Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Bush's political capital spent, voices in both parties suggest

Bush's political capital spent, voices in both parties suggest
Posted on Tuesday, May 31 @ 09:55:02 EDT
This article has been read 856 times.
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Is Bush using up 'political capital' on early second-term battles?
By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei, Seattle Times
WASHINGTON — Two days after winning re-election last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of "political capital and now I intend to spend it." Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.
In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem-cell research, Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador and a splinter group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.
With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the widely praised elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.
The series of setbacks on the domestic front could signal that the president has weakened leverage over his party, a situation that could embolden the opposition, according to analysts and politicians from both sides. "He has really burned up whatever mandate he had from that last election," said Leon Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff during President Clinton's second term....

Saturday, May 28, 2005

log of an american soldier stationed in Iraq

http://americanhajji.blogspot.com/

Kurd chief who taught mercy to Saddam's men

Kurd chief who taught mercy to Saddam's men

Jailed militia leader counselled ex-foes

Michael Howard in Irbil
Friday May 27, 2005
The Guardian

When Sheikh Ali Bapir saw his fellow prisoners at the US-run detention centre near Baghdad airport he was angry. They were the men he had fought against most of his life. Now he was in prison with them.

He knew their faces from TV: Ali Hassan al-Majid, aka Chemical Ali, the alleged mastermind of gas attacks on the Kurds and of the brutal suppression of the Shia; Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former Iraqi vice-president and a confidante of Saddam Hussein; Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister in the Ba'athist regime; and Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother.

In the near distance, separated from the others by a barbed wire fence, was Saddam.

Released without charge at the end of last month after 22 months in custody, Sheikh Ali, 44, the leader of the Komala Islami Kurdistan (Kurdistan Islamic group), spoke to the Guardian about his encounters with the former Iraqi leadership.

"Why did you put me in here with criminals and mass murderers?" he would ask of his interrogators. "I have never been a Ba'athist and I am not a terrorist. I even killed my brother because he spied for the Iraqi intelligence."

But as the weeks progressed, he channelled his rage into pity and became a spiritual guide to the ex-Ba'athist leaders, teaching them the Qur'an and leading them in prayer.

"At first I was hostile to them," he said. "What they did to my people and the Iraqi people in general was not to be forgiven. But they were also in prison and in a weak position. It was my duty under Islam to show mercy, even to these people who had never shown mercy to others."...

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Eliot Cohen, Confused Again

Without Reservation
A biweekly column by Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., Lt. Col. USAF (ret.)
posted 24 May 05
Eliot Cohen, Confused Again

In the May 13th Wall Street Journal op-ed, Eliot Cohen shares his dismay that Columbia University has joined a long list of colleges and universities that will no longer host the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) on their campuses....

Cohen appears to hold fast to a reactionary assumption that somehow ROTC offers academic military learning, or that the modern American military has somehow been improved by liberal educations.
If I were an ROTC or military leadership dilettante – as Cohen is – I might make the same faulty assumptions.
But as a product of four years of ROTC in the late 1970s and early 1980s at two different universities, I can vouch for the fact that little meaningful information is gained through the process, relating either to American military history or to the proper role of an American military officer in society and government.
Far more frightening is my observation, after over twenty years of service as an officer, that a lively academic curiosity and a serious understanding of American strategic and military history often serves as a handicap for the achievement of higher rank, at least at the flag officer level.
People like General Richard Myers, General Peter Pace, General John Abizaid and his predecessor General Tommy Franks come to mind. These current military leaders seem to have attended nothing more than the school of never asking questions, or perhaps the community college of refusing to engage in the rigorous checking of facts and data. These "military leaders" share a marked lack of intellectual curiosity of the past, present or future, beyond the dim-witted but comfortable world of the U.S. military-industrial complex....

With a Little Help From Our Friends

With a Little Help From Our Friends
By SARAH CHAYES
Published: May 26, 2005

Kandahar, Afghanistan

ON Saturday, May 14, several hundred people gathered in the windswept main street of Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan. Led by local religious leaders, the crowd chanted slogans protesting the supposed desecration of the Koran by interrogators at the detention center run by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, as reported in the May 9 issue of Newsweek.

Unlike protests widely covered in the news media, this one was peaceful and broke up after about an hour. And there lies a paradox: Zabul is one of the country's most conservative and anti-Western provinces. Only a few miles away on the very road where the demonstration took place, vehicles carrying Afghan employees of international organizations are regularly ambushed.

It is inconceivable that the residents of Zabul are less pained than other Afghans by an alleged insult to what they believe is the living word of God. And yet their protest came days late and featured none of the violence, vandalism or loss of life suffered elsewhere. Why the disparity?

For me, after three years in southern Afghanistan, something felt not quite right about the more virulent demonstrations across the country. The instant tip-off was that they were initially led by university students. Afghans and Westerners living in Kandahar have often wondered at the number of Pakistani students in what passes for a university here. The place is pathetically dilapidated, the library a locked storeroom, the medical faculty bereft of the most elementary skeleton or model of the human body. Why would anyone come here to study from Pakistan? Our unshakable conclusion has been that the adroit Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, is planting operatives in the student body. These students can also provoke agitation at Pakistani officials' behest, while affording the government in Islamabad plausible deniability.

In both Kandahar and Kabul, alert Afghan government officials were able to calm demonstrations by holding discussions with student leaders, an indication of the degree to which protesters' actions were manipulated and not the result of spontaneous outrage.

In other words, it's a mistake to focus on the Newsweek article as the cause of the recent demonstrations in Afghanistan. Instead, the reason was President Hamid Karzai's May 8 announcement that Afghanistan would enter a long-term strategic partnership with the United States.

Such an alliance discomfits Afghanistan's neighbors. Pakistan, for one, is used to treating Afghanistan as an all but subject territory. The events of Sept. 11 and the sudden arrival of the United States changed all that, to the muted chagrin of Islamabad. ....

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD
Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did. At that time I wrote an essay that described my learning journey to that point. Since then, I have read a great deal more, and engaged a lot of very bright and perceptive people in discussion of these issues. I intended to update the essay, but I have come to realize that the sequential story of discovering the unprecedented crisis this world is in today is essentially what the 'environmental philosophy' category of my weblog tells already. What is needed now instead is a recapitulation, much shorter and not necessarily in the order in which I learned it, of what I have learned and what I believe we need to do to stave off ecological catastrophe. That is what this essay is about.
It is my way of 'signing on' to the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries, which stated:
"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."
At the root of my environmental philosophy is a growing belief that just having everyone 'do their best' to make the world a better place will not be enough. In other words, we need to bring about a dramatic change in our world in this century, a much greater and faster change than any culture can achieve organically. A change this drastic and this sudden has occurred four times before in human history:

* about 30,000 years ago, with the invention of the axe, the flint arrowhead and the spear
* about 10,000 years ago, with the invention of catastrophic agriculture and animal domestication
* during the Renaissance, with the invention of modern science
* during the industrial revolution, with the invention of automation
Each of these revolutionary inventions utterly changed the way humans lived. None of them, I think importantly, came about because of political or social actions or revolutions -- they were all (in the broad sense of the term) technology-based. What we need urgently today is another such revolution, every bit as radical as these four. We need to find, and rapidly implement, a better, sustainable way to live....

