Weltanschauung.
n, 1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. 2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.

ERM still speaking...

" We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men ... who feared ... to defend causes which were unpopular .... The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay ... and whose fault is that? Not really his; he didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

(Excerpted from the March 9, 1954 See It Now broadcast, as quoted in In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow 1938-1961, pp 247-8.)

The Essential Krugman: "The Road to Dubai

Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Mar 27, 2006

"For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those who want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in common is mean-spiritedness.

But immigration remains a difficult issue for liberals. Let me say a bit more about the ... uncomfortable economics of immigration, then turn to what really worries me: the political implications of a large nonvoting work force. About the economics: the crucial divide isn't between legal and illegal immigration; it's between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants. High-skilled immigrants ... are, by any criterion I can think of, good for America.

But the effects of low-skilled immigration are mixed at best. ... All of these effects, except for the gains for the immigrants themselves, are fairly small. Some of my friends say that's the point I should stress: immigration is a wonderful thing for the immigrants, and claims that immigrants are undermining ... workers and taxpayers are hugely overblown — end of story. But it's important to be intellectually honest, even when it hurts. Moreover, what really worries me ...[is] the effects of having a disenfranchised labor force.

Imagine ... a future in which America becomes like Kuwait or Dubai, a country where a large fraction of the work force consists of illegal immigrants or foreigners on temporary visas — and neither group has the right to vote. Surely this would be a betrayal of our democratic ideals, of government of the people, by the people. Moreover, a political system in which many workers don't count is likely to ... have a weak social safety net and to spend too little on services like health care and education.

This isn't idle speculation. Countries with high immigration tend ... to have less generous welfare states... U.S. cities with ethnically diverse populations — often the result of immigration — tend to have worse public services...

Of course, America isn't Dubai. But we're moving in that direction. As of 2002, ... 14 percent of U.S. workers, and 20 percent of low-wage workers, were immigrants. Only a third ... were naturalized citizens. So we already have a large disenfranchised work force, and it's growing rapidly. The goal of immigration reform should be to reverse that trend.

So what do I think of the Senate ... proposal ... derived from a plan sponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy? I'm all in favor of ... offering those already here a possible route to permanent residency and citizenship. ... we aren't going to deport more than 10 million people ... But I'm puzzled by the plan to create a permanent guest-worker program, one that would admit 400,000 more workers a year (and you know that business interests would immediately start lobbying for an increase...). Isn't institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force a big step away from democracy?

For a hard-line economic conservative like Mr. McCain, the advantages to employers of a cheap work force may be more important than the violation of democratic principles. But why would someone like Mr. Kennedy go along? Is the point to help potential immigrants, or is it to buy support from business interests?

Either way, it's a dangerous route to go down. America's political system is already a lot less democratic in practice than it is on paper, and creating a permanent nonvoting working class would make things worse. The road to Dubai may be paved with good intentions.

Abramoff gets 6 years for fraud

Wed Mar 29, 2006 5:53 PM ET
By Jim Loney

MIAMI (Reuters) - Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist at the heart of a Washington influence-peddling scandal that has rattled top Republicans, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison on Wednesday for fraud in the purchase of a Florida casino cruise line.

Abramoff, who is cooperating in a federal investigation into whether Washington politicians gave his clients favorable treatment in exchange for campaign contributions, Super Bowl tickets and other illegal gifts, was also ordered to pay restitution of $21.7 million, together with a co-defendant. U.S. District Judge Paul Huck handed Abramoff and the co-defendant, New York businessman Adam Kidan, sentences of five years and 10 months in prison. They will be on probation for three years after their release.

Abramoff pleaded guilty in a Miami federal court in January to conspiracy and wire fraud charges, acknowledging he faked documents to get a $60 million loan to buy the SunCruz fleet of gambling ships in 2000. The acknowledgment of guilt was tied to a plea bargain deal that involves cooperating in a federal investigation into whether he showered golf trips, meals, sports tickets and other gifts on lawmakers -- almost all Republicans -- in return for actions that would help his clients.

Abramoff has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud charges in Washington, and federal investigators are examining his links to a number of politicians, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas and Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. DeLay and Ney have denied any wrongdoing.

Abramoff and Kidan bought SunCruz from Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, who was shot to death in an ambush on a street in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in February 2001. Three men were charged in the killing last year. Abramoff and Kidan have said they know nothing about Boulis' death.

A Must-Read by Bill Moyers

A Time for Heresy
By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted March 24, 2006.

Unless we choose to renew our commitment to America's deepest values, the day will come when we no longer recognize the country we love.

Editor's Note: This is the prepared text of Moyers' remarks delivered on March 14 upon the establishment by Marilyn and James Dunn, of the Wake Forest Divinity School, of a scholarship in religious freedom in the name of Judith and Bill Moyers.

---

"When Dean Bill Leonard asked James Dunn to join him here at Wake Forest's new Divinity School, my soul shouted "Yes!" These two men personify the honesty and courage we need to meet the challenge of faith in the fundamentalist dispensation of the 21st century as radical interpretations of both Islam and Christianity seek, in the words of C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, "to take over the government and use cause structures to advance the ideology, hierarchy, and laws" of their movement.

James Dunn and Bill Leonard are Baptists. What kind of Baptist matters. At last count there were more than two dozen varieties of Baptists in America. Bill Clinton is a Baptist. So is Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Jerry Falwell. No wonder Baptists have been compared to jalapeno peppers: one or two make for a tasty dish, but a whole bunch together will bring tears to your eyes.

Many Baptists are fundamentalists; they believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and the divine right of preachers to tell you what it means. They also believe in the separation of church and state only if they cannot control both. The only way to cooperate with fundamentalists, it has been said, is to obey them. James Dunn and Bill Leonard are not that kind of Baptist. They trace their spiritual heritage to forbearers who were considered heretics for standing up to ecclesiastical and state power on matters of conscience. One of them was Thomas Helwys, who, when Roman Catholics were being persecuted by the British crown, dared to defend the Catholics. Helwys went to jail, and died there, for telling the king of England, King James -- yes, of the King James Bible -- that "Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] conscience than ours, and that is none at all."

Baptists helped to turn that conviction into America's great contribution to political science and practical politics -- the independence of church and state. Baptists in colonial America flocked to Washington's army to fight in the Revolutionary War because they wanted to be free from sanctioned religion. When the war was won they refused to support a new Constitution unless it contained a Bill of Rights that guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom from religion. No religion was to become the official religion; you couldn't be taxed to pay for my exercise of faith. This was heresy because, while many of the first settlers in America had fled Europe to escape religious persecution at the hands of the majority, once here they made their faith the established religion that denied freedom to others. Early Baptists considered this to be tyranny. Said John Leland: "All people ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that each can best reconcile to their own consciences."

It was all about a free conscience in a free state, and James Dunn has spent his life as a champion of both. No one in my time has been a greater defender of "soul freedom" -- the competence of each man and woman to interpret their own experience of God in the light of faith and reason.

When James stood up against fundamentalists who would have the state recognize their literal reading of the Bible as the foundation for public policy, they smeared him. They demonized him. They tried to fire him from his denominational position. But they couldn't silence him. He stood against them when they set out to turn the Southern Baptist Convention into a monolith of dogma run from the top down by a cabal of credalists demanding doctrinal conformity. He riled them when they sought to turn the pews of their churches into precincts of partisan politics.

He infuriated them when he opposed their plotting with the White House to draft a Constitutional amendment that would trivialize prayer by reducing it to a perfunctory ritual approved by the state. Said James Dunn: "The Supreme Court can't ban prayer in school. Real prayer is always free."

When the fundamentalists and their obliging politicians claimed that God had been expelled from the classroom, Dunn answered: "The god whom I worship and serve has a perfect attendance record and has never been tardy."

I think of people like Dunn as primal Baptists. Traces of their mindset go all the way back to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the book of Genesis. I relish the interpretation of this ancient story of Davidson Loehr, a former carpenter, combat photographer, and scholar who is now a minister in Austin, Texas. He reminds us that technically Jacob's adversary was not an angel; it was the local deity who stood guard at the boundary beyond which Jacob was not supposed to venture. Local gods were everywhere in those days, protecting parochial fiefdoms. This one told Jacob he couldn't leave, to turn around and go back.

But Jacob wouldn't turn back; he had miles to go and promises to keep. He was called to discover his destiny, move out to the great world awaiting him. If he turned back he would spend the rest of his life in a place too narrow, with a god too small. So Jacob had to go to the mat with this presumptuous authority figure and they wrestled all night. It must have been a terrible struggle because when morning came and Jacob had pinned the god for the last time, his leg was on fire with pain.

He crossed the river and on the other side he got a new name -- now he would be known as Israel -- but for the rest of his life Jacob walked with a limp. Pain comes with freedom -- it's just the deal. The little gods don't want you to grow, learn, think for yourself. But you have to test their truth claims against your own life's experience -- against your own faith and reason. To cross over to freedom you have to show the bogus gods at the border that you have a mind of your own.

It's fascinating what is revealed to you. Joseph Campbell told me a story (also recently recounted by Davidson Loehr) about the Australian tribe that used the bullroarer to keep people in awe of the gods. The bullroarer is a long flat board with notches, or slits, at one end, and a rope at the other. When you swing it around your head, the action produces a musical humming. The sound struck the primitive tribes as other-worldly, causing them to tremble in fear that the gods were angry. So the elders would go into the forest and come back with word of what it would take to placate the gods. And the people would oblige.

Now when a young boy in the tribe was ready to become a man, a ritual took place. Wearing masks, the elders would kidnap him and take him into the woods, tie him down, and with a flint knife slice the underside of his penis. It was painful, but the medicine man said this is how you became a man.

It meant shedding one's innocence. At the end of the ritual one of the masked men dipped the bullroarer in the boy's blood and thrust it in his face, simultaneously removing his mask so the boy could see it's not a god at all -- it's just one of the old guys. And the medicine man would whisper, "We make the noises."

Ah, yes -- it's not the gods after all. It's just the old guys -- Uncle George, Uncle Dick, Uncle Don. The "noise" in the woods is the work of the old guys playing gods, wanting you to live in fear and trembling so that you will look to them to protect you against the wrath to come. It takes courage to put their truth-claims to the test of reality, to call their bluff.

We need such courage today. This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government "of, by, and for the people" into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire. We must answer the principalities and powers that would force on America a stifling conformity. Either we make the heretical choices that will inspire us to renew our commitment to America's deepest values and ideals, or the day will come when we will no longer recognize the country we love.

Here's what I mean.

Two years ago, the American Political Science Association produced a study entitled Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality. The report said people with wealth -- privileged Americans -- are "roaring with a clarity and consistency that public officials readily hear and routinely follow," while citizens "with lower or moderate incomes are speaking with a whisper." The study concluded that "progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and even, in some places, reversed."

The following year -- 2005 -- the editors of The Economist, one of the world's most pro-capitalist publications, produced their own sobering analysis of what is happening in America. They found great and growing income disparities. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 30 times the pay of the average worker; today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker. They found an education system "increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries." They found our celebrated universities increasingly "reinforcing rather that reducing" these educational inequalities. They found American corporations no longer successful agents of upward mobility.

It is now harder for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement. The editors of The Economist studied all this evidence and concluded -- and I am quoting a pro-business magazine, remember -- that the United States "risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society." Let that sink in: The United States "risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society."

In 1960 I heard John F. Kennedy promise that "a rising tide lifts all boats." He was right then. He would be wrong today. Just recently, The Washington Post, in a lead editorial, called for a second look at the old belief "that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can attain the American dream by sharing in the fruits of economic progress."

As great wealth accumulated at the top, the rest of the country is not benefiting proportionally. Across the country working men and women are strained to cope with the rising cost of health care, pharmaceutical drugs, housing, higher education, and public transportation -- all of which have risen faster than typical family income. The economist Robert J. Gordon, quoted in The Financial Times (another pro-business publication), says there has been "little long-term change in workers share of U.S. income over the past half century."

The top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains and the top one percent has gained the most of all -- more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent. We are witnessing a marked turn of events for a nation whose DNA contains the inherent promise of an equal opportunity at "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

We were not supposed to be a country where the winners take all. The great progressive struggles in our history were waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Today, however, the majority of Americans may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a good education for every child, and clean air and water, but there's no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on those aspirations. America is no longer working for all Americans.

How did this happen? By design. For a quarter of a century now, a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America's social contract. The corporate, political, and religious right converged in a movement that for a long time only they understood because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. Their economic strategy was to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe for even cheaper labor, and relieve investors of any responsibility for the cost of society.

On the weekend before President Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times described how his first round of tax cuts had already brought our tax code closer to a system under which income on wealth would not be taxed at all and public expenditures would be raised exclusively from salaries and wages. Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media, create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from the transfer of public resources to elite control.

Along the way, they would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready to retire, systematically stripping government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war and reward privilege. Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God's favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money. They found a deep flaw in our political system and zeroed in on it. Our elected officials need huge sums of money to finance their campaigns, especially to buy television. The average cost of running and winning a seat in the House of Representatives -- the so-called "People's House" -- now tops one million dollars.

The chairman of the Federal Election Commission said just this weekend that anyone who expects to run for the nomination for president -- the nomination -- in 2008 will need to have raised one hundred million dollars by the end of 2007. That money isn't going to come from regular folks -- less than one half of one percent of all Americans made a contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. No, the men and women who have mastered the money game have taken advantage of this fundamental weakness in our system -- the high cost of campaigns -- to sell democracy to the highest bidder.

Some simple facts: The number of lobbyists registered to do business in Washington has more than doubled in the last five years. That's 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 to 34,785 last year. Sixty-five lobbyists for every member of Congress. The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

But it's a small investment on the return. Just look at the most important legislation passed by Congress in the last decade. There was the energy bill that gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 billion in profits in 2005, while our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high. There was the bankruptcy "reform" bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe. There was the deregulation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors, which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors. There was the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price-gouging and the abandonment of news coverage by the big media companies. There was the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a P.O. box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.

In every case these results were driven by the demands of Big Money in the form of campaign contributions and the cost of lobbying. And in every case, the religious right was cheering for the winners. You've heard about Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, I'm sure. Let me tell you a little more than what you might have heard. Tom DeLay was a small businessman from Sugar Land, Texas, who ran a pest extermination business before he entered politics. He hated the government regulators who dared to tell him that some of the pesticides he used were dangerous -- as, unfortunately, they were.

DeLay got himself elected to the Texas legislature at a time the Republicans were becoming the majority in the once-solid Democratic south, and his reputation for joining in the wild parties around the state capital earned him the nickname "Hot Tub Tom." But early in his political career, with exquisite timing (and the help of some videos from the right-wing political evangelist, James Dobson) Tom DeLay found Jesus and became a full-fledged born-again Christian. He would, in time, humbly acknowledge that God had chosen him to restore America to its biblical worldview. "God," said Tom DeLay, "has been walking me through an incredible journey … God is using me, all the time, everywhere … God is training me. God is working with me …."

