pullitizer prize winning series.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Marketing Research For Politics

The Republican National Committee's Voter Vault and the Democratic National Committee's Datamart contain about 168 million names.

Those who have seen them say the databases include hundreds of pieces of information about each listed person; 300, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, boasts. But some experts working with the lists say that much of the information is redundant or irrelevant to predicting political inclinations.

Think of the lists as 168 million layer cakes, each layer made from a variety of ingredients. The trick for the experts is to decide which layers are accurate, which have changed, which are politically relevant, which predictive of voting, and ultimately, how best to use the valid information to type voters as likely supporters of John Kerry or George W. Bush.

Emily's List is making an ambitious effort to make a science of politics. Using polling, focus-group interviews and statistical analysis, the organization is hoping to rate each of Datamart's 168 million names from certain Democratic voter to possibly Democratic, to never.

Last summer, consultants working for the group polled 3,827 people drawn randomly from Datamart about issues and attitudes. Based on the answers, statisticians created categories, from the most Democratic ("college-educated progressive") to the most Republican ("social conservative").

Categorizing those polled allowed the analysts to see which of the demographic, economic and political information in Datamart made someone a college-educated progressive or a social conservative or in between. Then they extrapolated, placing every one of the 168 million people into one of the nine categories. So far, more field testing has shown that the calculations were mostly, but not 100 percent, correct, Ms. White said. Emily's List will contact those it thinks are leaning Democratic, especially those who do not vote often.

Emily's List. Democratic National Committee

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

There Were Occupation Plans For Iraq

Rumsfeld and the White House ignored all the planning.

The Bush war cabinet—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Powell and more recently Rice—have a decades-long history of distrusting both career diplomats and Pentagon generals who do not believe in American supremacy on the global stage or are reluctant to forcefully use American military power. Thus, the Bush White House purposefully unplugged the so-called interagency process, which in effect had been a system of shared responsibilities—and checks and balances—in the way America used its military power around the world.

Rumsfeld has now given his deputy, Wolfowitz, the job of dealing with Iraq.

It's interesting. My take is there is now a huge rift between Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. What I think is Rumsfeld's agenda is military transformation. Iraq is a sideshow. What he has done is turned the Iraq keys over to Wolfowitz..."

"Wolfowitz is the most dangerous guy in America right now," Gross said. "He doesn't listen. The interagency process is broken. The bad thing is nobody will call him out. Condi doesn't say anything about it. Cheney is not going to do anything about it. And Rumsfeld is doing military transformation."

James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

The Bush Guard Record

Removed and Inserted Documents.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Cursor.org

Commenting on fighting in Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra, Amarah, Nasiriyah and Najaf, U.S. occupation head Paul Bremer said: "If you just report on those few places, it does look chaotic." But Back-to-Iraq notes that "those few places" are home to about 77 percent of Iraqis.

A Los Angeles Times article predicts that the June 30 handoff will bring to Iraq a "Sovereignty Lite," watched over by the largest CIA station in the world.

Calling Moqtada al-Sadr Iraq's version of Lenin at the Finland Station, the American Prospect's Harold Meyerson writes that "The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone."

In 'The New Saddam,' Justin Raimondo argues that "This entire Sadrist episode has been an American provocation from start to finish." Plus: Iraq no longer safe enough for the old Saddam?

'Deeper Into The Abyss' American Conservative contributor Christopher Layne, wonders whether any American political leader will have the courage France's Charles de Gaulle showed when he elected to cut his country's losses in Algeria and get out.

Mark Kleiman tracks GOP efforts to spin Sen. Edward Kennedy's remark that "Iraq is George Bush's Viet Nam" into a prediction of American defeat, and Helen Thomas, saying it would be a travesty if the war in Iraq does not become the focus of debate in the presidential campaign, calls on Bush and Kerry to lay out their exit strategies. Plus: Bush administration's case for war no longer has leg to stand on.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Molly Ivins

If I were John Kerry, I would be having such horrible nightmares about winning the election -- and actually having to ask an American soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Lies From Right Wing Think Tank

Unemployment has been very low and is now near what economists call a "natural" rate. - Tim Kane is a research fellow in macroeconomics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation (Tax-Free GOP).

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Portugal Shows What Happens When Abortion is Recriminalized

Kristof - To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal.

Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 "accomplices," including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.

The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed.

This was the second such mass abortion trial lately in Portugal. The previous one involved 42 defendants, including a girl who had been 16 at the time of the alleged abortion.

Both trials ended in acquittals, except for a nurse who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for performing abortions.

Portugal, like the U.S., is an industrialized democracy with a conservative religious streak, but the trials have repulsed the Portuguese. A recent opinion poll shows that people here now favor abortion rights, 79 percent to 14 percent. In a sign of the changing mood, Portugal's president recently commuted the remainder of the nurse's sentence. There's a growing sense that while abortion may be wrong, criminalization is worse.

"It's very embarrassing," said Sandy Gageiro, a Lisbon journalist who covered the trials. "Lots of reporters came and covered Portugal and said it had this medieval process."

Portugal offers a couple of sobering lessons for Americans who, like Mr. Bush, aim to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The first is that abortion laws are very difficult to enforce in a world as mobile as ours. Some 20,000 Portuguese women still get abortions each year, mostly by crossing the border into Spain. In the U.S., where an overturn of Roe v. Wade would probably mean bans on abortion only in a patchwork of Bible Belt states, pregnant women would travel to places like New York, California and Illinois for their abortions.

The second is that if states did criminalize abortion, they would face a backlash as the public focus shifted from the fetus to the woman. "The fundamentalists have lost the debate" in Portugal, said Helena Pinto, president of UMAR, a Portuguese abortion rights group. "Now the debate has shifted to the rights of women. Do we want to live in a country where women can be in jail for abortion?"

The upshot is that many Portuguese seem to be both anti-abortion and pro-choice. They are morally uncomfortable with abortion, especially late in pregnancies, but they don't think the solution is to arrest young women for making agonizing personal choices to end their pregnancies.

As one sensible woman put it in her autobiography: "For me, abortion is a personal issue — between the mother, father and doctor." She added, "Abortion is not a presidential matter."

President Bush, listen to your mother.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Last Night Late Night Comics

NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno":

"Yesterday, President Bush got a little upset with a reporter for calling him 'sir' instead of Mr President. Man, how upset is he going to be after the election when they start calling him 'George' again."

"Yesterday, Vice President Cheney threw out the first pitch at the Cincinnati Reds opening game. President Bush, he threw out the first pitch at the Cardinals game. It's nice to see they've got time for that kind of stuff now that everything in Iraq is under control."

CBS's "The Late Show with David Letterman":

"President Bush says he is looking forward to the testimony from Condoleezza Rice before Congress. Well it makes perfect sense you know, he wants to know what was going on too."

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Bush is a Uniter - For Iraq Sunnis and Shiites

There may also be an ominous synergy developing between Sunni and Shiite insurgents. On Monday, insurgents fought a gun battle against United States troops in a Sunni neighborhood near Khadamiya in which three soldiers were killed. Witnesses said the attackers included a mix of Shiites and Sunnis. "There were Shiites from Sadr City and mujahedeen from Falluja," a hotbed of Sunni resistance, said Ayad Karim, a shopkeeper. "Now the resistance is united."

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Nader Calls For Bush To Be Impeached

"Deceiving the American people night after night after night" about U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

White House Attempts To Classify Public Speech

Suburban Guerilla and Talking Points Memo cover the attempt by the White House to classify a speech Condi Rice was scheduled to give on 9/11. A public speech. Why - it is obviously not secret but it would embarass the White House. "An address planned to be public is now top secret because, well, it shows they were wrong."

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Cross-Dressing Heats Up Texas Republican Race

Photographs of congressional candidate Sam Walls dressed in women's clothes have circulated among political leaders in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth. Local Republican leaders confirmed separately that they had seen the photographs of Walls in a wig, dress and high heels.

Walls, who has the endorsement of several leading Republicans in the state and was expected to win the run-off, was not available for comment. He said in comments printed in the Star-Telegram that he will not drop out of the race due to a campaign of blackmail.

Walls said his family had "dealt with" the issue. He said he was apologizing to his supporters for any embarrassment caused by "a small part of my personal past."

Dozens of photos of Walls were seized by a company that repossessed a worn-out single-wide trailer registered in Walls' name at a mobile home park in Crowley in Tarrant County, near the Johnson County border.

The eviction was prompted by Walls' failure to pay rent, court records show.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

U.S. Marines Hit Mosque Filled With Worshippers

Marines in a fierce battle for this Sunni Muslim stronghold fired rockets that destroyed part of a wall surrounding a mosque compound filled with worshippers Wednesday, and witnesses said as many as 40 people were killed.

The strike came as worshippers had gathered for afternoon prayers, witnesses said. Temporary hospitals were set up in private homes to treat the wounded and prepare the dead for burial.

Until the mosque attack, reports had at least 30 Americans and more than 150 Iraqis dead in fighting for the Sunni Triangle cities of Ramadi and Fallujah since Sunday. With confirmation of the 12 dead Marines, the American death toll since the war was at least 626. Shiite-inspired violence has spread to key cities in Iraq.

Arab Rulers' Worst Fears on Iraq Come True

As U.S. forces battle on a new front in Iraq, Baghdad's Arab neighbors watch the escalating violence with alarm and a message that affords them only the grimmest satisfaction: "We told you so."

Arab leaders had said loudly and repeatedly that a U.S. war against Saddam Hussein would unleash chaos in multi-ethnic Iraq and the region and open a Pandora's box of radicalism.

With U.S.-led forces now battling Shi'ite Muslims in several cities, they now feel their ominous prophecy has come true.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Houston may promote failing students to improve dropout rate

The City that Created No-Child Left Behind Shows The Results

Houston high school students who've failed core subjects such as English or math would get to move on to the next grade under a proposal HISD trustees are considering as part of the district's effort to reduce its dropout rate.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Voters defeat Wal-Mart

A bid by the world's largest corporation to bypass uncooperative elected officials and take its aggressive expansion plans to voters failed Tuesday, as Inglewood residents overwhelmingly rejected Wal-Mart's proposal to build a colossal retail and grocery center without an environmental review or public hearings.

With all votes counted Tuesday evening, 4,575 Inglewood residents had voted in favor of Wal-Mart's plan, while 7,049 had voted against it.

The company had spent more than $1 million on its campaign, and opponents had warned that if the company won, residents throughout California should gird for similar battles.

"What this shows is that Wal-Mart can't dupe people in this city to sign away their rights," said Mike Shimpock, a strategist for the campaign against the move. "If they spent $1 million here and lost by this margin, I doubt they'll try this elsewhere. They'll have to approach cities as equal partners."

Thwarted by officials in Inglewood and elsewhere, company strategists decided to take their proposal directly to voters, who the retailer said would be well served by new jobs, tax revenues and low prices.

The expansion encountered fierce opposition from organized labor, which insisted that Wal-Mart's aggressive business practices and anti-union employment policies would result in lost jobs and depressed wages for millions of workers.

The question on Tuesday's ballot in Inglewood was whether to allow the retailer to obtain building permits without a public hearing or environmental impact study. Many community leaders and Inglewood city officials, except the mayor, said the measure would set a dangerous precedent for cities nationwide by preempting local control over the development process and circumventing environmental review of large projects.

"They want to be the big gorilla and not even offer one banana," Assemblyman Jerome Horton (D-Inglewood) said Tuesday. "Clearly, this is a test site for Wal-Mart to determine if they can go from city to city to city, preempting state law and local building and safety codes…. I think everyone should prepare for a full frontal attack from Wal-Mart."

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Bush Approval Rating Plummeting

Janette: Bush Approval Rating Crashes to 43% - Now Pollsters Focus on Fudging Iraq Invasion Responses

Corporate pollsters, who for so long were able to tweak and tug Bush's approval rating enough to keep it just above the critical 50% mark, have given up the ghost on his approval ratings - the highest they can tug it now is 43% (which means it's probably at about 35% or so). Now they are turning their "polling magic" to a new Bush-protective front: the public's opinion on Bush's invasion of Iraq. This, of course is a critical question as the 9/11 hearings heat up. So now according to this poll we find, quite miraculously, that even though 60% of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq, 57% think it was just dandy that he attacked the country, Yeah, right! We expect to see a flurry of polls along these lines in the near future.

el - While some polls are slanted, (AP, Gallup and Fox for example), this might be a bit harsh. Polls are slanted more on their interpretation of results and the difficult and changing nature of reaching the electorate - people don't like to answer phones and take surveys. Still, only 43% approval is a disaster for Rove. In just talking to people about Iraq I still find a majority of people supported the invasion despite the fact that the present situation was totally predictable. It will take a while to wear away the invade Iraq propaganda campaign.

Gary Permalink on 4/07/2004

Massachusetts split over marriage amendment

In the first test of public opinion since the lawmakers' historic vote on March 29, the proposed amendment to the state constitution fell short of getting majority support in the poll, with 47 percent backing the measure and 47 opposing it.

40 percent of those surveyed supported gay marriage while 28 percent supported a ban on gay marriage but that would also provide for civil unions. The people who strongly opposed both legalizing gay marriage and authorizing same-sex civil unions represented only 17 percent of the poll sample.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Iraqi Blogs

Baghdad Burning

Healing Iraq

Dear Raed

A Family in Baghdad

When did all of this tension start?
Maybe two week ago…
After the assassination of Sheikh Yassin of Hamas [by Sharon].
I think that was the spark that started everything…
People went out in the streets protesting and demonstrating againd Israel and The United States.
Some days after that, Muqtada AsSadr declared that he is the attacking arm of Hamas and Hizb Allah, and that he can take this responsibility.
And people applauded and clapped!
Then the American forces closed his journal, and surrounded his office.
There I think the crisis started.

Back to Iraq

The View From Baghdad : KBR is actively structuring their organization to try to screw over Iraqis who risk, and in some cases give, their lives to help us in our efforts here.

If she was killed by Coalition Forces, my understanding is that she would be entitled to some $3000. But since she was killed working with the Coalition Forces, she gets nothing.

KBR, who has contracts in Iraq worth billions, is structuring their operations to save a few thousand dollars here and there by denying benefits to those Iraqis brave enough to work with us.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Marines Die in Iraq Attack

Up to Dozen (washingtonpost.com)

At least 12 US marines (aljazeera)

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Poppy opposed Dubya's war

New York Daily News - A new book on the Bush political dynasty claims former President George H.W. Bush opposed last year's invasion of Iraq.

In "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," Peter and Rochelle Schweizer cite as evidence a summer 2002 interview in which the older Bush's sister said her brother had expressed his "anguish" about the administration's preparations for war.

"But do they have an exit strategy?" the former President is quoted as worrying.

"Although he never went public with them," the authors assert, "the President's own father shared many of [the] concerns" of Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser and a leading war opponent.

Yet close friends and associates said the older Bush, while fiercely proud and protective of his son, nevertheless harbors concerns about the war and its aftermath.

These sources told The News that aside from his "exit-strategy" fears of a prolonged, bloody conflict, the ex-President is troubled that the war fractured the international coalition he painstakingly assembled to expel deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.

In his 1998 diplomatic memoir, the former President offered this impassioned defense of his controversial decision not to attack Baghdad and topple Saddam in 1991:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam ... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. ... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

el - Note that this book was written by a fawning Bush supporter.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

The Mercury Scandal

Krugman - If you want a single example that captures why so many people no longer believe in the good intentions of the Bush administration, look at the case of mercury pollution.

The head of the E.P.A.'s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven't guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn't just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration's proposal came directly from lobbyists' memos.

E.P.A. experts normally study regulations before they are issued, but they were bypassed. According to The Los Angeles Times: "E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. . . . E.P.A. veterans say they cannot recall another instance where the agency's technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal."

Mercury is just a particularly vivid example of what's going on in environmental protection, and public policy in general. As a devastating article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine documented, the administration's rollback of the Clean Air Act has gone beyond the polluters' wildest dreams.

And the corruption of the policy process — in which political appointees come in with a predetermined agenda, and technical experts who might present information their superiors don't want to hear are muzzled — has infected every area I know anything about, from tax cuts to matters of war and peace.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Sudan Government Complicit in Genocide

"Militia attacks and a scorched-earth government offensive have led to massive displacement, indiscriminate killings, looting and mass rape..."

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Beginning of the End?

The struggle to control/pacify Iraq has never been about a majority of the Iraqi people. Historians estimate that during the American Revolution one third of the populace was supportive of the revolution, one third remained loyal to the King and the other third just tried to stay out of the way. Using that same ratio with a population in Iraq of approximately 26 million people and the numbers become very chilling indeed.

The United States, a nation which has long, and rightfully so, taken great pride in its track record as a liberator from tyranny, is now in the eminently unenviable position of trying to suppress a nationwide insurrection waged against it as the foreign occupying power. This is something that we have tried only a few times in our history. And we all know how it turned the last time we were so blinded by hubris to put ourselves in a similarly wretched position.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Left Side Of US Politics Uniting

Liberals -- out of power, beleaguered by talk radio, outmaneuvered by conservative activists and hemmed in by new campaign finance rules -- are busily trying to build a new political infrastructure.

Liberals draw their energy this time from a wellspring of anger -- anger that started during the Clinton impeachment proceedings of 1998, spread with the contested 2000 election between Al Gore and George Bush, and exploded with the Iraq war and Bush's environmental and economic policies.

"I think of it as liberals getting sand kicked in their face for years, like the old Charles Atlas ad," said David Talbot, chief executive of the liberal San Francisco online publication Salon. "They were too wimpy, disorganized and demoralized to respond. Finally, I think enough was enough. Their anger started to boil over, and they've been pumping iron and are now able to fight back.''

"Because the left is so united in their feelings about Bush, there's a spirit of cooperation and communication and self-sacrifice we haven't seen on the left probably ever," said Jordan, of the liberal groups America Votes and America Coming Together.

"Why did this all happen now?" asked Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club in San Francisco and a board member of America Coming Together. "I have a two-word response: George W. Bush."

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Excellent Report On US Mercenaries In Iraq from Scotland

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Al-Sadr supporters take over Najaf

Supporters of maverick Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr controlled government, religious and security buildings in the holy city of Najaf early Tuesday evening, according to a coalition source in southern Iraq.

The source said al-Sadr's followers controlled the governor's office, police stations and the Imam Ali mosque, one of Shia Muslim's holiest shrines.

Al-Sadr also called for a general strike, demanding that the coalition pull back its troops from populated areas and release prisoners taken into custody in recent demonstrations.

Twelve coalition soldiers -- 11 Americans and a Salvadoran -- and dozens of Iraqis have been killed in three days of battles in Baghdad and Najaf, while firefights have erupted in other cities and towns as well.

Seven Marines were killed in the same time period in al Anbar province, west of Baghdad, along with two more soldiers in northern Iraq.

Despite the rising death toll, Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, said "there is no question we have control over the country."

"I know if you just report on those few places, it does look chaotic," Bremer said on CNN's "American Morning." "But if you travel around the country, what you find is a bustling economy, people opening businesses right and left, unemployment has dropped."

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Your taxpayer dollars at work: Bush uses gov't resources to push re-election

The Treasury Department analyzes John Kerry's tax proposals and the numbers quickly find their way to the Republican National Committee. The Health and Human Services Department spends millions on ads promoting President Bush's prescription drug plan. The House Resources Committee posts a diatribe against Kerry's "absurd" energy ideas on its Web site.

With friends like these - all operating at taxpayer expense - who needs a re-election campaign?

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Las Vegas Strippers Organizing, Getting Politically Active

This unusually colorful episode of open class warfare erupted last summer when the Clark County commissioners voted 5 to 1 to heavily regulate the stripping and lap dancing that bring millions of tourists and conventioneers and many more of their dollars annually into Vegas's thirty-six "gentlemen's clubs" and provide income for 15,000 women dancers.

Within days of the bill's passage, Hackett founded the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance, and by the end of the summer she had signed up nearly a thousand members. She now has "club reps"--sort of clandestine shop stewards--in about two-thirds of the dance establishments, and they are signing up about twenty-five new members a week. In addition to holding regular organizing meetings at the local library, Hackett's LVDA published a "Dancers Voter Guide" for the November 2002 election and conducted the first known voter-registration drive in history of nude and lap dancers. "We registered almost 500 new voters among the girls," she says proudly.

Hackett and other local political observers agree that the crackdown on lap dancing can be traced to the economic squeeze the big Vegas casinos and hotels have been feeling since 2000. Business is only down 2-4 percent, but that's an ice-cold shower for an industry that has been spoiled by two decades of uninterrupted growth and profitability. To jack up the inflow of tourists, many of the casino resorts have been turning to racier floor shows, but they are still prohibited by state regulation from mixing gambling with strip or lap dancing. In the past few weeks all of America has been exposed to a new, sexually suggestive, multimillion-dollar TV ad campaign run by Vegas gambling and hotel interests promising "What happens here, stays here." Meanwhile, the mega-lit billboards atop the giant Vegas hotels are filled more and more with explicitly sexual lures.

The non-employee status of the dancers may eventually thwart unionization efforts, but in that case the LVDA could still exert influence as a "professional organization," perhaps on the model of the National Writers Union. The alliance is also close to concluding a deal with an insurance carrier so that dancer-members would be able to purchase healthcare at group rates. Once that deal is concluded, alliance membership could soar.

LVDA can already claim some partial victories. Vigorous lobbying, a few rallies and marches downtown, and oodles of local and even international publicity forced partial reversal of last summer's near-total ban on lap dancing.

Hackett has recently started working with a nucleus of nude dancers in Texas who are trying to organize. And eventually, she says, she'd like to have a national organization. "I've already got the name figured out. The United States Dancers Alliance. Or USDA," she says with a laugh, slapping her flank. "Get it?"

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Britain chemical bomb attack foiled

British and U.S. intelligence agencies and police foiled a plot to create a chemical vapor bomb in Britain, the British Broadcasting Corp. said on Tuesday.

The alleged plot involved osmium tetroxide, a catalyst used in industry, but there was no indication that the suspected plotters had obtained any of the substance, the BBC said, citing security sources.

It wasn't clear whether the report was related to the arrest of nine British men last week and the seizure of a half-ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which has been used in terrorist bombs in the past.

The BBC said the plot apparently was to mix the chemical into a bomb, which would create a toxic cloud upon detonation.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

60% of US Frims Avoided Paying Taxes Even When Economy Booming

More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn't pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.

The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.

The GAO analysis of Internal Revenue Service data comes as tax avoidance by both U.S. and foreign companies also is drawing increased scrutiny from the IRS and Congress. But more so than similar previous reports, the analysis suggests that dodging taxes, both legally and otherwise, has become deeply rooted in U.S. corporate culture. The analysis found that even more foreign-owned companies doing business in the U.S. -- about 70% of them -- reported that they didn't owe any U.S. federal taxes during the late 1990s.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Anarchy across Iraq

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

US Weapons Inspector: "I Knew Within Days We Were Wrong on WMDs"

Kay: U.S. 'wrong' on WMD

The CIA's former weapons hunter in Iraq realized within days of arriving in Baghdad last summer that dictator Saddam Hussein was no longer stockpiling a banned arsenal, according to a new report.

David Kay, with whom the Bush administration placed its hopes of finding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, sent a startling E-mail to CIA Director George Tenet in early July 2003.

"I wrote that it looks as though they did not produce weapons," Kay reveals in an interview with the new Vanity Fair.

It wasn't until late January this year that Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "we were almost all wrong" on Iraq.

Kay told Vanity Fair, in its 22,000-word opus, "The Path to War," that he was actually ready to come home in mid-December. Tenet said no.