Monday, May 23, 2005

A breath of fresh air sweeps into hell

John Chuckman: 'A breath of fresh air sweeps into hell'
Posted on Monday, May 23 @ 10:05:07 EDT

... but there's still no way out
By John Chuckman
Like a refreshing breeze blowing briefly over those damned to endure the hell created by America's government came the words of British M.P. George Galloway to an American Senate Committee. The man was simply magnificent. Tough, brave, and articulate - hurling unanswerable truth at blubbering political lowlifes in silk suits.
Washington is the most dishonest place on earth, and with that fact goes another, that the American people are among the earth's worst governed. These creepy American Gauleiters had wronged Galloway with faked accusations of his profiting from oil trading with Saddam Hussein. My God, it's just one filthy lie after another. They tried smearing Kofi Anan with the same kind of stuff.
Why is it so rarely Americans who take on their own lying, murderous political establishment? It has always been the same. How few Americans stood up to that bellowing angry drunk, political wife-beater, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or that ugly maggot sucking at the nation's liberties, J. Edgar Hoover....

The curse of the single issue groups

The curse of the single issue groups
by kos
Daily Kos
Mon May 23rd, 2005 at 00:37:01 PDT
Armando has rightly taken NARAL to task for their endorsement of Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee. NARAL was one of the groups that fully opposed anti-abortion Democrat Jim Langevin's short bid for the Senate seat.

Nevermind that Langevin would've crushed Chafee and gotten us one seat closer to a Democratic-led Senate. And a Democratic-led Senate wouldn't ever let any abortion legislation see the light of day. But NARAL, myopic fools that they are, think Chafee is a better bet, despite his vote for Trent Lott, Bill Frist, and their allegiance to the James Dobson, American Taliban agenda.

NARAL, and many people here, whined and cried about Langevin, the way they whined and cried about Harry Reid, because of those Democrats' personal opposition to abortion. Didn't we know, they demanded, that choice was a core principle of the Democratic Party?

To which I have a simple answer: The hell it is.

One of the key problems with the Democratic Party is that single issue groups have hijacked it for their pet causes. So suddenly, Democrats are the party of abortion, of gun control, of spottend owls, of labor, of trial lawyers, etc, etc., et-frickin'-cetera. We don't stand for any ideals, we stand for specific causes. We don't have a core philosophy, we have a list with boxes to check off.

So while Republicans focus on building an ideological foundation for their cause, we focus on checking off those boxes on the list. Check enough boxes, and you're a Democrat in good standing.

Problem is, abortion and choice aren't core principles of the Democratic Party. Rather, things like a Right to Privacy are. And from a Right to Privacy certain things flow -- abortion rights, access to contraceptives, opposition to the Patriot Act, and freedom to worship the gods of our own choosing, or none at all.

Another example of a core Democratic principle -- equality under the law. And from that principle stem civil rights, gender equity, and gay rights. It's not that those individual issues aren't important, of course they are. It's just that they are just that -- individual issues. A party has to stand for something bigger than the sum of its parts.

We have confused groups that are natural allies of the Democratic Party for the party itself. And the party has ceded way too much power, way too much control, to those single issue groups.

NARAL's endorsement of Chafee may be supremely idiotic and counterproductive to their own cause, but it illustrates my point beautifully. NARAL's interests may coincide with the Democratic Party's more often than not, but they are not one and the same.

So if nothing else, this should add urgency to party efforts to find that elusive core philosophy that will help brand our party independent of those single-issue causes. A brand isn't built on the basis of a checklist. And we, as a party, need to stop thinking that way.

(p.s. I nominate this post for "most misunderstood Kos post of all time" before I even submit it. But this isn't a hit and run issue, and we'll have plenty of time to break out and further discuss my assumptions, my sweeping generalizations, and the vagueries inevitable in a blog post of limited size.)

Friday, May 20, 2005

GOP Blocked Judicial Nominees While in Minority

GOP Blocked Judicial Nominees While in Minority
by DavidNYC
Daily Kos
Fri May 20th, 2005 at 01:55:32 PDT
One claim the GOP likes to make is that they were justified in blocking many of Clinton's judicial nominees in the 90s because they were in the majority in Congress. Dems should now be supine, they say, because the right comparison to make is with the Senate Republicans in the first two years of Clinton's first term, when they were in the minority - and as docile as can be.

Only problem is, that story isn't true. Even when the Democrats held a 56-44 advantage in the Senate in 1993 & 1994, the Republicans still tried to stop nominees they didn't like. Here's a tale about one of them.

In 1993, Larry LaRocco, then a Democratic Congressman from Idaho, suggested to Bill Clinton that attorney John Tait be nominated to fill a vacant federal district judgeship in the state. The following year, Clinton went ahead and put Tait's name forward.

But GOP Sen. Larry Craig (and his former Idaho colleague Dirk Kempthorne) were irked about being left out of the process - usually senators get to advise presidents about judicial nominees, but because they were Republicans, they got passed over in favor of LaRocco. Primarily, of course, they were pissed about a Democrat (Tait) getting the nod.

So what did the aggrieved Idaho senators do? Did they just take their lumps and quietly lie down? Hardly:

Two months ago, U.S. Sens. Larry Craig and Dirk Kempthorne successfully blocked Tait's confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lewiston Morning Tribue, 12/14/1994

Orrin Hatch, then the ranking member of the judiciary committee, prevented Tait from getting a vote at Craig & Kempthorne's request. When the GOP took over Congress in November of that year, Tait's nomination was permanently dead. Tait, by the way, was rated as qualified by the American Bar Association.

I'm sorry for the lack of links - this story is just a bit too old to have made it on to the web. (Though if you have access to Lexis, you can easily confirm all the details.) But in fact, this is something the Republicans are relying on - they're trying to rewrite a period of history (as they often do) that's just a little bit beyond the edges of recent memory. Of course, we won't let them - and we'll remind them that while the GOP thwarted nominees for crass partisan reasons even when they were in the minority, we are currently only exercising our perogative in order to block a tiny handful of the very worst candidates.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Frist's Hypocritical and Dishonest Attack on Democracy

Frist's Hypocritical and Dishonest Attack on Democracy
American Progress
January 4, 2005

Documents obtained by American Progress show Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist participated in an effort to block one of Bill Clinton's judicial nominees via filibuster, then lied about it.

In recent weeks, Frist has been relentlessly preaching about the evils of judicial filibusters. Speaking to the Federalist Society on November 12, Frist said filibustering judicial nominees is "radical. It is dangerous and it must be overcome." [1] Frist called judicial filibusters "nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority." When Bill Clinton was President, however, Frist engaged in the same behavior he is now condemning.

In 1996 Clinton nominated Judge Richard Paez to the 9th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. Conservatives in Congress held up Paez's nomination for more than four years, culminating in an attempted filibuster on March 8, 2000. Bill Frist was among those who voted to filibuster Paez....

Also check out Frist Implodes on Senate floor

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Blaming the Messenger

Blaming the Messenger
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, May 18, 2005; Page A17
Washington Post

...There is no question that these were tactics designed to offend, no question that they were put in place after 2001 and no question that many considered them justified. Since the Afghan invasion, public supporters of "exceptional" interrogation methods have argued that in the special, unusual case of the war on terrorism, we may have to suspend our fussy legality, ignore our high ideals and resort to some unpleasant tactics that our military had never used. Opponents of these methods, among them some of the military's own interrogation experts, have argued, on the contrary, that "special methods" are not only ineffective but counterproductive: They might actually inspire Muslim terrorists instead of helping to defeat them. They might also make it easier, say, for fanatics in Jalalabad to use two lines of a magazine article to incite riots.