Yes, indeed: God does work in mysterious ways. In addition to finding Jesus, Tom DeLay also discovered the power of money to power his career. By raising more than two million dollars from lobbyists and business groups and distributing the money to dozens of Republican candidates in 1994, the year of the Republican breakthrough in the House, DeLay bought the loyalty of many freshmen legislators and got himself elected majority whip, the number three man in Newt Gingrich's "Gang of Seven," who ran the House.

Here's how they ran it: On the day before the Republicans formally took control of Congress on January 3, 1995, DeLay met in his office with a coterie of lobbyists from some of the biggest companies in America. He virtually invited them to write their own wish list. What they wanted first was "Project Relief" -- a wide-ranging moratorium on regulations that had originally been put into place for the health and safety of the public.

Soon scores of companies were gorging on his generosity, adding one juicy and expensive tidbit after another to the bill. On the eve of the debate 20 major corporate groups advised lawmakers that "this was a key vote, one that would be considered in future campaign contributions." On the day of the vote lobbyists on Capitol Hill were still writing amendments on their laptops and forwarding them to House leaders. Watching Tom DeLay become the virtual dictator of the House, with the approval of party leaders and the blessing of the Christian right, I was reminded of the card shark in Texas who said to his prey, "Now play the cards fair, Reuben; I know what I dealt you."

They were stacking the deck against the people. Consider what they did to the bill for Medicare prescription drug coverage. As the measure was coming to a vote, a majority of the full House was sympathetic to allowing cheaper imports from Canada and to giving the government the power to negotiate wholesale drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. But DeLay and his cronies were working in behalf of the big pharmaceutical companies and would have none of it. So they made sure there would be no amendments on the floor and they held off the final roll call a full three hours -- well after midnight -- in order to strong-arm members who wanted to vote against the bill.

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The price of corruption is passed on to you. What came of all these shenanigans was a bill that gave industry what it wanted and gave taxpayers the shaft. But when the deeply flawed bill passed in the wee hours of the morning, the champagne corks popped in the offices crowded with lobbyists for the big drug and insurance companies. They were about to be richer on the backs of America's senior citizens.

When Tom DeLay worked the system to reward the rich and powerful, he had come a long way from Sugar Land, Texas. The people who had voted for him had the right to expect him to represent them, not the big lobbyists in Washington. This expectation is the very soul of democracy. We can't all govern -- not even tiny, homogenous Switzerland practices pure democracy. So we Americans came to believe our best chance of responsible government lies in obtaining the considered judgments of those we elect to represent us. Having cast our ballots in the sanctity of the voting booth with its assurance of political equality, we go about our daily lives expecting the people we put in office to weigh the competing interests and decide to the best of their ability what is right.

What do they do instead? Well, as Tom DeLay became the king of campaign fundraising, The Associated Press writes "He began to live a lifestyle his constituents back in Sugar Land would have a hard time ever imagining." Big corporations provided private jets to take him to places of luxury most Americans have never seen -- places with "dazzling views, warm golden sunsets, golf, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms, and balconies overlooking the ocean."

The AP reports that various organizations -- campaign committees, political action committees, even a children's charity established by DeLay -- paid over $1 million for hotels, restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jets used by DeLay. There were at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists; and 500 meals at fancy restaurants, some averaging $200 for a dinner for two. Spreading a biblical worldview kept DeLay on the move and on the take.

But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a lobbyist and fellow ideologue named Jack Abramoff, who personifies the money machine of which DeLay, with the blessing of the political and religious right, was the mastermind. It was Abramoff who helped DeLay raise those millions of dollars from campaign donors that bought the support of other politicians and became the base for an empire of corruption.

Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. It's a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the far right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make.

Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff's campaign and would become the most powerful operative in Washington for advancing the movement's strategies. At their side was a youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed. Over the next several years they would yoke politics and religion to turn the conservative revolution into a rapacious racket. Ralph Reed found Jesus and wound up running Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. Time magazine put him on their cover as "the Right Hand of God."

Reportedly after seeing "Fiddler on the Roof" Abramoff became an Orthodox religious Jew who finagled fake awards to provide himself with credentials in the new piety-soaked world of conservative Washington politics. One of those bogus awards named him "a distinguished Bible scholar." He received the "Biblical Mercantile Award" from an organization which laundered money for Tom DeLay's junkets to plush golf clubs. It's impossible to treat all the schemes and scams this crowd concocted to subvert democracy in the name of God and greed. But here are two examples. Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes with gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon.

What they had to offer, of course, were their well-known connections to the political and religious power structure, including friends at the White House (Abramoff's personal assistant usefully became Karl Rove's personal assistant), members of Congress, Christian right activists like Reed, and right-wing ideologues like Norquist (according to one report, two lobbying clients of Abramoff paid $25,000 to Norquist's organization -- Americans for Tax Reform -- for a lunch date and meeting with President Bush in May 2001.) Before it was over the Indian tribes had paid them $82 million dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's pockets. But some of the money found its way to the righteous. Ralph Reed, for one, had his hand out. Reed was the religious right's poster boy against gambling.

"We believe gambling is a cancer on the American body politic," Reed had said. "It is stealing food from the mouths of children… [and] turning wives into widows." Reed was right about that, of course, but his distaste for gambling was no match for his desire to make himself some moolah by helping to protect Abramoff's gambling interests. When Reed resigned from the Christian Coalition -- just as it was coming under federal investigation and slipping into financial arrears -- he sent Abramoff an email: "Now that I am leaving electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts… I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."

Abramoff came through. According to published reports, he and his partner Michael Scanlon paid Reed some $4 million to whip up Christian opposition to gambling initiatives that could cut into the profits of Abramoff's clients. Reed called in some of the brightest stars in the Christian firmament -- Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly -- to participate in what became a ruse in Abramoff's behalf. They would oppose gambling on religious and moral grounds in strategic places (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama) at decisive moments when competitive challenges threatened Abramoff's clients.

Bogus Christian fronts were part of the strategy. Preachers in Texas rallied to Reed's appeals. Unsuspecting folks in Louisiana turned on their radios one day to hear the voice of God -- with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson doing the honors -- thundering against a riverboat gambling scheme which Abramoff wanted defeated because it threatened one of his own gambling clients. Reed even got James Dobson, whose nationwide radio "ministry" reaches millions of people, to deluge phone lines at the Interior Department and White House with calls from indignant Christians.

In 1999 Abramoff arranged for the Mississippi Choctaws, who were trying to stave off competition from other tribes, to contribute over $1 million to Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which then passed the money along to the Alabama Christian Coalition and to another anti-gambling group Reed had duped into aiding the cause. It is unclear how much these Christian soldiers, "marching as to war," knew about the true purpose of their crusade, but Ralph Reed knew all along that his money was coming from Abramoff. When he fiddled, his brethren on the Christian right danced. It gets worse.

And here we get to the heart of darkness. One of Abramoff's first big lobbying clients was the Northern Marianas Islands in the Pacific. After World War II the Marianas became a trusteeship of the United Nations, administered by the U.S. government under the stewardship of the Interior Department. During World War II thousands of Marines died on the Marianas, fighting for our way of life and our freedoms.

Today, these islands are a haven for tourists -- first-class hotels, beautiful beaches, championship golf courses. But that's not the whole story. The islands were exempted from U.S. labor and immigration laws, and over the years tens of thousands of people, primarily Chinese, mostly women, were brought there as garment workers to live in crowded barracks in miserable conditions.

The main island, Saipan, became known as America's biggest sweatshop. In 1998 a government report found workers there suffering severe malnutrition and health problems and subjected to unprovoked acts of violence. Many had signed "shadow contracts" which required them to pay up to $7000 just to get the job. They also had to renounce their claim to basic human rights. They were forbidden to engage in political and religious activities, to socialize or to marry. Some of the biggest names in the retail clothing industry were enabled to slap "made in the USA" labels on the clothes and import them to America while paying the workers practically nothing.

When these scandalous conditions began to attract attention, the sweatshop moguls fought all efforts at reform. Knowing that Jack Abramoff was close to Tom DeLay, they hired him to lobby for the islands. Conservative members of Congress lined up as Abramoff's team arranged for them to visit the islands on carefully guided junkets. Conservative intellectuals and journalists, for hire at rates considerably above what the women on the islands were making, also signed on for expense-free trips to the Marianas.

They flew first-class, dined at posh restaurants, slept in comfort at the beachfront hotel, and returned to write and speak of the islands as "a true free market success story" and "a laboratory of liberty." Abramoff took Tom DeLay and his wife there, too. DeLay practically swooned. He said the Marianas "represented what is best about America." He called them "my Galapagos" -- "a perfect petri dish of capitalism."

These fellow travelers -- rightwing members of Congress, their staffs and their lapdogs in the rightwing press and think tanks -- became a solid phalanx aimed at any and all attempts to provide workers on the islands with a living wage and decent living conditions. When a liberal California Democrat, George Miller, and a conservative Alaskan senator, Frank Murkowski, both indignant at the "appalling conditions," tried to raise minimum wages on the islands and at least prevent arbitrary deportation of the workers, they were stopped cold.

After the 2000 election, when the spoils of victory were being divided up, Abramoff got himself named to the Bush transition team for the Interior Department. He wanted to make sure the right people wound up overseeing his clients in the Marianas. He enlisted Ralph Reed, who said he would raise the matter with Rove, to stop at least one appointment to Interior that might prove troublesome.

It was about this time that Reed wrote an email to Enron's top lobbyist touting his pal Abramoff as "arguably the most influential and effective GOP lobbyist in Congress. I share several clients with him and have yet to see him lose a battle. He also is very close to DeLay and could help enormously on that front. raised $ for bush [sic]."

For his services to the Marianas Jack Abramoff was paid nearly $10 million dollars, including the fees he charged for booking his guests on the golf courses and providing them copies of Newt Gingrich's book To this day, workers on the Marianas are still denied the federal minimum wage while working long hours for subsistence income in their little "petri dish of capitalism" -- "America at its best."

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to the people. When the government of the United States falls under the thumb of the powerful and privileged, regular folks get squashed. We are dealing here with a vision sharply at odds with the majority of Americans. These are people who want to arrange the world for the convenience of themselves and the multinational corporations that pay for their elections.

With their fundamentalist medicine men twirling the bullroarers in the woods, they would turn America into their petri dish -- a replica of the Marianas, many times magnified: A society "run by the powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of accountability, enjoying a cozy relationship with government, thriving on crony capitalism," in the words of Al Meyeroff, who led a class-action suit in behalf of the worker on the Marianas and learned what they were up against.

Let this, too, sink in: If the corporate, political, and religious right have their way, we will go back to the first Gilded Age, when privilege controlled politics, votes were purchased, legislatures were bribed, bills were bought, and laws flagrantly disregarded -- all as God's will.

So, my friends at Wake Forest, there is work to do. These charlatans and demagogues know that by controlling a society's most emotionally laden symbols, they can control America, too. They must be challenged.

Davidson Loehr reminds us that holding preachers and politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict between the religion of the priests -- ancient and modern -- and the religion of the prophets. It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus.

Yes, the religion of Jesus. It was in the name of Jesus that a Methodist ship caulker named Edward Rogers crusaded across New England for an eight-hour work day. It was in the name of Jesus that Francis William rose up against the sweatshop. It was in the name of Jesus that Dorothy Day marched alongside auto workers in Michigan, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. It was in the name of Jesus that E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield stood against a Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude. It was in the name of Jesus that the young priest John Ryan -- ten years before the New Deal -- crusaded for child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor. And it was in the name of Jesus that Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to march with sanitation workers who were asking only for a living wage.

This is the heresy of our time -- to wrestle with the gods who guard the boundaries of this great nation's promise, and to confront the medicine men in the woods, twirling their bullroarers to keep us in fear and trembling. For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

Fitzgerald Will Seek New White House Indictments
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 28 March 2006

It may seem as though it's been moving along at a snail's pace, but the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment against one or two senior Bush administration officials.

In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a Justice Department investigation.

Details about the latest stage of the investigation began to take shape a few weeks ago when the lead FBI investigator on the leak case, John C. Eckenrode, retired from the agency and indicated to several colleagues that the investigation is about to wrap up with indictments handed up by the grand jury against Rove or Hadley or both officials, the sources said.

The Philadelphia-based Eckenrode is finished with his work on the case; however, he is expected to testify as a witness for the prosecution next year against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators regarding his role in the leak.

FEMA's Generator Reimbursements Flowed to Wealthier Pockets
By Eliot Kleinberg and Christine Stapleton
The Palm Beach Post
Sunday 26 March 2006

When Wilma knocked out power across South Florida, tens of thousands of people wheeled generators out of home improvement centers and fired them up in their driveways. More than 20,000 local homes sent the bill to FEMA.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency spent nearly $20 million in the six weeks following Wilma to reimburse households from Fort Pierce to Boca Raton and west to Lake Okeechobee. About half of those in Palm Beach County were in areas with a median income of $60,000 or more. About half of those in Martin County, and 40 percent of those in St. Lucie County, were in areas with median incomes of more than $50,000.

FEMA didn't just pay for generators. It paid for chain saws, wet-dry vacuums, dehumidifiers and air purifiers.

The multimillion-dollar payout for the 2005 storm wasn't a first for FEMA: The agency also spent millions reimbursing Florida households in 2004 after four hurricanes struck the state.

The program has come under fire because so many people who could easily afford a $700 to $900 generator took federal money from an agency that already was dealing with several disasters, including catastrophic flooding in New Orleans. Critics question the propriety of the reimbursements and FEMA's policy of not applying an income test.

"I'm troubled by the expectation where we bail everyone out," U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fort Pierce, said from Washington. "There are certain reasons FEMA exists. But it goes from the sublime to the ridiculous."

Craig Fugate, Florida's director of emergency management, said, "It was more like, 'Hey, it's the lottery. We got hit by the hurricane. We won a generator.' "

Fugate also wondered about a policy of paying only for generators bought when the power was out, not those bought before the storm.

"It's not really effective if we're reimbursing only after the fact," Fugate said. "We don't want to penalize people who prepare."

To encourage preparation, Gov. Jeb Bush has recommended generator purchases be included in the state's hurricane season preparation tax holiday. Florida then would consider pulling out of the reimbursement program, for which it pays 25 percent to FEMA's 75 percent and only in areas struck by a storm, Fugate said.

FEMA has sent mixed signals even on when it will pay. The agency said in November that it would pay for items bought from Oct. 19 to Nov. 18, and inspectors must verify that electricity went out in the home. That period is five days before Wilma struck and nearly a month after.

But the agency said later that generators had to be bought when power was out, "as reported by the local power company."

In the case of Wilma, except for small outfits in Lake Worth and elsewhere, the "local power company" was Florida Power & Light Co., which had to contend with outages in more than 6 million customer households from the Keys to Central Florida. FPL officials said all power was restored to Martin and St. Lucie counties by Nov. 5 and to Palm Beach County by Nov. 9.

Numerous attempts over several weeks to get FEMA to clarify its policy have been unsuccessful.