"If you resign now, it will appear that we don't know what we're doing and the wheels are coming off," he said Tenet told him.

Vanity Fair's look at the war in Iraq portrays Vice President Cheney as among the lead advocates for war.

The veep made at least 10 trips to the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, said Richard Kerr, a retired CIA official who did an internal review of prewar intelligence. "There was a lot of pressure, no question," Kerr said.

The magazine also bolstered the contention from some critics that President Bush was obsessed with Saddam.

A former British ambassador recounts a dinner meeting Bush had with Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sept. 20, 2001 - nine days after the terror attacks on America - where Bush pressed for an attack on Iraq.

The magazine also details extraordinary pressure on Secretary of State Powell to tie Saddam to the 9/11 attacks. Powell, who on Friday conceded the intelligence in his UN speech making the case for war in Iraq was faulty, refused.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable

The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Alanis gets naked (sort of) at awards

Canadian rocker Alanis Morissette didn't bare her breast like Janet Jackson, but she did bare her soul last night at Canada's annual music awards, demonstrating her disdain for what she called "hypocritical U.S. censorship."

Hosting the 2004 Juno Awards ceremonies, Canada's version of the Grammies, Morissette disrobed on stage to reveal a skin-colored, naked body suit with nipples and pubic hair.

As part of the skit, Morissette was then told by the show's assistant director that "actually, we can't show nipples or pubic hair on national TV," at which time the Ottawa-born singer pulled off the fake body parts.

The satirical act, says Morissette, was aimed at U.S. government institutions for over-reacting to cultural, free expression, as a result of the fallout surrounding Janet Jackson's Super Bowl faux pas, when her breast was accidentally exposed to millions of television viewers.

"As you may or may not be aware, recently in the United States, I ran into a little problem with regards to a lyric in one my songs," Morissette told the near-sellout audience of 17,000, referring to her latest release titled, "Everything." The song includes the lyrics, "I can be an ***hole of the grandest kind."

"It was requested that I change a word in the first verse. Well, I am overjoyed to be back in my homeland, the true North ... strong and censor-free."

American radio stations threatened recently to ban the song, forcing Morissette to change the controversial word to "nightmare."

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

D.A. accuses business group and GOP of hindering DeLay investigation

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle accused the Texas Association of Business on Friday of using stall tactics to distract his investigation into activities of the association and the Republican Party during the 2002 elections.

The investigation by the Travis County District Attorney's Public Integrity Unit first focused on the Texas Association of Business' use of corporate money to buy ads during the 2002 election.

The investigation has since broadened and now includes a probe into whether $152,000 in payments to Texas House candidates in 2002 from a political action committee created by Texas Republican U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay violated state law.

Earle released a similar batch of papers less than a month ago following a request from Tina Benkiser, chairwoman of the Texas Republican Party. She had asked for papers related to contacts between Earle's office and news reporters.

The papers released Friday included campaign finance reports, subpoenas for grand jury witnesses, date calendars from Earle's office, and correspondence between Earle's office and the media, as well as between Earle's office and the defeated Democratic candidates.

Earle said the papers show no contacts between his office and the local or national Democratic Party.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Darwin Awards

Janette sends this in: The Darwin Award 2003.

The candidates have finally been released! For those not familiar with the
Darwin Award, It's an annual honor given to the person who provided the
Universal human gene pool the biggest service by getting KILLED in the most
extraordinarily stupid way. As always, competition again this year has been
keen.

DARWIN AWARD CANDIDATES

* In September in Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two
feet of water after squeezing head first through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate
to retrieve his car keys.

* In October, a 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned
when he ran," accidentally jogged off a 100-foot-high cliff on his daily run.

* Buxton, NC: A man died on a beach when an 8-foot-deep hole he had dug into
the sand caved in as he sat inside it. Beach-goers said Daniel Jones, 21,
dug the hole for fun, or protection from the wind, and had been sitting in
a beach chair at the bottom Thursday afternoon when it collapsed, burying
him beneath 5 feet of sand.

People on the beach, on the outer banks, used their hands and shovels,
trying to claw their way to Jones, a resident of Woodbridge, VA, but could
not reach him. It took rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hour
to free him while about 200 people looked on. Jones was pronounced dead at a
hospital.

* In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompoc, CA, as he fell
face-first through the ceiling of bicycle shop he was burglarizing. Death
was caused when the long flashlight he had placed in his mouth (to keep his
hands free) rammed into the base of his skull as he hit the floor.

* According to police in Dahlonega, GA, ROTC cadet Nick Berrena, 20, was
stabbed to death in January by fellow cadet Jeffrey Hoffman, 23, who was
trying to prove that a knife could not penetrate the flak vest Berrena was
wearing.

* Sylvester Briddell, Jr., 26, was killed in February in Selbyville, Del, as
he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a revolver loaded with
four bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger.

* In February, according to police in Windsor, Ontario, Daniel Kolta, 27,
and Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on collision, thus earning a tie in the
game of chicken they were playing with their snowmobiles.

DARWIN AWARD HONORABLE MENTIONS

* In Guthrie, Okla, in October, Jason Heck tried to kill a millipede with a
shot from his 22 caliber rifle, but the bullet ricocheted off a rock near
the hole and hit pal Antonio Martinez in the head, fracturing his skull.

* In Elyria, Ohio, in October, Martyn Eskins, attempting to clean out
cobwebs in his basement, declined to use a broom in favor of a propane torch
and caused a fire that burned the first and second floors of his house.

* Paul Stiller, 47, was hospitalized in Andover Township, NJ, and his wife
Bonnie was also injured, when a quarter-stick of dynamite blew up in their
car. While driving around at 2 AM, the bored couple lit the dynamite and
tried to toss it out the window to see what would happen, but apparently
failed to notice the window was closed.

RUNNER UP....

TACOMA, WA

Kerry Bingham had been drinking with several friends when one of them said
they knew a person who had bungee-jumped from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in
the middle of traffic. The conversation grew more heated and at least 10 men
trooped along the walkway of the bridge at 4:30 am. Upon arrival at the
midpoint of the bridge they discovered that no one had brought a bungee
rope. Bingham, who had continued drinking, volunteered and pointed out that
a coil of lineman's cable lay nearby.

One end of the cable was secured around Bingham's leg and the other end was
tied to the bridge. His fall lasted 40 feet before the cable tightened and
tore his foot off at the ankle. He miraculously survived his fall into the
icy river water and was rescued by two nearby fishermen. "All I can say, "
said Bingham, "is that God was watching out for me on that night." "There's
just no other explanation for it." Bingham's foot was never located.

AND THE WINNER....

PADERBORN, GERMANY

Overzealous zookeeper Friedrich Riesfeldt fed his constipated elephant
Stefan 22 doses of animal laxative and more than a bushel of berries, figs
and prunes before the plugged-up pachyderm finally let it fly, and
suffocated the keeper under 200 pounds of poop.

Investigators say the ill-fated Friedrich, 46, was attempting to give the
ailing elephant an olive oil enema when the relieved beast unloaded on him.
"The sheer force of the elephant's unexpected defecation knocked Mr.
Riesfeldt to the ground, where he struck his head on a rock and lay
unconscious as the elephant continued to evacuate his bowels on top of him"
said flabbergasted Paderborn police detective Erik Dern. With no one there
to help him, he lay under the dung for at least an hour before a watchman
came along, during which time he suffocated.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Why are workers not getting the money from increased productity?

Bob Herbert - It's like running on a treadmill that keeps increasing its speed. You have to go faster and faster just to stay in place. Or, as a factory worker said many years ago, "You can work 'til you drop dead, but you won't get ahead."

American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increased productivity. While the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an unprecedented share of the cash from this burst of economic growth.

What is happening is nothing short of historic. The American workers' share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests have on the national conversation.

The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University: "The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003."

Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: "This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent."

The study is very clear on this point. The bulk of the gains did not go to workers, "but instead were used to boost profits, lower prices, or increase C.E.O. compensation."

This is a radical transformation of the way the bounty of this country has been distributed since World War II. Workers are being treated more and more like patrons in a rigged casino. They can't win.

Corporate profits go up. The stock market goes up. Executive compensation skyrockets. But workers, for the most part, remain on the treadmill.

When you look at corporate profits versus employee compensation in this recovery, and then compare that, as Mr. Sum and his colleagues did, with the eight previous recoveries since World War II, it's like turning a chart upside down.

I have to laugh when I hear conservatives complaining about class warfare. They know this terrain better than anyone. They launched the war. They're waging it. And they're winning it.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Questions For Dr. Rice

PETER BERGEN 3 of 9

3. Mr. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, has said that of the 100 or so meetings held by cabinet-level officials before 9/11 only one was about terrorism. Is this true? If so, was this emblematic of the Bush administration's posture on terrorism?

4. The Bush administration's position, and your own, has been that it would not have been possible to conceive that planes might be used as missiles against the United States. Yet during the 1996 Olympics countermeasures were taken for just that eventuality. How do you reconcile this discrepancy?

5. According to the interrogations of detainees held as suspected Al Qaeda operatives, the lack of response to the attack on the destroyer Cole made the group feel that it could act with impunity. Early in your administration Al Qaeda was identified as the principal suspect in that attack. In addition, Osama bin Laden released videotapes in January and June of 2001 more or less taking credit for his role in it. Why was there no response of any kind from your administration to the Cole attack, an act of war against the United States that killed 17 sailors and nearly sank one of the most advanced destroyers in the American fleet?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG

2. Looking back on 9/11, were your priorities appropriate for the threat based on what you knew? Did you take the necessary precautions given your perception of the threat at the time? Press reports indicate that before 9/11, you believed that the use of ballistic missiles against United States was our most pressing national security vulnerability. What precautions were taken to ensure that Al Qaeda militants in Kashmir did not provoke a ballistic missile exchange between India and Pakistan?

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Magazine Puts 40,000 Reader's Homes on Covers

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood - their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

On one level, the project, sort of the ultimate in customized publishing, is unsurprising: of course a magazine knows where its subscribers live. But it is still a remarkable demonstration of the growing number of ways databases can be harnessed. Apart from the cover image, several advertisements are customized to reflect the recipient's particulars.

In some respects, Reason's cover stunt is less Big Brother than one more demonstration that micromarketing is here to stay. "My son gets sports catalogs where his name is imprinted on the jerseys that are on the cover," Mr. Rotenberg said. "He thinks that's very cool."

In his editor's note describing the magazine's database package, Mr. Gillispie left open three spots - commuting time, educational attainment and percentage of children living with grandparents - so he could adapt his message to individual readers. Mr. Gillespie said that the parlor trick could have profound implications as database and printing capabilities grow.

"What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you?" he asked. "That would be a magazine that everyone would want to read."

el - Magazines want to read you more than you may want to read them.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Mexico's Fox to insist US honor World Court ruling on Death Row Inmates

Mexican President Vicente Fox said on Sunday he would insist to U.S. President George W. Bush that the United States respect a World Court order to review the cases of 51 Mexicans on death row in U.S. prisons.

The International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, last Wednesday ordered the United States to review the convictions and sentences of the Mexican defendants.

Texas snubbed the World Court, saying the international tribunal's order to review the cases did not apply in the nation's busiest death penalty state.

"We haven't spoken to him (Bush) up to now. We will do so in good time, to him and to the governor, to insist on this act of elemental justice," Fox told reporters as he left Sunday mass near his ranch in Guanajuato.

The international court sided in its ruling with Mexico, finding that the condemned men, held in 10 different states, were not apprised of their right under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to seek help from the Mexican consulate after their arrests.

On several occasions, Texas' executions of foreign nationals have angered close U.S. allies, including Canada, Britain and Mexico, which complained that their citizens were not apprised of their consular rights.

Texas leads all other U.S. states in terms of the number of executions -- 321 -- since resuming capital punishment in 1982, six years after a national death penalty ban was lifted.

Texas Gov. Perry Says Kiss My Ass.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's office said the decision would have no effect on the 16 affected cases in his state unless they are ordered to review the cases by the federal government.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Remember two words: Sibel Edmonds

TAP - On March 30, Salon's excellent Eric Boehlert interviewed this former FBI translator, who told him that she had told the 9-11 commission in closed testimony that clear warnings were received throughout the spring and summer of 2001 (Bush's watch, not Clinton's) that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted. Her name has not yet crept its way into the major American newspapers (with the interesting exception of The Washington Times). But there are many mentions in the international press, so the Washington bureaus should wake up eventually.

If Edmonds's testimony is credible -- and Republican Senator Charles Grassley has described her with exactly that word -- it's one more piece of a puzzle that Richard Clarke began to solve for us two weeks ago. Somehow, his story just keeps being corroborated. Funny thing.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

National Guardsmen may not receive education benefits

National Guardsmen returning from duty in Iraq are finding that the funds promised them for tuition reimbursement are in short supply.

The federal program that is supposed to defray up to 75 percent of their college expenses is broke, with no new funds in sight until this fall.

That's put Oregon National Guard leadership in an awkward position, as soldiers were promised up to a maximum of four thousand dollars per soldier per fiscal year as an enlistment incentive.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Kennedy Accuses Bush of Nixonian 'Credibility Gap'

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), broadening his criticism of President Bush from foreign policy to domestic issues, accused Bush yesterday of having "created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon" on education, health and jobs, as well as the war in Iraq.

"He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people," Kennedy said at the Brookings Institution in a speech that was clearly aimed at challenging Bush's credibility with voters, especially by comparing him with Nixon, who resigned as president in disgrace as a result of the Watergate scandal 30 years ago.

In response, Senate Republican leaders defended Bush's credibility, and the Bush-Cheney campaign accused Kennedy of serving as the "hatchet man" for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Kennedy, one of Bush's most vocal critics on Capitol Hill and a prominent Kerry backer, has made a series of speeches criticizing Bush's foreign policy and continued the attack yesterday, charging that Iraq was "George Bush's Vietnam."

In his speech, which was among his most sharply worded critiques of Bush, Kennedy also linked Iraq to domestic concerns, saying the war "diverted attention from the administration's deceptions here at home -- especially on the economy, health care and education." On domestic as well as foreign policy, "saying whatever it takes to prevail has become standard operating procedure in the Bush White House," he said. "In this administration, truth is the first casualty of policy."

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Mahdi Army Fights Coalition all over Iraq

Mahdi Army Fights Coalition in Baghdad, Karbala, Basra: Takes control of Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf

Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters

An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members on the U.S. government's headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm.

Before U.S. reinforcements could arrive, the firm, Blackwater Security Consulting, sent in its own helicopters amid an intense firefight to resupply its commandos with ammunition and to ferry out a wounded Marine, the sources said.

Nassiriya: Iraqi Shi'ite Militia Battles Italian Troops

Violence in Sadr City reminds one of Mogadishu

U.S. commanders, who reported eight dead and 40 wounded, termed the battle for Sadr City the capital's largest and longest engagement since the fall of Baghdad almost a year ago. Between the 5 p.m. ambush and the calming of the area seven hours later after the decisive arrival of a tank column, about 1,000 American soldiers churned into the filthy streets of Sadr City to reassert authority in a slum that had become home to the Mahdi Army, an anti-American militia answering to a firebrand young Shiite cleric, Moqtada Sadr.

As a fighting force, Sadr's militia impressed neither U.S. commanders nor the Iraqi officers at one police station they occupied for three hours.

"Mahdi Army! They're not an army!" Officer Haider Raheem said of the unemployed young men who took over one station by brandishing grenades. "They're a bunch of looters." Before running off at the sound of approaching tanks, Raheem said, they scooped up everything from rifles to food for the prisoners. "Can you believe they even stole the water cup from the restroom?" he said.

"It was really a mob," Dempsey said. "A mob with a lot of weapons."

An Apache attack helicopter skimmed overhead, and two girls and a boy of grade-school age aimed their fingers toward it, shouting "Pow! Pow! Pow!"

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Shia Rebellion Ranks Growing

"The Americans say they will capture or kill al-Sadr," Khusai told the militiamen. "What's your response?"

Theirs was more a roar than a response: "We will die that he may live!" they chanted.

Khusai, wrapped in the black linen cape of a religious leader, clasped his hands and smiled. For the Americans to arrest al-Sadr, he said, they "will have to kill all the Iraqi people."

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority on Monday labeled al-Sadr an "outlaw" and announced that a warrant had been issued several months ago for his arrest in connection with the murder of a cleric.

Coalition authorities have accused al-Sadr of fomenting two days of rioting in three Iraqi cities that caused the deaths of dozens of Iraqis, eight American soldiers and a Salvadoran trooper.

Yet al-Sadr's followers did not seem intimidated. Their ranks were growing daily, the cleric's lieutenants said Monday.

Still considered a precocious upstart by other Shiite leaders, the 30-year-old al-Sadr has been building up his forces throughout central and southern Iraq. He issues orders from his base in Najaf through fax, mobile phones, leaflets and the Internet in preparation for what increasingly looks like a full-fledged uprising, said his Baghdad-based deputies.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Report of US Troops Under Fire From US Trained Iraqi Forces

US Apache helicopters sprayed fire on the private army of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr during fierce battles today in the western Baghdad district of Al-Showla, witnesses and an AFP correspondent said.

"Two Apaches opened fire on armed members of the Mehdi Army," said Showla resident Abbas Amid.

The fighting erupted when five trucks of US soldiers and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) tried to enter the district and were attacked by Sadr supporters, Amid said.

Coming under fire, the ICDC, a paramilitary force trained by the Americans, turned on the US soldiers and started to shoot at them, according to Amid.

The soldiers fled their vehicles and headed for cover and then began to battle both the Mehdi Army and the ICDC members, he said. Their vehicles were set ablaze.

Heavy gunfire rattled the district and columns of black smoke billowed into the sky.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Eric Alterman Is Among Those Who Told You So

What we said before the war, in no particular order

The invasion of Iraq will cause, not prevent, terrorism.

The Bush administration was not to be trusted when it warned of the WMD threat.

Going in without the U.N. is worse than not going in at all.

They were asleep at the switch pre-9/11 and have been trying to cover this up ever since.

And they manipulated 9/11 as a pretext for a long-planned invasion of Iraq.

Any occupation by a foreign power, particularly one as incompetently planned as this one, will likely create more enemies than friends and put the U.S. in a situation similar at times to Vietnam, and at other times, similar to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon; both were disasters.

An invasion of Iraq will draw resources and attention away from the genuine perpetrators of the attack on us, and allow them to regroup for further attacks.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Iraq Coalition Press Office Part of Bush Reelection Team

Detroit Free Press - Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq.

One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern.

One of the main goals of the Office of Strategic Communications -- known as stratcom -- is to ensure Americans see the positive side of the Bush administration's invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and a deadly insurgency thrives.

"Beautification Plan for Baghdad Ready to Begin," one press release in late March said in its headline. Another statement last month cautioned, "The Reality is Nothing Like What You See on Television."

The office counts 21 Republicans -- 11 of whom have worked inside the Bush administration before their Iraq posting -- among its 58 U.S. civilian staffers, according to figures Senor provided.

More than half a dozen CPA officials in the press office worked on Bush's 2000 presidential campaign or are related to Bush campaign workers, according to payroll records filed with the Federal Elections Commission.

Republican figures also permeate the wider CPA staff, including top advisers to U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and the Iraqi ministries.

The U.S. team stands in deep contrast to the British team that works alongside it, almost all of whom are civil or foreign service employees, not political appointees. Many of the British in Iraq display regional knowledge or language skills that most of the Americans lack.

The drive to re-elect Bush is a sensitive topic. Several coalition officials angered by what they see as CPA politicking -- with U.S. accomplishments in Iraq being trumpeted to help Bush -- grumbled privately, but would not go on record with complaints.

But Gordon Robison, a former CPA contractor who helped build the Pentagon-funded Al-Iraqiya television station in Baghdad, said Republicans in the press room intensely followed the Democratic presidential primaries as John Kerry emerged as the presumed nominee.

"Iraq is in danger of costing George W. Bush his presidency and the CPA's media staff are determined to see that does not happen," Robison said. "I had the impression in dealing with the civilians in the Green Room that they viewed their job as essentially political, promoting what the Coalition Provisional Authority is doing in Iraq as a political arm of the Bush administration," he added.

One CPA staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity said the press office had sent targeted "good news" releases to American television, radio and newspaper outlets that were timed to deflect criticism of Bush during the Democratic primaries.

Rich Galen, 57, a well-known Republican strategist, oversees the daily news releases sent directly to media outlets in the United States. Before joining the CPA press operation late last year, Galen wrote a GOP insider column and appeared on Fox News to harpoon liberal critics of Bush.

Galen's vast expertise lies in political campaigning, not shipping radio and TV spots to local audiences. Putting a sharp strategist like him in the press room is a campaign masterstroke, said Bob Boorstin of the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan political think-tank in Washington.

"You know they're in trouble if they shipped Rich Galen over there," said Boorstin, who worked on four presidential campaigns, all Democratic.

"They're desperate to control the story over there. It's a very smart thing on their part. He knows what he's doing."

"There's some deep questions about whether (the U.S. invasion) was a good idea. Wherever and whenever they can, Bush's political people are manipulating whatever they can," he said.

"Is that a surprise? No. Would Democrats do it? Yes. But it's particularly noxious because people's lives are on the line."

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Sen. Graham on Bush's War

Frankly, we had al Qaeda on the ropes in the spring of 2002. But rather than finishing the job and crushing the operational command structure of al Qaeda, we shifted our focus.

Let me share a personal story. [U.S.] Central Command, which has responsibility for our military actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, at MacDill Air Force Base. It has been my practice to periodically visit the Central Command, to receive a briefing as to what they are doing. I did that in February of 2002. After the formal briefing with PowerPoint [presentations] and all that goes with a military briefing, I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command to go into his office. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and he said, "Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq." This is February of 2002. "Senator, what we are engaged in now is a manhunt not a war, and we are not trained to conduct a manhunt."

To draw a historical analogy, I think that what the Bush administration did, beginning as early as February of 2002, was to make a decision that we would fight a pre-emptive war against Mussolini and let Hitler run free.

I agree with Richard Clarke, who concludes in his book that Iraq was a complete and unnecessary tangent. I have described [it] as a distraction. Now, I don't mean to suggest, and I do not believe Richard Clarke means to suggest, that Saddam Hussein is anything other than a bad, evil person who did bad and evil things to his own people and his neighbors and would hoped to have done it more broadly. But the question was not a singular question about Saddam Hussein. It was, rather, a comparative question. Of all the evils in that neighborhood of the Middle East and Central Asia, which evil deserved to have our primary military attention?...

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

View Of Experts: Bush has no plan, has had no clue, Civil War likely

Josh Marshall has the following from The Nelson Report (a subscription political journal) ...

Gloom...has been building over Iraq. Increasingly, the Wise Heads are forecasting disaster. Wise Heads say they see no realistic plan, hear no serious concept to get ahead of the situation. Money, training, jobs...all lagging, all reinforce downward spiral highlighted by sickening violence. There seems to be no real "if", just when, and how badly it will hurt U.S. interests. Define "disaster"? Consensus prediction: if Bush insists on June 30/July 1 turnover, a rapid descent into civil war.

May happen anyway, if the young al-Sadr faction really breaks off from its parents. CSIS Anthony Cordesman's latest blast at Administration ineptitude says in public what Senior Observers say in private...the situation may still be salvaged, but then you have to factor in Sharon's increasing desperation, and the regional impact.

1. Comes word from Very Senior Foreign Policy Observers that the situation now unfolding in Iraq is "a qualitative change of very profound significance. The chances of something like a general breakdown after the July 1 transfer is accelerating." The Observation continues: "Even if [dissident cleric Muqtada] al-Sadr is arrested, the whole question is whether the Shi'ia majority is comfortable with continued U.S. occupation." The suggested answer seems to be "no".