Blaming the messenger, even for a bungled message, doesn't get the administration off the hook. Yes, to paraphrase Rumsfeld, people need to be very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do. And, yes, people whose military and diplomatic priorities include the defeat of Islamic fanaticism and the spread of democratic values in the Muslim world need to be very, very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do to the Muslims they hold in captivity.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

The veneer of fraternity

The veneer of fraternity

Tony Blair is not the first British prime minister to embrace a US president's mendacity, but he could well be the last

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 12, 2005
The Guardian

....In his relationship with Bush, Blair apparently misread the outward signs of American culture and interpreted them through British eyes. Bush can be so amiable and informal dressed in blue jeans that his manner can be mistaken for openness and cooperation, when it conceals a particular type of American class superiority and indifference. Bush, after all, seems so friendly compared with the glowering Cheney, who clawed his way upward. It's not easy for someone who's never travelled in America to grasp the evolution of the Bush family from north-east patricians into Texas Tories, and the dissolution of the New England character along the way, especially its sense of responsibility, duty and humility.

Bush's amiability towards Blair merely demonstrates his acceptance of the prime minister into his fraternity, his private club. But even if Blair got Bush exactly right in every nuance, the outcome remains the same. (Gordon Brown and Bush are a car crash waiting to happen. Bush has an instinctive revulsion for serious intellectuals who have little capacity for the locker-room banter that is his mode of condescension.)

The underlying events that produced this election result provide a harsh, cautionary and unsettling lesson not only for Blair. Prime ministers to come will take the story of Blair's embrace of a powerful ally's mendacity and Blair's subsequent loss of trust as a warning. Future American presidents will be regarded with underlying suspicion far into the future. By chastening Blair, the British voters have applied the only brake they have on Bush's foreign policy. But the damage done to the US-UK relationship could have incalculable long-term negative consequences for the world.

Of Mice and Men

posted 05 May 05
Of Mice and Men
'Without Reservation'by Karen Kwiatkowski

For those who cherish the idea of a bold military leader – a Patton for the 21st century – read no further. What follows is bound to disappoint.
This week, former Chief of the British Defence Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce revealed that in early 2003 he had demanded "'black-and-white' legal cover before he ordered [British] troops in [to Iraq]."
Admiral Boyce had apparently long wondered about the legality of the invasion of Iraq. Boyce was concerned that if the war was truly – or even arguably – illegal, he and his men would be particularly vulnerable to charges of war crimes. Further, such charges might eventually be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court.
"[I]f my soldiers went to jail and I did, some other people would go with me. ... I had a perfectly unambiguous black-and-white statement saying it would be legal to operate if we had to. ... It may not stop us from being charged, but, by God, it would make sure other people were brought in the frame as well."
Those other people were Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Attorney General, Lord Peter Goldsmith.
The modern era offers three legal rationales for war. These include self-defense, aversion of a humanitarian catastrophe, and the authorization of war under the United Nations, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The justification for invading Iraq was never self-defense or prevention of a humanitarian catastrophe. Instead, it was a strained legal interpretation of preexisting UN resolutions, combined with a persistent, but ultimately false, Bush administration insistence that Iraq was already – permanently, irrevocably, impossibly – in material breach of UN resolutions....

US 'backed illegal Iraqi oil deals'

US 'backed illegal Iraqi oil deals'

Report claims blind eye was turned to sanctions busting by American firms

Julian Borger and Jamie Wilson in Washington
Tuesday May 17, 2005
The Guardian

The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua....

Monday, May 16, 2005

Moyers defends PBS, takes aim at `radical right'

Sun, May. 15, 2005

Moyers defends PBS, takes aim at `radical right'
BY MICHAEL D. SORKIN
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS - (KRT) - Bill Moyers denounced on Sunday the right wing and top officials at the White House, saying they are trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media.

He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers." And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases.

Moyers spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. His reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s. He was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson and is a former newspaper publisher.

Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable."

Moyers described those officials as "obsessed with control" of the media. He said they are using the government "to threaten and intimidate."

Moyers answered for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal.

Those charges are from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and, in effect, Moyers' boss at the network.

Tomlinson, a Republican, paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers' show, "Now." Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series "Wide Angle."

Tomlinson, on the recommendation of administration officials, hired a senior White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, according to a report in The New York Times on May 2. Tomlinson has denied that he was carrying out a White House mandate.

Tomlinson complained that Moyers' show was consistently critical of Republicans and the Bush administration. He said there was a "tone deafness" at PBS headquarters on issues of "tone and balance."

Moyers said he knew his broadcasts have created a backlash in Washington.

"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party," he said.

"That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

Moyers' speech was interrupted by standing ovations at the Conference for Media Reform here over the weekend. More than 2,500 people attended the three-day conference.

Ernest Wilson III serves with Tomlinson on the board that oversees public broadcasting. He said PBS outranks the Fox News Channel, CNN and all the broadcast news networks in a survey that asked whom the public trusts.

"We are, by far, the most `fair and balanced,'" he said, a reference to the motto of Fox News.

Moyers complained that PBS' "liberal" label is undeserved.

"In contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely features the voices of establishment critics," he said, alternative voices on public television are rare and usually drowned out by government and corporate views.

Moyers said that's exactly what the right wing wants.

"They want your reporting to validate their belief system, and when it doesn't God forbid."

He said he always thought that the American eagle needed both a left wing and a right wing. "But with two right wings, or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle, and it's going to crash."

Moyers said right wingers had attacked him after he closed a broadcast by placing a flag in his lapel.

It was the first time that he had worn a flag. He said he put it on to remind himself that "not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us."

"The flag has been hijacked and turned into a logo, a trademark of a monopoly on patriotism," Moyers said.

Moyers had harsh words for reporters who simply recount what officials say, without scrutinizing what they say and do.

He said New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, among other reporters, had relied on official but unnamed sources "when she served essentially as the government's stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction."

Moyers said he has come to understand that "news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity."

He said that kind of reporting has never been tougher to do:

"Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the news speak vernacular of George Orwell's `1984,' giving us a program, no child will be left behind, while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged children.

"They give us legislation calling for clear skies and healthy forests" while "turning over public lands to the energy industry."

He said the public shares the blame:

"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight - ask questions and be skeptical."

Moyers compared Tomlinson and other conservatives to Richard Nixon, who he said was another president who tried to take control of public television.

"I always knew Nixon would be back," Moyers said. "I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

Moyers was a last-minute addition to the conference. He finished writing his hourlong speech 20 minutes before he spoke. His ending was nearly drowned out by a blaring fire alarm that went off by mistake.

The conference ended Sunday, and some who attended said they were still unsure what reforming the media means. Others said they were energized to go home and give it a try.

"It's true that no one laid out a battle plan," said Mercedes Lynn DeUriarte, an associate journalism professor from the University of Texas at Austin. "But everybody left understanding that we're at a critical point, where we must find a way to protect a democratic press or risk democracy."

---

© 2005, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Visit the Post-Dispatch on the World Wide Web at http://www.stltoday.com

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 KRT Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.grandforks.com

The deserters: Awol crisis hits the US forces

The deserters: Awol crisis hits the US forces
Independent News
As the death toll of troops mounts in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's military recruiting figures have plummeted to an all-time low. Thousands of US servicemen and women are now refusing to serve their country. Andrew Buncombe reports

16 May 2005

Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.

Last January, these memories became too much for this veteran of the war in Iraq. Informed his unit was about to return, he told his commanders he wanted out and applied to be considered a conscientious objector. The Army refused and charged him with desertion. Last week, his case - which carries a penalty of up to seven years' imprisonment - started before a military judge at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

"If I am sincere in what I say and there's consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it," Sgt Benderman said. "If I have to go to prison because I don't want to kill anybody, so be it."

The case of Sgt Benderman and those of others like him has focused attention on the thousands of US troops who have gone Awol (Absent Without Leave) since the start of President George Bush's so-called war on terror....