FEMA also did not respond to requests to respond to critics of the reimbursement program. Concerns about generator payments from FEMA were initially reported in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

No Help for Planning Ahead

The FEMA statistics show an inconsistent picture of the financial conditions of those who were reimbursed.

Residents in ZIP code 33428, west of Boca Raton, where the median household income is $62,727, got more reimbursements for generators than any other: 1,197. In the island town of Palm Beach, where the median income is over $100,000, only a dozen residents were reimbursed. In Martin and St. Lucie counties, the top three ZIP codes in numbers of homes reimbursed were Port St. Lucie-area neighborhoods with median household incomes from $39,000 to $51,000.

The six ZIP codes ringing the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee - the poorest and hardest-hit in the county -accounted for 861 generator reimbursements. Three of those ZIP codes had the highest rate of reimbursement.

In the Wellington ZIP code, 33414, where the median income is $82,000, nearly 1,100 people were reimbursed.

Pete Wallwork wasn't one of them. Wallwork, a firefighter, bought his generator just before Hurricane Frances in 2004. His wife suffers from heart disease and her ill parents were living with Wallwork as well.

Although Wallwork suffered heavy losses in all three storms, FEMA refused to pay.

"That's a brilliant plan. So you plan ahead and think about it, (and) there's no reimbursement," Wallwork scoffed.

David A. Smith of Stuart, a former Martin County 911 dispatcher, was struck by lightning through his headset in August 1992. He lives on Social Security, and his household income is about $10,000. Right before Wilma, he spent $700 on a generator to keep his refrigerator going and run a nebulizer for his 84-year-old father. FEMA never responded to his claim.

"We got the royal runaround," he said.

Other residents pointed to inconsistencies by FEMA in settling reimbursement claims.

Nancy Pire of suburban Lake Worth, who teaches computer skills to data processors for Palm Beach County schools, was living with her unemployed diabetic daughter and 18-month-old granddaughter when Wilma hit. The three lived on about $30,000 a year.

The morning after the storm, Pire frantically searched area stores for a generator. In desperation, she bought one for $850 from a man at the corner of Forest Hill Boulevard and Military Trail. The man wrote out a receipt, signed and dated it, and put down his phone number, Pire said. The FEMA inspector who came to her home told her the agency would not pay because the receipt was not from a store.

"I know two other people who were paid and didn't even send a receipt," Pire said. "They didn't even have the generator at their house when the FEMA guy came."

But FEMA did pay Pire for her collapsed garage door, she said.

Pharmacist Paul Ackerman of suburban Palm Beach Gardens bought a generator during the five days he was without power following Hurricane Jeanne. Ackerman then learned FEMA was reimbursing people for generators. Despite having a household income of $80,000, he applied for and got the $800 he paid for the unit, plus another $50 for gasoline he'd bought. He said he had qualms but took the money anyway.

"I do pay good taxes," Ackerman said. "Why should I give it all to the poor people? Get a little back for myself."

Some people got more than they spent.

Charlie Backman of Jupiter Farms, a retired insurance claim manager, bought a $178.88 chain saw after Wilma to replace one that broke during cleanup. A FEMA representative came to his house and looked at his receipt. Later, FEMA sent him $226.80. Backman wrote a check for the difference and asked the agency to explain the overpayment. The agency never wrote back, but did cash his check a month after he sent it.

"If they're paying guys like for me for chain saws, and my neighbor got reimbursed for a generator, for $2,500, what a rip-off," Backman said.

FEMA does not release information on individuals, citing privacy considerations.

Money Misses Mark

South Bay Mayor Clarence Anthony said he was bothered by a system that reimburses only those who can afford to pay for the generator up front.

"While we were passing out the water and the ice, I would say, 90 percent of the people did not have generators. It was a money issue," Anthony said. He said people should be able to get generators through community development block grants.

"There's got to be a more creative way to find resources to help the poor be prepared," Anthony said. He said he already owned a generator, which he lent to friends following the storms, and did not seek FEMA reimbursement.

Florida emergency manager Fugate said that when he asked FEMA officials about setting up income standards so only the neediest get help, "They kind of shrugged." He said the officials told him it slows the pace and that guidelines are vague.

Deni Elliott, a professor of ethics at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus, compared the FEMA program to insurance, which reimburses people for losses whether they can afford them or not.

"I can see a rich guy making the argument that a lot of the money is going to graft and greed, and is not being used in appropriate ways, and so why shouldn't they benefit? The more interesting question is really how to make funds accessible for people that needed them when they need them," Elliott said.

Randy Cohen, who writes a nationally syndicated column on ethics, said there's a bigger picture to think about.

"If we all agree that we want public money to be for people that truly need it, then the ethical question we should ask is why FEMA has such a boneheaded program," Cohen said.

"If this was Japan 75 years ago, these people would have to commit suicide. They would feel honor bound," Cohen said from New York. "It's dishonorable to do this. But it is a petty transgression compared to what routinely goes on. If you're going to make a fuss, then you need to make a fuss about the people that are making 100 times that a day."

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Halliburton's Performance Worsens Under Second Iraqi Oil Contract
By Representative Henry Waxman's Office
t r u t h o u t | Press Release
Tuesday 28 March 2006
[Full Text Available Here]

Washington, D.C. - Today Rep. Waxman released the first analysis of Halliburton's RIO 2 contract to restore Iraq's southern oil fields. The examination of previously undisclosed correspondence, evaluations, and audits reveals that government officials and investigators have harshly criticized Halliburton's performance under RIO 2. The documents disclose an "overwhelmingly negative" performance, including:

* Intentional Overcharging: Halliburton repeatedly overcharged the taxpayer, apparently intentionally. In one case, "[c]ost estimates had hidden rate factors to increase cost of project without informing the Government." In another instance, Halliburton "tried to inflate cost estimate by $26M." In a third example, Halliburton claimed costs for laying concrete pads and footings that the Iraqi Oil Ministry had "already put in place."

* Exorbitant Costs: Halliburton was "accruing exorbitant indirect costs at a rapid rate." Government officials concluded that Halliburton's "lack of cost containment and funds management is the single biggest detriment to this program." They found a "lack of cost control ... in Houston, Kuwait, and Iraq." In a partial review of the RIO 2 contract, DCAA auditors challenged $45 million in costs as unreasonable or unsupported.

* Inadequate Cost Reporting: Halliburton "universally failed to provide adequate cost information," had "profound systemic problems," provided "substandard" cost reports that did "not meet minimum standards," and submitted reports that had been "vetted of any information that would allow tracking of details." Halliburton produced "unacceptable unchecked cost reports."

* Schedule Delays: Halliburton's work under RIO 2 was continually plagued by delays. Halliburton had a "50% late completion" rate for RIO 2 projects. Evaluations noted "untimely work" and "schedule slippage."

* Refusal to Cooperate: Evaluations described Halliburton as "obstructive" with oversight officials. Despite the billions in taxpayer funds Halliburton has been paid, the company's "leadership demonstrated minimal cooperative attitude resolving problems."

The Essential Krugman: Notes on Immigration

NY Times - March 27, 2006
Paul Krugman

"Immigration is an intensely painful topic for a liberal like myself, because it places basic principles in conflict. Should migration from Mexico to the United States be celebrated, because it helps very poor people find a better life? Or should it be condemned, because it drives down the wages of working Americans and threatens to undermine the welfare state? I suspect that my March 27 column will anger people on all sides; I wish the economic research on immigration were more favorable than it is.

In writing this piece I drew mainly on three sources, research papers by economists I know and trust. First is a paper, “Immigration Policy,” by Gordon H. Hanson (pdf) of the University of California at San Diego. Mr. Hanson is one of my former students, and a leading expert on all matters having to do with U.S.-Mexican economic relations, especially issues having to do with income distribution. This paper gives a good overview of the (small) gains from immigration and the fiscal impacts.

Second is a paper by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, “The Evolution of the Mexican-Born Workforce in the United States." (pdf). Mr. Borjas is a leading expert on immigration issues; Mr. Katz is one of America’s leading labor economists.

Third is a paper by Mr. Hanson, Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth (another former student) and Kenneth Scheve (pdf) of the University of Michigan. This paper alerted me to the way immigration penalizes more generous states.

Like all research results, the conclusions of these papers may have to be revised in the light of future research. But I’m afraid that the three negative conclusions I stressed in the column are fairly robust.

First, the benefits of immigration to the population already here are small. The reason is that immigrant workers are, at least roughly speaking, paid their “marginal product”: an immigrant worker is paid roughly the value of the additional goods and services he or she enables the U.S. economy to produce. That means that there isn’t anything left over to increase the income of the people already here.

You might ask why, in that case, there are any gains from immigration. The answer is that when a country receives a lot of immigrants, the wage paid to immigrants reflects the marginal product of the last immigrant, which is less than that of earlier immigrants. So there is some gain. But as Mr. Hanson explains in his paper, reasonable calculations suggest that we’re talking about very small numbers, perhaps as little as 0.1 percent of GDP.

There is, by the way, a possible out from this argument in the case of high-skill immigrants. You could argue that, say, South Asian engineers who move to Silicon Valley add to the dynamism of the region, generating benefits much larger than their wages. (Economists know that I’m talking about “positive externalities.”) But that’s not an argument you can easily make about Mexican migrants who haven’t completed high school.

My second negative point is that immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages. Mr. Borjas and Mr. Katz have to go through a lot of number-crunching to turn that general proposition into specific estimates of the wage impact, but the general point seems impossible to deny.

Finally, the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear. Mr. Hanson uses some estimates from the National Research Council to get a specific number, around 0.25 percent of G.D.P. Again, I think that you’d be hard pressed to find any set of assumptions under which Mexican immigrants are a net fiscal plus, but equally hard pressed to make the burden more than a fraction of a percent of G.D.P.

The specifics of the Feingold censure motion from the March 13, 2006 Congressional Record - Senate

Swiftly Defending DeLay
factcheck.org
A somewhat misleading pro-DeLay ad is funded by $200,000 from a donor who also bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
February 20, 2006

A newly formed conservative group is running a TV ad in Houston implying that liberal billionaire George Soros is "the source" of an earlier anti-DeLay ad by liberal groups. The pro-DeLay ad is somewhat misleading. Soros gave the liberal groups early funding two years ago, but there's no evidence he funded the anti-DeLay ad.

However, the source of the pro-DeLay ad turns out to be a Houston homebuilder who gave $200,000 to air it, and who also was an early financier of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the 2004 presidential campaign.

UCC announces campaign to amplify mainline churches’ public voice
UCC.ORG News
Written by J. Bennett Guess
Monday, 27 March 2006

Have the religious “mainlines” been sidelined? That’s the view of the Rev. Robert Chase, the UCC's communications director, who today announced a new blog-focused advocacy campaign to draw attention to ways in which the nation’s historic, mainline Christian denominations have been “silenced” by network and cable news programs.

Accessibleairwaves.org has placed ads on dozens of internet blogs, drawing attention to the UCC’s new effort to lift the public voice of the old “mainliners.” The announcement came on the same day that another of the UCC’s 30-second television ads was unveiled for the media, even though it has been rejected by the broadcast networks as “controversial,” therefore “unacceptable.” The newest ad, known as “ejector seat,” will begin airing April 3 on cable networks only.

The major networks’ silencing act is not only affecting the UCC, Chase said, but other mainline churches as well. According to Media Matters, a public-interest research group, you’re far more likely to hear from the head of Focus on the Family or the 700 Club, than you are a United Methodist bishop or the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

“What do James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Richard Land and Gary Bauer have in common?” asked Chase at a press conference in Cleveland. “Together, they have racked up 36 appearances on the Sunday news talk shows, including Meet the Press and Face the Nation, during the past eight years.”

“But what do the principal leaders of the United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), American Baptist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Reformed Church in America, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, among others, have in common?” he further asked. “They haven’t appeared once.”

“Increasingly,” Chase said, “millions of U.S. Christians have grown weary of having their more-inclusive, more-progressive values silenced.”

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Note: There is a second-source website that takes the UCC to task for it's new TV ad, among other things. And here is another UCC Pastor's website that provides a more neutral perspective.

The Obscenity of Canned Hunting

Cheney's Canned Kill, and Other Hunting Excesses of the Bush Administration
The Humane Society of the United States
By Wayne Pacelle

"Vice President Dick Cheney went pheasant shooting in Pennsylvania in December 2003, but unlike most of his fellow hunters across America, he didn't have to spend hours or even days tramping the fields and hedgerows in hopes of bagging a brace of birds for the dinner table.

Upon his arrival at the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets for the benefit of him and his party. In a blaze of gunfire, the group—which included legendary Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), along with major fundraisers for Republican candidates—killed at least 417 of the birds. According to one gamekeeper who spoke to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cheney was credited with shooting more than 70 of the pen-reared fowl.

After lunch, the group shot flocks of mallard ducks, also reared in pens and shot like so many live skeet. There's been no report on the number of mallards the hunting party killed, but it's likely that hundreds fell.

Rolling Rock is an exclusive private club for the wealthy with a world-class golf course and a closed membership list. It is also a "canned hunting" operation—a place where fee-paying hunters blast away at released animals, whether birds or mammals, who often have no reasonable chance to escape. Most are "no kill, no pay" operations where patrons only shells out funds for the animals they kill.

Bird-shooting operations offer pheasants, quail, partridges, and mallard ducks, often dizzying the birds and planting them in front of hunters or tossing them from towers toward waiting shotguns. There are, perhaps, more than 3,000 such operations in the United States, according to outdoor writer Ted Williams.

For canned hunts involving mammals, hunters can shoot animals native to given continents—everything from Addax to Zebra—within the confines of a fenced area, assuring the animals have no opportunity to escape. Time magazine estimates that 2,000 facilities offer native or exotic mammals for shooting within fenced enclosures.

The HSUS worked hard to expose Cheney's shooting spree, and we were fortunate in persuading The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and other media outlets to cover the events of that day and our subsequent criticism.

Our criticism is simple to understand: Farm-raised pheasants are about as wary as urban pigeons and shooting them is nothing more than live target practice, especially when they are released from a hill in front of 10 gunners hidden below in blinds—as Cheney and his party were. Such hunting makes a mockery of basic principles of fair play and humane treatment, and the vice president should not associate himself with such conduct.

The private excesses of Cheney are bad enough, and worthy of The HSUS's rebuke. But it's the public policy excesses that are of even greater concern to me. Cheney's hunting trip strikes me as emblematic of the Bush Administration's callousness towards the earth's animals.

The administration's most outrageous proposal is its plan to allow trophy hunters to shoot endangered species in other countries and import the trophies and hides into the United States. The administration first floated the proposal a few months ago, with formal proposals subsequently published in the Federal Register, and President Bush is expected to make a final decision soon on the plan, which originated with his U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

For 30 years, the Endangered Species Act has provided critical protections for species near extinction in the United States. The act also protects species in foreign nations, by barring pet traders, circuses, trophy hunters, and others from importing live or dead endangered species. While we can't prevent the shooting or capture of endangered species overseas, we can prevent imports—thus eliminating the incentive for American hunters and others to shoot or trap the animals in the first place.