-- the Observer goes on to warn that, on the basis of personal soundings within the Administration, the conviction arises that the White House has "no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work."

Easrlier he had the original statement pre-invasion to back up his statement: If you put yourself back in that mindset the Bush politicals had as of early 2003, the idea was that the great mass of the Iraqi population would be in sync with what we were doing and eager to participate. Our role was being there at the ready to help them deal with crises brought on by the war or by the internal degeneration of the country in the years before it: ready to ship in water, food, help repave the roads, technical assistance getting their economy in order and reformed, etc. That's what we'd be there for. And thus we could pull most combat troops out after a few months.

The idea that we'd need a vast army of occupation -- hopefully one with some multinational flavor -- to make everyone keep their heads down while we went about with the serious and risky business of nation-building simply didn't occur to them. Thus the treatment of Shinseki.

This crew simply didn't understand what they were getting into. It was an intelligence failure even more difficult to grasp than the fiasco over WMD -- and in this case it stemmed entirely from administration political appointees in the face of unanimous contrary advice from everywhere else in government.

They've never copped to that misunderstanding, even to themselves. That team can't save the situation.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

Clarke's Statements Bolstered

The broad outline of Clarke's criticism has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush's admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book "Bush at War" that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.

In addition, a review of dozens of declassified citations from Clarke's 2002 testimony provides no evidence of contradiction, and White House officials familiar with the testimony agree that any differences are matters of emphasis, not fact. Indeed, the declassified 838-page report of the 2002 congressional inquiry includes many passages that appear to bolster the arguments Clarke has made.

Gary Permalink on 4/06/2004

10 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraqi Violence

Supporters of an anti-American cleric rioted in four Iraqi cities Sunday, killing eight U.S. troops and one Salvadoran soldier in the worst unrest since the spasm of looting and arson immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. military on Sunday reported two Marines were killed in a separate "enemy action" in Anbar province, raising the toll of American service members killed in Iraq to at least 610.

10 US deaths - worse day ever as Iraq plunges toward civil war

Gary Permalink on 4/05/2004

Bush Wins Popular, Loses Electoral?

This Time, Bush Could Get the Gore Treatment (washingtonpost.com)

The day after speculating about a tied electoral college vote the Washington Post is wondering about Bush losing the electors but winning the popular vote.

Not only are the red states getting redder and the blue states bluer but, as Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, it's "the big states like New York, Texas, California, Illinois and New Jersey that are no longer battlegrounds." Combine big-state blowouts that introduce huge popular-vote fluctuations, with small-state victories that can shift electors by the swing of just a few hundred votes (such as Gore's 366-vote New Mexico victory in 2000), and you have a recipe for misfired elections.

All of which calls into question -- again -- the Electoral College method for choosing a president.

In 2004, as always, the likelihood of a misfired election remains small. But if the election is close, Kerry and the Democrats could suffer Gore's fate. Or, because close elections can tip either way, Bush could find himself leaving the White House the same way he arrived -- as the candidate with a surplus of votes in the wrong states.

el - But if Bush loses popular vote the GOP will try to ignore the electoral college as they had plans for last election despite the media spin it was Gore who was guilty of unmitigated chutzpah.

Gary Permalink on 4/05/2004

Worse than 2000

Janette sends me this: Presidential race could end in a Bush-Kerry tie

In 2000, it was a recount.

This time, it could be a tie.

Yes, get ready for the horrifying possibility that this election could prompt a worse constitutional crisis than the last one did.

Four years after the mess in Florida, the nation remains polarized and polls in the swing states show a very real chance of an Electoral College tie.

"It's not as unlikely as most people might imagine," said Electoral College expert Michael White at the National Archives.

To win, a candidate needs 270 of the 538 electoral votes.

The way the states are leaning, there are several scenarios under which both George Bush and John Kerry end up with 269 -- one electoral vote short.

In that case, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives gets to pick the president, ensuring a Bush victory.

El - Call for a constitutional convention for an amendment calling for direct popular vote of the president and vice president. Add Instant Runoff Voting while you are at it.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Mired in a Mirage

Dowd is becoming one of my favorites.

The administration does not want to admit the extent of anti-American hatred among Iraqis. And even if some of the perpetrators are outsiders, they could never succeed without the active help of Iraqis.

Just as they once conjured a mirage of a Saddam sharing lethal weapons with Osama, now the president and vice president make the disingenuous claim that Al Qaeda is on the run and that many of its capos are behind bars. Meanwhile, counterterrorism experts say terrorism has become hydra-headed, and one told Newsweek that the spawned heads have perpetrated more major terror attacks in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months before. Experts agree that the nature of the threat has shifted, with more than a dozen regional militant Islamic groups reflecting growing strength.

Senator Bob Graham compared the new, decentralized Al Qaeda to a blob of mercury that "you slam your fist into and it suddenly bursts into a hundred small pieces."

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Cat Story

Nothing but trouble.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Reinstating the draft in 2005

Sydney sends me this - ARE YOU AWAKE NOW?

And what of Ralph Nader and John Kerry? Why aren’t they speaking out against this? Where are the politically charged speeches by Ted Kennedy on the floor of the Senate or Howard Dean’s screaming rants?

I don’t know, but I’m going to make it my business to find out and I’m going to let you know about it everyday.

ARE YOU AWAKE YET? Let’s ask these “leaders” about S.89 and H.R. 163. Ask your senators and congressman, ask your favorite candidate about S.89 and H.R. 163.

Charles adds this - Newsweek: Has the World Made Us Safer?

Controversial former counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke likens the aftermath of the Afghan war to "smashing a pod of seeds that spread round the world," allowing bin Laden and his deputies "to step back out of the picture and have the regional organizations they created take their generation-long struggle to the next level." The Iraq war, Clarke insists, was an enormous distraction and a drain on resources. Worse, "we delivered to Al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable," Clarke writes.

This is the essence of the problem. Would-be holy warriors are brought into the global insurgency by rabble-rousing Muslim preachers who teach the glories of martyrdom in the face of infidel violence and repression. The sermons are reinforced by satellite television, videotapes and CD-ROMs that show foreign forces brutalizing Muslims. Once recruited, some militants may rush to Iraq to commit suicide. But they are likely to be even more dangerous if they stay where they are, in Europe or Canada or the United States, as well as the Muslim world, looking for ways to bring the war home.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Madrid 'ringleader' dies in blast

The suspected ringleader of the Madrid train bombings was among four suspects who blew themselves up during a police raid, Spain's interior minister said. The suspect, Serhane ben Abdelmajid Farkhet, alias "The Tunisian", was named last week in international arrest warrants connected with the attacks.

Interior Minister Angel Acebes said the suspect died in an explosion in a Madrid suburb on Saturday night.

One policeman was killed and 11 others hurt in the blast, some seriously.

Another of the dead suspects, Moroccan Abdennabi Kounjaa, was also among six suspects named in the arrest warrants, the interior minister said.

On Saturday, Mr Acebes said tests had confirmed that an unexploded bomb found on a high-speed railway line on Friday contained the same explosive as the Madrid bombs.

"The core of the group that carried out the attacks is either arrested or dead in yesterday's collective suicide, including the head of the operative commando," Mr Acebes told a news conference.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

UFO Rods Explained

A theory that many UFO's are plasma living creatures that was supposedly suportive by videotaped evidence has been debunked. Flying insects captured at the right speed and distance form rods due to videotape camera lenses.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

U.S. Funds Aid Venezuela Opposition

The United States is using a quasi-governmental organization created during the Reagan years and funded largely by Congress to pump about a million dollars a year into groups opposed to Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, according to officials in Venezuela and a Venezuelan-American attorney.

Some 2,000 pages of newly disclosed documents show that the little-known National Endowment for Democracy is financing a vast array of groups: campesinos, businessmen, former military officials, unions, lawyers, educators, even an organization leading a recall drive against Chavez. Some compare the agency, in certain of its activities, to the CIA of previous decades when the agency was regularly used to interfere in the affairs of Latin American countries.

"It certainly shows an incredible pattern of financing basically every single sector in Venezuelan society," said Eva Golinger, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based attorney who helped obtain the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. "That's the most amazing part about it."

Chris Sabatini, the endowment's senior program officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, acknowledged the organization is handing out $922,000 this year, largely (el - almost entirely) to groups opposed to Chavez, and gave out $1,046,323 last year.

In the wake of disclosures about the National Endowment for Democracy, Chavez has dropped his past caution on the topic and now openly accuses the United States of backing the 2002 coup attempt and bankrolling efforts to destabilize and overthrow his government. He is also threatening that Venezuela, one of the world?s top oil suppliers, might cut off shipments to the United States if the Bush administration persists in its efforts to undermine him.

The group's involvement in Venezuela "is in keeping with a pattern from NED's very origins when the Reagan administration used it to do overtly what it was trying to do covertly in Nicaragua -- undermine the Sandinista revolution," said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive in Washington. "The difference of course is that Ch?vez was elected and the Sandinistas were a revolutionary government."

Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet Files and an expert on declassified government documents, added: "The NED was created to supplement the activities of the CIA."

Michael Shifter, a former NED grants officer for Latin America who is now an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said that if the NED is inserting itself into Venezuela under the premise that Ch?vez is a cruel tyrant who is wiping out democracy and must be stopped, the group "is misreading the situation." While Chavez, a former paratrooper who led his own failed coup in 1992, has shown some troubling autocratic tendencies, Shifter said, democracy remains essentially intact.

The jails hold no political prisoners, he said. The opposition-owned press operates freely, with Chavez critics even calling for coups on national television. Tens of thousands of his opponents regularly protest in the streets. International observers considered the elections that brought Chavez to power free and fair. Foreign investors generally are "happy," Shifter said. Despite significant opposition, Chavez retains a strong base of support.

As for the opposition, he added, "there's this ambivalence about democratic methods."

Bush's Godfather policy - if we like you we'll do nothing otherwise we will bring you down.

Some leaders in [Latin America] are wondering privately whether President Bush has retreated from the American commitment to strengthening their political and economic institutions, a policy of Democratic and Republican administrations for two decades.

Shortly before he left office in 2003, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil said in an interview on Mexican television that became famous throughout the region that President Bush "knows nothing about Latin America" and "doesn't have the same web of contacts in the region as previous administrations."

"The first time I talked with President Bush, he showed a complete hands-off attitude" about defending free markets and democratic values, Mr. Cardoso said, adding, "Since we are not a threat, we have been consigned to irrelevance." Today, expressions of such attitudes are a staple in the region's press, and they worry some American experts on Latin America.

To such thinkers a pattern seems to have emerged in which the United States does not come to the rescue of friends of democracy and American policies like Gonzalo S?nchez de Losada in Bolivia or Fernando de la R?a in Argentina, even as it acts to help bring down leaders it cannot stomach, like Mr. Aristide and President Hugo Ch?vez of Venezuela.

As the cases of Argentina, Bolivia and Haiti indicate, the threat to stability today bears little resemblance to the classic Latin American military coup. Instead, the model is one of a popular uproar that forces an elected but unpopular (and in Mr. Aristide's case increasingly autocratic) leader to step down.

So while leaders may no longer look over their shoulders at the barracks, they have to worry about being thrown out of office because an impatient citizenry expects immediate results from a weak state with weak institutions. "That's an extremely disturbing attitude, because it provides no incentive to engage in democratic politics" and "only emboldens and heartens groups that are more interested in violence," said Michael Shifter of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based group.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

10 Preliminary Actions to Defeat Bush in 2004

A handy list to take your country back.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Bush Plotting To Overthrow Saddam Nine Days After 9/11

George Bush asked for Tony Blair's backing to remove Saddam Hussein from power just nine days after the 11 September attacks, over a private dinner at the White House, a US magazine reported last night.

Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, was at the dinner table as Mr Blair replied that he would rather concentrate on ousting the Taliban and restoring peace in Afghanistan.

In a 25,000-word article in this month's American edition of Vanity Fair, Sir Christopher recounts Mr Bush as responding: "I agree with you Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." Mr Blair, Sir Christopher writes, "said nothing to demur" at the prospect.

Sir Christopher's account presents a new challenge to Mr Blair's assertion that no decision was taken on the invasion of Iraq until just days before operations began, in March 2003. It implies regime change in Iraq was US policy immediately after 11 September.

el - It does more than imply but this again is stuff everyone should know. Everyone except Powell connected to foreign and military policy in Bush's cabinet had spend years waiting to get back in power to overthrow Saddam as the start for a new world war for the U.S.. This would be a war to create an unchallenged American Empire and insure a century of world dominance. The war would be to take down any state that had anything objectionable to American right-wing ideology. Non-state threats like al Qaeda were not considered except as being sponsered by states. The Vulcan neo-con radicals in the Bush administration were recreating their glory days of a cold war with the Soviet Union. See Pax Americana doctrine and Project for a New American Century, as they were quite open about developing this.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Chalabi Provided All Four Lying Iraqi Defectors

The Iraqi National Congress, a U.S.-funded group of former Iraqi exiles, supplied the four defectors whose claims that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological warfare facilities now are being questioned by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

One of the defectors was code-named Curveball, senior U.S. officials said, and Curveball was the brother of a top lieutenant to Ahmed Chalabi, the group's leader and now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. U.S. intelligence officials never directly questioned Curveball before the war, they said.

A second defector was determined to be a fabricator, but his claims still found their way into the Bush administration's case for war, according to U.S. officials.

"The other two (defectors) were not as significant," said a senior U.S. official, who like all of those who spoke requested anonymity because the matter remains classified. "Their information appeared corroborative of the overall thing."

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Papers on 1964 LBJ - CIA Backed Brazil Coup Declassified

Jim referred me to this AP story: Newsday.com - AP World News

The documents show members of Lyndon B. Johnson's administration actively preparing to aid the coup plotters.

In a March 27, 1964, cable to the State Department, [Ambassador] Gordon requested a naval task and deliveries of fuel and arms to the coup plotters "to help avert a major disaster here."

Gordon said in the cable that Brazil could fall under the spell of a communist-style regime led by President Joao Goulart, "which might make Brazil the China of the 1960s." Mainland China turned communist in 1949 under Mao Zedong.

The documents also reveal what some experts say was a major miscalculation by the CIA.

A CIA cable from Brazil, dated March 30, predicted a military coup "within the next few days." It added, "The revolution will not be resolved quickly and will be bloody."

In fact, the coup was put in motion the next day, March 31, and was over by April 4, when Goulart fled to exile in Uruguay. The entire episode was bloodless.

From 1964 to 1985, Brazil was ruled by a string of five colorless military presidents chosen by their fellow officers. The dictatorship ended in 1985 when a democracy movement swept the country.

el - This is kinda everybody knows this was a CIA coup but the extent this was directed by LBJ is revealed. Not that you really get it from the right-wing AP story. As usual, Jim Lobe provides better background.

"I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do," [LBJ] tells Ball on Mar. 31, 1964, the day before Brazilian President Joao Goulart fled the country.

"We just can't take this one," he says, apparently referring to Goulart, whose populist rhetoric and alleged association with leaders of the Brazilian Communist Party had fostered fears that South America's largest country could turn into a giant Cuba.

"I'd get right on top of it and stick my neck out a little," adds Johnson, who one year later would send thousands of Marines to intervene in civil unrest in the Dominican Republic.

He then calls for "everybody that had any imagination or ingenuity ... (Central Intelligence Agency Director John) McCone ... (Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara," to ensure that the coup that was already in play in Brazil was successfully concluded.

Much has already been revealed about US support for a military coup.

In 1976, for example, secret documents uncovered by a graduate student at the University of Texas and later published in the Brazilian press offered some details about CIA operations and also confirmed that Washington had deployed a aircraft carrier task force that included destroyers and oil tankers off the Brazilian coast at the time of the coup, presumably to intervene either covertly or overtly on behalf of the coup forces, if Gordon deemed it necessary.

"These documents reflect the degree to which the Johnson administration, starting with the president himself, was willing to intervene to ensure the success of this coup," said Peter Kornbluh, the chief Latin American researcher at the NSA.

"They shed new details about sending arms and ammunition via submarine and appropriating an Esso tanker to support rebels forces, if needed.

"They make it more clear than ever before that the US was prepared to do a great deal – overtly if necessary – if the coup did not quickly succeed, to ensure that Goulart was indeed overthrown," he added.

While the new releases contribute more to what is known about the coup and the US role in it, the record remains far from complete, according to Kornbluh, who said the CIA has failed to disclose documents relating to its operations in Brazil, in contrast to those concerning its actions with respect to the military regimes in Chile and Argentina.

Is Venezuela next?

Someone once asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization.

"It would be nice," he replied.

Democracy in Latin America might also prove nice if the United States would allow it to occur. Traditionally, when Latin Americans elect governments that show even vague intentions of redistributing the lopsided national wealth toward the poor, U.S. officials get their knickers in a twist and force new elections: the pro-U.S. candidate then emerges. But Washington’s rhetorically concealed fusion between popular elections and imperial appointments hardly assures Latin American stability.

Indeed, since 1999, seven hemispheric heads of state have left office before finishing their terms. In October, four months before U.S. and French officials dispatched Haiti's elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, pro U.S. President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozado fled Bolivia to Miami. Massive popular protests erupted against his pro-American economic policies. Similarly, Paraguay's Raul Cubas had to quit when faced with heavy opposition, some of it turbulent.

Ecuador's pro free trade president, Jamil Mahuad, also got 86’d. Peruvians sort of elected the fascistic Alberto Fujimori, currently exiled in Japan and facing criminal charges in Peru – and also hoping to return to Peru to grab the presidency again. President Alejandro Toledo, who replaced the disgraced Fujimori, followed U.S. dictates on free trade that has created deep unrest. In December 2001, Argentina's economy collapsed and Fernando De la Rua resigned in the face of popular revolts against neo-liberal policies. Pro-U.S. economic (free trade) policies caused the undoing of these regimes.

"Pro-U.S.," however, hardly describes Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the current target for covert destabilizing.

Gary Permalink on 4/04/2004

Powell: Iraq biological labs intelligence was shaky

No shit, Sherlock.

I had this over a year ago. I have reported numerous times (link to a summary debunking this year) his entire presentation did not hold water and was discredited point by point shortly after it was given.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Here's where things seem to stand in Iraq:

-In less that three months, the US is supposedly handing power over to an Iraqi interim government. [el - Right now, there is no plan or agreement to whom.]

-In the Sunni Triangle, a lot of people obviously don't like the US.

-The majority of relatively moderate Shiites, led by Ayatollah Sistani, aren't too happy about the lack of elections prior to the establishment of Iraq's new regime.

-The more radical Shiites, whom firebrand Moqtada Sadr has been trying to rally, have just been given a boost by Bremer's decision to padlock one of their newspapers. (Juan Cole notes a large protest demo in Baghdad that was overshadowed by yesterday's news from Fallujah.)

-We're not far from spending $250 billion on operations in Iraq (counting the war itself and money not yet included in the President's budget request). That's compared to less than $2 billion on reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda did have a base. (Another tip of the hat to Cole for that trenchant point.)

-Condoleezza Rice, who was tasked last fall with overseeing America's postwar effort in Iraq, is a little distracted these days.

-Ahmed Chalabi, a crook who STILL has the ear of the DOD and hundreds of thousands in monthly payments from the US Treasury, money that helped buy trumped up stories of Iraq's WMD in the past, is still on track to become Iraq's Prime Minister. [el - Despite having 0.1% support and being the most distrusted leader in a British poll of Iraqis.]

-The American media, pushed by gleeful Democrats who are very good at scoring points against Bush's past mistakes but very bad at articulating how we get out of this mess, aren't paying much attention to any of this.

If you, like I, was an opponent of the Iraq War--because we didn't believe there was a connection between Iraq and 9-11 or al-Qaeda, because we didn't believe Saddam presented an imminent threat to the US, because we believed the UN inspections were steadily working to contain any WMD ambitions he might have, because we feared the post-war chaos and sectarian competition that would be unleashed inside Iraq (with us as the overseers), and because we felt that any humanitarian intervention to overthrow Saddam should have included a much broader UN-mandated coalition of forces--it's tempting to just sit back and watch Bush and Crew stew in their own juices. This mess is their creation, after all.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Revenge of the WarBots

Wow, from tex on anti-war blog: Many civilians have been killed in Iraq and up to now the Nuke Fallujah crowd hasn't protested. Four American missionaries were gunned down in Mosul just last month, two of them women, eliciting no warbot retaliation strikes. It can't be the grisly nature of the deaths, because American corpses have been defiled by crowds in Iraq before, most notably the incident in Mosul last November. No one seemed to think Mosul should be nuked.

So, what is special about these four mercs?

[It is] because they are having difficulty dealing with their own responsibility for the deaths of those four Americans. Since there are no weapons of mass destruction and no credible proof that Hussein had anything to do with 9-11, there is no real reason that those four should have been there in the first place. Nevertheless they were there, why? I say they died in large part because of the mindless jingoism espoused by the likes of Bruce and O’Reilly. People in this country are constantly advocating that the government take some kind of action, but they never want to take any responsibility for the results of the actions that they advocate.

The warbots see the meltdown of all the justifications for their Excellent Iraqi Adventure, the roach-like scrambling for cover as the "War President" and his courtiers try to stonewall and evade the 9/11 commission, the military deaths mounting, the civilian deaths mounting, the pervasive anti-Americanism growing in intensity world-wide but most notably in Muslim and Arab countries, and their illusions of "democracy-building" shattering as the deadline for "Iraqi sovereignty" rushes toward them like a runaway freight train even as Iraq spirals into chaos and lawlessness. In the midst of this debacle, Fallujah rebels create a scene so horrible that it's like waving a neon flag in the face of the most tuned-out American and yelling "Look at this disgusting, bloody, violent mess over here! It's getting worse every day!"

Own it, warbots. We tried to warn you. We protested, we railed and wrote arguments against the war, but you wouldn't listen. Now, those mercs killed in Fallujah were your responsibility. You put them there, with your cakewalking, rosepetal fantasies and ridiculous misconceptions about Iraq. The blood of all the dead from your illegal, unjustified war in Iraq - both "coalition" and Iraqi - is on your hands.

Daily Kos was attacked and smeared across the blog right-wing community because of his stand that it is not surprising that mercenaries are killed and vilified.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

The Death of Bush's Compassionate Conservatism

Polls Show President's 'Compassion' Rating Falling Steadily

The Post poll found Americans split over whether Bush has governed in a compassionate way, with 49 percent saying he has and 45 percent saying he has not. That is down sharply from February 2003, when a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans thought he had governed compassionately.

While a majority of Americans (58 percent) say Bush has governed as expected, the Post poll showed that the rest are about twice as likely to say the president has been less compassionate (25 percent) than to say he has been more compassionate (13 percent). Forty-four percent now believe Bush cares most about serving upper-income people, an increase from 31 percent in September 1999 and 39 percent in July 2000. Forty-one percent believe Bush cares equally about all people, with small numbers saying he favors the poor or the middle class.

el - I would have to say that Bush's promises to govern compassionately and to change the tenor of American politics were beyond misleading to the point of being lies. But I knew that in 2000.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Economist cover story and picture

Better Ways to Attack Bush on Atrios

Another Reason to Love the Economist on Kos

I love the hot air and no cojones bits. "Even when Clinton was under impeachment, no magazines showed an arrow pointing directly at his Little Adviser."

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Bush I thought atheists aren't citizens

At a news conference in Chicago on August 27, 1987, which I covered as a fully credentialed journalist, I asked Vice President Bush several questions. In response to one question, Bush said, "I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God."