Lessons for John Bolton

Lessons for John Bolton
Denver Post

In the melodramatic fashion of a classic Washington soap opera, John Bolton's nomination for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has moved from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for consideration by the full Senate.

During the weeks when his nomination was stuck in committee, we learned much about Bolton - especially his high-handed way of dealing with others and his contempt for the U.N. Perhaps the most serious concern was that Bolton tried repeatedly to twist intelligence to fit his policy positions, including findings on North Korean, Cuban and Syrian weapons of mass destruction programs.

For those reasons, Bolton could not win a majority in committee, and he suffered the indignity of seeing his nomination go to the Senate floor without recommendation, and with the harsh criticism of a well-regarded Senate Republican ringing in his ears. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, spoke for many when he said Bolton was not the best candidate for a job in which relations with American allies are critical.

Nevertheless, Bolton is the president's choice, and Voinovich allowed his nomination to go to the Senate floor where there is a chance he will be confirmed. If that's the case, we hope he has learned some lessons along the way....

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Petty partisanship has no place in the pulpit

Petty partisanship has no place in the pulpit
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
Originally published May 15, 2005

WASHINGTON - Consider Christianity.

It is a faith broad enough to encompass everything from a pope in Rome to a missionary in South America to a snake handler in Appalachia. Apparently, however, it is not broad enough to encompass a Democrat in North Carolina.

That, at least, is the inference to be gleaned from the experience of nine people who say they were kicked out of their church recently because they voted for John Kerry in the 2004 election. The nine former members of East Waynesville Baptist say the Rev. Chan Chandler led the drive to oust them. The resulting uproar has made headlines nationwide and drawn harsh criticism, even from other clergy. Pastor Chandler initially denied the accusations and characterized the flap as a "misunderstanding."

The claim is undercut by his own words. Last week, ABC News played an audiotape of an October sermon in which the preacher said, "If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign. You have been holding back God's church way too long."

Pastor Chandler stepped down a few days ago....

Hiding the truth in plain sight

Hiding the truth in plain sight
May 15, 2005
BY WILLIAM O'ROURKE

Laura Bush's recent appearance at the White House correspondents' dinner -- her ribald monologue about her husband, the president -- has caused a minor stir. A number of conservatives are upset, given the subject of her jokes: male strippers, desperate housewives, fondling a horse's private parts. The first lady was lucky her routine was televised on C-SPAN and not on PBS, where it would have been shredded with edits decreed by the newly censorious, Republican-led Corporation for Public Broadcasting.


But her comedy routine was a case of Laura Bush letting her class slip show. Just as President Bush in his prime time news conference attempted to put some space between himself and conservative attacks on the judiciary, Laura was sent out to put a little distance between the right-wing puritans and the Bush family. George W. has done such a good job portraying himself as a regular guy, Laura needed to remind the media elite that the Bushes were sophisticated and with it, not fuddy-duddy prudes. They aren't the media elite, but better: the actual elite. Laura Bush's job at the correspondents' dinner was, in part, to pander to the Christie Todd Whitman-Arnold Schwarzenegger side of the GOP: therefore, the jokes about Chippendales, the male strip clubs, and the wife abandoned by her early-to-bed husband, and so on.

As the president often tells the world, he made a good choice when he married Laura Bush. It is impossible to imagine him married to a lawyer, a Hillary Clinton sort. A schoolteacher, librarian, is just right. The sexual nature of Laura Bush's humor was to remind everyone that here was a woman of warm sensuality, but a woman under control, possessed of a wholesome licentiousness masked by proper manners: hidden but not repressed. What has been hidden, repressed, though, is Laura Bush's long-held pro-choice position on abortion. For quite some time that has been hidden in plain sight.....

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Rebuffing Bush, 132 Mayors Embrace Kyoto Rules

Rebuffing Bush, 132 Mayors Embrace Kyoto Rules
By ELI SANDERS
Published: May 14, 2005
The New York Times
SEATTLE, May 13 - Unsettled by a series of dry winters in this normally wet city, Mayor Greg Nickels has begun a nationwide effort to do something the Bush administration will not: carry out the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Enlarge This Image

Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle formed a bipartisan coalition of mayors to adopt the Kyoto Protocol on global warming on the local level.

Mr. Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other likeminded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration's policy.

The mayors, from cities as liberal as Los Angeles and as conservative as Hurst, Tex., represent nearly 29 million citizens in 35 states, according to Mayor Nickels's office. They are pledging to have their cities meet what would have been a binding requirement for the nation had the Bush administration not rejected the Kyoto Protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012.

On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brought New York City into the coalition, the latest Republican mayor to join.

Mr. Nickels said that to achieve the 7 percent reduction, Seattle was requiring cruise ships that dock in its bustling port to turn off their diesel engines while resupplying and to rely only on electric power provided by the city, a requirement that has forced some ships to retrofit. And by the end of this year the city's power utility, Seattle City Light, will be the only utility in the country with no net emissions of greenhouse gases, the mayor's office said.....

Friday, May 13, 2005

When Cowards Rule, America Loses

When Cowards Rule, America Loses
By DOUG THOMPSON
May 13, 2005, 08:05

When, exactly, did America turn into a nation of frightened, over-reactive sissies?

How is it the country that runs the most deadly military on the face of the earth can act like the Keystone Kops when a couple of navigation-challenged pilots in a single-engine Cessna wander off course?

Have we become such a country of cowards that the slightest, unexplained event can send us running from buildings and hiding in terror?

Apparently so. This week, the government of the most powerful nation in the world evacuated the White House and the Capitol because a private plane with two dimwits at the helm ventured into DC airspace.

Last month, a flight of geese spooked a radar operator in Washington and Secret Service agents rushed the President and Vice President to “secure locations.” It’s a sad state of affairs when terrorist geese can cause America to pee in its collective shorts.

The clockers and watchers who monitor the state of things in the world often talk abut the “mood of the country.” If America has a mood today, it’s a paranoid one, driven by fear, lunacy and outright cowardice....

....America is vulnerable because our efforts are wasted on political expendiency, not security. Our leaders pander to fear, not logic. We waste our resources, and American lives, half a world away on a war that had nothing to do with the attack on our nation while our enemies are free to regroup and plan anew.

When another terrorist attack comes, as it surely will, it won’t be from a Cessna flying in open skies into the waiting clutches of American fighter planes. It will come in a way we least expect it, exploiting a vulnerability we haven’t discovered and corrected because we were far too busy overreacting to perceived threats that didn’t exist.

Cowards make mistakes and when a nation like America is run, and controlled by, cowards, those mistakes make it all to easy for our enemies to use those mistakes to kill us.

White Working Class Voters and the Democratic Economic Agenda

May 12, 2005
White Working Class Voters and the Democratic Economic Agenda

By Ralph Whitehead, Jr.

What's surprising, amid the stream of post-election advice to Democrats, is how little of it so far has been devoted to a sustained effort to identify which segments of the beyond-our-base electorate ought to be our targets for the next time around. Our side did a brilliant job of mobilizing our base, but still fell short, because the other side did more than just mobilize its base. It also tried to pick off voters beyond its base, such as white Catholics with weak Democratic leanings, Hispanics (both Catholic and Pentecostal), steelworkers in West Virginia and Ohio and Pennsylvania, African-Americans in Ohio, Jewish voters in South Florida, and married mothers. As they say in the NFL, the Republicans played in our backfield, but we didn't play in theirs. We need an equivalent list, the better to figure out how we, too, can appeal to voters beyond our base, and should get started on the list and the figuring-out ASAP.