But with this plan the administration is seeking to punch gaping holes in the prohibitions, under the assumption that generating revenue through the sale of hunting licenses will aid on-the-ground conservation in foreign lands.

The plan is transparent on its face. It's not aimed to help species, but to aid special interests who want to profit from the exploitation of wildlife. No group is more centrally involved in this miserable plan than Safari Club International, the world's leading trophy hunting organization and an entity with close ties to the Bush Administration.

The 40,000 member organization of rich trophy collectors has doled out close to $600,000 in campaign contributions among GOP candidates in the past six years. President Bush appointed a former top lobbyist of the Safari Club to be the deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—again, the very agency promoting the plan to allow the selling off of endangered species to private interests.

The HSUS is not a pro-hunting organization. That said, we view certain types of hunting as worse than others. It crosses any reasonable line to support the shooting of some of the rarest and most endangered animals in the world. And it is beyond the pale to advocate for or participate in the shooting of animals in canned hunts—for birds or mammals.

President Bush met with leaders of 19 hunting organizations on December 12. While we expect him to endorse certain forms of hunting, he should in no way countenance the shooting of endangered species or the hunting of captive or pen-reared animals. If that's where these hunting groups want to lead him, he needs to resist their entreaties. He needs to stand up to these special interest groups and draw a bright line between certain types of hunting conduct.

Americans don't support this nonsense, and the president shouldn't either.

Blogger Puts Guide to Abortion Online
By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent UK
Friday 17 March 2006

Washington - A blogger has added fresh fuel to the abortion debate that divides the US by posting online detailed instructions on how to perform such an operation. She said she had received death threats as a result.

The blogger, who uses the pseudonym Molly Blythe, said she was inspired to post the abortion guide after the recent signing of legislation in South Dakota that outlaws abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. The only exception to the law would be if the woman's life was threatened if she continued the pregnancy.

Ms. Blythe said: "Myself and some friends have been collecting this information for the past couple of years because we believed that Roe vs Wade [the 1973 Supreme Court case that affords women the right to an abortion] was not going to be around for ever."

The guide, titled "For the Women of South Dakota: An Abortion Manual", lists the equipment required and the procedure to follow to carry out a dilation and curettage abortion.

Ms. Blythe said: "My philosophy is if you don't want to have an abortion, don't have one. But people have the right to know exactly what is involved."

Legislation Sparks "Mini Revolution"

The Los Angeles Police Department told NBC News that an estimated 500,000 protesters clogged the streets in front of Los Angeles city hall to protest a proposed law they see as punitive to undocumented workers.

Activists in Georgia said tens of thousands of workers did not show up at their jobs Friday to protest a bill passed by the state House that would deny state services to adults in the U.S. illegally and impose a 5-percent surcharge on wire transfers from illegal immigrants.

The Essential Krugman: North of the Border

NY Times Columnist
March 2006

North of the Border, Immigration Facts, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," wrote Emma Lazarus, in a poem that still puts a lump in my throat. I'm proud of America's immigrant history, and grateful that the door was open when my grandparents fled Russia.

In other words, I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration. But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular. If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.

Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education ... they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study ... by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do "jobs that Americans will not do." The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants. Finally, ... our social safety net has more holes in it than it should — and low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel that safety net. ... Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they receive. ...

We shouldn't exaggerate these problems. Mexican immigration, says the Borjas-Katz study, has played only a "modest role" in growing U.S. inequality. And ... the disastrous Medicare drug bill alone does far more to undermine ... our social insurance system than the whole burden of ... illegal immigrants. But modest problems are still real problems, and immigration is becoming a major political issue. What are we going to do about it?

Realistically, we'll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants. ... But the harsh anti-immigration legislation passed by the House... legislation that would, among other things, make it a criminal act to provide an illegal immigrant with medical care — is simply immoral.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's plan for a "guest worker" program is clearly designed by and for corporate interests, who'd love to have a low-wage work force that couldn't vote. Not only is it deeply un-American; it does nothing to reduce the adverse effect of immigration on wages. And because guest workers would face the prospect of deportation after a few years, they would have no incentive to become integrated into our society.

What about a guest-worker program that includes a clearer route to citizenship? I'd still be careful. ... it could all too easily ... create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised workers. We need to do something about immigration, and soon. But I'd rather see Congress fail to agree on anything this year than have it rush into ill-considered legislation that betrays our moral and democratic principles.

The Essential Krugman: Letter to the Secretary

NY Times
March 2006

Letter to the Secretary, Dear John Snow, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: Dear John Snow, secretary of the Treasury:

I'm glad that you've started talking about income inequality, which in recent years has reached levels not seen since before World War II. But if you want to be credible on the subject, you need to make some changes in your approach.

First, you shouldn't claim, as you seemed to ..., that there's anything meaningful about the decline in some measures of inequality between 2000 and 2003. Every economist realizes that ... "much of the decline in inequality during that period reflected the popping of the stock market bubble," which led to a large but temporary fall in the incomes of the richest Americans.

We don't have detailed data ... yet, but the available indicators suggest that after 2003, incomes at the top ... came roaring back. ... I find it helpful to illustrate ... with a hypothetical example: say 10 middle-class guys are sitting in a bar. Then the richest guy leaves, and Bill Gates walks in. Because the richest guy in the bar is now much richer than before, the average income in the bar soars. But the income of the nine men who aren't Bill Gates hasn't increased, and no amount of repeating "But average income is up!" will convince them that they're better off.

Now think about what happened in 2004 ... a small fraction of the population got much, much richer. ... In effect, Bill Gates walked into the bar. Average income rose, but only because of rising incomes at the top.

Speaking of executive compensation, Mr. Snow, it hurts your credibility when you say, as you did ..., that soaring pay for top executives reflects their productivity and that we should "trust the marketplace." Executive pay isn't set in the marketplace; it's set by boards ... And executives' pay often bears little relationship to their performance. You yourself ... are often cited as an example. When you were appointed to your present job, ... the performance of the company you had run, CSX, was "middling at best." Nonetheless, you were "by far the highest-paid chief in the industry." ... So my advice on the question of executive pay is: don't go there.

Finally, you should stop denying that the Bush tax cuts favor the wealthy. ... [U]sing the right measure — the effect of the tax cuts on after-tax income — the bias toward the haves and have-mores is unmistakable. ... once the Bush tax cuts are fully phased in, they will raise the after-tax income of middle-income families by 2.3 percent. But they will raise the after-tax income of people ... with incomes of more than $1 million, by 7.3 percent.

And those calculations don't take into account the indirect effects of tax cuts. If the tax cuts are made permanent, they'll eventually have to be offset by large spending cuts. ... that means cuts where the money is: in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Since middle-income Americans will feel the brunt of these cuts, yet received a relatively small tax break, they'll end up worse off. But the wealthy will be left considerably wealthier.

Of course, my suggestions about how to improve your credibility would force you to stop repeating administration talking points. But you're the secretary of the Treasury. Your job is to make economic policy, not to spout propaganda. Oh, wait.

Is there a case for impeachment?

Harper's Monthly March 2006

Posted on Wednesday, March 22, 2006. Edited selections from a forum moderated by Sam Seder and featuring Representative John Conyers Jr., John Dean, Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, Lewis Lapham, and Michael Ratner, held March 2, 2006 at Town Hall in New York City.

Why We Fight: Grand Prize Winner Sundance Festival 2005

A modern retelling of Frank Capra's original. See the trailer here.
or read a review here.

---

Documentary Sends Warning to Congress
By Walter Cronkite
The Miami Herald
Thursday 23 March 2006

"Not unlike the Vietnam quagmire on which I reported in 1968, we are today presented with the Iraq quagmire. The threat of world communism has been replaced by international terror as a pretext for another misbegotten and mismanaged war, but the falsehoods, broken promises and withering national faith are too familiar.

Now, as then, with each further escalation, we come closer to the brink of cosmic disaster. A recent poll revealed that three-fourths of U.S. troops serving in Iraq want full withdrawal, one-fourth immediately. Despite the executive's stubborn optimism, two-thirds of the public now favor withdrawal.

Yet in Congress, such voices are the minority.

In my February 1968 broadcast, I called the position of Vietnam a stalemate.

I'm not sure ''stalemate'' fits the U.S. military's loose footing in the sands of Iraq, but the need to cut losses does. In the wake of the Golden Mosque bombing in Samarra, Shiites and Sunnis now clash across the region. Our men and women in uniform face the task of trying to stave off a civil war when their very presence as an occupying force more often than not fuels the violence and represents an obstacle to Shiite and Sunni reconciliation.

As I stated in relation to Vietnam, the only rational way out is to proceed not as victors but as an honorable people who tried to defend democracy the best they could. Recently, I suggested that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina there was an opportunity to withdraw from Iraq and still maintain our sense of honor. We had an urgent need to redirect our resources to the aid of our communities and people stricken by the devastation of the great storm. Almost no one on Capitol Hill was listening.

Why We Fight should be required viewing for Americans but even more for those on Capitol Hill. The film sends a chilling warning that should not be ignored by Congress and our executive branch.

Walter Cronkite is a former anchorman for CBS News.

At The End...

Epiphany - upon his deathbed - "everyman deserves some marker to let others know he was here"

Biodiesel vs Corn-based vs Cellulosic Ethanol

Full Report Here
..."The production of ethanol from corn is a mature technology that is not likely to see significant reductions in production costs. The ability to produce ethanol from low-cost biomass will be key to making it competitive as a gasoline additive. If Department of Energy goals are met, the cost of producing ethanol could be reduced by as much as 60 cents per gallon by 2015 with cellulosic conversion technology. "

---

The "What Would Jesus Drive" Leaders' Statement on S.342 and the Need for Action on Climate Change

---

Ethanol decent on efficiency but not on greenhouse gases, study finds
National Public Radio - Jan. 2006

The heated debate over biofuels took another sharp turn this week: New research in the journal Science claims that replacing fossil fuels with corn-based ethanol is energy-efficient (contrary to some previous studies), but doesn't do much to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. Researchers from UC-Berkeley determined that ethanol results in a net energy gain of about 20 percent, but that the pollution generated in processing the corn offsets most of ethanol's gains in greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cornell University scientist David Pimentel -- author of several studies questioning ethanol's energy efficiency -- disagrees with the findings, saying they failed to factor in farm machinery and overestimated the value of corn byproducts. But all agree that the future of ethanol is not corn, but higher-cellulose plants like switchgrass and willow trees -- news the powerful agribusiness and corn lobbies will no doubt try to play down.

---

Barack Obama's Comment to Grist Magazine - Mar. 2006

"I think cellulosic ethanol is probably our best short-term solution. The amount of energy required to produce cellulosic ethanol is a significant improvement over corn-based ethanol. The technology exists. We don't have to change distribution systems; essentially it pumps just like gasoline. It only costs $100 to retrofit any vehicle out there. And if Brazil can do it in the span of three or four years, while cutting their transportation-gasoline use essentially in half, there's no reason we can't do it."

It's criminal

Posted by Scott Ritter at 9:59 AM on March 20, 2006.
alternet.blog

Note: Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Nation Books, 2005).

"As America reaches the third anniversary of President Bush's decision to invade and occupy Iraq, there is for the first time the unsettling realization brought about by the clarity of acts that emerges only after the passage of time that something horrible has happened.

This awakening of collective awareness on the part of the American people is reflected not only in the numerous polls which show President Bush's popularity plummeting to all-time lows, largely because of the war in Iraq, but also the collective shrug of the shoulders on the part of the one-time cheerleaders for the war in Iraq -- the mainstream American media -- when covering the hollow rhetoric of the President as he tries to rally a nation around a cause that has long since lost its allure.

No amount of flowery language and repeated pulls at the patriotic heartstrings of America, no repeated assault on the senses and sensibilities through repetitious referral to the events of 9/11 can jump start a second phase of the kind of mindless nationalistic fervor that greeted the erstwhile Cowboy President when he first herded a compliant America down the path of war with Iraq three years ago.

Looking back on the string of unfulfilled objectives, broken promises, squandered dreams, shattered bodies and eviscerated lives that was and is the war in Iraq, one thought emerges plain and clear. This isn't simply a result of bad governance. This is criminal.

Bad governance is telling the American people that a war with Iraq would be concluded in a manner of months, and would cost the American taxpayer less that $2 billion, when in fact the war has gone on for three years now, with no end in sight, and over a quarter-trillion dollars have been expended, with untold billions more to be spent.

Criminal governance is the fabrication of a justification for war (weapons of mass destruction), hiding the President’s true intentions from the American people and the Congress of the United States (Bush signed off on the Iraq war plans in late August 2002, and yet continued to publicly state that no decision for military action had been made), and shredding international law by waging an aggressive war of pre-emption void of any United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing such actions.

Bad governance is manipulating war planning on the part of military professionals so that we enter into a conflict with far too few troops for the task, with no plan for how to proceed once the fighting ended and the reality of occupation set in.

Criminal governance is violating every principle of the laws of war in the conduct of the occupation of Iraq, manipulating the economic and political direction of Iraq, suppressing its population, and engaging in wanton acts of widespread murder, torture and abuse of the Iraqi people.

The fact is the war in Iraq has degenerated into one giant hate crime.

American soldiers and Marines are being thrown into a cauldron of our own making, scalded by a conflict with no purpose or direction, with the end result being that in order to survive these fighting men and women have dehumanized the totality of the Iraqi people.

The ancestors of ancient Babylon have become nothing more than "sand niggers", "rag-heads", "camel jockeys", "ninja women" or "haji" in the hearts and minds of American fighting men who are now killing Iraqis in ever increasing numbers. Gone is any talk of rebuilding Iraq. We are there to destroy it. The criminal nature of the war in Iraq is starting to become common knowledge among observers of the war.

It has long sense been common knowledge on the part of those waging it. In Vietnam Americans were shocked by the revelations of Mai Lai and the murder of innocent Vietnamese civilians by American fighting men. But Mai Lai is repeated in bits and pieces every day in Iraq, with the American military occupation slaughtering family after family of Iraqis in the name of bringing peace and security.

The realization that something has gone horribly wrong in Iraq, however, has not translated into any kind of discernable action on the part of the American people. While pundit after pundit breaks ranks with the Bush administration on Iraq, often repudiating their own pre-war chest beating and encouragement of the war, the fact is that the manifesto which manifested itself in the invasion of Iraq -- the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States -- continues to dictate the manner and nature of America's interfacing with the rest of the world in unquestioned fashion.

Indeed, President Bush has, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Iraqi war, promulgated a new, improved version of this manifesto, the 2006 National Security Strategy of the United States, which re-affirms America's commitment to the principles of pre-emptive war. In short, the President has re-certified America as the greatest threat to international peace and security in modern times, especially when one considers that even as America is engaged in the brutal rape and occupation of Iraq, President Bush has his eyes firmly set on another war of aggression in Iran.