More quotes from that news conference here.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

TV Shows Against Bush

Liberal media elite has had it, asking pointed questions, bringing up Bush in shows.

It has been pointed out this was another poor ass reporter from the New York Times repeating GOP talking points.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Top Ten Questions You're Afraid To Ask Condoleezza Rice

10. "Did Bush ever hurt himself trying to pronounce your name?"

9. "At cabinet meetings, who besides you and Cheney wear lipstick?"

8. "Do you know Leeza Gibbons?"

7. "Do you own a condo?"

6. "Did you ever try the 'Condoleezza Rice' at Chi-Chi's?"

5. "As a souvenir, did you keep any of Saddam's beard lice?"

4. "Hey, where'd you get that cool Halliburton sweatshirt?"

3. "Who told CNN that Letterman faked the footage of the bored kid next to Bush?"

2. "About those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction -- did you check Baghdad Mini-Storage?"

1. "What kind of job will you and Bush be looking for in January 2005?"

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

More Baghdad Today

The Ugly American's Quagmire

'Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier. She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head.
"No," she replies.

We try not to notice that there are 60 room keys in pigeonholes behind her desk - the place is empty.

"Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"

She hesitates. "Ahh ... No."

We return to our current hotel - the one we want to leave because there are bets on when it is going to get hit - and flick on the TV: the BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the September 11 commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether invading Iraq has made America safer.

They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators and pretty much anyone else associated with the Americans. Which is why we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her decision: if you want to survive in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us. (We thought about explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are sporting the maple leaf - that is, when they aren't trying to disappear behind their newly purchased headscarves.)

The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, hasn't started wearing a hijab yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are teaching Iraqis about press freedom. "I never thought before that the coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people," one trainee is quoted as saying. "Now I can see it on my eyes that they are doing good things for my country and the accomplishment they made. I wish my people can see that, the way I see it."

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shia cleric has been preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So far, al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed resistance, but many here are predicting that closing down the newspaper - a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation - was just the push he needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty of the presidential envoy to Iraq: Bremer's first act after being tapped by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful pensions, but allow them to hold on to their weapons - in case they needed them later.

While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office, I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola. I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer," Khamis told me, flanked by a line-up of 30 Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."

These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US multinational in Iraq's new "free market". It's also that few Iraqis supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam executed both his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "you can't imagine how much relief we felt", he says.

"It's not the war that caused the hatred. It's what they did after. What they are doing now."

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

The Axles of Evil and Other White House Secrets

Jim sends me this rant by Sebastian

I don’t watch presidential speeches or political speeches in general. I didn’t watch
Clinton’s speeches and I certainly don’t watch Bush’s.

Here’s why. Politician’s speeches are written by speechwriters. Who are speechwriters you say? Speechwriters are clever, well educated, well spoken articulate men and women who write intelligent, reasoned and generally well though out speeches for their pig ignorant, inbred, bone-headed politician/employers.

Would the nation not be better served if the speechwriters held power instead of their pig ignorant, inbred, bone-headed politician/employers? Why yes, but the speechwriters lack the necessary personality deficits and psychoses essential for success in public life.

When you hear a well turned phrase or line coming out of the mouth of your favorite politico you can be assured that it was composed by some speechwriter sweating away in a windowless back office.

Before, this fact, while undoubtedly true, was hard to prove as the speechwriter took a
solemn and required oath to preserve forever the true depth of his boss’s ignorance from the public. Now however, thru the glory of email and specifically the forward button we know the true author of “Bush’s” axis of evil line. It is, trumpet blast, David Frum
former Canadian journalist and author and until recently Whitehouse speechwriter.

Frum's wife, Danielle Crittenden, also a Canadian and currently a journalist, expressed
her glee at her husband’s authorship of the phrase in an e-mail to her friends.
Washington D.C. being what it is, one of said friends forwarded the email to the online
political magazine, Slate, which published it.

Not that I’m implying that “Axis of Evil” is any great moment in the history of rhetoric
or that policy behind it makes any sense. It’s just that the chance of Bush coming up with
it all by his lonesome is about as likely as his being able to define or pronounce
antidisestablishmentarism.

Having said all this; I would like to say that if president Clinton had been handed a
speech by his speechwriters which contained the phrase “Axis of Evil” I don’t think it
would have been necessary to explain that to him that; at least in this case, the word
“Axis” did not refer to the part of the pickup truck that the wheel bolts onto.

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Broken US troops face bigger enemy at home

Bush's War grinding up veterans who face cost cutting at home

A stretched Pentagon is sending unfit soldiers back to Iraq long before they are ready to serve again.

The Guardian has uncovered more than a dozen instances in which ill or injured soldiers were sent to war by a US military whose resources have been stretched near to breaking point by the simultaneous fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In its investigation, the Guardian learned of soldiers who were deployed with almost wilful disregard to their medical histories, and with the most cursory physical examinations. Soldiers went to war with chronic illnesses such as coronary disease, mental illness, arthritis, diabetes and the nervous condition, Tourette's syndrome, or after undergoing recent surgery.

One sergeant major was shipped out two months after neck surgery, despite orders from his military doctor for six months' rest. "The nurse told me to put my hands above my head and said you are good to go," he told the Guardian. A female supply sergeant said she was sent to Kuwait under medical advice not to walk more than half a mile at a time, or carry more than 50lb. Both had to be medically evacuated within weeks; the sergeant major required surgery on his return.

In some cases, the wounded were recycled with alarming speed. A mechanic, who suffered brain damage last June when his vehicle was hit by a suicide bus, was sent back to Iraq in October despite reported blurred vision and memory loss. He returned with his unit last month, and medical evaluations showed he had continued bleeding from the original head injury.

15,000 soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed for disability claims. Some 12,000 have sought medical treatment from facilities run by the department of veterans affairs. About 4,600 have sought psychological counselling. That demand threatens to overwhelm a veterans' healthcare system that has received no new funding since the Iraq war began.

The drain on combat-ready soldiers - and the costs of carrying those damaged by this war - are becoming logistical nightmares for military planners. The Pentagon has already been forced to extraordinary measures. Last year, it locked up the service contracts of National Guard members and army reservists, preventing them from leaving the military when their time is up.

Gerry Mosley, 49, a first sergeant in a transportation unit, was injured jumping off a truck that came under fire. By the time he was medically retired on March 17, he was taking 56 pills a day for shoulder, back and spinal conditions, post-traumatic stress disorder, and Parkinson's which was not diagnosed when he was shipped out.

Mosley also developed an abiding anger against an institution he served for 31 years, accusing the army of trying to shirk responsibility for his condition now he was surplus to requirements.

"I went to Iraq and fought the enemy, not knowing I was going to come back to the United States and fight a bigger enemy," he says.

Link provided by Editerette13

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Molly Ivins Latest

Gary Permalink on 4/03/2004

Eat Your Heart Out, Janet

BAD ATTITUDES: Good Golly Miss Piggie!

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

I'm listening to Howard Dean and Jeanine Garofalo

Senator Garofalo.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Jaclyn Smith Nude

The Charlie's Angels Hottie at RetroCrush

An easy on the eyes real collection.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

A Better Live Play of Air America Liberal Radio

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Teen charged with sexually abusing herself

State police have charged a 15-year-old Latrobe girl with child pornography for taking photos of herself and posting them on the Internet.

Police said the girl, whose identity they withheld, photographed herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She then sent the photos to people she met in chat rooms.

A police report did not say how police learned about the girl. They found dozens of pictures of her on her computer.

She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.

el - wasn't child porn laws supposed to be about protecting children, not charging them with making it?

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Tbogg

...Isn't the fact that the Iraqi people wouldn't want us occupying their country one of the main reasons that those of us who didn't want this stupid war cited back in those days prior to Shock & Awe & Bluster & Death? As someone once said: an attack on a soveriegn country will make the people of that country support their leader no matter how horrible, evil, or inept that person is.

Just look at what happened after 9/11.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

The Whistleblowers

What do all these flip-floppers have in common? Not subject matter: DiIulio worked on social policy, O'Neill on economics, Clarke on national security. Not party: Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt are Democrats; O'Neill is a Republican; Clarke worked for President Reagan and both Bushes as well as for President Clinton. The only thing they have in common is that they all cooperated with this administration before deciding they'd been conned. Flip-flopping, it turns out, is the final stage of trusting George W. Bush.

How Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt got whiplash. They supported tax cuts in 2001 when Bush challenged them to give back some of the surplus. Then the surplus vanished, Bush demanded more tax cuts, and they decided they'd been conned. They supported Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education bill in 2001. Then the administration withheld money for it, and they decided they'd been conned. They supported the Patriot Act after 9/11 when Bush urged them to trust law enforcement. Then the Justice Department took liberties with its new powers, and they decided they'd been conned. They voted for a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq after the administration promised to use the resolution as leverage toward U.N. action, reserving unilateral war as a last resort. Then Bush ditched the United Nations and went to war, and they decided they'd been conned.

When the administration offered them a supposedly $400 billion Medicare bill stuffed with goodies for health insurers and drug companies, they said no. But lots of fiscally conservative House Republicans said yes. Now, thanks to yet another flip-flopping Bush administration whistleblower, those Republicans have discovered that the real bill, concealed by the White House, will be $150 billion higher than advertised. You don't have to be a Democrat to feel conned.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Mogadishu Deja Vu

This is surely one of the ugliest incidents involving American citizens that I can ever remember. And it certainly does beg the question -- why are we there? In an entire city not a single individual came to the aid of Americans -- not one. Is this the thanks we get for sending our young men and women to die there? Ostensibly to secure 'democracy' for these people? These people who behave like crazed murderous beasts?

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

WHERE WAS THE AIR NATIONAL GUARD?

Ted Rall asks the real question about 9/11.

Once it became obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked--at one point that Tuesday morning, Clarke says the FAA thought it had as many as "eleven aircraft off course or out of communications"--why didn't our government intercept them?

The notion of a hijacked passenger jet meandering over the northeastern United States, unmolested for more than an hour before blasting away a chunk of the Pentagon, should appall anyone whose taxes contributed to the quarter of a trillion dollars spent on defense that year. And if you stop and think about it, there was actually two hours in which something could have been done.

Fifteen minutes after taking off from Boston at 7:58 am, American Airlines flight attendant Madeline Sweeney telephoned a flight services manager back at Logan airport to report that two of her colleagues had been stabbed and a passenger had had his throat cut by Middle Eastern men. "This flight has been hijacked," she concluded, maintaining her professional composure as Los Angeles-bound Flight 11 veered south toward Manhattan. Meanwhile, up in the cockpit, the pilot was frantically clicking his transmission button to tell air traffic controllers what was happening.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Springtime, Hammocks and Fake Breasts

What is wrong with this picture? (contains nudity)

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Nude Golfer

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

"Billionaires for Bush" coming to Houston!

The national chapter of "Billionaires for Bush" wants to starts some activities here in the Prez's back yard!
http://billionairesforbush.com/index.php

Are you tired of the way that billionaires get discriminated against?
. . . How Halliburton is getting screwed by the government?
. . . The way that corporations don't have enough power and money?
. . . Unfair attacks on oil companies?
. . . Not enough wars for you?

Then this is the group you MUST join. It's time for for American's most significant oppressed group, billionaires, to organize to fight for our rights.

Remember, "no billionaire left behind."

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Bush's Biggest Failure

The Texas Observer -- Peak Oil Is Passing With No Plan

Democrats are attacking George W. Bush on many fronts: the lousy intelligence that led to the Second Iraq War, his go-it-alone foreign policy, the faltering economy, the paucity of new job creation, his penchant for deficit spending, his questionable record while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, and even his syntax and invention of words like “nucular.” All of those things are being used to bludgeon Bush.

But all of them pale when compared to the most important issue in America today: energy. George W. Bush’s greatest failure as the 43rd president of the United States has been his lack of serious action on energy policy at a time when the world desperately needs leadership from America. Global energy consumption is soaring. Oil and gas production is faltering. Almost every month, new studies come out that corroborate the harm being done to the world’s atmosphere by carbon dioxide, which comes from the burning of fossil fuels. And yet, Bush has done nothing to address America’s long-term energy needs or deal with the greenhouse gas problem.

The unfortunate truth about America in 2004 is that it is in the same position as it was in 1973, when the first OPEC-induced oil shocks paralyzed the country. Despite three decades of rhetoric, six different presidents, and a plethora of promises, America still doesn’t have a viable long-term energy policy. It never has. America has been stuck in the same misguided trance that has paralyzed policy makers since the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided to shut off the flow of oil to America in early 1973. Despite all that has happened since then—additional OPEC price hikes, two wars in Iraq, and the Saudi-funded attacks on America on September 11, 2001, to name just a few—America’s policy-makers are still afflicted with acute energy myopia and a firm belief that we can produce ever-increasing amounts of energy to fill our gas tanks. And George W. Bush and his cronies are the blindest of them all.

Cheney’s report can be summed up thusly: America doesn’t need more efficiency or renewable energy because there’s always going to be plenty of oil available. We can produce our way out of our energy predicament. There’s only one problem with that thinking: It’s not true.

On January 9, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the second largest oil company on earth, announced that it had overbooked its proven reserves by 20 percent and that it would write down its asset base to reflect that fact.

The bad news hasn’t stopped. A short time after announcing that its reserves were far less than it had claimed, Shell announced that its oil and gas production fell by 2 percent in 2003, that it would be flat for all of 2004, and that production would fall again in 2005. The other major oil companies had similar results. In late January, Irving-based ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, announced that despite record profits of $21.5 billion in 2003, its total oil and gas production fell 1 percent. The company said that it produced less energy even though it spent about $20 billion exploring for new oil and gas deposits. California-based ChevronTexaco told a similar story. It, too, had a huge profit of $7.2 billion, but its total oil and gas output fell 2 percent, even though it spent over $4 billion exploring for new energy deposits.

Indeed, a quick look at ExxonMobil’s annual reports shows that the company’s energy production has been flat or declining for the last six years. In 1998, the company’s production of oil and gas totaled 4.27 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. (The oil equivalent figure combines total oil and gas production into one figure.) In 2003, the oil giant produced 4.20 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Oil production in the Persian Gulf has been flat since 1997. According to the Energy Information Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy, the entire region produced about 18 million barrels of oil per day in 2002, about the same amount as five years earlier.

I could provide many more examples of why world oil supplies are tightening, but the simple truth is that Hubbert’s Peak is upon us. The issue is being discussed at virtually every major energy conference and industry gathering. And it’s happening at a time when demand for energy is increasing dramatically. In January, the International Energy Agency estimated that worldwide demand is growing by nearly 2 percent per year. In February, ExxonMobil predicted that worldwide energy demand will have grown by 40 percent by 2020. In short, more and more people on planet Earth are vying for fewer and fewer resources. The surge in demand is coming primarily from two of the fastest growing countries on Earth: China and India.

World oil markets might be able to absorb China’s burgeoning demand if energy demand in the United States slows down or declines. But it isn’t. Instead, it’s rising. Between 1990 and 2000, America’s total energy consumption increased by 16 percent, to the equivalent of nearly 48 million barrels of oil per day. America’s share of world energy consumption is rising, too. From 1990 to 2000, U.S. energy use increased from 25.3 percent to 27.3 percent of total world consumption. In 2000, Americans burned more fuel than all of the countries of Europe combined.

The United States is actually driving backward when it comes to fuel efficiency. Vehicles made in America today are about 7 percent less efficient (on a miles per gallon basis) than they were in 1987.

The Bush’s Administration’s decision to ignore the looming global energy crisis verges on criminal. Bush has certainly earned a place in American history. His misbegotten rush to send American troops into the Second Iraq War will likely be the headline for his entry in the history books. But there should be another entry: one recalling that Texas oil man George W. Bush was the president who, when faced with Hubbert’s Peak and the myriad of dangers that came with it, kept his head firmly up his own tailpipe.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

This White House Will Lie About Anything

And the media will cover for them.

Letterman poked fun at Bush by showing a video of a kid falling asleep during a speech Bush made in Florida. The White House called CNN, which was replaying the story, and said the tape was doctored. Letterman proved it wasn't and denounced them for saying it was. CNN says they misspoke, it wasn't the White House that called. Letterman says he knows it was.

Story here and here.

The White House -- any White House -- dodging questions is nothing new. More disturbing is CNN's apparent disregard in this case for the public's right to the true story. For a news organization, that obligation ought to trump everything else -- including any internal embarrassment over missing the bucket completely on what should have been a slam dunk.

Daryl Kagan offered yet another elaboration, stating that the White House did not ever call CNN to allege the tape was faked and served up an apology -- not to viewers, but to Letterman. But an apology is not an explanation, and there have to be a few hundreds of thousands of baffled CNN devotees still wondering how you get something like that wrong twice in two hours.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Flying Blind With No End In Sight

Herbert - There were 4,000 marines stationed near Falluja when Wednesday's gruesome attack occurred. But Marine commanders, as The Times's Jeffrey Gettleman reports, decided they would not intervene to stop the mutilation of the bodies. The atrocity unfolded without interference.

On that same day five soldiers were killed when their convoy rolled over a bomb buried in the road in a town 15 miles west of Falluja. A major trade show in Baghdad that was supposed to be held next week to showcase investment opportunities in the new Iraq had to be postponed yesterday because of security concerns.

We are mired in a savage mess in Iraq, and no one knows how to get out of it. More than 600 U.S. troops are already dead. The rest of the world has decided that this is an American show, so we're not getting much in the way of help. (Even the Saudis have been sticking their fingers in Uncle Sam's eye, leading the effort by OPEC to cut oil production.) President Bush won't come clean about the financial costs of the war. His mantra remains: tax cuts, tax cuts.

We're flying blind. There's no evidence that the president or anyone in his administration knows what the next act of this great tragedy will be.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Unemployment Rate Really Over 7%

Unemployed Dropping Out of Labor Pool

The share of the U.S. population working or actively seeking a job has fallen to 65.9 percent, the lowest level in 16 years. Economists say the weak jobs market is causing people to give up their searches and drop out of the labor pool at an unusual pace.

Americans not actively seeking work when the Labor Department conducts its survey of households are not counted as unemployed. Those people say they have stopped looking because of frustration or personal responsibilities, such as deciding to attend school.

That growing trend has caused the participation rate to fall 1.2 percentage points since the start of the recession in March 2001. This is the first time the participation rate has fallen 27 months into an economic recovery.

"Normally in a recovery the participation rate would rise,'' said Sung Won Sohn, Wells Fargo's chief economist. "People hear about the improving economy and more job opportunities so they actually come out of the woodwork. We are seeing the opposite of what's been normal in the past. That's why the jobless rate has really become somewhat of a misleading indicator.''

If those people who want jobs but aren't looking were counted, the unemployment rate would be more than 7 percent, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com.

"To me, that is much more representative of the state of the job market,'' he said. "It doesn't feel like a 5.6 percent job market. It feels like more of a 7 or a 7 and a half percent job market.''

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Administration Smears Without Fear

Krugman - Look, I understand why major news organizations must act respectfully toward government officials. But officials shouldn't be sure — as Mr. Wilkinson obviously was — that they can make wild accusations without any fear that they will be challenged on the spot or held accountable later.

And administration officials shouldn't be able to spread stories without making themselves accountable. If an administration official is willing to say something on the record, that's a story, because he pays a price if his claims are false. But if unnamed "administration officials" spread rumors about administration critics, reporters have an obligation to check the facts before giving those rumors national exposure. And there's no excuse for disseminating unchecked rumors because they come from "the White House," then denying the White House connection when the rumors prove false. That's simply giving the administration a license to smear with impunity.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Earthquake For California Desert by September?

A state earthquake council has given a qualified endorsement to a prediction by a group of scientists who believe that a temblor of magnitude 6.4 or greater will occur in the Southern California desert sometime in the next five months.

The scientists piqued interest after they forecast the magnitude-6.5 San Simeon quake in December and the magnitude-8.1 quake last year off Japan's Hokkaido island. In both cases, the group set wide parameters in place and time.

The team bases its predictions on long chains of small earthquakes recorded in the area.

The team of scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, predicts that a quake will occur within a 12,000-square-mile area east of Los Angeles by Sept. 5. The zone includes a large swath of the Mojave Desert, the Coachella Valley, the Imperial Valley and eastern San Diego County.

Emergency officials in Victorville said last month they were aware of the prediction and generally advise residents to be prepared for any disaster.

Basic preparedness would include a 72-hour survival kit with necessities, such as water, food, clothing, blankets, a flashlight, a radio and batteries.

An evacuation plan, important phone numbers and a list of places to go are also suggested.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Democracy Taking Root In Iraq

In response to this week’s violence in Fallujah, the White House, reminiscent of those McNamara days, says, "These are horrific attacks by people who are trying to prevent democracy from moving forward, but democracy is taking root."

Of course it is. It’s taking root in its ugliest form – mob rule, insecurity of Iraqi people of all ethnic and religious groups, demagoguery and yellow journalism manipulated by those jockeying for political power.

Yellow journalism in Iraq – rumor-mongering and manipulation of local fears in pursuit of certain political ends – is something we Americans deal with every day here at home. One honorable and brave and lonely American reporter has pointed out that Randolph Hearst had nothing on the mainstream press of modern America. In Iraq, we lock down newspapers and arrest the evildoers. In Washington and New York, they are entertained with degrading jokes, expensive dinners and continued favored access to the administration’s key policymakers.

One year after their order systems were blasted into the past, most Iraqis wait, worry and wonder. But for those in the Anbar Province, they act democratically. Which is to say, the "will of the people" is expressed. Which is to say, using makeshift bombs and a motley array of Cold War weaponry, the people come together to kill Americans and the Iraqis who work with them.

el - Unfortunately Col. Karen is right, these appeared to be the people, not terrorists, an ugly vicious mob of people.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Bush Aides Block Clinton's Papers From 9/11 Panel

The White House confirmed on Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Mr. Clinton's files that had been gathered by the National Archives over the last two years in response to requests from the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law enforcement failures before the attacks.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," while others were withheld because they were "highly sensitive" and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways. "We are providing the commission with access to all the information they need to do their job," Mr. McClellan said.

The commission and the White House were reacting to public complaints from former aides to Mr. Clinton, who said they had been surprised to learn in recent months that three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of files the former president was ready to offer the commission had been withheld by the Bush administration. The former aides said the files contained highly classified documents about the Clinton administration's efforts against Al Qaeda.

Mr. Lindsey, who is Mr. Clinton's liaison to the National Archives, said he was surprised to discover from the archives in later months that the Bush administration, after reviewing the Clinton documents gathered by researchers there, had decided not to turn over most of the material.

He said he had read through many of the 10,800 pages that were collected and believed them to be valuable to the work of the panel.

"They involved all of the issues — Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, terrorism, all of the areas with the commission's jurisdiction," he said.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Late Night Political Jokes

"Not only will Condoleezza Rice testify, but President Bush has also agreed to meet with the (9/11) commission. He's going to testify, but he said he wants have Dick Cheney there with him. Why does he want Cheney with him? What? Does he have a learner's permit to be president and have to have an adult with him." —Jay Leno

"Michael Jackson was in Washington, DC and met with a number of Congressmen. He's pretty smart. He knows he's going to have to lie under oath pretty soon, so why not get some expert advice?" —Jay Leno

"Former Vice President Al Gore has purchased his own cable television channel. It's going to be the Al Gore TV network. He said it's going to be a lot like C-SPAN, but less exciting." —David Letterman

"Even Jessica Simpson is voting for John Kerry. You know Bush is in trouble when his own people are turning on him." —Craig Kilborn

Ditzy pop star Jessica Simpson, who is known for her idiotic verbal gaffes, delivered a doozy during a recent tour of the White House, the Washington Post reports. Upon being introduced to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Simpson gushed, "You've done a nice job decorating the White House." Sounds like she could be presidential material.