One group that belongs on the list is white working class voters–white voters without a four-year degree--especially those of working-age who don't live in union households. White working class voters as a whole make up around half of the electorate and, according to Ruy Teixeira’s analysis of the 2004 NEP exit poll data, they voted for Bush by a margin of 23 points. Because they favored Bush by a smaller 17 point margin in Gore's popular-vote victory of 2000, Kerry could have come very close to winning the 2004 election simply by keeping his losing margin among working class voters at Gore’s level.

If you're inclined to attribute the 2004 drubbing among white working class voters in part to the their social and cultural concerns, you're on solid ground. We ignore those concerns at our peril. At the same time, though, there has been a view that we can override those concerns (up to a point) by appealing to the white working class on the economy. What is striking in Teixeira’s analysis of the 2004 NEP data, consequently, is his finding that noncollege white voters favored Bush on the economy by a margin of 55 to 39. Our economic agenda isn't yet a magic bullet.

Consequently, it's important to develop an economic agenda that appeals strongly enough to the white working class to be able to pull some of its members into our column. In developing this agenda, I would argue, we have to swallow hard and acknowledge a couple of daunting obstacles that stand before us....

Bush facing lame-duck woes

Bush facing lame-duck woes

Tom Raum
Associated Press
May. 12, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - He can't just blame the Democrats. Some lawmakers in President Bush's own party are giving him an increasingly hard time over everything from Social Security to a free-trade pact for Central America to his plan to ease immigration laws.
It may be an early lame-duck warning for his presidency....

Bolton & Bush

May 13, 2005
Ron Brownstein: Bush's Satisfaction Living with Achingly Narrow Margins of Success

Ron Brownstein's survey of today's Bolton drama is very lucid and fair. He outlines the importance of Voinovich's move, the angst in nearly every other political faction, and the willingness of the White House to do nearly anything to win.

TWN wants the White House to do nearly anything to win. In so doing, the White House loses.

Attention: Deficit Disorder

Attention: Deficit Disorder
By ROBERT E. RUBIN
Published: May 13, 2005

THE United States has tremendous economic strengths but it also faces great challenges: the need to ensure national security; a newly competitive China and India; serious shortcomings in public education, basic research, infrastructure and other requisites for meeting that competition; and much else. An immediate and critical imperative is to redress fiscal imbalances.

Most pressing is the 10-year federal deficit, which most independent analysts project at $4.5 trillion to $5 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 are made permanent and that the alternative minimum tax is adjusted to avoid unintended effects on middle-income taxpayers. And while 10-year numbers can be highly unreliable, deficits are as likely to be higher as to be lower. Over the longer term, Social Security has a 75-year estimated deficit of $4 trillion, while the different components of Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, represent a fiscal problem of roughly $20 trillion.

Virtually all mainstream economists agree that, over time, sustained deficits crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, and reduce productivity and economic growth. But, far more dangerously, if markets here and abroad begin to fear long-term fiscal disarray and our related trade imbalances, those markets could then demand sharply higher interest rates for providing long-term debt capital and could put abrupt and sharp downward pressure on the dollar. These market effects, plus the adverse impact of continuing fiscal imbalances on business and consumer confidence, could seriously undermine our economy.

We have managed to avoid these market effects so far because private demand for capital has been relatively limited, and because the central banks of Japan, China and other countries have provided large inflows of foreign capital....

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Home from Iraq

Home from Iraq
Journalist urges Americans to search for truth, freedom'

This article is adapted from a speech given by photojournalist Molly Bingham at Western Kentucky University last month. Bingham, a Louisville native, was detained in 2003 by Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March 25 to April 2, 2003. Eighteen days after her release, she returned to Iraq to pursue stories for The New York Times, The Guardian of London and others. Taking a short break during the summer of 2003, Bingham had the idea of working on a story to explore who was involved in the nascent resistance that was becoming apparent throughout Iraq. She scanned the papers that summer, looking for an article that would show some journalist had reported the story, had gone deeper to find out the source of the new violence. No one had. So in August 2003, Bingham returned with British journalist Steve Connors and spent the next 10 months reporting the story of the Iraqi resistance. Her account was published in Vanity Fair magazine in July 2004; Connors shot a documentary film on the subject. This speech was a challenge to journalists, and Americans, to speak up and be sure their comments, questions and thoughts are heard, and that the First Amendment is celebrated in all its strengths. Bingham began her career as a photo intern for The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times.

We spent 10 months in Iraq, working on a story, understanding who the people are who are fighting, why they fight, what their fundamental beliefs are, when they started, what kinds of backgrounds they come from, what education, jobs they have. Were they former military, are they Iraqi or foreign? Are they part of al-Qaida? What we came up with is a story in itself, and one that Vanity Fair ran in July 2004 with my text and pictures. [My colleague Steve Connors] shot a documentary film that is still waiting to find a home. But the basic point for this discussion is that we both thought it was really journalistically important to understand who it was who was resisting the presence of the foreign troops. If you didn't understand that, how could you report what was clearly becoming an "ongoing conflict?" And if you were reading the news in America, or Europe, how could you understand the full context of what was unfolding if what motivates the "other side" of the conflict is not understood, or even discussed?

Just the process of working on that story has revealed many things to me about my own country. I'd like to share some of them with you:

Lesson One: Many journalists in Iraq could not, or would not, check their nationality or their own perspective at the door.

One of the hardest things about working on this story for me personally, and as a journalist, was to set my "American self" and perspective aside. It was an ongoing challenge to listen open-mindedly to a group of people whose foundation of belief is significantly different from mine, and one I found I often strongly disagreed with.

But going in to report a story with a pile of prejudices is no way to do a story justice, or to do it fairly, and that constant necessity to bite my tongue, wipe the smirk off my face or continue to listen through a racial or religious diatribe that I found appalling was a skill I had to practice. We would never walk in to cover a union problem or political event without seeking to understand the perspective from both, or the many sides of the story that exist. Why should we as journalists do it in Iraq?...

Home from Iraq

Home from Iraq
Journalist urges Americans to search for truth, freedom'

This article is adapted from a speech given by photojournalist Molly Bingham at Western Kentucky University last month. Bingham, a Louisville native, was detained in 2003 by Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March 25 to April 2, 2003. Eighteen days after her release, she returned to Iraq to pursue stories for The New York Times, The Guardian of London and others. Taking a short break during the summer of 2003, Bingham had the idea of working on a story to explore who was involved in the nascent resistance that was becoming apparent throughout Iraq. She scanned the papers that summer, looking for an article that would show some journalist had reported the story, had gone deeper to find out the source of the new violence. No one had. So in August 2003, Bingham returned with British journalist Steve Connors and spent the next 10 months reporting the story of the Iraqi resistance. Her account was published in Vanity Fair magazine in July 2004; Connors shot a documentary film on the subject. This speech was a challenge to journalists, and Americans, to speak up and be sure their comments, questions and thoughts are heard, and that the First Amendment is celebrated in all its strengths. Bingham began her career as a photo intern for The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times.

We spent 10 months in Iraq, working on a story, understanding who the people are who are fighting, why they fight, what their fundamental beliefs are, when they started, what kinds of backgrounds they come from, what education, jobs they have. Were they former military, are they Iraqi or foreign? Are they part of al-Qaida? What we came up with is a story in itself, and one that Vanity Fair ran in July 2004 with my text and pictures. [My colleague Steve Connors] shot a documentary film that is still waiting to find a home. But the basic point for this discussion is that we both thought it was really journalistically important to understand who it was who was resisting the presence of the foreign troops. If you didn't understand that, how could you report what was clearly becoming an "ongoing conflict?" And if you were reading the news in America, or Europe, how could you understand the full context of what was unfolding if what motivates the "other side" of the conflict is not understood, or even discussed?