What are the American people doing in response? There is a huge difference between becoming aware and taking action. While poll numbers on Iraq reflect a growing unease about the war, this unease has not manifested itself into any discernable reaction of consequence. The Democratic Party has remained largely mute, largely because of the culpability on the part of much of its membership in facilitating and sustaining the Iraqi war and its underlining doctrine of global domination by the United States.

But in the face of the near total subservience on the part of the Republican Party in supporting the policies of President Bush no matter how illegal and harmful they are to America and the world, the Democratic Party must shake itself free of the doldrums it currently finds itself stuck in. The time for passive recognition that the war in Iraq has gone bad is long past.

The time for concrete political action has arrived. The Democrats need to recognize that the political struggle in America today is not a trivial extension of the partisan Red State-Blue State nonsense the American media likes to bandy about, but rather a far more serious struggle of national survival, if one in fact defines the American nation as being reflective of the ideals and values set forth by the Constitution of the United States.

The Iraq War, if anything, is a reflection of the total abrogation of constitutional responsibility and process by the Congress of the United States. As a result, the President has led a nation down the path of illegal war of aggression which has damaged America's reputation abroad, and its very fabric here at home. The Republican-controlled Congress has done little to stop this collective march towards national self-destruction, rubber-stamping the president's illegal actions with little regard to either the rule of law or Congress's status as a second but equal branch of government.

This must end.

The fact is that America today stands on the brink of having everything we stand for as a nation being swept away by a power-crazed President and a compliant Congress, both of whom are Republican. Whatever direction the Democratic Party takes in the future, it must be with the recognition that the hopes and dreams of saving the United States as a nation of laws founded in the words and principles of the Constitution rest heavily on their shoulders. The Democratic Party must become laser-like in its rejection of the war in Iraq, resolute in condemning this war for what it is, an illegal war of aggression,and determined in fighting for the concept of a nation governed by the rule of law by holding President Bush accountable for his illegal actions.

In short, the rallying cry of the Democratic Party must become impeachment. Given the magnitude of the crimes committed by the United States in Iraq under the direction and leadership of President Bush and his administration, there is simply no other recourse that can bring a halt to the madness in Iraq, and the insanity being planned in Iran and elsewhere.

The remedy is clear. The question now is whether the Democratic Party is up to the task.

It's Stupid...

The all-powerful Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is nowhere to be found; but the atrocities continue.

Bunch of OIF Veterans run for Congress...one Republican, nine Democrats

Sein Fein, Beider-Meinhof, ETA, Black Panters, SLA, al-Qaeda - we allowed them to frighten us, thus we gave them power they didn't otherwise have

Japan beats Cuba, LSU beats Duke

Soaps and Cop Shows account for over 65% of all programs on network TV. Educational programs less than 10%

Who in their right mind wants an erection to last longer than about an hour. Four hours is stupid, and probably not gonna happen.

A med that has worse side-effects than the problem it was designed to mitigate is really stupid.

GM complains about CAFE standards being aimed at Hummers and other monster SUV's. Loses another $5 bn...

Dieters who yo-yo a hundred pounds or more need more than a diet

Sen. Feingold's Censure idea is great for making Republicans look stupid when they attack it, and Democrats look naive and weak when they support it.

Gansta rap for bourgeois white boys - an idea who's time has long since passed

SIlicone or saline - doesn't matter - they're still false, and useless, unlike false teeth

High US corporate profits are more related to cheap Chinese goods, lax taxation, negligible oversight, and outsourcing rather than enhanced production capabilities or operating efficiencies.

Oral sex: if your gal does it to you - that's wonderful; if your buddy does it - that's ...

Journalism is not based on a perceived need to present balanced spin.

Without craftsmanship, art usually doesn't happen

George W. Bush is not an idiot. One must, unfortunately, assume some thought goes into what he says and does.

Blue jeans and a black top alone cannot make anyone into a Steve Jobs clone.

Fifth year senior - n, an acronym for basketball player

Almost all non-professional golfers play bogey golf or worse, if they record their scores accurately

What's with the heavy emphasis on the hairdo for Senators? No cardigan sweaters, no tweeds, no jeans...

50% of Georgians currently do not graduate from high school; yet folks want to talk incessantly about the upper 20% and ignore the middle 30%, and discount the lower 50%.

More IE Security Problems

Microsoft Confirms 'Highly Critical' IE Hole
PCMag.com
By Ryan Naraine
March 22, 2006

Microsoft plans to release a pre-patch advisory with workarounds for a "highly critical" vulnerability that could put millions of Internet Explorer users at the mercy of malicious hackers.

The advisory, which will be posted here, acknowledges a code execution hole that was discovered and publicly reported by Secunia Research of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Secunia said in an alert that the vulnerability is due to an error in the processing of the "createTextRange()" method call applied on a radio button control.

The latest warning comes just 24 hours after the discovery, and public release, of a denial-of-service bug in the dominant Web browser.

Not Your Father’s Detroit
American Prospect - Apr 8th, 2006 Edition
By Harold Meyerson
Issue Date: 04.08.06
...
Can America survive American capitalism? only if it fundamentally alters the way we do business. Herewith, three immodest proposals:

• First, revive industrial policy. We haven’t had an industrial policy discussion in the United States in some time -- since the early 1990s, in fact. It’s easy to understand why we had one then: From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, America lost 2.4 million manufacturing jobs.

Now, in the past five years alone, we’ve lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs. But there is no great public conversation about this. The reasons for this silence are many. There’s the declining political weight of the manufacturing sector (both companies and unions) in both political parties. There’s the corresponding rise of the political clout of the financial sector (a driving force in America’s deindustrialization) in both political parties. There’s the prosperity of the late 1990s, which led many to believe that high-tech could engender a sustained, widespread economic boom as manufacturing had once done.

Of course, high-tech did nothing of the sort. Not only did it fail to bolster incomes in other sectors of the economy, it hasn’t provided rising incomes to its own employees since the bubble burst in 2000. For one thing, the number of jobs in science and engineering is not increasing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), we have generated just 70,000 new jobs in engineering and architecture over the past five years, and the BLS does not project an increase in high-skill employment over the next decade.

In raw numbers, the fastest growing occupations between 2004 and 2014, says the bureau, will be retail salespersons, nurses, post-secondary teachers, customer service representatives, janitors, waiters, food-preparation workers, and home-health aides. Five of the 10 fastest-growing occupations fall under the BLS’s designation of very-low income -- which the BLS defines as an annual income under $20,184. In such an economy, sending more people to college is not really a panacea. In 2002, says the bureau, 26.9 percent of all jobs in the United States required college degrees; in 2012, that will rise to just 27.9 percent -- one measly point.

Much of the problem is that many highly skilled professionals have jobs that are increasingly offshorable. Last year, economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of University of California-Santa Cruz concluded that it’s skilled workers in general and scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in particular who are vulnerable to having their jobs exported. “Across all occupations,” they write, “workers in tradable occupations receive 9 percent higher wages than workers in non-tradable occupations. For ‘high-end’ service occupations, workers in the tradable sector receive almost 13 percent higher wages … .” For confirmation of Jensen and Kletzer’s hypothesis, simply turn to a study by economists Jerry and Marie Thursby (of Emory and Georgia Tech, respectively) published this February that surveyed 200 U.S.-based multinationals. The Thursbys reported that 38 percent of the companies planned to relocate at least some of their research and development facilities to other nations, chiefly India and China. “More companies in the survey,” the authors wrote, “said they planned to decrease research and development employment in the United States and Europe than planned to increase employment.” (“Having internationalized the hands,” says chief AFL-CIO economist Ron Blackwell, “they’re busy internationalizing the mind.”)

The export of our high-end manufacturing may be one factor hastening the export of American research and development. As former Reagan administration Commerce Department official Clyde Prestowitz has pointed out, the U.S. armed forces have unparalleled night-vision capacity because of the work of U.S. scientists with cadmium mercury telluride semiconductor materials. The manufacturers of such materials, however, are located in Japan, and now the research scientists have moved there, too. The army may claim to own the night, but, in actuality, it’s renting it.

The movement of strategic manufacturing abroad was of sufficient concern to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology that in their 2004 report they noted, “[the] research to manufacturing process is not sequential in a single direction, but results from an R&D-manufacturing ecosystem [so that] … new ideas can be tested and discussed with those working on the ground.” There are fewer such ecosystems of this kind in America today.

There are also fewer strategic industries. The vast majority of machine tools used in U.S. factories and shops are made abroad now. With them have vanished the American workers capable of working with high-end machine technology. Having received a spate of new aerospace contracts, Boeing is currently hiring new workers at its Wichita plant, and, according to Machinists union international president Tom Buffenbarger, is “scouring the country for tool and die makers and instrumentation mechanics, because we don’t have them any more.”

Indeed, if deindustrialization were to continue apace, it’s not clear that America would have the work force and the facilities to produce the goods we’d need to close our massive trade deficit. “If we’re in the business of making things with fewer workers, that’s okay,” says University of California-Berkeley economist and former Clinton administration Treasury Department official J. Bradford DeLong. “If we’re out of business altogether, that’s something else. I worry that a lot of manufacturing capacity we could get back now we may not be able to get back in a couple of years.”

The promise of global trade, after all, is that we will one day be able to sell many billions of dollars of products to the newly minted middle class of China and India. If we can’t, if we’re no longer making what several billion new consumers would want to buy, then our economic straits would be something worse than dire.

So we need an industrial policy, to cajole and compel American corporations to make strategic investments in America. The bipartisan reaction against the administration’s proposed Dubai-port deal points to a broad public awareness that the nation’s security interests are not invariably well-served by the calculus of the marketplace. Surely, the offshoring of our scientific and high-end manufacturing capacity poses a threat to our economy every bit as dangerous to our long-term security as the sale of our harbor operations.

Yet the federal government and the entire financial community view any effort to induce U.S.-based corporations to invest at home as heresy. Meanwhile, the Chinese government routinely picks up the costs of building factories and training a workforce for American corporations seeking to move there. “Because we hate having U.S. bureaucrats pick winners and losers,” Prestowitz has written, “we outsource the job to Chinese bureaucrats.”

One strategy for in-sourcing American industry is to have the government -- abetted by public- and union-controlled pension funds -- upgrade the physical infrastructure, lower energy costs (through vast retrofitting projects), undertake industry-specific worker training, and offer companies tax credits in return for their commitments to invest and hire locally, pay decently, and contract with their suppliers regionally. (We make a better country, you become a better citizen.) Such a strategy describes the project that Wisconsin-based political scientist Joel Rogers and Michigan-based auto industry analyst Dan Luria have undertaken to enlist the governors of the industrial Midwest -- the area most decimated by outsourcing -- to build a regional consortium to attract industrial investment. Those principles run so counter to the strategies -- more than that, the instincts -- of our current capitalism, however, that our capitalism probably must be altered if genuine in-sourcing is to occur.

• Second, upgrade all non-offshorable work. Casual observers of unions could have been forgiven last summer if they failed to fathom what the unions that left the AFL-CIO to form the Change to Win Federation had in common. Politically, the unions ranged across the spectrum. What united them was that they represented workers whose jobs could not be exported: nurses, truckers, supermarket clerks, carpenters, laborers, hotel workers, and janitors. Together, they represented 6 million workers -- which left, by their count, 44 million workers in those sectors unorganized.

We may not think of these jobs as commanding decent wages, but in fact, union density is determinative here. Hotel room maids in cities where hotels are almost entirely unionized make $20 an hour; in cities that are half-unionized, $12 an hour; in non-union cities, $7 an hour. In heavily unionized Las Vegas, hotel workers can avail themselves of employer-funded training programs to advance to more highly skilled jobs, and make enough to buy homes that would be far beyond the reach of hotel workers in non-union towns. In the largest unionization drive currently underway in the nation, UNITE HERE (the hotel workers union) is using the threat of a strike this summer against hotels in most unionized cities to compel some national chains to agree not to oppose the organization of their workers in non-union cities.

Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow, currently working on a Russell Sage Foundation study comparing low-wage work in Europe and America, believes that upgrading service-sector work is crucial for the American economy. Pessimistic about the future of domestic manufacturing, Solow notes that some European nations make civil servants of child-care and elderly care workers, and pay them accordingly. “We usually think of a revived WPA creating employment in construction and manufacturing work,” he says, “but if it’s not focused on the service sector, it won’t be that useful. That’s where the demand is.” One such neo-WPA proposal, appearing on California’s primary ballot this June, is Rob Reiner’s initiative to create universal preschool for the state’s four-year-olds, funded by a tax on the wealthiest Californians. The measure includes $700 million to provide college training and credentials to child-care providers, and provisions that would enable them to form unions.

Professionalizing and unionizing non-offshorable work would help reinvent broadly shared prosperity in America. But it would not necessarily offset the effect of downscaling occupations that can be shipped abroad (indeed, the diminution of the manufacturing labor pool increases competition in the service-sector labor pool). “Andy [Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and the leading figure in the drive to organize non-offshorable workers] thinks you can grow a union inside these limitations,” one leading labor official comments. “I doubt it. The neo-liberal system incentivizes employers to compete with each other in the worst possible way. You can’t fix this at the workplace. We don’t have business leaders who will say, ‘We want to make money, but we also want to build a strong national economy.’ You can’t solve our problems unless you constrain these guys to focus on that.”

• And so, third, constrain business leaders by changing corporate governance. In the evocative words of business writer Barry Lynn, the CEO “was once the company’s man in the boardroom. Now, he’s the investors’ man in the company.” Even that may be giving corporate leaders too much credit, since the model CEO not only seeks to enrich the shareholder at the expense of employees, but himself at the expense of the shareholder. A 2005 study of 20,000 firms by economists Lucian Bebchuk and Yaniv Grinstein finds that the percentage of the typical firm’s total earnings paid out in compensation to the company’s top five executives grew from 5 percent in 1993-1995 to 10 percent in 2001-2003. Bebchuk and Grinstein conclude that out of the $83 billion that the 99.99th percentile of wealthiest Americas reported on their taxes in 2001, $48 billion was the income of companies’ top five executives, which averaged $6.4 million (CEO salaries averaged $14.3 million). With their salary and benefit levels set by corporate boards and compensation committees on which their fellow CEOs sit, the men who run American business are paid a fortune to retain a fortune. Nice work if you can get it.

But the case for corporate clean-up goes well beyond the need to end legalized looting. Unless statutory changes force corporate and investment-fund boards to exclude back-scratching CEOs and include a majority of employee and public representatives, disinvestment in America -- at least, the America of decently paid work -- will continue apace. This is not to negate the importance of restoring progressive taxation and the right to join unions and a hundred other necessary reforms. It is to say that American capitalism itself is, in its exploitation of globalization, the most fundamental threat today to American living standards. If the era of mass prosperity that began at Highland Park is not to end at Wixom, the nation must reclaim its economy.
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

Iraq War Vet Leads in Illinois Race
By Eric Pianin
The Washington Post
Wednesday 22 March 2006

Tammy Duckworth, the decorated Iraq war veteran who lost both legs in a grenade attack, won a close race Wednesday in her bid for the Democratic primary nomination to succeed retiring Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R) in Illinois's 6th Congressional District.