"The price of gas in California is going crazy. In fact, today I did something smart. I bought a gallon as an investment." —Jay Leno

"It's really getting ugly between the White House and this former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke. ... Clarke accused President Bush of subterfuge, an accusation President Bush both denied and had to look up." —Jay Leno

"They say that Saddam is stonewalling, he's refusing to talk, he's not giving out any information. No, wait a minute, that's Condoleezza Rice." —David Letterman

"John Kerry is quite an athlete. He's in Idaho and they showed him snowboarding. Did you see it on the news? Man he is a good snowboarder. He was going downhill faster than Howard Dean." —Jay Leno

"It's interesting. I see all these political ads and all these commentators say it's our job as Americans to vote. Let me tell you something, with Bush in charge of the economy, this might be the only job you have all year." —Jay Leno

"There was an article in the paper today that said America is really a place where losers can actually come out ahead. This is true, like Clay Aiken, who lost on 'American Idol,' he's a big star now. ... Trista lost on 'The Bachelor,' she's got her own dating show now. ... George Bush lost the election and became president of the United States." —Jay Leno

Weekly tracking compiled by Daniel Kurtzman

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Unemployment rate unchanged at 5.7 percent

Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 308,000 in March. This is the first real job growth for the administration.

The unemployment rate, 5.7 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, 8.4 million, were essentially unchanged in March. Both measures remained below their recent highs of June 2003. Unemployment rates for the major worker groups--adult men (5.2 percent), adult women (5.1 percent), teenagers (16.5 percent), whites (5.1 percent), blacks (10.2 percent), and Hispanics or Latinos (7.4 percent)--showed little or no change over the month.

In March, the number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons increased to 4.7 million, about the same level as in January. These individuals indicated that they would like to work full time but were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find full-time jobs.

The number of persons who were marginally attached to the labor force totaled 1.6 million in March, about the same as a year earlier. These individuals wanted and were available to work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed, however, because they did not actively search for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

Household data continues to contradict establishment data. The survey of households indicates that employment went down 3,000. That unemployment went up 182,000 and the number NOT in labor force also went up 14,000.

Average hourly earnings went up $0.02 and average weekly earnings went down $0.88.

Inside the numbers - the trash smells.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Left, Right, and Center

The only talk radio with all three sides, a weekly confrontation over politics, policy and popular culture.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Without Reservation

Karen Kwiatkowski on Dick Clarke

Clarke accurately describes the Cold Warriors in the Bush administration with "It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier." I and many others observed the same thing, at a lower level within the Pentagon.

The White House faces a grave and growing danger. Its attack machine is activated against Clarke, but, preferring character assassination over basic truth, it will be hard to sustain. Clarke's public stance of honor and credibility has real staying power, and it has already inspired and heartened both new witnesses and the mainstream media to seek and reveal the truth.

This truth is damaging to that single horse the administration is riding in this election race. The economy, the budget, the debt, veteran's benefits, military readiness, Medicare and social security crises, education, immigration – all are issues where the administration has sorely disappointed conservatives like me, as well as liberals and independents, in every state. If the war on terror horse stumbles, the administration falls.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Democracy Now interview with Sibel Edmonds

She says the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11 and calls Condoleezza Rice's claim the White House had no specific information on a domestic threat or one involving planes "an outrageous lie." [includes rush transcript]

"We had not one, but we had many specific informations."

"Attorney General Ashcroft on October 18, 2002, personally asserted State Secret Privilege in my case. I would read two sentences here: 'To prevent disclosure of certain classified and sensitive national security information, Attorney General Ashcroft today asserted the State Secret Privilege in Sibel Edmonds' case. This assertion was made at the request of the F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller,' in papers filed today, and they are citing the reason that because this case would create substantial risks of disclosing classified and sensitive national security information that could cause serious damage to our country's security. They are citing that this privilege is very rare and is asserted to prevent certain information getting -- becoming public or hurting diplomatic relations. I would underline this phrase, diplomatic relations several times."

"You see, after September 11, these people -- people from the F.B.I., came forward and they blamed everything on shortage of budgets and shortage of personnel. And they said, we failed, and these were the major causes. These were the reasons. That is not accurate. We were told during the time that these people were going on TV and they were begging for people to apply for translation positions because we had this shortage, what was going on behind the scenes was exactly opposite. We were being asked not to do these translations, and let the documents pile up, because within a month or so, they were scheduled to go in front of the Senate and Congress and ask for increased budgets. In doing so, they needed to give numbers of pages, numbers of documents and audios that they were not translated due to the shortage, and needed to be translated, and that they were urgent, and in order to do so, we had to increase that number, the number of pages and the number of audio. "

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

GOP House Defies Bush - Over Pork Spending

In using the popular transportation bill to advertise his tough position on spending, the president appears to have badly miscalculated the mood of members of his own party. Sweetening the House measure are about 3,000 parochial projects for home districts -- double the number approved in the previous long-term bill, passed in 1997.

They include a $15 million earmark to build a road to a gold mine in Alaska; $3 million for a river walkway in Montgomery, Ala.; and $250,000 to construct a transportation museum at a Cleveland high school.

At the same time, GOP lawmakers from Florida, Ohio, Michigan and other states seen as battlegrounds in the presidential election are demanding major changes in a highway aid formula that, they say, shortchanges their states. In tense sessions with House GOP leaders this week, some Republicans from those states indicated that they might vote against the bill unless the disparities are corrected.

Rather than forcing House Republicans into line, as in the past, the White House's veto threats provoked an unprecedented revolt by congressional Republicans.

el - I suspect some element of payback for Bush lying about Medicare Drug Bill costs.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

US 'knew' air attack coming

US officials knew months before September 11, 2001 that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network was planning to use aircraft to carry out a terrorist attack, a former FBI translator has alleged.

Sibel Edmonds told the Independent newspaper, in an interview published on Friday, that a claim by US President George W Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza Rice that there had been no such warnings was "an outrageous lie".

"President Bush said they had no specific information about September 11 and that is accurate but only because he said September 11," Edmonds told the Independent.

There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Iraq Survey

Apart from right and wrong, do you feel the US-led coalition force invasion -

Base = All respondents %
Humiliated Iraq 41.2
Liberated Iraq 41.8
Difficult to say 17.0
Total 100.0

Only 6.5% think the US should be a model for Iraq.

Ahmed Chalabi is trusted by 0.2% of the people to be a leader for Iraq. He has the largest percentage 10.3%, who do not trust him at all.

42.8% have no confidence at all in U.S. U.K. occupying forces, 23.5% have very little.

17.3% think attacks on coalition forces are acceptable, 13.6% think that attacks on the Coalition Provisional Authority are acceptable, 13.2% think that attacks on foreigners working for the CPA are acceptable, even 1.5% think that attacks on the new Iraq police are acceptable.

el - One out of six Iraqis think that attacking US and UK troops is acceptable, way to liberate Iraq and bring democracy Dubya.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Travel to Baghdad Blog

Several Iraq blog digests today.

I've got some friends in my local Pub who once went to Medallin in Cuba at the height of the cocaine war between the DEA / CIA and the Cuban Drug cartel. I was always jealous of the stories that they told so maybe I want to go one better than them.

Maybe it's for the money. We are being very well paid.

Maybe I'm just mad!

I think it's a combination of all of the above, but whatever the reasons, I'm going to Baghdad, and I've agreed with my best mate and co - worker Fiona (Fi) to keep a diary of my thoughts for her brothers web - site.

I've never done this kind of thing before, (allowing my thoughts to be scrutinized by others) but a deal's a deal, so here is my first ever 'blog' as she insists I call it.

After delays, arguments, second thoughts, third thoughts and more delays, we have finally been given our flight details.

Shit, it's really happening!

I'm actually going to travel into a warzone.

I've never really been one to study current affairs in any great depth, but when you're about to embark on a journey to one of the most dangerous places on earth via one of the most hazardous roads on earth, I think only a fool would ignore the news.

I wish I'd ignored the news.

I wish I didn't have satellite TV. Too much information.

It seems like I'm phoning Fi every couple of hours with more bad news. But she's determined to go, no matter what. She's got some balls that bird, I can tell ya.

Our boss has given us the chance to back out due to the increased hostilities, but, we're going to Baghdad, and Nothing can stop us.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

A Girl, A Toolkit, Iraq

Sallah tells us that Fallujah is the only place in Iraq where (even during Saddam’s regime) there was never a ruling Governor. It’s a real rebel town. Based on the traditional tribal system (which still exists). They are very proud and dignified people who WILL NOT accept within their multi – tribal society, working out their own co – existence, that there should be a person promoted to such a position that does not respect this equality and the diversity. The first Governor lasted a day before he was shot dead, the second, two. Rebel town.

On the way into Baghdad, he told us that both Fallujah and Ramadi were the most dangerous places for Westerners, as the US forces had come down hard on them, showing no respect for their traditions, beliefs, culture, dignity, intelligence… or the fact that they were actually, really, human beings.

So we find ourselves stopped by the US forces on the highway. Sallah (who speaks very good English) calls to a GI to find out if the road is being closed. The charmer he speaks to doesn’t take his hand off his automatic rifle and tells him to stay in lane. This is traffic control, GI style.

A conversation in Arabic between the Fixer and the driver. Next thing we know, we are off – roading, trying to find a different route. We can hear automatic gunfire.

And it sounds quite close.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Raed in the Middle

Violence is never the answer.

The extremely shallow foreign police of the American administration gives wrong indications, it proved for everyone in the Middle East region that violence is the only language that they understand…

I was watching one of the public discussion programs at Al-Jazeera channel, where an extremely angry man was shouting:
Americans are democratic for themselves, but for us? not at all. They don’t even know the meaning of diplomacy and politics. The only language they understand is the language of explosions. Tell me… why did Americans withdraw from Somalia? Because of peace talks or because of killing their soldiers brutally? Why did Israel, the untouchable daughter of the Americans, go out of Lebanon? Wasn’t that because of the unbearable pressure of Hizb Allah? Why did Americans leave Lebanon in the early eighties? Wasn’t that because a car bomb killed some dozens of their soldiers and civilians?

I would like to have a different answer for Mr. Extremist, but I just wish I could.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Tales from an Occupied Colony

Baghdad Burning

On a cold night in November, M., her mother, and four brothers had been sleeping when their door suddenly came crashing down during the early hours of the morning. The scene that followed was one of chaos and confusion- screaming, shouting, cursing, pushing and pulling followed. The family were all gathered into the living room and the four sons- one of them only 15- were dragged away with bags over their heads. The mother and daughter were questioned- who was the man in the picture hanging on the wall? He was M.'s father who had died 6 years ago of a stroke. You're lying, they were told- wasn't he a part of some secret underground resistance cell? M.'s mother was hysterical by then- he was her dead husband and why were they taking away her sons? What had they done? They were supporting the resistance, came the answer through the interpreter.

How were they supporting the resistance, their mother wanted to know? "You are contributing large sums of money to terrorists." The interpreter explained. The troops had received an anonymous tip that M.'s family were giving funds to support attacks on the troops.

It was useless trying to explain that the family didn't have any 'funds'- ever since two of her sons lost their jobs at a factory that had closed down after the war, the family had been living off of the little money they got from a 'kushuk' or little shop that sold cigarettes, biscuits and candy to people in the neighborhood. They barely made enough to cover the cost of food! Nothing mattered. The mother and daughter were also taken away, with bags over their heads.

Umm Hassen had been telling the story up until that moment, M. was only nodding her head in agreement and listening raptly, like it was someone else's story. She continued it from there - M. and her mother were taken to the airport for interrogation. M. remembers being in a room, with a bag over her head and bright lights above. She claimed she could see the shapes of figures through the little holes in the bag. She was made to sit on her knees, in the interrogation room while her mother was kicked and beaten to the ground.

M.'s hands trembled as she held the cup of tea Umm Hassen had given her. Her face was very pale as she said, "I heard my mother begging them to please let me go and not hurt me - she told them she'd do anything- say anything- if they just let me go." After a couple hours of general abuse, the mother and daughter were divided, each one thrown into a seperate room for questioning. M. was questioned about everything concerning their family life- who came to visit them, who they were related to and when and under what circumstances her father had died. Hours later, the mother and daughter were taken to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison- home to thousands of criminals and innocents alike.

In Abu Ghraib, they were seperated and M. suspected that her mother was taken to another prison outside of Baghdad. A couple of terrible months later- after witnessing several beatings and the rape of a male prisoner by one of the jailors- in mid-January, M. was suddenly set free and taken to her uncle's home where she found her youngest brother waiting for her. Her uncle, through some lawyers and contacts, had managed to extract M. and her 15-year-old brother from two different prisons. M. also learned that her mother was still in Abu Ghraib but they weren't sure about her three brothers.

M. and her uncle later learned that a certain neighbor had made the false accusation against her family. The neighbor's 20-year-old son was still bitter over a fight he had several years ago with one of M.'s brothers. All he had to do was contact a certain translator who worked for the troops and give M.'s address. It was that easy.

Abu Hassen was contacted by M. and her uncle because he was an old family friend and was willing to do the work free of charge. They have been trying to get her brothers and mother out ever since. I was enraged- why don't they contact the press? Why don't they contact the Red Cross?! What were they waiting for?! She shook her head sadly and said that they *had* contacted the Red Cross but they were just one case in thousands upon thousands- it would take forever to get to them. As for the press- was I crazy? How could she contact the press and risk the wrath of the American authorities while her mother and brothers were still imprisoned?! There were prisoners who had already gotten up to 15 years of prison for 'acting against the coallition'... she couldn't risk that. They would just have to be patient and do a lot of praying.

By the end of her tale, M. was crying silently and my mother and Umm Hassen were hastily wiping away tears. All I could do was repeat, "I'm so sorry... I'm really sorry..." and a lot of other useless words. She shook her head and waved away my words of sympathy, "It's ok- really- I'm one of the lucky ones... all they did was beat me."

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Bush Credibility Finally Taking Hits

The latest CBS News poll, conducted Tuesday through Thursday, shows declines in the president's approval ratings in a number of policy areas, but especially changes in the evaluation of the president's handling of terrorism.

Six in ten Americans are following the hearings closely; 56 percent say the administration is cooperating with the panel. But what the administration is saying does not receives high marks: 59 percent say it is hiding something it knew before Sept. 11, and 11 percent even say it is lying. Only one in four think the administration is telling the entire truth.

The president receives a 49 percent approval rating overall; his approval ratings on the economy, foreign policy, and Iraq are lower – and the lowest approval ratings he has received in these policy areas.

So far, the impact on the campaign is mixed. Nationally, the president appears to have lost ground in the last two weeks, trailing Democrat John Kerry among registered voters by five points, 48 percent to 43 percent. However, the election won't be determined by the size of the Democratic or Republican margins in states like Texas, New York and California, the largest states. There are 18 battleground states where the campaigns are already focusing their attention and their advertising campaigns. In those states, the race is tighter, with Mr. Bush receiving 47 percent to Kerry's 45 percent.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

U.S. Firms Keep Billions Overseas Away From US Taxes

Large US Companies Are Expanding Jobs Overseas And Shelter Income There

With sales up 5 percent last year, Merck & Co. was not satisfied: To hold down costs, the pharmaceutical giant shed 3,200 jobs as 2003 drew to a close, and announced that an additional 1,200 positions would go this year.

But Merck's picture abroad was quite different. It made 1,300 new hires in 2003 outside the United States, on top of the 900 brought on the year before. Company documents indicate that Merck had a cumulative $18 billion in foreign earnings untaxed by the end of last year, $3 billion more than in 2002. And the company said it had no intention of ever paying U.S. taxes on that burgeoning sum.

"Foreign earnings of $18.0 billion . . . have been retained indefinitely by subsidiary companies for reinvestment," Merck's annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said. "No provision is made for income taxes that would be payable upon distribution of such earning."

Last week, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the likely Democratic nominee for president, made such lucrative income-tax deferrals a focal point of his campaign, asserting that they are driving companies to expand abroad. Merck's numbers appear to back that up, and so do those of several other big U.S. companies.

By the end of its 2003 fiscal year, Hewlett-Packard Co. had "indefinitely" deferred taxation on $14.4 billion of foreign earnings, according to SEC filings, a move that helped lower its effective tax rate from the statutory corporate income tax rate of 35 percent to 12 percent.

Domestic employment at Intel Corp. slipped by more than 3,300 people last year, but it grew by more than 4,300 abroad. By the end of 2003, the company had $7 billion in cumulative foreign earnings, $700 million more than it had sheltered in 2002, according to SEC filings. The semiconductor powerhouse stated that it "intends to reinvest these earnings indefinitely in operations outside the U.S."

The U.S. tax code is actually encouraging the movement of jobs overseas.

"This is a big deal," agreed Robert S. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, who has inveighed against foreign tax deferral for years. As a company, he said, "you may go to India or China or Ireland for the wage differentials -- there's nothing we can do about that. But we don't have to pay you to go there."

"This is a largely broken system, rife with abuse," said Gene B. Sperling, a former economic aide to President Bill Clinton who advises Kerry and is an architect of the candidate's plan.

"There is a real problem here," said Gary C. Hufbauer, an international tax expert at the Institute for International Economics, who is skeptical of Kerry's proposal. "U.S. firms doing business in the U.S. are taxed more heavily than many of their foreign competitors. That's demonstrably true."

Under Kerry's plan, U.S.-based companies would have to pay taxes immediately on virtually all foreign profits that are not taxed by another country. Firms could still defer taxation on profits from subsidiaries set up abroad to serve local markets, but if a U.S. company sets up overseas to ship goods back home, taxes would be due in full.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

Girls Gone Riled: Will Single Women Break Bush's Heart?

ARIANNA ONLINE - Why don't single women vote?

As a group, single women feel particularly detached from the political process. They don’t believe that politicians listen to them or care about their problems. Compared to the big money interests that dominate our politics, they feel powerless to effect real change. They are also turned off by the overwhelmingly negative tone of modern campaigns.

If John Kerry is going to capture the hearts and votes of this crucial voting bloc, he’s going to have to offer them more than sweet talk and the policy equivalent of a dozen roses.

Luckily for Kerry, what he needs to do to attract single women voters is exactly the same thing he needs to do to attract the rest of the electorate: Provide a bold moral vision of what America can be. A vision that brings hope and soul back to our politics and appeals to more than voters’ narrow self-interests and unspoken prejudices.

Polls show that single women don’t see themselves as tied to any political party. But they do see themselves as part of the larger American community, and are deeply concerned about the well-being of their neighbors and the nation as a whole. “This year, politicians of any stripe ignore these women at their peril,” says Christina Desser, co-director of Women’s Voices.

Single women are fed up and desperately want change. Now it’s up to John Kerry to empower these Girls Gone Riled and convince them to kick George Bush to the curb.

Gary Permalink on 4/02/2004

GOP Grandmother Attacks Perry

Sounding like a challenger in the 2006 governor's race, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn gave Gov. Rick Perry a verbal pasting Wednesday, asserting that her Republican colleague needs pressure to act on public education and reverse health care cuts.

Advocates are poised today to mark the fourth anniversary of the Texas Children's Health Insurance Program by bemoaning an enrollment drop of nearly 120,000 children to 388,000 participants since last summer.

Lawmakers tightened CHIP access last year to save money. Changes include a 90-day waiting period between signing up and enrollment, increased co-payments, and requiring families to enroll their children every six months rather than annually.

Strayhorn said Perry should free up $583 million in available funds to restore CHIP, and also return benefits such as eyeglasses and hearing aids to adult Medicaid recipients.

She said Perry also should tell his appointed commissioner of health and human services to cancel plans to restrict CHIP access based on family assets, a change coming next month projected to whittle enrollment by an additional 4,700 children.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Bush Signs Fetus Rights Legislation

Plans to campaign on fetal right to vote soon.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Clarke - "Invading Iraq after 9/11 was like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor."

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Bill O'Reilly Advocates "Final Solution" for Arabs

Atrios blogging O'Reilly.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism - Obvious

On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.

The speech was postponed in the chaos of the day, part of which Rice spent in a bunker. It mentioned terrorism, but did so in the context used in other Bush administration speeches in early 2001: as one of the dangers from rogue nations, such as Iraq, that might use weapons of terror, rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.

The text also implicitly challenged the Clinton administration's policy, saying it did not do enough about the real threat -- long-range missiles.

Rice's text noted that Bush appointed Cheney to oversee a coordinated national effort to protect against a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction.

el - the Cheney coordinated national effort never met.

In April 2002, Rice followed through on her postponed Sept. 11 speaking engagement at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. But the speech she delivered did not contain any of the original text, former U.S. officials said.

In the revamped speech, Rice's focus was on the threat of international terrorists -- and missile defense was mentioned only once, almost in passing.

"An earthquake of the magnitude of 9/11 can shift the tectonic plates of international politics," she noted.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Majority Report Radio Blog

Janeane and I want you to be a part of what we’re doing. We welcome all your comments, suggestions, gripes etc.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

White House Scripted Some Clarke Questions on 9/11 Panel

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales called commissioner Fred F. Fielding, one of five GOP members of the body, and, according to one observer, also called Republican commission member James R. Thompson. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, wrote to Gonzales yesterday asking him to confirm and describe the conversations.

Waxman said "it would be unusual if such ex parte contacts occurred" during the hearing. Waxman did not allege that there would be anything illegal in such phone calls. But he suggested that such contacts would be improper because "the conduct of the White House is one of the key issues being investigated by the commission."

The 9/11 Widows Who Created and Still Dog the Panel

Since the commission began its work, the Sept. 11 relatives, who call themselves the Family Steering Committee, have dogged its every move. When the panel complained of a lack of money, they lobbied for a bigger budget — and won. When the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, refused to grant the panel an extension, they headed to Washington again, and the speaker retreated. "Public pressure by the 9/11 families," Mr. Hastert's spokesman, John Feehery, said about the reversal. "There is no doubt about that."

For every battle they have won, though, the families have lost others. The commission rejected their calls to subpoena classified intelligence briefings and to fire its executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, who co-wrote a book with Ms. Rice. The families also complained that last week's hearings deteriorated into a partisan spat over a book by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official. "They were right on that one," Mr. Kean conceded.

So the Jersey girls are not congratulating themselves now on Ms. Rice. "There are no victories here," Ms. Casazza said. Ms. Breitweiser added: "A victory implies that this is a game. And this is not a game."

Before Sept. 11, the Jersey girls (the nickname, which distinguishes the women from their New York and Connecticut counterparts, was popularized in song by Bruce Springsteen) knew little about government and less about politics. The closest Ms. Casazza came to foreign affairs was processing visa applications for French trainees while working for the cosmetics company Lancôme. Ms. Van Auken could not keep the two chambers of Congress straight.

"I remember saying to Patty: `Which one is the one with more people, the Senate or the House?' " she recalled.

The story of how they helped move a seemingly immoveable bureaucracy is at once the tale of a political education, and a sisterhood born of grief.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

We should be ashamed of CNN and the New York Times

Many example from recent Clake coverage by the Daily Howler.

...To state the obvious, Blitzer knew that this presentation was fake, designed to mislead Wolf’s viewers. Even if Blitzer wasn’t prepared to deal with this clowning at the time it occurred, didn’t he have an obligation to explain the facts at some later point? But this is a major problem facing the press as this White House spreads strings of fake, phony stories. Did Kerry “vote for higher taxes 350 times?” Everyone knows that this claim is pure crap. But very few members of the press have had the courage to deal with this problem.