Just the process of working on that story has revealed many things to me about my own country. I'd like to share some of them with you:

Lesson One: Many journalists in Iraq could not, or would not, check their nationality or their own perspective at the door.

One of the hardest things about working on this story for me personally, and as a journalist, was to set my "American self" and perspective aside. It was an ongoing challenge to listen open-mindedly to a group of people whose foundation of belief is significantly different from mine, and one I found I often strongly disagreed with.

But going in to report a story with a pile of prejudices is no way to do a story justice, or to do it fairly, and that constant necessity to bite my tongue, wipe the smirk off my face or continue to listen through a racial or religious diatribe that I found appalling was a skill I had to practice. We would never walk in to cover a union problem or political event without seeking to understand the perspective from both, or the many sides of the story that exist. Why should we as journalists do it in Iraq?...

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie

May 10, 2005
COMMENTARY
Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie
LA Times
By Jacob Heilbrunn, Jacob Heilbrunn is a Times editorial writer.
During his visit to the Baltics over the weekend, President Bush infuriated Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin by declaring the obvious: that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was "one of the greatest wrongs of history." But it was what he said next — comparing the Yalta accord among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1945 to the Hitler-Stalin pact — that should cause outrage here at home.
The claim that Roosevelt betrayed Eastern Europe at Yalta, and that he set the stage for 40 years of Soviet domination, is an old right-wing canard. By repeating it, and by publicly charging that the Yalta agreement was in the "unjust tradition" of Hitler's deal with Stalin, Bush was simply engaging in cheap historical revisionism. His glib comments belong to the Ann Coulter school of history.
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The slander against Roosevelt that Bush has taken up dates back to the early 1950s, after Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had supposedly "lost" China to communism. That's when the American right first decried what it viewed as a consistent pattern of "appeasement" in the Democratic Party. The right contended that Roosevelt "sold out" Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference by promising the Soviets an unchallenged sphere of influence in the region.
One element of the right-wing mythology developed in those years was that Alger Hiss, who served during the war as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. — and who was charged in the years that followed with being a Soviet spy and was convicted of perjury — was instrumental in getting Roosevelt to collude with Stalin against Churchill. It was none other than Joseph McCarthy who declared in February 1950 that "if time permitted, it might be well to go into detail about the fact that Hiss was Roosevelt's chief advisor at Yalta when Roosevelt was admittedly in ill health and tired physically and mentally...."

Some touching moments on VE Day until Dubya hijacked it

Some touching moments on VE Day until Dubya hijacked it
IAN BELL May 09 2005
The Herald
60th Anniversary of VE Day BBC News 24, EuroNews, Fox News, TV5, Deutsche Welle, 10.00am
Scotland's VE Day – Countdown to Victory BBC2, 7.25pm (Saturday)
Doctor Who BBC1, 7.00pm (Saturday)
History is rewritten daily, and there is not a lot that most of us can do about it. Sometimes, nevertheless, you come across examples of revisionism so gross and opportunistic they make the word shameless seem inadequate.
The plan yesterday morning was to attempt to get a sense of how Europe was marking the 60th anniversary of VE Day. The old men and women are fast diminishing in number now. The chances of another full-dress commemorative rite are remote. So could the news media convey a sense of differing perceptions and differing memories – in Britain of victory, in France of occupation, in Germany of defeat and absolute devastation? To put it another way: could the rolling news channels do history?
Decent scheme, I thought, until I turned to BBC News 24. There, against a sea of 8300 crosses at the Margraten cemetery near Maastricht in Holland, was George W Bush trying to attach his war on Iraq to the liberation of Europe. The conflicts, he was attempting to say, were one and the same thing. The capacity for disgust I thought I had lost suddenly reappeared. What's a relevant fact in a news report? The BBC announcer seemed to know full well that some people, veterans included, would be offended by Bush's behaviour. Someone could have pointed out that this president dodged military service. They could have added that the Iraq adventure, unlike the war against the Nazis, has been deemed illegal....

BUSH MENDACITY WILL SHOCK HISTORIANS

Niagara Falls Reporter
BUSH MENDACITY WILL SHOCK HISTORIANS
By Bill Gallagher

DETROIT -- When historians write about our times, they'll shake their heads and wonder how so many people could believe so many lies for so long. They might actually write two parallel books -- one describing the cascading lies and deceptions George W. Bush and the Republicans sold and the other telling the truth.

We're told, in effect, that trampling on civil liberties and eroding freedom are a sure way to protect us from terrorists who envy our freedom. That colossal lie will be one of the lasting stains on this era, and I fear the day coming when the Busheviks or their political heirs, gripped in fascist fever, will silence those who expose the fraud.

The latest assault on liberty cloaked as protection is the Republican campaign in Congress for national identity cards. Of course, they don't call them that. Such candor sparks opposition. It's much more benevolent sounding to call the measure the Real ID Act.

The plan is to impose national standards for driver's licenses and require four pieces of identification before states issue them. The House Republicans attached the proposed law to the bill for appropriating funds for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The proposal is really aimed at immigrants and has nothing to do with terrorism. It would create a bureaucratic nightmare, impose an unfunded mandate on state governments and do nothing to protect us from al-Qaeda.....

Why aren't TV pundits, politicians pro-enlistment?

Why aren't TV pundits, politicians pro-enlistment?
by kos
Tue May 10th, 2005 at 11:49:58 PDT
Yesterday I asked why the 101st Fighting Keyboardists and Religious Right aren't pro-enlistment. I mean, there is a real crisis in Army and Marine recruitment right now:

In April, the Army missed its recruiting goal for the third month in a row, short by nearly 2,800 recruits, or 42 percent off its target. And for the first time in 10 years, the Marine Corps missed its recruiting goal for the last four months.
Yet the cowards hiding behind monitors and pulpits can't stop singing the war's praises.

Ahh, but they're not alone.

Where is Rush Limbaugh's plea to his listeners to enlist? How about Sean Hannity? Bill O'Reilly? Nevermind they passed on serving their nation when they had a chance. Why aren't they using their influence to encourage military service?

How about President Bush? Where is he in this important issue? Joe Lieberman? Bill Frist? Tom DeLay? Sure, they shirked their duty given the chance. But since they're cheering the quagmire in the Gulf, shouldn't they be working balls-out to ensure we have the resources to fight their war?

Cowards, the lot of them. Mouthing "support" for the troops means nothing unless those troops have the manpower and equipment to fight the war effectively.

Yet they do no such thing. Why? It doesn't hurt that the draft-dodging lot of them have no credibility asking others to sacrifice when they themselves couldn't lift a finger in service to their nation when their nation needed them most....

Monday, May 09, 2005

Of Mice and Men

Without Reservation
A biweekly column by Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.)


posted 05 May 05
Of Mice and Men

For those who cherish the idea of a bold military leader – a Patton for the 21st century – read no further. What follows is bound to disappoint.
This week, former Chief of the British Defence Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce revealed that in early 2003 he had demanded "'black-and-white' legal cover before he ordered [British] troops in [to Iraq]."
Admiral Boyce had apparently long wondered about the legality of the invasion of Iraq. Boyce was concerned that if the war was truly – or even arguably – illegal, he and his men would be particularly vulnerable to charges of war crimes. Further, such charges might eventually be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court.
"[I]f my soldiers went to jail and I did, some other people would go with me. ... I had a perfectly unambiguous black-and-white statement saying it would be legal to operate if we had to. ... It may not stop us from being charged, but, by God, it would make sure other people were brought in the frame as well."
Those other people were Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Attorney General, Lord Peter Goldsmith.
The modern era offers three legal rationales for war. These include self-defense, aversion of a humanitarian catastrophe, and the authorization of war under the United Nations, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The justification for invading Iraq was never self-defense or prevention of a humanitarian catastrophe. Instead, it was a strained legal interpretation of preexisting UN resolutions, combined with a persistent, but ultimately false, Bush administration insistence that Iraq was already – permanently, irrevocably, impossibly – in material breach of UN resolutions....