Duckworth, the most prominent and best-financed of nearly a dozen veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars attempting to launch careers in Congress, was vying with Democratic rival Christine Cegelis, a computer consultant who has been running nonstop since she lost to Hyde two years ago.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, the Associated Press declared the Thailand-born Duckworth the narrow winner with 44 percent, or 14,019 votes, to Cegelis' 40 percent.

Duckworth, 38, a retired Army major who was wounded on Nov. 12, 2004, while piloting a helicopter in Iraq, formally announced her candidacy in December. Since then, she has enjoyed the high-profile backing and money-raising power of such Democratic Party luminaries as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Barack Obama (Ill.).

Although Duckworth sought to stress bread-and-butter issues, her views on the war inevitably garnered far more attention. She told audiences that she supports the troops and believes that the United States must persevere long enough to give Iraqis a chance. But she asserted that President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was an error and that the war has been badly managed.

Cegelis sought to portray Duckworth as a political carpetbagger in the congressional district, a traditionally GOP bastion west of Chicago in DuPage County. Cegelis asserted that many residents resented that Duckworth lives in a home three miles outside the district and that she raised most of her $517,747 campaign war chest with the help of her national Democratic allies. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, helped Duckworth raise $139,000 earlier this month with an e-mailed fundraising appeal.

Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris  

A Disillusioned American Soldier's Return From Iraq
By Corine Lesnes
Le Monde: Saturday 18 March 2006

One thing has become intolerable to him: fatty food. French fries, hamburgers. Since he's been back from Iraq, soldier Erik Bunger hasn't been able to go into a fast-food restaurant, although before he went to them "all the time." He can't bring himself to watch television. "There are lots of things about Western society that don't work for me any more," he says.

Former President Jimmy Carter's: "Malaise Speech"

1979

"Good evening.

This is a special night for me. Exactly 3 years ago, on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for President of the United States. I promised you a President who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.
...
I know, of course, being President, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That's why I've worked hard to put my campaign promises into law -- and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Water gate.

We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's re sources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like, and neither do I. What can we do?

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: "We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America."

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.

We ourselves and the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous tool on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our Nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.
...

The Essential Krugman: "Bogus Bush Bashing"

NY Times - Paul Krugman
Mar. 20th, 2006

Paul Krugman discusses how new conservative critics of Bush are not criticizing his policies because they were complicit in bringing those policies about. Instead, they accuse him of violating conservative principles by being a big spender, a criticism that is off base.

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"The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is 'incompetent,' and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: 'idiot' and 'liar.' " So says the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, whose most recent poll found that only only 33 percent of the public approves of the job President Bush is doing.

Mr. Bush, of course, bears primary responsibility for the state of his presidency. But ... we're looking at the failure of a movement as well as a man. ... [M]ost of the conservatives now rushing to distance themselves from Mr. Bush still can't bring themselves to criticize his actual policies. Instead, they accuse him of policy sins — in particular, of being a big spender on domestic programs — that he has not, in fact, committed.

Before I get to the bogus issue of domestic spending, let's look at the policies the new wave of conservative Bush bashers refuses to criticize. Mr. Bush's new conservative critics don't say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That's not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can't criticize the ... war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision. Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush's almost surreal bungling of the war. ...

Meanwhile, the continuing allegiance of conservatives to tax cuts ... prevents them from saying anything about the real sources of the federal budget deficit, in particular Mr. Bush's unprecedented decision to cut taxes in the middle of a war. ... They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. ... As Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it ..., conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.

So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem ... it's not true. It's true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001 and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.

Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. ... So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? ...[L]argely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of control. Mr. Riedl is very good at his job ... managing to convey the false impression that soaring spending on domestic social programs is a major cause of the federal budget deficit without literally lying.

But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

Link to Slate's Online Podcast Archive is Here

Customs of 'honor culture' may give rise to revenge
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, March 18, 2006

In Iraq, revenge is more than sweet.

Ancient tribal customs mean that insults and injuries must be avenged to restore honor, according to anthropologists and counterinsurgency experts — and Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli. “You’ve got to understand the culture,” Chiarelli said. “You’re in a culture where revenge is acceptable when you are wronged. The problem is they go after someone wearing this uniform or anyone in the coalition.”

Chiarelli, a longtime proponent of trying to ease alienation between the U.S. and Iraqis so people will deny insurgents sanctuary, is currently taking on a difficult task.

He’s looking for ways to reduce the number of times U.S. soldiers kill or wound Iraqi motorists because the Iraqis drive too close to a convoy or checkpoint, don’t respond to signs and shouts to stop and are perceived as a lethal threat.

He’s convinced that many of the relatives of the killed and wounded have joined the insurgency to regain their honor.

It’s a theory that holds up well. Iraq’s culture, like many in the Middle East that grew from tribal nomadic groups, is known as an “honor culture,” in which real or even perceived wrongs must be dealt with violently or shame may be brought to the entire group.

Although little has been reported about revenge on U.S. soldiers for a wounded or killed relative, much has been written about the honor culture and what Westerners consider one of its most horrible manifestations: honor killings.

Honor killings are committed by men against women in their own families, for bringing dishonor by refusing an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, committing adultery or being raped.

According to Human Rights Watch, a 2001 United Nations report said that in the past decade an estimated 4,000 women and girls had been victims of “honor killings” in Iraq.

The practice of seeking revenge also extends to some families of those held in U.S. detention centers, the Diyala province justice minister recently told Chiarelli, and added to crime and the insurgency. “If you bring a great deal of people without acceptable evidence, their relatives will be pushed to retribution,” he said.

But Chiarelli sees a bright spot: another part of the culture that accepts monetary compensation (without having to file a tort) for a killing or injury.

“If you accidentally kill an Iraqi — the culture also offers you the ability to make amends,” Chiarelli said. “If you do that within the required time period, you’re forgiven. If you do that, it’s considered insha’allah,” using the Arabic word for “God’s will.”

Anytime a weapon is discharged by soldiers on a convoy, according to a new order, they are required to stop, not drive on. They’re supposed to give first aid and call an ambulance or medevac if anyone is injured, provide claim forms for damages and complete a report for their headquarters.

Old Navy Guy Blog Entry on Altercation

Name: Nicholas Pisano
Hometown: Destin, FL

Military members are like everyone else, especially a professional military in times like this one, in which national survival is not at stake. I can hear the howls now-but I challenge anyone to tell me how a well-financed terrorist organization of a couple of thousand members can threaten the nation to such an extent that an extraordinary and unprecedented consolidation of power in the executive and the violation of political rights and civil liberties (apart from the lies, corruption and abuse of power that seem to go hand-in-hand with these other actions) are necessary compared to, say, the Cold War where we faced the old Soviet Union with its sophisticated intelligence infrastructure, modern military and nuclear weapons that could (and we did come to the brink) wipe us off the map in a matter of minutes? Or how it compares to World War II where both Japan and Germany-two of the largest economies and military powers in the world at the time-were dedicated to our destruction and waged total war against us?

This is a fake war manufactured by cowards to hide their insecurities and to make money. Nor do military members have the inside track on virtue or truth (which should be self-evident). Only in fascist countries is the military held to a higher level of respect or position than a citizen. When I served I was doing a job. It was one that I felt required the highest ethical and moral conduct since the authority given me as a senior officer was quite weighty: one that flowed from the laws of the land. It is a necessary discipline because we all are only people-other citizens---and possess the same weaknesses, which-apart from all of the other stupidities to which one can become susceptible-includes the ability to be corrupted by power. There are military people who try to do the right thing, who obey the laws of the land, are professional and compassionate-like Major Bob and the Master Chief. But there are also those who commit crimes, abuse their authority and lead reprehensible lives. This is aside from the run-of-the-mill idealists, bootlickers, politicians, opportunists and careerists. Like the society that creates it, the military is generally representative of that society in terms of human frailties and virtues.

These common sense observations should go without saying, but a mystique seems to have grown around our military placing its members beyond criticism, especially convenient to those who would use it for questionable ends. The members of certain political and economic classes have aligned themselves with the military and, as a result, have through that alignment attempted to appropriate this mystique for their own gain. Some military members have been all too happy to oblige, further compromising their own legitimacy. Thus I think it is time to talk about the military tradition concerning the concept of accountability that seems to have been forgotten.

To the general public (and to the non-Sea Services) this is often and sadly a hard concept to grasp, but it is a necessary one for those who are given responsibility for decisions that can make the difference between life and death. After all, the sea is unforgiving. One who is given unique authority over others who falls short of what it takes needs to be removed from doing any more harm than he or she may have already caused.

You can delegate responsibility to someone to achieve a particular goal but you, as a Commissioned Officer (or a President), cannot escape the judgment of accountability. For example, when you are given the "con" on a U.S. Navy ship, you are accountable for everything that happens during your watch. No special pleading about conditions that may have existed before your assumption of that position will save you from harsh judgment should you run the ship aground, hazard your vessel unnecessarily or collide with another vessel. You voluntarily took the con and are expected to understand all important conditions prior to assuming command. Without accountability power lacks legitimacy and we are left with official lawlessness and despotism.

The Master Chief, of all the writers, should know better and is being disingenuous when he shifts blame for 9/11 and other lapses of judgment and offenses committed by this Administration to previous ones. I fault the 9/11 Commission for the same dishonesty. The 9/11 attack, the cooked evidence for the Iraq invasion, the Katrina debacle, the abuse of power in domestic spying involving hundreds of thousands of Americans with no connection to al-Qaeda, the widespread corruption involving billions of dollars in misappropriated funds all occurred on the watch of this President. Some of these involved unforgivable acts of omission and others were acts of commission involving the abuse of power.

No one forced George W. Bush to be President. He pursued that office and insisted on taking it even when all indications were that such a claim lacked democratic legitimacy. He sought it a second time through artifice and ruthlessness, cynically knowing that the perspective of time and discovery would be too late to stop him from continuing to pursue these acts.

The judgment of the President's acts will play out in the political sphere, but there is another concern that I believe it is imperative that we understand. That is, it is time for this standing and institutionalized volunteer military-which increasingly is being manipulated and used as a pawn by economic and political elites through a presumptuous executive branch-be brought back into the fold of democratic government through reform before it is too late and we suddenly realize that we have reason to fear it.

Photo used in a talk by Bruce Sterling.

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"You know what you're seeing here? The legacy of the past. This is the emeging tech of the past: receding tech..."

Number One Application Download: Ad-Aware SE

Note: Go to Lavasoft's Website and review the downloadable options. The trial version expires - the free version doesn't - and it's free for personal use. Absolutely the best current anti-virus option for most PC users.

"American Theocracy": The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips. Viking Press - 462pp

NY Times Book Review
Mar. 2006

Operation Swarmer - Three Views - Two Assert it was essentially a photo-op

Garrison Keillor: Day of reckoning for the Current Occupant

"The Republican Revolution has gone the way of all flesh. It took over Congress and the White House, horns blew, church bells rang, sailors kissed each other, and what happened? The Republicans led us into a reckless foreign war and steered the economy toward receivership and wielded power as if there were no rules. Democrats are accused of having no new ideas, but Republicans are making some of the old ideas look awfully good, such as constitutional checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, and the notion of realism in foreign affairs and taking actions that serve the national interest. What one might call "conservatism."

Via Megnut - Read the Numbers on Your Fruit

"Another little tidbit gleaned from April's Food & Wine: those sticker numbers on your fruit actually mean something. Here in the US, fruit often comes with stickers on it, sometimes telling you where it's from and/or what it is. There's also a number, but I never paid attention to that. But on p. 72 I spotted this interesting bit of information:"

"[T]he sticker labels on fruit: The numbers tell you how the fruit was grown. Conventionally grown fruit has four digits; organically grown fruit has five and starts with a nine; genetically engineered has five numbers and starts with an eight."

SXSW is hosting an MP3 of Bruce Sterling's traditional SXSW keynote speech, another must-hear barn-burner:

"When you actually ignore reality for years on end, the payback is a bitch brother! ... We're seeing just frantic collisions of fundamentalist delusion with objective reality... We're on a kind of slider bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable now, between the grim meathook future and the bright green future. There are ways out of this situation; there are actual ways to move the slider bar from one side to the other, except that we haven't invented the words for them yet. "

Credo of the Compassionate Friends

Needing Help With Grief? We need not walk alone.
We are The Compassionate Friends.

We reach out to each other with love, with understanding and with hope. Our children have died at all ages and from many different causes, but our love for our children unites us. Your pain becomes my pain just as your hope becomes my hope. We come together from all walks of life, from many different circumstances.

We are a unique family because we represent many races and creeds. We are young, and we are old. Some of us are far along in our grief, but others still feel a grief so fresh and so intensely painful that we feel helpless and see no hope. Some of us have found our faith to be a source of strength; some of us are struggling to find answers. Some of us are angry, filled with guilt or in deep depression; others radiate an inner peace.

But whatever pain we bring to this gathering of The Compassionate Friends, it is pain we will share just as we share with each other our love for our children. We are all seeking and struggling to build a future for ourselves, but we are committed to building that future together as we reach out to each other in love and share the pain as well as the joy, share the anger as well as the peace, share the faith as well as the doubts, and help each other to grieve as well as to grow.

More on the RFID tag virus possibility

Can Tag Viruses Infect RFID Systems?
RFID Journal March 2006
by Jonathan Collins

A group of European computer researchers have issued a study warning that RFID middleware and applications are vulnerable to viruses encoded into a tag's memory.

Mar. 15, 2006—A group of European computer researchers at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, have published a paper they claim shows how RFID tags, including those complyiant with EPCglobal standards, could be used to transmit computer viruses capable of bringing down and compromising entire computer systems.

"Even a tag with just 112 bytes available can create a buffer overflow or an SQL injection attack," says Andrew Tanenbaum, professor of computer science at the university.

RFID software designers have long thought the memory of passive RFID tags too small to pose any likely security threat, the researchers explain, saying their work shows that threats are possible by using tags to exploit long-standing vulnerabilities in the middleware and application software.

However, the group's claims were immediately rejected by some members of the RFID industry, including Kevin Ashton, cofounder and former executive director of MIT's Auto-ID Center and now vice president of marketing for RFID interrogator manufacturer ThingMagic.

"A typical EPC tag has 96 bits of memory with an ID number," Ashton notes. "For any such threat to be credible, there would have to be more memory, a read-write tag and variable-length tag reads. It would also need a reader and a system stupid enough and vulnerable enough to allow executable malicious code."

Sue Hutchinson is the director of product management for EPCglobal US, the U.S. arm of EPCglobal, a GS1-sponsored organization working to commercialize EPC technology and RFID standards. She says the security features built into the latest EPC tag and reader standard, Class 1 Gen 2, make the air interface protocol very different than the tags and readers used in the Dutch study.

Studies such as the one done at Vrije University are important because "they keep us thinking about these things, and it's of critical importance," says Hutchinson, "but it's a grand leap to say that [what was shown in the study] could happen to EPC tags and readers."