How dumb is this White House willing to be? And just how far will journalists go to accomodate the Bush camp’s stupid stories? On Tuesday, we presented an example from David Sanger’s laughable piece in the New York Times (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/30/04). The White House wanted you to think that Clarke’s book was packed with mistakes. So a White House aide listed problems with Clarke’s first chapter—and Sanger obediently typed them on up. The first example that Sanger provided? At one point, Clarke quotes the aide, Franklin Miller, saying this: “What can I do?” But Miller said that didn’t sound right—more likely, he would have said: “How can I help?” And yes, this actually went in the Times, the first item in a long story which ran with a photo of Clarke. (Sanger included six examples in all.)

You’ll note that Clarke isn’t quoted here; Sanger helpfully paraphrases (he “describes the Situation Room as sparsely populated”). Of course, most of Sanger’s readers didn’t have Clarke’s book. But we do. Here’s what Clarke writes:

CLARKE (page 10): The White House compound was empty now except for the group with Cheney in the Easy Wing bomb shelter and the team with me in the West Wing Situation Room: Roger [Cressey], Lisa [Gordon-Hagerty] and Paul [Kurtz] from my counterterrorist staff, Frank Miller and Marine Colonel Tom Greenwood and a half dozen Situation Room staff.
So let’s count the people in the room:
Richard Clarke
Roger Cressey
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
Paul Kurtz
Frank Miller
Tom Greenwood
A half dozen staffers

Those familiar with life on the planet will note that this adds up to a dozen! Tell us again why American citizens should tolerate people like Sanger.

Of course, when Clarke’s book appeared, so did the propaganda; White House slugs fed nonsense to scribes, and scribes ran to type the scripts up. All these scripts were designed to suggest that Dick Clarke has just made this sh*t up. Eric Alterman comments aptly on the oddness of this “Richard Clarke food-fight:”

ALTERMAN: [T[he ferocity of the argument is odd. Clarke is not really revealing anything we did not already know. So far, I’ve not heard anything—absent insidery detail—that I did not include in my chapter on the subject in The Book on Bush, including for instance, the fact that Cheney’s alleged commission on terrorism never once met. This is not news. I read it in The Washington Post, I believe, which is why I knew it.
Indeed, many disputed points in Clarke’s book have been supported in other venues (as Kakutani notes in today’s review). In particular, many of Clarke’s “controversial” points are supported by Bob Woodward’s Bush at War.

Woodward’s book quite clearly supports a number of Clarke’s “controversial” statements. Let’s cite four examples:

Before September 11 occurred, was Bush detached from the War on Terror?
When Clarke returned to the White House on September 12, did he really find Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz trying “to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq?”
Did Rumsfeld really say that “there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets?”
Was Bush “testily” hoping to connect Iraq to 9/11?

All these points caused consternation when Clarke’s deeply-troubling book appeared. Indeed, eager “journalists” manned battle stations, hoping to win free bottles of White House perfume by suggesting that Clarke was just making sh*t up. But all four statements are strongly supported by passages in Woodward’s Bush at War. Powdered lackeys just luvved Bush at War—but it supports much of what Clarke has said.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Charlie McCarthy Hearings

Dowd - While we continue to hold to the principles underlying the Constitutional separation of powers, that the appropriate and patriotic action for the Commission is to shut down and stop pestering us, the President is prepared, in the interest of comity and popularity, to testify, subject to the conditions set forth below.

The President at all times, even on trips to the men's room, will be accompanied by the Vice President.

The Commission must agree in writing that it will not pose any questions directly to the President. Mr. Bush's statements will be restricted to asides on Dick Cheney's brushoffs, as in "Just like he said," "Roger that" and "Ditto."

The Commission must not, under any circumstances, ask the Vice President why American soldiers and civilians in Iraq are being greeted with barbarous infernos rather than flowery bouquets.

Finally, we request that when the President finishes with this painful teeth-pulling visit, the Commission shall offer him a lollipop.

el - After denying gay marriage, Bush wants the right for he and Cheney to hold hands to testify.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Desert Badger Game

Was Bush going to sacrifice a pilot to have an Iraq war?

This was a pointless media campaign that began shortly after Bush took office about how Iraq was attacking our planes. The problem, if it was a problem, was they never hit them. Of course, they were tracking our planes because we kept attacking Iraq targets. It has now been alleged that Bush really wanted one to be hit just after 9/11 to provide an excuse to launch his war.

OpEd News has more.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

Liberal Radio Network Hits Air With Left Jabs

Howard Kurtz doesn't listen to right radio but thinks left radio could be partisan.

Gary Permalink on 4/01/2004

How the CIA has taken over the AFL-CIO in Venezuela

Massive mobilizations, strikes, street conflict, hysterical mass media, social and economic disruption: Chile in 1972-73 Venezuela in 2002-04.

The AFL-CIO is once again on the scene, this time in Venezuela, just as it was in Chile in 1973. Once again, its operations in that country are being funded by the U.S. government. This time, the money is being laundered through the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy, hidden from AFL-CIO members and the American public.

Once again, it is being used to support the efforts of reactionary labor and business leaders, helping to destabilize a democratically-elected government that has made major efforts to alleviate poverty, carried out significant land reform in both urban and rural areas, and striven to change political institutions that have long worked to marginalize those at the lowest rungs in society. And also like Allende's Chile, Venezuela's government under president Hugo Chavez has opposed a number of actions by the U.S. Government, this time by the Bush Administration.

Solidarity Center Director Harry Kamberis' background is not a typical labor background and looks suspiciously like CIA. Most of ACILS' funding comes from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), not the AFL-CIO. The NED was created by the Reagan Administration in 1983. One of the authors of the enabling legislation has said that NED was to do at least some of the work previously done by the CIA, albeit publicly: its talk appears progressive, but its actions are reactionary. One of the NED's initial directors was that well-known democrat, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon's point man in the campaign against Chile's elected president, Salvador Allende.

"...In Venezuela, the AFL-CIO has ... supported a reactionary union establishment as it tried repeatedly to overthrow President Hugo Chavez-and in the process, wrecked the country's economy."

NED quadrupled its budget in Venezuela to $877,000 in the period shortly before the coup, according to Marquis of The New York Times. In addition to the $157,377 to ACILS, NED provided $339,998 to the international wing of the Republican Party; $210,000 to the international wing of the Democratic Party; and presumably another $171,125 to the Center for International Private Enterprise, the international wing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It is bad enough that ACILS gets money from NED, but it is much worse that they work to carry out the NED program.

The parallels with 1972-73 Chile are overwhelming. Just like in Chile in 1972-73, the AFL-CIO, through ACILS, is clearly engaged in an effort to destabilize a democratically elected government that disagrees with a number of positions of the US Government.

This destabilization effort is not singular, but is one component of a multiple-track endeavor that includes supporting a peasant organization that opposes land reform; an educational organization that has suggested no education reforms; an organization seeking to incite a military rebellion; a civic association that has worked to mobilize middle class neighborhoods to "defend themselves" from the poor; a civil justice group that opposes grassroots community organizations because they supports the Chavez government; a "leadership group" that supports the metropolitan Caracas police, whose behavior has become markedly more repressive over the past year; and a number of other anti-Chavez organizations, each which have received recent funding from NED.

There are three questions that beg for answers from ACILS, Harry Kamberis, and the AFL-CIO leadership in general. First, how do these efforts to overthrow a democratically-elected president-a president who is actively trying to meet the needs and aspirations of the poorest 80 percent of the population-help meet the needs of these working people? Second, how does working to destabilize the elected government of Venezuela help workers and their families in the United States? And third, if your projects such as in Venezuela are so good for American working people, why are you trying so desperately to keep U.S. trade unionists from accurately knowing what you are doing in these countries? Why, indeed?

Gary Permalink on 3/31/2004

Texas Dems Vow Unity Ticket

The leaders of the Dean, Kucinich, Edwards, and Clark campaigns met in Austin yesterday and had a conference call with the Texas desk of the Kerry national campaign.

We’ve agreed to the following concepts:
- All of us are agreed that we want a unified state convention for John Kerry in Texas. That will be achieved by all of us signing in for Kerry at State.

- Democrats who were in the campaigns of any of the nine candidates still would like to go to the National Convention and all should feel free to run for Kerry delegates or for the nine Edwards seats allocated by the primary. To do so, you will have to file an application as a Kerry or Edwards national delegate. Applications will be posted on the Texas Democratic Party website beginning late April.

- In all dealings at the State convention, no person will be prohibited or discouraged from being a party officer candidate or National Delegate because of which campaign they originally supported.

- The various campaign leaders will all have input on naming some of the At-Large delegates. There will be people who originally supported Dean (or the others) considered and elected by the Nominations Committee to be Kerry At-Large National Delegates.

On Saturday, please do whatever enables you to move through the process: You can sign in for Dean or Kerry. We urge you to support like-minded people for state delegates, so please vote for people who have been active in our efforts! Remember the basic rules, however. For instance, the more people who sign in for Dean at the door tomorrow (and if you make 15% of the County convention) the more At-Large Delegates we win to state. If you sign in for Dean, and are running for State Delegate, be sure to tell folks we are ALL going to be signing in for Kerry at the State Convention so that folks from other camps will feel free to vote for you!

From Byron - I'm amazed how eager every single Democratic Presidential candidate (with the exception of Kucinich, for now) has been to help John Kerry get elected. Howard Dean endosed Kerry and sent out an email fundraising pitch for him. Dick Gephardt is campaigning with Kerry in Missouri this weekend. Wes Clark is using his contacts and email lists to raise money for Kerry. Joe Lieberman and Bob Graham will campaign for Kerry in Florida. John Edwards has introduced John Kerry to his fundraising contacts and is raising money for Kerry himself. Even Al Sharpton has embraced John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich has promised to support John Kerry by the convention. We're united.

A lot of Deaniacs will be at state, under the Kerry banners.

Gary Permalink on 3/31/2004

Liberal Radio

Al Franken is taking the fight to America's airwaves--and he's doing it drug-free.

Radio schedule. Randi Rhodes is also very good and I fantasize about Janeane Garofalo. Oops, did that slip out? I mean I fantasize about her being Senator, yeah, that's the ticket - Senator Garofalo.

Gary Permalink on 3/31/2004

More Bush whistleblowers

Michael Springman

WHO: Twenty-year State Department veteran, and former head of the visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

CLAIM: He was repeatedly overruled by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to bin Laden recruits so they could receive training in the United States. Says this continued at least until the summer of 2001. (Notably, 15 of the 9/11 hijackers first entered the US through Jeddah.) Springman protested.

RESULT: Fired. Springman says he believes that the victims of 9/11 "may have been sacrificed in order to further wider US geopolitical objectives."
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=104&row=1
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/02/521.shtml
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/dispatches/audio/020116_springman.rm

Sibel Edmonds

WHO: FBI translator

CLAIM: That a Turkish "spy ring" operated in the translation department with the apparent protection of FBI brass, falsifying intercepts containing explicit, actionable warnings of 9/11. That members of this ring were involved with the subjects of the intercepts. And that high-ranking officials asked her to falsify her translations and bribed her to keep quiet.

RESULT: Fired. After taking concerns to upper management, was dismissed with only one reason offered: "for the convenience of the government." Escorted from building by agents who said "We will be watching you and listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney who is not approved by the FBI, or if you take this issue outside the FBI to the Senate, the next time I see you, it will be in jail." Told by John Ashcroft that he was invoking "State Secret Privilege and National Security" to keep what she knows from reaching the public.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/spy/edmonds.htm
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=8516
http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=50

Robert Wright

WHO: FBI special investigator

CLAIM: That FBI agents assigned to intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and prosecution. That the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training camps, and he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a direct link to terrorism. Says the FBI "intentionally and repeatedly thwarted his attempts to launch a more comprehensive investigation to identify and neutralize terrorists."

RESULT: Suspended and ordered to remain silent. Subject of at least three internal FBI investigations. Has written a book that the FBI is not only refusing to allow publication, but is not permitting anyone to even see it.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/printer_2469.shtml
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/37/news-crogan.php

Lt. Col. Steve Butler

WHO: Vice Chancellor for student affairs, Defense Language Institute in Monterey.
CLAIM: In a letter to the editor of a local paper, Butler wrote "Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is...contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain." During Butler’s term as chancellor, 9/11 hijacker Saeed Alghamdi was enrolled at the Defense Language Institute.

RESULT: Disciplined, lost his position and threatened with court martial.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mcherald/3406502.htm
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.06E.butler.bush.htm
http://raleigh.craigslist.org/com/21220698.html

Indira Singh

WHO: "Risk architect" consultant to JP Morgan Chase.

CLAIM: That Ptech, a software company founded by a Saudi financier on the terrorist watch list, had troubling access to sensitive US institutions, which was apparently of no concern to the institutions involved or the FBI. For instance, a "person of interest" from Ptech “had a team in the basement of the FAA for two years” before 9/11. One of Ptech’s projects gained it access to "all information processes and issues that the FAA had with the National Airspace Systems Agency."

RESULT: Warnings went ignored by institutions and the FBI. Told to keep quiet. Subject to surveillance and threats.
http://www.madcowprod.com/index45.html

Colleen Rowley

WHO: FBI field agent, Minnesota office.

CLAIM: That FBI head office perversely thwarted the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, throwing up unusual roadblocks which prevented exposing the terrorist use of flight schools in the summer of 2001. That Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalism Unit altered her report, rendering it impossible for the FBI to pursue the matter further.

RESULT: After 9/11, Frasca – the senior official who altered Rowley’s report and sat on the Minnesota office's request to investigate flight schools, even though he had received a similar request from the Phoenix office – is promoted and commended.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020603/memo.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO208B.html

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Charisma

This is not the actress on Angel or Buffy. Contains nudity.

This is the actress at naked blog. Does not contain nudity.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Murder or war targets?

Does Israel have a legal right to assassinate its enemies - or are such executions war crimes? After two years deliberating, its supreme court is set to decide.

At first the assassinations were directed at people who were said to be "ticking time bombs" - individuals who were actively involved in organising terrorist attacks. But more recently the Israeli military has shifted to a wider range of targets, including figures such as Sheikh Yassin, who are leaders of militant groups rather than actual bomb-makers.

"If a terrorist - or any criminal - is threatening someone's life, then you can do everything necessary to stop him," says Sfard. "But these assassinations target people at home, sleeping in their beds, or when they're simply driving in their cars - they're not endangering anyone at the time when they're killed." To kill under these circumstances is simply execution - but carried out without any trial or proof of guilt.

el - Not only is there a debate over the targets but over the unconcern for bystanders. Yes, this applies equally to the other side.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Caribbean Won't Accept Haiti's New Gov't

The 15-nation Caribbean Community refused recognition Friday for Haiti's new U.S.-backed government amid continuing concerns over the departure of ousted leder Jean-Bertrand Aristide, senior Caribbean officials said.

The move came a day after the leaders demanded that the U.N. General Assembly investigate Aristide's claims he was abducted at gunpoint by U.S. agents when he left Feb. 29 as rebels threatened to attack Haiti's capital.

el - This got almost no news coverage in the U.S. media.

At a summit meeting last weekend in St. Kitts, leaders of the 15-nation Caribbean Community, or Caricom, withstood U.S. pressure to embrace the new Haitian government led by Prime Minister G?rard Latortue and deferred a decision until July on whether to formally accept its legitimacy.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Air America Radio Launch Tomorrow

So tomorrow, Air America Radio will be launching at 12pm with the 'O'Franken Factor,' with Al Franken and Katherine Lanpher, formerly with Minnesota Public Radio. A couple weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend a rehearsal of the radio show in New York, and it was fun and exciting stuff. If you've heard the audio version of Al's books on tapes, it's going to be similar to that, only in a talk radio format - an infusion of comedy, interviews, and lie research.

Where can you find it? Initially, it is only launching on a few stations: NYC (WLIB, 1190AM), LA (KBLA, 1580AM), Chicago (WNTD, 950AM), Portland (KPOJ, 620AM), Inland Empire, CA (KCAA, 1050AM), XM Radio Channel 167.

There will obviously be challenges, and I have no doubt there will be some problems when the network starts off. One problem that has already surfaced is the website: AirAmericaRadio.com has been inadequate in distributing information, and it doesn't appear as though it'll be fully functional with the features I'd like it to have on the launch date (though I've been assured it'll have streaming audio on March 31).

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

The NPR Debate

NPR Stations Had Pushed for Change

NPR management's decision to remove Mr. Edwards before his program's 25th anniversary in November, said other managers, seemed unnecessarily heavy-handed.

The announcement that Mr. Edwards would leave his anchor post, effective April 30, to take on a new assignment as a senior correspondent, and his statements that the move was not his idea, ignited widespread criticism. NPR, based in Washington, has received more than 17,000 calls and e-mail messages from angry listeners, its officials said. A Web site, savebobedwards.com, has generated close to 3,000 signatures.

As much as public radio stations around the country have been pressing their national partner for change, they also want many things to stay the same.

"There is a hope that NPR's focus on content will not be eclipsed by this move for new personalities," Mr. Hansen, of KUOW in Seattle, said. "You look at the media landscape with all of these bombastic hosts who tell you more about themselves than about the news. We don't need to know about the host's life or likes, we just need a facilitator who can help the show move."

As for loyal NPR listeners, who are still busy sending e-mail messages, calling Mr. Kernis and other managers and signing petitions to keep Mr. Edwards on "Morning Edition," the resounding message seems to be: Proceed with extreme caution.

Mark Forman, online petition signer No. 1,191, who listens to NPR on WFPL in Louisville, perhaps summed up the sentiment of many fellow listeners when he wrote, "This could be NPR's version of the `New Coke' debacle in the works."

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Report From Houston

GOP base looks discouraged and their judges are afraid of voters.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Hawkish Clarke Turned Against Bush Failures

With 30 years experience in the US national security establishment, including high-level positions in the Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton administrations before he served in the second Bush White House, Clarke is no anti-war dissenter. He is a ruthless advocate of military and covert action in pursuit of the interests of American imperialism. This makes his testimony against the Bush administration all the more damaging.

In both his 9/11 commission testimony and his March 28 television interview, Clarke highlighted the difference between the approach of the Clinton administration to an upsurge of terrorist threats and that of the Bush administration under similar circumstances.

In the period leading up to the millenium celebrations in December 1999, US intelligence agencies reported a dramatic spike in intercepts of threatening communications involving Al Qaeda. At Clinton’s behest, his national security adviser, Samuel Berger, convened daily meetings of the highest-level security officials, including the heads of the CIA and FBI, to monitor efforts to forestall an attack. This continuous pressure, according to Clarke, led to the disruption of a planned New Year’s Eve attack on Los Angeles Airport when an Al Qaeda operative assigned to that attack was arrested attempting to cross the US-Canada border near Vancouver, British Columbia.

If an effort of similar intensity had been mounted during the summer of 2001, when intelligence intercepts about terrorist threats from Al Qaeda again began to spike, Clarke insisted, the September 11 attacks might have been disrupted or prevented.

"I do think what Clarke has done is really unprecedented in our history: somebody who served as a national security adviser to the president stepping down and, while that president is still in office, blasting him," he said. "That just hasn't been done before" . . . .

Above links from cursor.org, another fine news summary.

THOSE WHO TOLD

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers three decades ago, cited these people as part of what he sees as a new trend of those who criticize governments still in power:

-- Scott Ritter, the former lead inspector for the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) Concealment and Investigations team in Iraq.

-- Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, whose January book about his tenure inside the Bush administration was based, in part, on classified documents.

-- Rand Beers, who quit as President Bush's antiterrorism adviser to become John Kerry's foreign policy adviser.

-- Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who investigated whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger and later publicly accused the White House of manipulating his findings.

-- John Brady Kiesling, a career U.S. diplomat who resigned to protest the Bush administration's policies on Iraq.

-- Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst on the steering committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

-- Robin Cook, a former British foreign minister who quit and wrote a book saying the threat of Iraq was overblown.

-- Katharine Gun, a British government linguist who was charged under the British Official Secrets Act for leaking an e-mail purportedly from U.S. intelligence services asking for help spying on U.N. ambassadors.

-- Anthony Zinni, retired Marine general and former U.S. commander for the Middle East who has criticized the handling of postwar Iraq.

-- Clare Short, a former international development secretary who resigned from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in protest after the invasion and later said she had seen transcripts of bugging of Kofi Annan's office.

-- Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant colonel formerly assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans who wrote an article critical of the war on the online site Salon.com -- entitled "The New Pentagon Papers."

el - I would add Greg Thielmann. State Department intelligence analyst reponsible for weapons of mass destruction. Thielmann resigned and appeared on PBS Frontline to denounce Bush, Powell and other administration officials lies and exagerations about Iraq weapons of mass destruction.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

One Reporter Apologizes, Knight-Ridder Doesn't Need To

Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage

While the major media, from The New York Times on down, has largely remained silent about their own failings in this area, a young columnist for a small paper in Fredericksburg, Va., has stepped forward.

"The media are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there is one thing they forgot to say: We're sorry," Rick Mercier wrote, in a column published Sunday in The Free Lance-Star.

"Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.

"Maybe we'll do a better job next war."

Mercier admitted that it was "absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post."

A team from Knight Ridder, led by two veteran editors, has supplied some of the best homegrown scoops on Iraq.

Hoyt had observed that "by and large, coverage of the war mainly amplified the official line." His bureau's coverage, he explains, "did not start from an antiwar position but from questioning the case made for a pre-emptive war. As we began exploring we found a lot more division and doubt within the government than top officials, and much of the press, were expressing.Now we feel we owe it to every single member of the military killed or wounded, their families, and the public at large, to keep exploring how and why this war happened, until the full story is out there." Knight Ridder, he says, felt a special responsibility, since it (unlike, say, The New York Times Co. and Tribune Co.) fields so many papers in military towns. As KR's own Joe Galloway once put it, "war ought to be the hardest thing a country can do."

Walcott explains that the bureau's skepticism about the case for war was sparked after checking "every single claim" made by the administration about Saddam's links to al-Qaeda and finding they simply "didn't make sense." From that, "one question led to another," he recalls.

But there's another reason KR was so "alert" (as Ben Bradlee would phrase it) when some of the other national news outlets were not. "Our sources," Walcott says, "include a large number of people at the working level in government, not on the cocktail circuit. These unglamorous people — they could be called the 'blue- collar' type — actually handled intelligence and saw it different than officials."

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

GOP PR Group Strikes Out In Columbia

The secretive Washington-based PR firm the Rendon Group apparently dealt the Columbian Ministry of Defense a losing hand.

According to its website, Rendon has been working closely with the Colombian Army, Navy, Air Force and National Police on "message development and dissemination, strategic communications planning, and media event planning." To those ends, Rendon created a deck of playing cards featuring Columbian "narco-terrorists" -- otherwise known as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and two other antigovernment groups. The Washington Times writes, "A State Department official ... said wanted posters in the form of playing cards are a poor fit in Colombia. In fact, he said, some diplomats were 'surprised' to find out last year that a defense contractor working in Colombia used its contract dollars to produce the decks." The State Department has blocked distribution of the decks. The Rendon Group gained notoriety for its work in Iraq -- it's credited with creating the Iraqi National Congress for the CIA in the early 90s -- and for its post-9/11 contract with the Pentagon.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Rice to testify in public, under oath

After days of intense pressure, the White House on Tuesday agreed to allow national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly and under oath before the commission investigating the September 11 attacks.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Daily Show Beats Fox and CNN in Ratings

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

This Isn't America

George Bush's America has become a byword for deception and abuse of power.

Krugman - Last week an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin said, "This isn't America; the government did not invent intelligence material nor exaggerate the description of the threat to justify their attack."