CIA Agent Plame & The Supreme Court

An Update on the Investigation Into the Leak Of CIA Agent Plame's Identity:
Will The Supreme Court Take The Miller And Cooper Cases?
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Apr. 22, 2005


The investigation relating to the improper (if not felonious) revelation of Valerie Plame's CIA identity by syndicated news columnist Robert Novak seems to be heading toward its conclusion. (I have previously written about the investigation in columns of January 6, 2004 and January 30, 2004.)

The investigation has been marked by some surprising developments. The latest twist relates to two reporters: New York Times investigative reporter Judith Miller, and Time magazine White House correspondent Matthew Cooper.


The two appear to be peripheral players at best, but appearances may be deceiving: According to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Miller and Cooper are essential to his completing his investigation.

Playing hardball, Fitzgerald has insisted both Miller and Cooper be found in contempt of court for their refusal to reveal their confidential sources to his grand jury. So far, courts have ruled in his favor. The question now is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will take the case, and if it does, what it will rule.

A Brief Recap Of The Situation

On October 7, 2004, the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Thomas Hogan, held Miller in contempt. Then, on October 13, Judge Hogan held Cooper in contempt. Judge Hogan ordered each to pay a fine of $1,000 per day and to stay in jail until he or she testifies. However, he stayed his order pending their appeals....

REPUBLICANS vs. DEMOCRATS ON THE ECONOMY

May 9, 2005
Kevin Drum

REPUBLICANS vs. DEMOCRATS ON THE ECONOMY....Did you know that Democratic presidents are better for the economy than Republicans? Sure you did. I pointed this out two years ago, back when my readership numbered in the dozens, and more recently Michael Kinsley ran the numbers in the LA Times and came to the same conclusion.

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There's just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

Skeptics offer two arguments: first, that presidents don't control the economy; second, that there are too few data points to draw any firm conclusions. Neither argument is convincing. It's true that presidents don't control the economy, but they do influence it — as everyone tacitly acknowledges by fighting like crazed banshees over every facet of fiscal policy ever offered up by a president.

The second argument doesn't hold water either. The dataset that delivers these results now covers more than 50 years, 10 administrations, and half a dozen different measures. That's a fair amount of data, and the results are awesomely consistent: Democrats do better no matter what you measure, how you measure it, or how you fiddle with the data....

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Al Gore Gets Down

Al Gore Gets Down
By Ari Berman, The Nation. Posted May 4, 2005.

With Al Gore's progressive cable channel, what began as an effort to challenge the right-wing domination of the corporate media has transformed into a business proposition to lure a youth audience. Story Tools

During a town hall meeting on MTV in 2000, Al Gore dismissed a question about the rapper Mos Def. Throughout his career, Gore viewed hip-hop music, even when practiced by a politically conscious artist like Mos Def, as an undignified form of political expression. "Gandhi once said you must become the change you wish to see in the world," Gore said of hip-hop. "I don't think it's good enough to say, 'Well, we're just reflecting a reality.'"

Five years later, on a spring night in San Francisco, none other than Mos Def was anchoring the pre-launch party for Gore's new youth cable channel, Current, reflecting a reality of a different sort--that of the television business, where hipness trumps values. Gore was there too, trying to pump up enthusiasm for what he claims will be an entirely new approach to news and culture. Looking bulky but relaxed, Gore asked the diverse young crowd, "How many of y'all would like to see an opportunity to talk about what's going on in your world that you can participate in with television?"...

IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."

IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."
Special to BuzzFlash
Thursday, May 5, 2005
By Greg Palast
Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.
The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."
For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor."
And if this ain't it, nothing is.
The memo uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.
A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives.....

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

THE AGENCY OF MORAL CLEANSING

THE AGENCY OF MORAL CLEANSING
__________
Andrew Sullivan noted that the "ban gay books" bill introduced by Alabama State Representative Gerald Allen actually has a much wider scope than it first appears. The bill could potentially extend far beyond Oscar Wilhttp://www.blogger.com/de books. Here is the actual language of the bill (via PolySciFi):

No public funds or public facilities shall be used by any state agency, public school, public library, or public college or university for the purchase, production, or promotion of printed or electronic materials or activities that, directly or indirectly, sanction, recognize, foster, or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of the state of Alabama.
PolySciFi explains just how potentially expansive this law could be. After reading it, I had another vision of the future: be. After reading it, I had another vision of the future:...

....Chairman: Today’s hearing is not to debate the merits of the Moral Cleansing Act, but to address your specific complaints. You were told this many times. Now proceed.
Librarian (sighing). The Agency has banned all books on Joseph McCarthy because it includes references to Roy Cohn.
Rep. Allen: Why would it do that?
Librarian: He was gay. He died of AIDS....
Rep. Allen: Roy Cohn? Really?...

Monday, May 02, 2005

The Nuclear Option, Algeria and David Hume's Perfect Commonwealth

Juan Cole
Monday, May 02, 2005

The Nuclear Option, Algeria and David Hume's Perfect Commonwealth
What has the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s got to do with the dictatorial way the US Senate Republicans have begun acting with regard to judicial appointments? The war pitted secular and religious forces against one another, killing over 100,000 persons in constant village massacres and urban assassinations over more than a decade. One of the extreme religious factions, the Armed Islamic Group (French acronym GIA), became angered at US and French support for the secular-leaning military government.
The Algerian Civil War is an intimate part of the US War on Terror. The GIA established a cell in Montreal and loosely hooked up with al-Qaeda affiliates planning a spectacular set of bombings for New Year's Eve, 2000. Part of the Millennial Plot targeted tourist hotels in Jordan, which would have been overflowing with American Christian tourists eager to visit the Jordan River and other religious sites. The Montreal cell decided to blow up Los Angeles Airport, and sent Algerian petty thief Ahmed Ressam with a trunkful of high explosives to carry out the operation. He was apprehended by alert US border inspectors at the entry point to Washington state.
The Algerian Civil War and the GIA Millennium Plot was provoked by a crisis that was foreseen by US Founding Father James Madison. You see, the military government announced in the late 1980s that it would hold free elections for parliament. Unexpectedly, in 1991, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front won 188 of the 231 seats contested in the first round. It was clearly headed for an overwhelming majority. The problem was that the Algerian constitution then allowed parliament to amend the constitution by a simple majority vote, which would then be approved in a popular referendum. (Unlike in the US, the provinces had no say in the matter, and anyway provincial governors are appointed by the central government everywhere in the Arab world except Iraq).
The Algerian military could plainly see that the Islamic Salvation Front (French acronym FIS) could now change the constitution at will. It could arrange for there never to be another vote, if the fundamentalists so desired. It could have the Algerian officer corps taken out and shot if it liked (as had happened in revolutionary Iran). It is not clear that FIS would have gone that route. But in strategy you don't worry about your opponents' intentions, you worry about their capabilities.
The military therefore cancelled the election results. The fundamentalists were enraged and turned to violence and terrorism. All this happened because Algeria was structured as an uncomplicated democracy where a tyranny of the majority was enabled by the constitution, and where a single religion-backed faction could hope to impose its will on the whole country, with no real checks or balances.
It is away from our republican system and toward the old Algerian system of simple majority rule that the Bush administration is now attempting to take us. And it will will produce the same turmoil and violence, ultimately, as the rather stupid 1963/1976 Algerian constitutions produced in that country....