"We've been taking a very proactive stance at looking at security in the EPC Gen 2 protocol," she says. To strengthen security, the Gen 2 protocol includes two key safeguards: the ability to lock a tag so that only an authorized interrogator can write any data to it, and the use of RF masking, which adds a random number to a tag's ID and requires the tag and reader to exchange what she likens to a handshake before they can exchange any data. These features "make it much harder to introduce a virus into the system," she says, than using the method in the study.

According to a paper written by the Dutch researchers, the group carried out multiple tests of RFID tags made with Philips UHF I-Code SL1 chips, which, according to the paper, had 896 bits of memory. During the tests, the tags were programmed with a number of viruses and other types of malware developed at the university. The group used its own RFID middleware and a number of commercially available databases in its trials. The tests showed that tags could be employed to instigate a number of malicious attacks on the databases and middleware used in an RFID network, including buffer overflow and SQL injection, and even open a back door to the RFID application server.

"A lot of these attacks are common knowledge to IT security professionals, but what is different is that no one expects these attacks to come from an RFID tag," says Melanie Rieback, a Vrije University Ph.D. student who presented the group's findings today in a paper at the IEEE conference Pervasive Computing and Communications (IEEE PerCom) in Pisa, Italy. The paper, entitled "Is Your Cat Infected With a Computer Virus?," is available at the group's Web site.

The goal of the group's work, says Rieback, is to ensure that commercial RFID middleware developers, as well as RFID deployers developing their own middleware, address the potential of security attacks emanating from tags. "It is early enough not to cause too much damage," she says. "What would have been worse is if this threat had been discovered only through the work of a malicious hacker in five years' time, when many RFID systems have been deployed."

According to Ashton, the group's development of its own middleware to test the system underestimates the security built into commercially developed RFID middleware. "The RFID industry is an offshoot of the IT industry, and that industry has always taken security very seriously," he says. "Some of the earliest work at the Auto-ID Center addressed security."

"We've built security features into every part of the EPCglobal Network," says Hutchinson, "not just in the air-interface protocol, but also into the application-level events protocol and into the higher-level [elements] used for data discovery and track-and-trace applications."

While such virus attacks may be possible in theory, says Ashton, good software development practices would ensure that these vulnerabilities would be extremely unlikely to be found in any RFID network. "There are any number of hurdles that a piece of malicious code would have to overcome [to do any damage]," he claims, adding that RFID interrogators alone would detect rogue tags or rogue software on tags as part of the verification process of reading them.

Nonetheless, Tanenbaum believes a system using read-write tags are at the greatest risk because a system compromised by a single malicious tag could be used to create many more infected tags. One example is the tag used in RFID-enabled baggage-handling systems already in operation at Las Vegas' McCarran Airport. Once infected, Tanenbaum claims, baggage tags could be used to infect baggage-handling systems worldwide as bags with infected tags move to and are read at other airports.

The potential threat from RFID viruses is compounded further, say the researchers, by the interaction RFID tags enable between physical objects and events and computer systems. "In the past, if these attacks were used on a PC, then it might crash the computer, but RFID merges the real world and the virtual world, and so there is the potential for real and much more severe consequences," Tanenbaum says.

Ashton, however, asserts that the comparison with PC systems underlines a problem in the research group's work. "RFID systems are built using middleware, software and database systems, as well as custom software to act as a glue between these elements," he explains. "Every [RFID system] is unique, not like a PC desktop system. There would have to be stupid holes in the system vulnerable to attack, and the attacker would need intimate knowledge of those holes. If that were ever the case, the attacker wouldn't use RFID as a weapon of choice."

Meds & Canadian Pharmacies

Is it safe?

What are the names of some quality Canadian websites?

How much can I save?

What about a place to contact if something doesn't go right with my purchase?

What is Ketek? I understand it is for treating rhinovirus? (Common Cold/Flu)

I've got a bunch of pills; but I don't know what they are for. Can anyone help?

RFID Tag Virus?

Study Says Chips in ID Tags Are Vulnerable to Viruses
NY Times
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: March 15, 2006

A group of European computer researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to insert a software virus into radio frequency identification tags, part of a microchip-based tracking technology in growing use in commercial and security applications. Radio frequency identity tags are growing in popularity because they are easily scanned.

In a paper to be presented today at an academic computing conference in Pisa, Italy, the researchers plan to demonstrate how it is possible to infect a tiny portion of memory in the chip, which can hold as little as 128 characters of information. Until now, most computer security experts have discounted the possibility of using such tags, known as RFID chips, to spread a computer virus because of the tiny amount of memory on the chips.

The chips have already prompted debate over privacy and surveillance, given their tracking ability. Now the researchers have added a series of worrisome prospects, including the ability of terrorists and smugglers to evade airport luggage scanning systems that will use RFID tags in the future.

In the researchers' paper, "Is Your Cat Infected With a Computer Virus?," the group, affiliated with the computer science department at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, also describes how the vulnerability could be used to undermine a variety of tracking systems.

The researchers said they realized that there are risks associated with publishing security vulnerabilities in computerized systems. To head off some of the possible attacks they described, they have also published a set of steps to help protect RFID chips from such attacks.

The group, led by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, an American computer scientist, will make the presentation at the annual Pervasive Computing and Communications Conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Mr. Tanenbaum is the author of the Minix operating system, an experimental project that became the heart of the Linux open-source operating system.

The researchers asserted that the RFID demonstration had not used the commercial software that collects and organizes information from RFID readers. Rather, it used software that they designed to replicate those systems.

"We have not found specific flaws" in the commercial RFID software, Mr. Tanenbaum said, but "experience shows that software written by large companies has errors in it."

The researchers have posted their paper and related materials on security issues related to RFID systems at www.rfidvirus.org.

The researchers acknowledged that inside information would be required in many cases to plant a hostile program. But they asserted that the commercial software developed for RFID applications had the same potential vulnerabilities that have been exploited by viruses and other malicious software, or malware, in the rest of the computer industry.

One such standard industry problem is a software coding error referred to as a buffer overflow. Such errors occur when programmers set aside memory to receive data temporarily, but fail to require a check on the size of the value that is moved to the allocated space. A larger-than-expected value can cause the program to break and trick the computer operating system into executing a malicious program. "You should check all of your input all of the time, but experience shows this isn't the case," Mr. Tanenbaum said.

Independent computer security specialists also said RFID systems were potential problem areas.

"It shouldn't surprise you that a system that is designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible is designed with no security constraints whatsoever," said Peter Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI International, a research firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

Mr. Neumann is the co-author of an article to be published in the May issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the risks of RFID systems. He said existing RFID systems were a computer security disaster waiting to happen.

He cited inadequate identification for users, the potential for counterfeiting or disabling tags, and the problem of weak encryption in a passport-tracking system being developed in the United States. But he said he had not previously considered the possibility of viruses and other malicious software programs.

An industry executive acknowledged that the companies that make computerized tracking systems faced potential security problems.

"We are very actively looking at the different way the technology is used," said the executive, Daniel P. Mullen, president of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility, an industry trade group. "It's an ongoing dialogue about protecting information on the tag and in the database."

The association has a working group of experts assessing both security and privacy challenges, he said.

There are many types of RFID tag, and some of the sophisticated versions include security features like encryption of the identifying number carried by the chip.

But the Dutch research group warned that in a variety of situations it is possible for attackers to alter the information in an RFID tag to subvert its purpose.

"RFID malware is a Pandora's box that has been gathering dust in the corners of our 'smart' warehouses and homes," they write in their paper.

In one example they offered, a virus from an infected tag on luggage passing through an airport could be picked up when it is scanned by the luggage-handling control systems and then spread to tags attached to other pieces of luggage.

Such an attack, they suggest, might spread luggage contamination to other airports. It might also be used by a smuggler to cause a piece of luggage to avoid security systems.

They also described situations of counterfeit RFID tags possibly being be used to subvert pricing and other aspects of commercial sales systems, or a virus could be inserted into RFID tags used to identify pets.

NASCAR Museum or New Home for the ASO?

NASCAR outraces ASO bid for government help
By PIERRE RUHE, and TOM SABULIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 02/26/2006

Millions for NASCAR, nothing for the symphony. Not this year, anyway.

That's what state and local officials have said in recent weeks by promising more than $32 million in public funds for a new NASCAR Hall of Fame. At the same time, they declined to grant any money for a new concert hall for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

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The ASO on NASCAR:

How do ASO officials feel about the proposed NASCAR Hall of Fame and the more than $32 million it's been promised in public funds? Is there a sense of competition, a race to the finish line?

"We're thrilled at the progress on the NASCAR museum," says Paul Hogle, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra vice president for development. "We think it's an example of the kind of private/public partnerships that are necessary and will benefit our state.

"We're encouraged that the state finds NASCAR a healthy investment. Our case is similar, about economic development, about tourism, about a beacon for the state to draw people here. This [NASCAR] is moving forward right now; we're on a different time frame.

"It's all part of the statewide renaissance for Georgia, which is a collection of items. NASCAR is one of those items. Symphony Center is an item. We think it bodes well."

Greenhouse Gases

Global warming gases at highest levels ever: UN
Tue Mar 14, 2006 10:36 AM ET
By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Greenhouse gases blamed for global warming and climate change have reached their highest ever levels in the atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.

A bulletin from the United Nations agency said the gases -- the main warming culprit carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide -- "all reached new highs in 2004."

WMO officials also indicated that a near record year-on-year rise in CO2 levels for 2005 recorded by U.S. monitors -- well above the average for the past 10 years -- would not come as a major surprise.

"Global observations coordinated by WMO show that levels of carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, continue to increase steadily and show no signs of leveling off," said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

Carbon dioxide, which the WMO says accounts for 90 percent of warming over the past decade, is largely generated by human activity involving the burning of fossil fuels -- including in industry, transport and domestic heating.

Scientists warn emissions must be slowed and reduced if the earth is to avoid climatic havoc with devastating heat waves, droughts, floods and rising sea-levels sinking low-lying island states and hitting seaboard cities like New York and London.

The U.N.'s 1992 Kyoto Protocol, which came into force last year after a decade of wrangling, obliges major industrial nations to cut emissions while granting exemptions to developing countries like India and China.

But it was weakened by the withdrawal in 2001 of the United States, whose President George W. Bush said that working to meet its targets would seriously damage the U.S. economy. He has also argued that warming is a natural, not man-made, process.

In its first Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, to be an annual publication, the WMO said that in 2004 carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere stood at 377.1 parts per million (ppm), 35 percent higher than in the pre-industrial age before 1750.

Methane, generated by intensive farming and landfills as well as the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal and which accounts for around 20 percent of the greenhouse effect, has risen 155 percent in the modern age.

But its growth is slowing down, the WMO said, while nitrous oxide, which accounts for only 6 percent of the warming effect, is rising consistently.

The average annual increase in absolute amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere over the past decade has been 1.9 ppm, slightly higher than the 1.8 ppm of 2004, WMO environment division chief Leonard Barrie told a news conference.

Barrie said a finding by the U.N. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cited by the British Broadcasting Corporation, that carbon dioxide had grown last year by 2.6 ppm had to be viewed in perspective.

"It is important to take the long view. There can be fluctuations," he said. "The 2.6 ppm figure is within past experience. If it were to persist over several years, then we would have to start talking about what it means."

Note: Ah yes, we need to study this further...

Latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll Results

60% of Americans believe the Iraq war is going badly.

March 13 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's job- approval rating fell
to a record low in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, as concern about the Iraq
conflict approaches levels of public discontent during the last years of the
Vietnam War. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents said going to war in Iraq
was a mistake, up from 55 percent in the previous poll the survey found. The
rating is close to public sentiment during the Vietnam War, when the number of
Americans who believed the conflict in Southeast Asia was a mistake reached a
record 61 percent in May 1971, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey.

The number of Americans who believe the Iraq war is going badly for the U.S.
rose to 60 percent, from 53 percent in a January questionnaire, the survey
showed.

For most of Bush's five years in office, polls have showed Americans have
favored Republicans over Democrats by a wide margin on the issue of fighting
terrorism. The poll released today suggested that gap is narrowing. Forty-one
percent of respondents said Democrats would handle terrorism better, compared
with 45 percent endorsing Bush's Republican Party, the survey said. That's
marked shift from a July 2003 survey that showed 55 percent favoring Republicans
and 27 percent backing Democrats on terrorism, according to data released by CNN
and USA Today.

Democrats also got an 8 percentage point advantage over Republicans on who
best would handle Iraq and a 15 point edge on dealing with the economy.

---

From the March 9-12, 2006 CBS News Poll

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?"
	Approve  %	Disapprove %	Unsure %
All Adults	31	63	6
Republicans	67	30	3
Democrats	8	84	8
Independents	25	68	7

Wow! It's really difficult to look at this poll result without shaking your head in amazement.

U.S. current account gap balloons in 4th quarter
Tuesday 14 March 2006, 8:31am EST


WASHINGTON, March 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. current account deficit widened more than expected in the fourth quarter to a record $224.9 billion as the goods trade gap ballooned, pushing the current account gap to a record $804.9 billion in 2005, government data showed on Tuesday. The quarterly shortfall was much larger than Wall Street forecasts for a deficit of $217.7 billion. The Commerce Department revised down the current account deficit in the third quarter to $185.4 billion, from the previously reported $195.8 billion.

The current account, the broadest measure of U.S. trade with the rest of the world, includes both trade in goods and services and investment flows. The deficit widened $136.9 billion from 2004 to $804.9 billion, representing 6.4 percent of gross domestic product, up from 5.7 percent in 2004, the Commerce Department said.

The ballooning current account deficit has been attributed to high U.S. consumer spending and a low saving rate. Some economists believe it leaves the United States vulnerable to the changing appetites of foreign investors and may be unsustainable in the long run.

Slobodan Milosevic: A Petty Hitler

By Wesley K. Clark
March 13, 2006; Page A18
The Wall Street Journal

Slobodan Milosevic's death in The Hague is a real tragedy for the international community. But most of all it will be a tragedy for the Serbs themselves. It will likely be another step in a series of historic Serb failures, martyrdom and isolation, all of which Milosevic himself grandly evoked to gain and maintain his power. I knew him as a nationalist leader and wartime adversary.

Along with the other Americans on Richard Holbrooke's 1995 Balkan peace talks mission, I spent countless hours with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. As NATO's then supreme allied commander, Europe, I haggled with Milosevic about war criminals and the Dayton Peace Agreement implementation in 1997, delivered NATO's warnings and threat in 1998, implored his cooperation in heading off renewed conflict, and then, when all else failed, I led the NATO military campaign which forced him to end ethnic cleansing and remove his troops and police from Kosovo. In 2003, I faced him again when I testified for the prosecution in his war crimes trial at The Hague.

While his death at The Hague ends his interminable trial, nothing is resolved. His death only compounds many of the difficult issues still facing the international community, Europe and Serbia itself.