So even in Israel, George Bush's America has become a byword for deception and abuse of power. And the administration's reaction to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" provides more evidence of something rotten in the state of our government.

The truth is that among experts, what Mr. Clarke says about Mr. Bush's terrorism policy isn't controversial. The facts that terrorism was placed on the back burner before 9/11 and that Mr. Bush blamed Iraq despite the lack of evidence are confirmed by many sources — including "Bush at War," by Bob Woodward.

And new evidence keeps emerging for Mr. Clarke's main charge, that the Iraq obsession undermined the pursuit of Al Qaeda. From yesterday's USA Today: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures."

That's why the administration responded to Mr. Clarke the way it responds to anyone who reveals inconvenient facts: with a campaign of character assassination.

Some journalists seem, finally, to have caught on. Last week an Associated Press news analysis noted that such personal attacks were "standard operating procedure" for this administration and cited "a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster," the Medicare actuary who revealed how the administration had deceived Congress about the cost of its prescription drug bill.

But other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics — even compared with Nixon's. Even more disturbing is its readiness to abuse power — to use its control of the government to intimidate potential critics.

To be fair, Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

And there are many other cases of apparent abuse of power by the administration and its Congressional allies. A few examples: according to The Hill, Republican lawmakers threatened to cut off funds for the General Accounting Office unless it dropped its lawsuit against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post says Representative Michael Oxley told lobbyists that "a Congressional probe might ease if it replaced its Democratic lobbyist with a Republican." Tom DeLay used the Homeland Security Department to track down Democrats trying to prevent redistricting in Texas. And Medicare is spending millions of dollars on misleading ads for the new drug benefit — ads that look like news reports and also serve as commercials for the Bush campaign.

On the terrorism front, here's one story that deserves special mention. One of the few successful post-9/11 terror prosecutions — a case in Detroit — seems to be unraveling. The government withheld information from the defense, and witnesses unfavorable to the prosecution were deported (by accident, the government says). After the former lead prosecutor complained about the Justice Department's handling of the case, he suddenly found himself facing an internal investigation — and someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation to the press.

el - Reminds me of the end of Nixon's first term, people who were paying attention realized he had no principles except getting reelected. Opponents realized he was dirty, nasty, vicious, and unlawful. Nixon was reelected in a landslide anyway, mainly because there was a war on and the GOP had poisoned the mass media culture into a "us against them" mentality, running on fear and flag-waving. If you pay attention to politics and are reading this you are in the minority. Most people just catch TV sound bites or radio in the car. This is why the GOP keeps trotting out the same old lies. They figure most people haven't heard they are lies.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

One thing the 9/11 Commision Should Look At

All of the plane transcripts and tapes. The airline ID'ed the hijackers early and passed the info to NORAD.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Lynne Cheney's Novel of Forbidden Love in the Old West

Sisters is being reissued.

Excerpts here from "a novel of the American frontier that broke new ground."

Originally published in 1981. Interesting.

Sophie Dymond had overcome nineteenth-century prejudices to succeed as publisher of a hugely popular women's magazine. But when she left New York to revisit her native Wyoming, where her sister had died mysteriously, she left her prestige and power far behind. Waiting for Sophie was a world where women were treated either as decorative figurines or as abject sexual vassals...where wives were led to despise the marriage act and prostitutes pandered to husbands' hungers...where the relationship between women and men became a kind of guerilla warfare in which women were forced to band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted. In her effort to grasp the meaning of her sister's life and death, Sophie discovers the secret that tainted her life and begins to understand the experience of the vast majority of silent, trapped women.

More than a lesbian novel it is an anti-male, anti-establishment, pro-contraception historical tale.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

New Sign Of Life On Mars

The most compelling evidence yet that alien life once lived on Mars - and might still be thriving deep below the surface - has been unearthed by Nasa and European space scientists.

Two studies have confirmed the presence of methane on the red planet. On Earth, the gas is almost always produced by microbes.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Challenges to Abortion-Procedure Ban Begin

As expected - Abortion-rights proponents launched challenges in three courtrooms across the country Monday to the first federal ban on an abortion procedure since a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy was established by Roe v. Wade more than three decades ago.

At issue is an act signed into law by President Bush last year that outlaws a procedure described by opponents as "partial-birth abortion," and by most doctors as "intact dilation and extraction."

The plaintiffs, including Planned Parenthood, the Federation of America, National Abortion Federation, Center for Reproductive Rights and doctors from Nebraska, New York, Virginia and Iowa, contend that the law is unconstitutional because it contains the same deficiencies as one overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000.

Like that law, they argued Monday, it provides no exceptions for the health of the mother and is so "hopelessly unclear" that it could outlaw more common procedures performed as early as 13 weeks gestation and thereby place an undue burden on a woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion.

"Congress could easily have much more precisely defined what it sought to ban," A. Stephen Hut Jr. said in opening statements before the packed courtroom of U.S. District Judge Richard Conway Casey in New York.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 in 2000 to strike down a similar Nebraska law. In Stenberg vs. Carhart, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that any such law would create an undue burden on a woman's right to choose an abortion unless it created an exception for the mother's health and more narrowly defined the banned procedure.

Attorney General John Ashcroft stirred controversy recently when he issued subpoenas to hospitals and clinics across the country for abortion records, arguing that they are necessary to determine whether the procedures were medically necessary. But the subpoenas have been decried by the facilities and abortion-rights proponents as an intimidation tactic and an unjustifiable invasion of the privacy of patients.

Although several judges, including U.S. District Judge Richard Conway Casey in New York, have ordered the documents released, others, including U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in San Francisco, denied the requests. A federal appeals court Monday temporarily stayed Casey's ruling that New York Presbyterian Hospital turn over the records.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

True Porn Comics

Whenever I read autobiographical comics I can’t wait until the storyteller gets to the part where they have sex. It’s always the most revealing and often interesting aspect because cartoonists have the most f**ked up sex life. I think comic book creators Kelli Nelson and Robyn Chapman think the same thing and that’s why they put together True Porn. It’s a collection of almost 50 stories by independent comic books creators and the stories are all about sex.

True Porn co-editor and contributor Kelli Nelson.

On Sale At Amazon

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

The Heroic Bureaucrat and the Creepy Administration Villain

WP - The Wonk That Roared

Richard Clarke, rushing to the White House as hijacked planes crash into buildings on 9/11, barks into a phone: "Activate the CSG on secure video."

This is the first time we hear his voice in "Against All Enemies," and it captures the man: He issues commands, speaks in acronyms, understands the interdepartmental communications infrastructure. He knows how to run a video conference. He knows who's in the PEOC and how many minutes until the CAP is in place. He is the one who activates the COG.

Running a meeting of the Counterterrorism Security Group, Clarke is the kind of man who says, "POTUS is inbound Offutt. I need video connectivity to STRATCOM and I need them to have this PowerPoint."

(Whereas POTUS himself -- the President of the United States -- is the kind of man who says in a meeting with Clarke and others, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.")

Despite his procedural virtuosity, no one could call Clarke a pencil-pusher. No, he's pistol-packing. He writes that, late on the night of the attacks, "I had to get back to the White House and begin planning to prevent follow-on attacks. I found my Secret Service-issued .357 sidearm, thrust it in my belt, and went back out into the night, back to the West Wing."

Richard Clarke: The alpha-bureaucrat.

el - Of course, Heroic Bureacrats must battle Creepy Administration Villains.

Demonstrators Swarm Around Rove's Home

Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants.

At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.

Shortly thereafter, sirens shot through the neighborhood and Secret Service agents and D.C. police joined the crowd on the lawn. Rove opened his door long enough to talk to an officer, and the crowd serenaded them with a stanza of "America the Beautiful."

After about 30 minutes of goading by protesters in English and Spanish, Rove agreed to meet with two members of the coalition on the condition that the rest of the protesters board their buses and leave his street. The group obliged.

Rove opened his garage door and allowed Palacios and Inez Killingsworth to enter. The meeting lasted two minutes and ended with Rove closing the garage door on Palacios while she was still talking.

Palacios said that Rove was "very upset" and was "yelling in our faces" and that Rove told them "he hoped we were proud to make his 14-year-old and 10-year-old cry."

A White House spokesman said one of the children was a neighbor.

Palacios, trembling and in tears herself, said, "He is very offended because we dared to come here. We dared to come here because he dared to ignore us. I'm sorry we disturbed his children, but our children are disturbed every day.

"He also said, 'Don't ever dare to come back,' " Palacios said. "We will, if he continues to ignore us."

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

Fake News Parallels The Rise of Bush

NYT - Television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news

This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in TV "news" videos distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows around the country. The point of these spots — which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states — was to hype the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed Godsend to elderly voters. They are part of a year-plus p.r. campaign, which, with its $124 million budget, would dwarf in size most actual news organizations.

When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The Times, blew the whistle on these TV "news" stories this month, a government spokesman defended them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." The government also informed us that Ms. Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ms. Ryan's past assignments included serving as a TV shill for pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin. Given that drug companies may also be the principal beneficiaries of the new Medicare law, she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when appearing in Levitra ads.

George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible. By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of 71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Mr. Bush has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" — as he calls the news media — and "speak directly to the people." When the president made a rare exception last month and took questions from an actual front-line journalist, NBC's Tim Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated anytime too soon.

There's no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick, whatever the filter might have to say about it. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on 9/11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week — just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account — many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Mr. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on TV that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Mr. Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.

The "news" of the war included its fictionalized Rambo, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, and its fictionalized conclusion, the "Mission Accomplished" celebration led by the president on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. (Mr. Bush said that the premature victory banner was the handiwork of the ship's crew when in fact it was the product of the White House scenic shop.) But for all that fake news, we still don't know such real news as how many Iraqi civilians were killed as we gave them their freedom. We are still shielded from images of American casualties, before or after they are placed in coffins.

Gary Permalink on 3/30/2004

World Public Opinion Poll

Growing Hostility Toward America and Its Foreign Policy - Click">Audio

A recent survey conducted in European and Arab nations by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, has found increasing hostility toward America and its foreign policy. The public opinion poll titled, "A Year After the Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists," revealed that antagonism for the U.S. has intensified among the people of France, Germany and Britain. This comes as there is growing support in Europe for foreign and military policies more independent of the United States.

In Muslim countries surveyed, resentment against the U.S. is pervasive. Majorities of those polled in four Muslim nations doubt the sincerity of the U.S. war on terrorism and believe instead that Washington's policies are aimed at controlling Middle East Oil and to dominate the world. More alarmingly, Osama bin Laden is viewed favorably by large percentages of people in Pakistan, Jordan and Morocco. The recent Israeli assassination of the wheelchair-bound Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin has undoubtedly deepened the already burning rage against America in the Arab and Muslim world.

"George Bush has taken great efforts to put forward this notion that this is a great victory for democracy. It appears from the results of this poll that the people are not buying that. His sell on that is not convincing the people of the world that the U.S. had good intentions."

Gary Permalink on 3/29/2004

US Poll - Voters Just Watch The Commercials

USATODAY.com - TV ads are powerful.

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows a remarkable turnaround in 17 battleground states where polls and historic trends indicate the race will be close, and where the Bush campaign has aired TV ads. Those ads say Bush has provided "steady leadership in times of change" while portraying Kerry as a tax-hiking, flip-flopping liberal.

The Bush campaign also has begun defining Kerry before he has defined himself. In the states where the ads have run, Kerry's unfavorable rating has risen 16 points since mid-February. In the other states, it's up just five points. The margin of error for each group of states is +/{ndash}5 percentage points.

A majority echoed the Bush ads' themes about the Massachusetts senator: 57% say Kerry has changed positions for political reasons, and 58% say their federal taxes will go up if he's elected. And the percentage who say he's "too liberal" has jumped from 29% in February to 41% now.

In contrast, there has been much less volatility in states where the ads haven't aired. Kerry held a four-point lead in them in February; Bush holds a two-point lead now.

Among Republicans, 83% believe the Bush administration's testimony before the Sept. 11 commission. Among Democrats, 76% believe Clarke.

A 53% majority now say that the Bush administration is "covering up something" about its handling of intelligence information before the attacks. Bush's approval rating on handling terrorism dropped to its lowest level since Sept. 11, though a 58% majority still express approval.

Still, Bush fares much better against Kerry than he did just three weeks ago. In early March, Kerry led by eight points. Now Bush leads by four.

CNN - Among likely voters surveyed, 51 percent said they would choose Bush for president, while 47 percent said they would vote for Kerry, within the margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Three weeks ago, as Kerry was cinching the Democratic nomination with a string of primary victories, he led the president by 8 points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup among likely voters, 52 percent to 44 percent.

On the question of whether they approve of how Bush is handling the war on terrorism, 58 percent said yes -- down from 65 percent in December but still a majority.

Among Clarke's charges was that Bush and other administration officials were distracted from the pursuit of al Qaeda by their campaign against Iraq. Asked whether they thought that was the case, 49 percent of those polled said no, while 46 percent said yes, within the margin of error.

Poll respondents were also equally divided on whether the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism, but 56 percent said they still think the situation there was worth going to war.

Clarke has been particularly critical of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, his former boss and one of Bush's closest confidants. He has charged that she didn't "do her job" before 9/11; she has called his charges "scurrilous."

Asked about Rice, 50 percent of those polled said they have a favorable opinion of her, compared to 25 percent with an unfavorable opinion and 25 percent who were unsure.

Gary Permalink on 3/29/2004

Condoleezza Rice's Credibility Gap

Center for American Progress - Fact Checking Condi

Not only did Rice refuse to take Richard Clarke's lead and admit responsibility for her role in the worst national security failure in American history, but she continued to make unsubstantiated and contradictory assertions:

RICE CLAIM: "The administration took seriously the threat" of terrorism before 9/11.

FACTS: President Bush himself acknowledges that, despite repeated warnings of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, before 9/11 "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism. Similarly, Newsweek reports that his attitude was reflected throughout an Administration that was trying to "de-emphasize terrorism" as an overall priority. As proof, just two of the hundred national security meetings the Administration held during this period addressed the terrorist threat, and the White House refused to hold even one meeting of its highly-touted counterterrorism task force. Meanwhile, the Administration was actively trying to cut funding for counterterrorism, and "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism" despite a serious increase in terrorist chatter in the summer of 2001.

Source: "Bush At War" by Bob Woodward

Source: Newsweek & vetoed request

Source: Refusal to hold task force meeting

Source: Only two meetings out of 100

RICE CLAIM: "I don't know what a sense of urgency any greater than the one we had would have caused us to do anything differently. I don't know how...we could have done more. I would like very much to know what more could have been done?"

FACTS: There are many things that could have been done: first and foremost, the Administration could have desisted from de-emphasizing and cutting funding for counterterrorism in the months before 9/11. It could have held more meetings of top principals to get the directors of the CIA and FBI to share information, especially considering the major intelligence spike occurring in the summer of 2001. As 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick said on ABC this morning, the lack of focus and meetings meant agencies were not talking to each other, and key evidence was overlooked. For instance, with better focus and more urgency, the FBI's discovery of Islamic radicals training at flight schools might have raised red flags. Similarly, the fact that "months before Sept. 11, the CIA knew two of the al-Qaeda hijackers were in the United States" could have spurred a nationwide manhunt. But because there was no focus or urgency, "No nationwide manhunt was undertaken," said Gorelick. "The State Department watch list was not given to the FAA. If you brought people together, perhaps key connections could have been made."

Source: Slash counterterrorism funding

Source: CIA knew 2 hijackers in the U.S.

RICE CLAIM:“Nothing would be better from my point of view than to be able to testify, but there is an important principle involved here it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisors do not testify before the Congress.”

FACTS: Republican Commission John F. Lehman, who served as Navy Secretary under President Reagan said on ABC this morning that "This is not testimony before a tribunal of the Congress…There are plenty of precedents for appearing in public and answering questions…There are plenty of precedents the White House could use if they wanted to do this.” 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick agreed, saying “Our commission is sui generis…the Chairman has been appointed by the President. We are distinguishable from Congress.” Rice's remarks on 60 Minutes that the principle is limited to "sitting national security advisers" is also a departure from her statements earlier this week, when she said the principle applied to all presidential advisers. She was forced to change this claim for 60 Minutes after 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste “cited examples of non-Cabinet presidential advisers who have testified publicly to Congress." Finally, the White House is reportedly moving to declassify congressional testimony then-White House adviser Richard Clarke gave in 2002. By declassifying this testimony, the White House is breaking the very same "principle" of barring White House adviser's testimony from being public that Rice is using to avoid appearing publicly before the 9/11 commission.

Source: Quote from Tony Snow Show

RICE CLAIM: "Iraq was put aside" immediately after 9/11.

FACTS: According to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by a CBS News, which reported on 9/4/02 that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." The President therefore did not put Iraq aside -- he merely deferred it to a second phase, after Afghanistan. To the question of Iraq or Afghanistan, Bush replied: let's do both, starting with Afghanistan. In terms of resources, the Iraq decision had far-reaching effects on the efforts to hunt down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As the Boston Globe reported, "the Bush administration is continuing to shift highly specialized intelligence officers from the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to the Iraq crisis."

Source: September 17th directive
Source: Rumsfeld orders Iraq plan
Source: Shifting special forces

Presented here were only the 60 minutes claims. Here is more fact-checking on her statements before she appeared.

Here is their Daily Progress Report, required reading, with more Rice lies and Bush de facto admits being negligent.

Gary Permalink on 3/29/2004

Clarke's Story Hasn't Changed

Since he talked to Time in 2002.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Justifying Invasion a Full-Time Job

Helen Thomas - President Bush says the United States and the world are safer against terrorist attacks since his invasion of Iraq.

After the bombings in Madrid and Baghdad, that is wishful thinking.

The president doesn't act like he thinks the world is safer, given the huge security entourage that accompanies him when he travels.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Byrd has persuaded Rockefeller

The political atmosphere in Washington, D.C., changed dramatically after Bush took office, said Rockefeller, who has served in the Senate since 1985. “Republicans fell totally in line since Bush came into office. They have a loyalty I have never seen before.

“They are true believers. It started with Newt Gingrich in 1994. Nothing gets in their way. Facts don’t get in their way.

“And three chairmen of major [Senate] committees were told by Dick Cheney not to investigate anything in the administration.”

On the Iraq war resolution: "If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. “I have admitted that my vote was wrong.”

The key Senate vote authorizing a war against Iraq came Oct. 11, 2003. It passed 77 to 23. The opponents included Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., an outspoken opponent of President Bush’s war plans. (The House of Representatives voted to pass a similar resolution, 296 to 133.)

“The decision got made before there was a whole bunch of intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped.

“You had a president who we now know was determined to go to war. He was going to be a war president,” Rockefeller said during an interview with editors at The Charleston Gazette on Friday.

Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the influence of terrorist groups, such as al-Qaida, is growing. “But only about five percent of the insurgents in Iraq are coming across the borders into the country. Most of them are homegrown.”

Domestic problems will continue to grow, Rockefeller believes, since Bush administration tax cuts could put the nation in a deficit for the next 50 years.

Tax cuts are hurting all federal social, educational and medical programs. The only agencies currently getting significantly increased funding today are military, homeland security and intelligence operations.

Rockefeller had high praise for Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief who served for 30 years under three Republican presidents and one Democratic president.

“Clarke is a master. He is not particularly liked, not a pleasant person. But he is bright, smart and tough,” Rockefeller said. “He disdains politicians of whatever stripe, whatever party. But if you have done something all your life and take great pride in it, then see it crumbling, you get angry.”

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Bush team can use the word Lie, opponents cannot

The US media will repeatedly use the l-word against Bush enemies, if only to repeat the administration attacks, but never use it against the administration.

A recent example of bending over backwards to avoid connecting Bush and the l-word was the Wall Street Journal's March 22 lead story about gaps between Bush's account of his actions on Sept. 11, 2001, and the public record.

The story's headline, 'Detailed Picture of U.S. Actions On Sept. 11 Remains Elusive,' didn't give much of a clue what to expect. While avoiding the l-word or anything close to a synonym, the article told the story of how Bush and his aides made statements at variance with the verifiable record about the events of that tragic day.

The Journal article by Scot J. Paltrow gave six examples of Bush or his top aides offering Sept. 11 accounts - all portraying Bush as a decisive leader - that didn't square with the factual record.

A key question in this fall's U.S. election, however, will be whether Bush can maintain his image as a "straight-shooter" by destroying the credibility of those who question his leadership and honesty. The ferocity of the Bush assaults on former Treasury Secretary O'Neill and now former counter-terrorism chief Clarke reveals how important Bush and his political advisers see the threat from these whistleblowers.

Central to Bush's success in his new war against his ex-assistants will be whether the major news media will continue its obsequious behaviour. Bush's strategy can only work if he and his surrogates are allowed to throw around the l-word without fear that it might finally be tossed back at them.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Billionaires for Bush.

Surreal Protest-Support Rallies

The men handsome in tuxedos and top hats and the women stunning in ball gowns with elbow-length gloves, they marched boldly past the protesters. They shouted, ''We want Bush!'' One placard they held up read, ''Because He's Just Like Us.'' Hisses traveled through the body of the mob, as a policeman stopped traffic so they could cross. Applause erupted from the ranks of the flag-wavers at the arrival of such beautiful people. Pro-Bush people happily backed up, ceding the most prime piece of their ''free speech zone.'' Then it happened. Halfway across the street -- in that moment of eerie suspension as the bare flick of a police officer's hand caused the dragon of traffic to pause -- you could see the epiphany. The newcomers unfurled their giant banner: ''Billionaires for Bush.'' The revelation -- is this somebody's idea of joke? -- moved across the faces of the crowd like a wave undulating through a sports arena. Amid the hand-drawn placards, the Billionaires unsheathed their professionally printed, brightly colored laminated posters.

''Leave No Billionaire Behind.''

''Corporations Are People Too.''

The Billionaires popped corks and drank bubbly from flutes. Huge cigars and cigarette holders appeared.

When the Billionaires started a chant -- ''Tax Work Not Wealth'' -- the pro-Bush folks shouted back, ''Tax Cuts!'' But irony has a toxic effect on earnestness. The counterchant quickly faded, and right away the anger began to smolder.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

As Expected - GOP donors double dipping with Nader

Nader is getting big contributions from Bush donors. Kinda like the GOP providing funding for Sharpton and advising his campaign.

Nearly 10 percent of the Nader contributors who have given him at least $250 each have a history of supporting the Republican president, national GOP candidates or the party, according to computer-assisted review of financial records by The Dallas Morning News.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

No Wonder the Administration Went Nuclear on Clarke

He is a power Washington player and has been the media's main administration source for counter-terrorism stories for years. If you want the real book on Richard Clarke—minus the Bush-administration attacks and Clarke’s self-promotion—read Ghost Wars, Steve Coll’s new book on the CIA in Afghanistan. Clarke was mentioned by name in nearly 1,000 stories over the years, and he was the unnamed source for many more.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

The Who's Your Daddy Party?

Dowd - I wasn't sure how to ask John Kerry, so I just blurted it out: "Is there anything we need to know about your relationship with your father?"

I didn't think the country could take another vertiginous ride on the Oedipal tilt-a-whirl. It's hard not to see the Bush unilateral foreign policy — blowing off allies and the U.N. to rewrite the ending of a gulf war his father felt had ended appropriately — as the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion.

"I know what you're saying," Mr. Kerry murmured.

The globe got whipsawed by a father-son relationship so twisty and rife with undercurrents that we're still not sure if W. was trying to avenge his father with Saddam or upend his dad's legacy in Iraq — or both. Or was he just following the gloomy, brass-knuckled lead of his surrogate father, Dick Cheney?