Untangling a Lobbyist's Stake in a Casino Fleet

Untangling a Lobbyist's Stake in a Casino Fleet
By Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi
The Washington Post

Sunday 01 May 2005
With millions of dollars unaccounted for, another federal investigation targets Abramoff.

It was a gangland-style hit straight out of "Goodfellas."

A man in a BMW was driving down a quiet side street after an evening meeting at his Fort Lauderdale office when a car slowed to a stop in front of him. A second car boxed the BMW in from behind, then a dark Mustang appeared from the opposite direction. The Mustang's driver pulled alongside and pumped three hollow-point bullets into the BMW driver's chest.

The dead man was Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, a volatile 51-year-old self-made millionaire, a Greek immigrant who had started as a dishwasher in Canada and ended up in Florida, where he built an empire of restaurants, hotels and cruise ships used for offshore casino gambling. Boulis's slaying, still unsolved four years later, reverberated all the way to Washington. Months earlier he had sold his fleet of casino ships to a partnership that included Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Abramoff is best known as a target of a federal investigation in Washington into the tens of millions in fees he and a partner collected from casino-owning Indian tribes. But the wreckage from his brief and tumultuous time as owner of the gambling fleet threatens to overtake his Washington legal troubles.

Not long after Abramoff and his partners bought SunCruz Casinos in September 2000, the venture ran aground after a fistfight between two of the owners, allegations of mob influence, dueling lawsuits and, finally, Boulis's death on Feb. 6, 2001. Now, Abramoff is the target of a federal investigation into whether the casino ship deal involved bank fraud. According to court records, the SunCruz purchase hinged on a fake wire transfer for $23 million intended to persuade lenders to provide financing to Abramoff's group.

Although the outlines of the tale have become part of South Florida lore, what has not been disclosed are the full details of the alleged fraud at the heart of the transaction and the extent of Abramoff's role - including his use of contacts with Republican Reps. Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and members of their staffs as he worked to land the deal....

RAW STORY Interview with Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA)

...President Bush is holding an event to promote his plan in Moran's district Friday. The events—like most of those the president held during his presidential campaign—are prescreened to include supporters. Moran suggested that such events may have contributed to what he sees as a sense of "self-delusion" Bush has shown in promoting a plan that polls poorly with the American public.

"I don’t think he has much experience with regular people that haven’t been prescreened," he said.

"He doesn’t read any books, and he doesn’t talk with people that don’t already agree with him," he added. "He’s surrounded himself with ideological sycophants. And the biggest ass-kisser of all is Dick Cheney...."

A Bolton from the Bush

Without Reservation
A biweekly column by Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.)
A Bolton from the Bush

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has some concerns about George W. Bush's pick for UN Ambassador.
He says, "I have been troubled with more and more allegations, revelations, coming out about his style, his method of operation."
John Bolton, of course, is a very different man than Chuck Hagel. In theory, both are members of the Republican Party. The similarities stop there.
Hagel served in Vietnam, and was the recipient of two Purple Hearts for sustaining injury in combat. Bolton, like most members of the current administration, has never worn a military uniform....

A Gut Punch to the Middle

A Gut Punch to the Middle
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 2, 2005
The New York Times
...The important thing to understand is that the attempt to turn Social Security into nothing but a program for the poor isn't driven by concerns about the future budget burden of benefit payments. After all, if Mr. Bush was worried about the budget, he would be reconsidering his tax cuts.

No, this is about ideology: Mr. Bush comes to bury Social Security, not to save it. His goal is to turn F.D.R.'s most durable achievement into an unpopular welfare program, so some future president will be able to attack it with tall tales about Social Security queens driving Cadillacs.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

George W. Bush, egghead

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Washington Post Writers Group
04.29.05
George W. Bush, egghead
Devotion to unproven theoretical notions is hallmark of Bush presidency
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's critics have him all wrong. They think of him as an anti-intellectual, opposed to theory and disdainful of grand ideas.

To the contrary. George W. Bush's spring of discontent arises from a fact that no one dares to notice: George W. Bush is an egghead....

The notion of Bush as an egghead no doubt appalls conservatives, too. People on the right have long savored attacking their opponents as "pointy-headed intellectuals" -- the late George Wallace's phrase was widely popular. Spiro T. Agnew, Richard Nixon's vice president, had perfect right-wing pitch when he assailed his boss' opponents as an "effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." That dismissive phrase -- "who characterize themselves as intellectuals" -- was nothing short of brilliant.

But with apologies to both sides, the case for Bush as an egghead is overwhelming. One of the central characteristics of the Bush presidency is a profound commitment to theoretical notions, nurtured in think tanks and ideological magazines, and a relentless -- yes, even principled -- commitment to pushing them regardless of the facts or the consequences.....

How Bush is Destroying the Middle Class

How Bush is Destroying the Middle Class
by bonddad
Sat Apr 30th, 2005 at 14:47:57 PDT

Update [2005-4-30 17:47:57 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando.

For the last week, I have run a series of diaries titled "It's the Economy, Stupid", highlighting the negative effects of Bush's policies on the middle class. Because we are already moving into the beginnings of the 2006 election cycle, I wanted to take all of these diaries and construct one coherent argument that all Democrats could use for the upcoming elections. I have added some new information and arguments, and taken out some of the editorial fat.

The economy will be very important for all candidates for office. It is imperative they have the ability to concisely describe Bush's failures. Bush continually talks about an ownership society. What he really means is a society where the corporations own the workers....

Endangered By Sprawl

WASHINGTON, DC — The rapid consumption of land in the nation’s fastest-growing large metropolitan areas could threaten the survival of nearly one out of every three imperiled species, according to the first study ever to quantify the impact of sprawling development on wildlife nationally. In at least three dozen rapidly-growing counties found mostly in the South and West, open space on non-federal lands is being lost so quickly that essential wildlife habitat will be mostly gone within the next two decades, unless development patterns are altered.

According to the report Endangered By Sprawl: How Runaway Development Threatens America’s Wildlife, produced by the National Wildlife Federation, Smart Growth America, and NatureServe, the rapid conversion of once-natural areas and farmland into subdivisions, shopping centers, roads and parking lots has become a leading threat to America’s native plants and animals.

Endangered By Sprawl: How Runaway Development Threatens America’s Wildlife. download full report (pdf file)

Revealed: documents show Blair's secret plans for war

Revealed: documents show Blair's secret plans for war

PM decided on conflict from the start. Blair told war illegal in March 2002. Latest leak confirms Goldsmith doubts
By Raymond Whitaker, Andy McSmith and Francis Elliott
The Independent
01 May 2005


Tony Blair had resolved to send British troops into action alongside US forces eight months before the Iraq War began, despite a clear warning from the Foreign Office that the conflict could be illegal.

A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that President Bush had firmly made up his mind to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, adding that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

At the same time, a document obtained by this newspaper reveals the Foreign Office legal advice given to Mr Blair in March 2002, before he travelled to meet Mr Bush at his Texas ranch. It contains many of the reservations listed nearly a year later by the Attorney General in his confidential advice to the Prime Minister, which the Government was forced to publish last week, including the warning that the US government took a different view of international law from Britain or virtually any other country.

The advice, also put before the July meeting, was drawn up in part by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser, who resigned on the eve of war in protest at what she called a "crime of aggression".

The latest revelations could scarcely have come at a worse time for Labour, with a general election only four days away and the opposition parties lining up to attack the Prime Ministers credibility....