Even a president who was routinely referred to as adolescent criticized this White House's adolescent attitude.

"They remind me of teenagers who got their inheritance too soon and couldn't wait to blow it," Bill Clinton said. And this, he scoffed, is the "mature daddy party"?

Well, it's the party obsessed with daddy. That's for sure.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Clarke says he didn't vote for Bush

A correction to an earlier post. My respect for him goes up.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

FBI translator says she was bribed not to spill beans on 9-11 cover-up

Boing Boing - Sibel Edmonds said she was hired to retranslate material that was collected prior to Sept. 11 to determine if anything was missed in the translations that related to the plot. In her review, Edmonds said the documents clearly showed that the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country and plotting to use airplanes as missiles. The documents also included information relating to their financial activities. Edmonds said she could not comment in detail because she has been under a Justice Department gag order since October 2002.

FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA.
Edmonds, a ten year U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination, speaks fluent Farsi and Turkish and had been working part time with the FBI for six months-- commencing in December, 2001.

In a 50 reporter frenzy in front of some 12 news cameras, Edmonds said "Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts."

Salon has more. Salon has had many must read features this week and last but I find myself saving up to visit because of the commericial I have to wade through. I should use the last donation to get a subscription again except I have other pressing priorities.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Has Bush hired his own fix-it plumbers?

Shades of Nixon, historian files on Kerry's anti-war activities stolen. It would be silly for the Kerry team to steal something they should already have copious records on. This sounds more like a fishing expedition from the RNC-Bush-Cheney team, similar to Nixon stealing Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's reports.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Cerebus Tale Finally Ends

One of our era's most enduring and complex epics of fantasy storytelling came to an end this month. It was 6,000 pages long, and chronicled one man's rise through a fascinatingly imagined world, on the cusp between medieval and early industrial ages.

A couple of complications are also worth noting. First, the protagonist is not strictly a man -- in two respects. "He" is a hermaphrodite, though he thinks of himself as male, and he's also an aardvark. A talking, hind-foot walking, sword-wielding, hard-drinking, scripture-parsing aardvark, mind you.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

How Chalabi Snookered Bush-Cheney Big-Time

The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.

Weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist, officials said. They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.

Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.

Based largely on his account, President Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the shadowy germ trucks, dubbed "Winnebagos of Death" or "Hell on Wheels" in news accounts, and they became a crucial part of the White House case for war — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the war.

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information.

el - Duh, you think?

Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us." But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

U.S. and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since major combat ended in Iraq that lies or distortions by Iraqi opposition groups in exile contributed to numerous misjudgments about Iraq's suspected weapons programs.

A former U.S. official who has reviewed the classified file said the BND warned the CIA last spring that it had "various problems with the source."

"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said. He showed what he called "highly detailed and extremely accurate" diagrams of how the trucks were configured, and warned that they could spew enough anthrax or botulinus toxin "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

But Kay, who sought to confirm Curveball's claims in Iraq after the end of major combat, said Powell's account was "disingenuous."

Kay added: "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name,' as he's describing this, I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Powell assured U.N. diplomats that two other Iraqi sources, who he said were "in a position to know," had corroborated the "eyewitness account." The CIA later said those reports arrived in December 2000 and mid-2002.

Kay said the debriefing files on the pair showed that they never had direct contact with the biowarfare trucks. "None of them claimed to have seen them," he said. "They said they were aware of the mobile program. They had heard there was a mobile program."

CIA files showed that another Iraqi defector, an engineer who had worked with Curveball, specifically denied that they had worked on such facilities, Kay said. Powell did not cite that defector.

The CIA acknowledged last month that a fourth defector whom Powell cited at the U.N., a former major in Iraq's intelligence service, had lied when he said that Baghdad had built mobile research laboratories to test biological agents. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency twice debriefed that defector in early 2002 and reported his claims. But it then concluded that he did not have firsthand information and probably was coached by Chalabi's exile group.

In May 2002, the agency posted a "fabrication notice" on a classified computer network to warn other U.S. intelligence agencies that the defector had lied. But CIA officials said the notice was overlooked, and his information was cited both in Powell's speech and the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to Congress.

During the summer, Kay's investigators visited Curveball's parents and brother in Baghdad, as well as his former work sites. They determined that he was last in his class at the University of Baghdad, not first as he had claimed. They learned he had been fired from his job and jailed for embezzlement before he fled Iraq.

Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, retains strong support in the White House. He was a guest of First Lady Laura Bush at the president's State of the Union address last January, and his organization still receives several hundred thousand dollars a month from the Pentagon to help collect intelligence in Iraq.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Condi urged to testify under oath

The leaders of the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks urged national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday to reconsider her refusal to appear before the panel in public to rebut testimony earlier this week by former White House aide Richard Clarke.

Organizations representing families of those killed in the attacks have urged Rice to testify before the commission in a public setting.

The 9/11 Families Steering Committee issued such a statement Saturday.

"Dr. Rice should testify to set a moral precedent that is aptly warranted by the murder of 3,000 people," the statement said.

"Voluntarily coming forward to testify under oath during a public hearing without the use of a subpoena would simply set a rare, refreshing, and appropriate moral precedent for all of history to judge."

[Future President] Kerry chastised national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Saturday for refusing to testify publicly before the 9/11 commission and accused the Bush administration of conducting "character assassination" against people who say things the White House doesn't like.

"If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do '60 Minutes' on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath," Kerry said while campaigning Saturday.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Clarke lands more blows to Bush facade

"When you're in the White House, you spin. I have no obligation any more to spin."

Former White House counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, whose criticism of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policy has triggered a ferocious response from the White House, said Sunday he supports Republican calls for declassifying testimony he gave Congress in 2002.

On Sunday, Clarke told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the release of his previous testimony will prove false any claims that his earlier testimony contradicts statements in his new book, "Against All Enemies."

"I would welcome it being declassified," Clarke said. "But not just a little line here and there -- let's declassify all six hours of my testimony."

Clarke called on the White House to end what he called "vicious personal attacks" and "character assassination" in response to his accusations.

"People on the taxpayers' rolls are engaged in a campaign to destroy me personally and professionally, because I had the temerity to suggest that the American people should consider whether the president has done a good job in the war on terrorism," he said.
Clarke also told NBC he wants even more information declassified, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission. The White House has said Rice cannot testify publicly because of her position, but the commission has disagreed and asked the administration to change its stance.

Clarke also called for a document mentioned in the commission's staff report this week to be declassified -- a "strategy paper" he sent to Rice shortly after she assumed office in January 2001. Rice and Clarke have characterized the document very differently, with Clarke insisting it shows the administration's failure to act on "urgent" calls for action and Rice saying it was largely a list of anti-terrorism steps left over from the Clinton administration.

"Let's go further," he told NBC. "The White House is now selectively finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed are covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press. Let's take all of my e-mails and memos that I sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to September 11, and let's declassify all of it."

In his book and in testimony to the commission this week, Clarke said the Bush administration did not act on repeated warnings before September 11, 2001, that an al Qaeda attack could be imminent. He told the commission the administration considered terrorism an important issue, but not an "urgent" issue.

He reiterated that assessment on NBC, adding, "They had 100 meetings before they were willing to have one on terrorism."

Although the administration vigorously denied Clarke's assessment, Clarke quoted Bush, in an interview with reporter Bob Woodward, acknowledging that before September 11 he did not consider terrorism an "urgent" issue.

Clarke arrived at NBC armed with several documents to support his statements and rebut what the administration said about him this week.

Among them was a hand-written note the president wrote him upon his resignation in early 2003. "Dear Dick, you will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor," the note says, according to Clarke. "You have left a positive mark on our government."

Clarke said the White House should end its attacks on his credibility and focus on the issues.

"This is about the president's job in the war on terrorism," he said. "This is about how going into Iraq hurt the war on terrorism. This is not about Dick Clarke," Clarke said.

Clarke denied having been demoted by the administration, saying he asked to be transferred to a position in charge of battling cybersecurity partly due to his frustration with "the administration's lackadaisical attitude" toward terrorism.

As for Rice, he said, "I have great respect" for her. "I've known Condi a long time, I think she's a very good person."

el - Finally he says something I disagree with - I have no respect for Rice, too many lies, too little talent. Someone who lies that much and that badly is not a good person.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Modern Trench Warfare - American Politics

Whiskey Bar compare the presidential race to WW1.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Report From Local Democracy

I was an election judge for the March 9 primary. I needed the money. Turnout was abysmal. Under 10% voting and most of that early voting. The poor Democratic primary schedule had a lot to do with it. Winners get anointed too fast and then the primaries come at such a rapid clip others can't mount a challenge. Another is that the vast majority of people are too discouraged and they feel disenfranchised. Voting no longer seems a civic virtue. It makes the voter seem partly responsible for the messes. Just one of my theories you can take or leave.

We have the eVote machines. The machines are fundamentally wrong, there is no way to easily determine if the votes the central computer reports are the real votes. There are many ways to gimmick the database. In fact, the controversy over the machine really started when one writer realized that for at least one company the software seems designed for vote-stealing, disabling audit trails and keeping three sets of vote totals. These issues are unknown to most users. I will add that if you have corrupt judges they can easily add votes at the end of the day. Actually anytime during the day but you add signatures at the end to avoid embarrassment if someone finds they already voted. The only check are the signatures, which are separate books not connected to the electronic system.

I persuaded several people to stay for the caucus and that was fun except I had to turn the machines in and couldn't stay or go out for coffee. I rushed them to get done so I could pack up and leave.

Help? - the Democratic party and the county administration are understaffed and had difficulty getting workers for what they pay. I ended up with only one clerk, a close friend, for a few hours in the morning who came back to bring me lunch and to help put away the machines and deliver the paperwork later.

Yes, I was alone more time than I was with someone. I will note that even for Harris County this is very rare. Most precinct judges get their family and friends to help and have several there. I didn't decide I would work until the last couple days and got assigned as a precinct judge just before 5 PM the previous day. The September election I recruited one member from a science fiction book group to help me.

Saturday March 27 I attended the Harris County - Senate District 11 Democratic convention. This was mainly to elect delegates for the state convention. A major lesson learned was why Kucinich was staying in. While he will likely have no delegates from Texas his team had the great majority of the resolutions - all of which passed. A report from another convention confirms that almost all resolutions that were introduced at the precinct level are passed and his supporters came prepared to the precinct caucuses with downloaded resolutions so even if they don't get elected they influence the party, become positions of the party, and may be written into the party platform.

I also served on the credentials committee which was mainly signing people in. Pat in another convention became a member of the resolutions committee and saw all the precinct resolutions. Great majority were downloaded Kucinich resolutions, other downloaded or copied from special interest groups, only around 10% seemed written by an individual or at the caucus.

At my convention the resolutions that made it to the floor, there were hundreds the resolution committee was looking at (but I bet most were duplicates), were all approved. Debate on four, some opposition on three, one was amended, one was closely split but passed. The convention by a narrow majority supported Kucinich's argument to pull out of WTO, NAFTA, and similar trade treaties. Everyone would have supported that there are problems with the agreements, the problems with pulling out completely a pro-labor crowd did not want to hear. We voted on about a dozen resolutions. At the end of the meeting a motion was made to accept whatever the resolutions committee decided on all other resolutions.

Pat and I were both struck by how the Democratic party was like a club. Some long-time members really run things and sweep everybody along. They have experience with the rules and how to get what they want accomplished while moving things to the next item. I don't think anything occurred at the meeting that the few leaders didn't want. As an example Pat had a resolution that a majority of her resolutions committee didn't want, poorly written, and they voted it down. The chairwoman came back and it was her resolution so she called another vote and got it to the floor.

My website name seems a misnomer, maybe I should call this mad and angry moderate news. The one's calling themselves liberals in my party are pushing for radical makeovers regardless of political realities: lowering the retirement age, tripling minimum wage, free universal health care, withdrawal from all trade treaties, pure libertarian sounding open immigration, a cabinet department of peace, repeal everything related to the Patriot Act and similar left platforms. The only debates had to due with mandatory jail sentences on drivers who cause serious injury or death to motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians and how far to close US markets, The traffic accident resolution passed after removing mandatory jail time but making it a more serious offense then now. It likely would have been voted down or amended more except for a strong appeal from a motorcycle club member who says they buried 18 friends last year from motorcycle crashes, 17 caused by failure to yield of car drivers.

I had a private debate over gay marriages. Some of the older crowd are still unsure about that. An argument that gay partners cannot get health insurance unless the state recognizes the partnership and requires employers to offer benefits seemed persuasive. Gay related resolutions did not make it to the floor in my convention - ran out of time.

Very interesting experiences and I recommend everyone attend your caucus and move up your political participation. Saw the impressive Democratic candidate against DeLay. In between all the business candidates drop by and speak a little. There was a rumor that Morrison would be a stealth campaign. No way. He spoke like an old-style New Deal Democrat and vows to run an in-your-face campaign against the most powerful man on the Hill. Most people hadn't heard much about him but he got several standing ovations and lots of supporters.

I am now a delegate to the state convention which will be held in Houston. I haven't figured out suitable punishment yet for my brother for not voting. I should also get onto some people for not attending the caucus. It was fun. One major lesson learned was as a speaker said - talking and yelling at the TV doesn't change things. Taking some action does. We can't just talk among ourselves about how bad Bush is, we have to give the neutrals a reason to vote for us and cast doubt among those who support the GOP. Kevin Drum had an old article about how the grassroots Texas GOP must now be becoming closet revolutionary fundamentalists worse than the Taliban based on their party platform. We need to start dragging them out of the closet. Dragging some of the top Texas GOP officials out of their closets might be smart too.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Why does Middle America Not see Bush as Nasty?

President Bush is playing supercharged hardball in going after his own former anti-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke. It's a risky strategy that shows the single-mindedness of Bush and his re-election team in trying to deflect politically damaging criticism.

Loyalty is a hallmark of Bush's administration, with the president and his top lieutenants quick to turn on those who stray from the fold.

In his book "Against All Enemies,'' Clarke predicted retribution from a White House "adept at revenge.''

But Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, are essentially following the same game plan that the late Lee Atwater - an early political mentor of Rove's - used to get the first President Bush elected in 1988: define and undercut an opponent early with a fusillade of negative attacks.

"This team is tough. You cross them and they go after you and raise questions about you and your credibility rather than what you have to say,'' said Thomas Mann, a scholar with the Brookings Institution.

Others who have fallen out of favor over Iraq include former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. All voiced concerns about either the expense or number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. All were treated dismissively by the White House. All are gone, but their estimates proved accurate.

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV drew the administration's wrath by suggesting Bush exaggerated Saddam's nuclear capabilities. A federal grand jury is investigating whether a White House official illegally disclosed that Wilson's wife was a CIA officer to get back at him.

On the domestic front, Paul O'Neill was fired as Treasury secretary in December 2002 after publicly questioning the need for additional Bush tax cuts - another core campaign issue for Bush.

Administration officials now are waging a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster, a Medicare accountant who publicly said he was forbidden by his superiors from sharing with Congress a higher - and more accurate - cost estimate for the administration's Medicare program.

John DiIulio quit as director of Bush's office of faith-based initiatives in 2002, telling Esquire magazine that "Mayberry Machiavellis'' led by Rove were basing policy only on re-election concerns. He later apologized for making what he said were rude remarks.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., stood on the Senate floor last week to urge Bush to stop the "character attacks'' on Clarke, saying they recalled scorched-earth tactics that Bush and his allies used to defeat Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the GOP presidential primary in 2000, and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia in the 2002 midterm elections.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

Iraq Total Chaos - Waiting For Civil War

Reason Magazine shows the reality in Iraq we are not getting on the news.

Sunni and Shi'ite leaders were quick to condemn the new interim constitution for its secularism. They were united in calling the Quran their only constitution. They need not have worried since what happens in the walled-off "Green Zone" of the Occupiers is a land of make believe that does not affect the rest of Iraqis living in the "Red Zone" which is the rest of the country. Westerners who work for the Occupation in the green zone rarely venture beyond its walls; Iraq is as alien to them as they are to Iraqis. Congressional staffers put in six months to spice up their resumes, former military or State Department officials fish for contracts with General Electric or KBR after they finish their stint. They don't have to deal with many Iraqis. In the Rashid cafeteria for military and civilian servants of the Occupation, non-Iraqis serve the food. When they do deal with Iraqis, they have interesting choices. The deputy minister of the interior has been diverting arms and stockpiling them privately. He is accompanied by two doting American intelligence agents. Perhaps he is their last hope, should all else fail. The minister of higher education has banned all student unions that are not ethnically or religiously based. He is forcing even Christian girls to cover their heads and instituting mandatory Islamic education.

I was with a US army unit when they went on a raid one morning. Tanks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees squeezed through the neighborhood walls as a CIA operator eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses angrily, a silencer on his assault weapon. Intelligence had intercepted a phone conversation in which a man called Ayoub spoke of advancing to the next level to obtain landmines and other weapons. Soldiers broke through Ayoub's door early in the morning, but when the sleepy man did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with non-lethal ordnance, little pellets exploding like gun shot from the weapon's grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered with his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against their garden's fence.

Ayoub's frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with the immense soldier to spare her son's life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier's hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub's four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide open in terror, clutching one another as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two compact discs with Saddam Hussein and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called The Crimes of Saddam, are common on every Iraqi street and, as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters. But the soldiers couldn't read Arabic and saw only the picture of Saddam, which was proof enough of guilt. Ayoub was brought out and pushed on to the truck. He gestured to his shrieking family to remain where they were. He was a gentle, avuncular man, small and round, balding and unshaven, with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. It seemed unlikely that he was involved in any anti-American activity; but he did not protest and maintained his dignity, sitting frozen, staring numbly ahead. The soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub's injured hand and chuckled to his friends, "It ain't my hand." The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.

Several hours later a call was intercepted from another Ayoub. "Oh shit," said the unit's intelligence officer, "it was the wrong Ayoub." The innocent father of six who had the wrong name was not immediately let go so as not to risk revealing to the other Ayoub that the Americans were searching for him. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family and tell them he was fine, but would not be home for a few days. "It was not the wrong guy," said the units commander defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. "We raided the house we were supposed to and arrested the man we were told to." Meanwhile Army intelligence was still confounded by the meaning of the intercepted conversations until somebody realized it was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons. It was a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.

The violence is relentless. Explosions from bombs, rocket propelled grenades and artillery as well as guns firing can be heard all day and night, but their locations are usually impossible to determine, even if you are foolish enough to search for them after dark, when gangs and wild dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the occupiers. The pace of the violence is normal and mundane, so nobody cares. Unless an explosion is perceptibly close, it is just an echo, and nobody pauses in mid-conversation or stops chewing his kabob. Nobody in the US (and certainly nobody in Iraq) even cares much about the American soldiers dying daily, as long as the numbers on any given day are low. In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya in Baghdad there are nightly RPG and mortar attacks on the US base, and the men on the street erupt in cheers and whistles at the sounds.

Mosques are attacked every night and clerics killed, leading to retaliations against the opposite sect. Mosques now have armies of young volunteers wielding Kalashnikovs guarding them. Soon neighborhood mosques will unite to form neighborhood armies, to fight rival mosques or rival neighborhoods. (Even many journalists now travel with armed bodyguards; in at least one incident they returned fire, making them combatants). In the Sunni Hudheifa Mosque in Rasala one can purchase a magazine that praises Yazid, the early Muslim leader who killed Hussein, the martyr whom Shi'ites venerate and mourn for. This article would be enough to start a civil war if Shi'ites found it.

"We don't talk about civil war," one Sunni tribal leader told me. "We just prepare for it."

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004

David Brooks As An East Coast Snob Writing Error Filled Travel Guides to Hicksville

Brooks could be dismissed as little more than a snarky punch-line artist, except that he postures as a public intellectual -- and has been received as one.

It's hard, in fact, to think of many American thinkers more influential at this moment than Brooks. His 2000 book Bobos in Paradise heralded the rise of a new upper class that mixed '60s-style liberalism with '80s-style conspicuous consumption; celebrated by reviewers, it quickly became a best-seller. Brooks wrote that his hometown, Wayne, was emblematic of the "Upscale Suburban Hippiedom" that was the natural habitat of these "bourgeois bohemians." Like "yuppie" and "metrosexual," Brooks's "bobo" entered the language as a successful coinage of pop sociology.

Following the success of Bobos, Brooks -- who was then writing for the Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek and appearing on pbs and NPR -- was offered the Times column, formalizing his position as the in-house conservative pundit of liberal America. In his column, Brooks writes mostly about affairs of state, but with the same approach -- a cultural analysis grounded in social observation -- that made Bobos such a success.

Brooks... draws caricatures. Whether out of sloppiness or laziness, the examples he conjures to illustrate well-founded premises are often unfounded, undermining the very points he's trying to make.

I looked at another of brooks's more celebrated articles, an August 2002 piece in the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in which he discerned a new American archetype he dubbed "Patio Man." Patio Man, in Brooks's description, "walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway missionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly." Patio Man, Brooks wrote, lives in one of the new Sprinkler Cities, "the fast-growing suburbs mostly in the South and West that are the homes of the new-style American dream."

Brooks illuminated Patio Man's world with vivid portraiture, telling details, and clever observations about American culture. Brooks's suggestion that Patio Man's brethren would become the basis of a coming Republican majority found many friends. Slate identified him as a "new sociological icon." The New York Times Magazine 2002 "Year in Ideas" issue cited Patio Man in its encapsulation of "Post-Soccer-Mom Nomenclature."

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured. He describes the ladies of Sprinkler City as "trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady." That chain of women's gyms has three locations -- all in New Jersey, far from any Sprinkler City. "The roads," Brooks writes, "have been given names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue." There are no Entrepreneur Avenues anywhere in the country, according to the business-directory database Referenceusa, and only two Innovation Boulevards -- in non-Sprinkler cities Fort Wayne, Indiana, and State College, Pennsylvania. There is also an Innovation Boulevard in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The basic premises of Brooks's articles aren't necessarily wrong. His Red/Blue article was anchored in the research of political analyst Michael Barone, who in a June 2001 article in National Journal delineated a country split evenly in two: "One is observant, tradition-minded, moralistic. The other is unobservant, liberation-minded, relativistic." Brooks's Patio Man article was a pop translation of a February 2002 paper by University of Michigan demographer William H. Frey, who wrote that 2000 Census figures showed growth of "the New Sunbelt."

el - David Brooks success was taking sociological and political papers and translating them to East Coast elitism-speak and incorporating familiar pop culture examples. His examples are usually totally wrong.

Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it. Barone relies on election returns and public-opinion data as the basis for his research; Frey looks to the census. But Brooks takes their findings and, regardless of origin, applies to them what one might call the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy.

There are salient cultural divides in the United States -- and, in fact, different values and practices among residents of Montgomery and Franklin counties -- but consumer life is the place where they are most rapidly converging. In this regard, Brooks would have been better off relying on the newest generation of elitist truism -- tongue-in-cheek laments about the proliferation of ubiquitous chain espresso bars and bookstores. Last fall, Pottery Barn opened stores in Huntsville, Alabama, and Franklin, Tennessee, and the New York Times has introduced home delivery in Colorado Springs. It likely won't be long before Franklin County gets both; yoga classes have already arrived.

el - For a serious look on understanding America by how communities live and what they buy see The Clustered World. Claritas, the leader in geodemographic lifestyle segmentation systems, has an online free zip code lookup.You can use any of six different marketing segmentation systems to classify you and your neighbors. The newest system has over 60 categories. One system, MicroVision, has 95. Does business really use this stuff? Of course.

Gary Permalink on 3/28/2004