In his 64 years, Milosevic was an army officer, a Communist, a bureaucrat, a banker and, above all, a Yugoslav Serb who used his skills and harsh nationalist rhetoric to parlay himself into the highest office in Yugoslavia only to then alienate and attack his fellow Yugoslav citizens. In four successive conflicts which he all lost, Milosevic used war as a means of plundering and disassembling his own country. He forced millions from their homes and caused several hundred thousands of deaths. He was rational and sometimes cunning, often a brilliant tactical negotiator but ultimately a fool of a strategist, whose reckless crimes included murder and genocide, and who has cost humanity as a whole and his own Serbs dearly.

* * *

As a young man Milosevic was a dutiful communist and an outstanding student who scored top marks in school. His mother was a teacher who encouraged his studies but kept him away from sports. He fell in love with Mira Markovic, a personal favorite of Tito, who lost her mother during World War II in still unresolved circumstances. Her partisan mother was captured by the Nazis who interrogated, tortured, confessed and then supposedly killed her. More likely she was released only to be killed as a collaborator by fellow partisans. Milosevic himself lost both his parents and an uncle to suicide. But though he clearly had a dark side, I never saw Milosevic as a suicide risk -- he was too committed to himself and to his ideas.

During the many hours of our negotiations in the summer and autumn of 1995, we dined with him, chatted with him about history and geopolitics, and talked about everything from his experiences as a young man in America to his concerns for his family. Given his gruff, commanding manner, many joked during the Dayton peace talks that he was the real Godfather. But we quickly came to think of him more appropriately as a petty Hitler, an unlawful dictator capable of malice, murder and ethnic cleansing. Any arrangement with him had to be weighed morally: for its legitimization of Milosevic as well as its value in ending a bloody conflict.

During the Dayton peace talks, all of Milosevic's "qualities" were at display: his stubborn cunning and blustering outbursts, his often grandiose dreams of Serbia as one of the seven gateways of Europe, his patent disloyalty to his fellow Serbs and transparent lies about everything from Srebrenica to his attitudes toward other nations. He smoked and drank excessively, even as he complained about his blood pressure and his health. At the Paris signature ceremony for the Dayton negotiations, Milosevic was center stage, conversing with world leaders like President Bill Clinton. But he failed to deliver on many of his promises, especially regarding indicted war criminals like former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic. By the late summer of 1997, Serb resistance to NATO-led enforcement of the peace accords was rising and we called again on Milosevic for help. But he stubbornly refused to assist us. He still held dreams of a greater Serbia and he thought he had NATO's measure.

In the spring of 1998 he unleashed the next round of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, this time turning his Special Police against a prominent Albanian family in Kosovo, killing 60 of them, including women and children. For most of that year NATO struggled to find a balanced approach, alternating negotiations with intensifying threats to head off another war in former Yugoslavia. But Milosevic foolishly believed he could defy NATO warnings and launch a broad ethnic cleansing effort with impunity.

It was another strategic miscalculation by Milosevic. NATO followed through in its threats, unleashing a 78-day, gradually intensifying air campaign and threatened ground intervention. Coupled with Russian diplomatic assistance and his indictment for war crimes, Milosevic was forced to pull his forces out of Kosovo. It was yet another blow to his vision of a greater Serbia. When he tried the next year to win re-election, his opponents in Belgrade were ready -- demanding an honest vote and his resignation. Soon he was delivered to The Hague.

Predictably, his cause of death is being disputed by some of his Serb countrymen who blame the U.N. He will surely be lionized and glorified by the radical nationalists he so nurtured.

History's longest war crimes trial will never be concluded. Milosevic's many victims and their families will be denied justice. And the Serb people themselves will have one more escape from the awful truth of the crimes under Milosevic's leadership. His death comes at a bad time.

Serbia is struggling to acknowledge its past and face its future.

Indicted war criminals like Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic are still at large -- most likely living under official protection. The future status of Kosovo is unresolved and Serb participation in a resolution would be helpful. Another challenge will be Montenegro's upcoming referendum on its independence. And even as Serbia looks westward for help, its future alignment is still unsettled as the Serb people struggle to recognize how badly they have been deceived and misled.

Even during Milosevic's rule, many in Serbia yearned to join the EU and work with NATO. Its economic modernization would strengthen all its neighbors, including NATO members Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. Its participation as a modern state would help promote political reconciliation and development throughout the Balkans. But all this means giving up the kind of hypernationalism that Milosevic trumpeted and fanned, and for many in Serbia, this has long been a mythology they have come to believe to offset the reality of deprivations, corruption and poverty.

Milosevic's death will likely bury the truth beneath another layer of charges and countercharges. His trial had been a long-running national TV drama in Serbia. The impact there of the evidence so painstakingly presented was blunted by Milosevic's star status at home and his grandiloquent and often irrelevant argumentation.

Now there will be no conviction and Serbia's weak leaders will have to cope with yet another obstacle in re-educating and reorienting their people. His death is as much a tragedy as his life. Both in life and in death, Milosevic has deprived millions of people of justice, hope and a better future.

Mr. Clark was supreme allied commander of NATO during the 1999 Kosovo campaign and a Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2004.

Lawmakers: Wal-Mart threatens US payment system
Fri Mar 10, 2006 11:49 AM ET
Reuters International
By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of lawmakers on Friday said an industrial bank owned by Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, could threaten the stability of the U.S. financial system and drive community banks out of business. In a highly critical letter to the acting chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., obtained by Reuters, a group of more than 30 Congress members asked the bank regulator to reject Wal-Mart's application to open a bank in Utah.

"Wal-Mart's plan, to have its bank process hundreds of billions in transactions for its own stores, could threaten the stability of the nation's payments system," the lawmakers wrote. "Given Wal-Mart's massive scope and international dealings, it is not possible to rule out a financial crisis within the company that could damage the bank and severely disrupt the flow of payments throughout the financial system."

The congressmen said the losses to the FDIC, which insures deposits at banks and thrift institutions, could be staggering if Wal-Mart begins to have financial troubles that bleed into its bank's business. "Consider the consequences if Enron or WorldCom had owned a bank," the group said.

From Eisenhower's First Inaugural Address
Tuesday, Jan. 20, 1953

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."

From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address
Saturday, March 4, 1865

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

From RFID Journal: March 2006
Quote of the Week

"I had a tag that showed up for about 40 days [as being read], coming in and out of a grocery store's stock room. I knew something was wrong. Turns out someone was reusing the tagged box for bringing stock out to the floor.

—Kevin Brown, director of information systems, Daisy Brand, recalling the company's initiative to track sour cream sales in an RFID-enabled grocery store

Pink Floyd Lyrics: Time Lyrics from Dark Side of the Moon Album - 1973

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desparation is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I'd something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells"

The Essential Krugman: "The Mensch Gap"

NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman
February 20, 2006

"Everybody makes mistakes. But not everyone can admit them:

The Mensch Gap, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: "Be a mensch," my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions. ...

Dick Cheney isn't a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney's recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn't a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion's aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about "unknown unknowns" and going to war with "the army you have," ducking responsibility for the failures of leadership that have turned the war into a stunning victory — for Iran.

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn't a mensch. Remember his excuse ... "I remember on Tuesday morning," ... "picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.' " There were no such headlines, at least in major newspapers, and we now know that he received — and ignored — many warnings about the unfolding disaster.

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn't a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan's catastrophic start doesn't reflect poorly on his department, that "no logical person" would have expected "a transition happening that is so large without some problems." In fact, Medicare's 1966 startup went very smoothly. ...

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility ... it's always someone else's fault. Was it always like this? I don't want to romanticize our political history, but I don't think so. ... Dwight Eisenhower ... wrote a letter before D-Day accepting the blame if the landings failed. His modern equivalent would probably insist that the landings were a "catastrophic success," then ... blame ... their failure on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Where have all the mensches gone? The character of the administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility ... approaches the pathological. ... And as long as his appointees remain personally loyal, he defends their performance, no matter how incompetent. After all, to do otherwise would be to admit that he made a mistake in choosing them. ...

But how did such people attain power in the first place? ... Whatever the reason ... it has horrifying consequences. You can't learn from mistakes if you won't admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years ...

Above all, the anti-mensches now ruling America are destroying our moral standing. A recent National Journal report finds that we're continuing to hold many prisoners at Guantánamo even though the supposed evidence against them has been discredited. We're even holding at least eight prisoners who are no longer designated enemy combatants. Why? Well, releasing people you've imprisoned by mistake means admitting that you made a mistake. And that's something the people now running America never do.

Googled Semi-Recent Neo-Logisms

Neologisms: n, a new word, expression, or usage.

Mashup: n, a digital recording that combines and synchronizes instrumental and vocal tracks from two or more songs

Hedonic treadmill: n. The tendency for a person's economic expectations and desires to rise at the same rate as his or her income, resulting in no net gain of satisfaction or happiness.

Milk-brain: n, feelings of disorientation and mental sluggishness reported by some mothers of newborn babies.

Metrosexual: n. An urban male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

Drink the Kool-Aid: v. To become a firm believer in something; to accept an argument or philosophy wholeheartedly or blindly.

Bluejacking: pp. Temporarily hijacking another person's cell phone by sending it an anonymous text message using the Bluetooth wireless networking system.

Stendhal's syndrome: n. Dizziness, panic, paranoia, or madness caused by viewing certain artistic or historical artifacts or by trying to see too many such artifacts in too short a time.

Jump the shark: v. In a television show, to include an over-the-top scene or plot twist that is indicative either of an irreversible decline in the show's quality or of a desperate bid to stem the show's declining ratings. Also: JTS.

Bling-bling: n. Expensive or gaudy jewelry worn in excessive amounts; a flashy or tasteless display of wealth.

McMansion: n. A large, opulent house, especially a new house that has a size and style that doesn't fit in with the surrounding houses.

Butt call: n. An unintended phone call placed by sitting on one's cell phone.

Bobo: n. A person who combines affluence and a successful career with a preference for countercultural ideas and artifacts. (Bourgeois Bohemians)

Bridezilla: n. A bride-to-be who, while planning her wedding, becomes exceptionally selfish, greedy, and obnoxious.

Flash mob: n. A large group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse.

Lake Wobegon effect: n. The tendency to treat all members of a group as above average, particularly with respect to numerical values such as test scores or executive salaries; in a survey, the tendency for most people to describe themselves or their abilities as above average.

BFE adj. Very far away: Beyond Fu**ing Egypt. also B.F.E., b.f.e. Variant: Bomfoq Egypt

Troll:, n. A person who sends messages to online blogs and newsgroup to incite emotions and cause controversy.

Mitumba: n. second-hand clothing, especially that donated by aid agencies in the West.

Podcast: n. a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.

Rendition: n. the practice of capturing a criminal suspect and handing them over to the authorities of a different country for interrogation or imprisonment

Asbo: n. Anti-social behaviour order: a civil order aiming to protect the community from a named individual who has allegedly caused major disturbance to others through vandalism, drunkenness, etc.

DeLay Beats 3 Rivals in Texas G.O.P. Primary
NY Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: March 8, 2006

HOUSTON, March 7 — Representative Tom DeLay survived a challenge to his renomination for Congress Tuesday night, outpacing three Republican primary rivals seeking to capitalize on the criminal charges and ethics citations against him. Mr. DeLay, 58, an 11-term incumbent, turned out a disciplined army of poll workers and pledged his Washington influence on behalf of NASA's Johnson Space Center and other big constituencies. With nearly 88 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Delay had 19,684, or 61 percent of the vote, far ahead of his closest opponent, Tom Campbell, at 9,595, or 30 percent.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit Washington-based research group that tracks money in politics, called the race in the 22nd District the most expensive in the country so far. As of Feb. 13, it said, Mr. DeLay spent almost $1.6 million, Mr. Lampson, the Democratic party opponent almost $300,000 and Mr. Campbell only $4,674.

On The Radio - Payola

N.Y. Attorney General Sues Radio Chain
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 8, 2006
Filed at 6:11 p.m. ET

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- Gifts, trips and cash were used to pave the way for air time for certain songs at radio stations owned and operated by the nation's fifth largest chain, according to a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

The accusation was denied by the company, Entercom Communications Corp. of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., which owns and operates more than 105 radio stations.

''We have moved from the label side, those who put out the records and are forced to pay for air time, and switched to the radio conglomerates ... that are extracting money,'' Spitzer said Wednesday.

For example, one memo from a programmer at WKSE in Buffalo to Columbia Records in 2003 stated: ''Do you need help on Jessica (Simpson) this week? .... if you don't need help I certainly don't need to play it.''

Spitzer claims air time was sold for $1,000 or more for individual songs. He said the practice included providing a $2,500 laptop computer for a country station in exchange for playing artists Joe Nichols and the duo McHayes, for station concert appearances, for a personal appearance by country artist Blake Shelton, and for playing Liz Phair songs. ''Don't Tell Me'' by Avril Lavigne aired 109 times in a week on Entercom's Nashville station WQZQ. More than a third of the ''spins'' were paid for by Arista Records, the lawsuit claims.

Spitzer also accused the company of ''falsely promoting records up the music charts'' in reports to the magazines Billboard and Radio & Records about the play time of songs that was supposed to be based on popularity.

Spitzer said payola violates radio stations' federal licenses and New York state civil law. He said the Federal Communications Commission, which he accused of being ''asleep at the switch'' on payola, should consider revoking the licenses.

Spitzer said listeners and artists are hurt by payola, sometimes forcing the same song on the air every hour, according to the lawsuit. ''The decisions are being made as to what to put on the airwaves based on bribes to be paid and extracted, rather than on judgments based on artistic merit,'' he said.

The lawsuit claims it has evidence in documents and e-mails that executives discussed strategies for supplementing radio station budgets with payola cash from record companies and the independent promoters that act as middle men in the industry. Spitzer said Entercom e-mails he obtained include one from an unidentified executive that stated: ''These are not optional. They come from corporate and generate millions of dollars for Entercom.'' Spitzer said he is filing the civil action in state Supreme Court in Manhattan because New York's civil laws address the alleged behavior. He said a criminal case would be difficult if not impossible to make.

In February, Spitzer subpoenaed nine of the nation's largest radio conglomerates in his ''payola'' investigation of major artists and songs that he claims received air time because of payoffs by recording companies. Two major recording companies agreed last year to settle their parts of the investigation. Warner Music Group Corp. said it would pay $5 million, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to pay $10 million.

Payola today differs from the 1950s payola that shocked early rock 'n' roll. These days programming executives, not disc jockeys, decide what is played. Spitzer said he found the practice at Top 40, adult contemporary and country stations. One memo said a single station should expect $125,000 a year in payola. Shares of Entercom fell 26 cents, to close at $28.50 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Now running for office: an army of Iraq veterans
All but one of these 11 House hopefuls are in the Democratic Party.
By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – They call themselves the Band of Brothers, about 50 men - and a few women - all Democrats, all opposed to the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, and all military veterans.

One more thing: They're all running for Congress this year.

Not since 1946 have so many vets from one party come together in a political campaign, they claim. Their wildest dream is to give the Democratic Party the extra edge it needs - by boosting its weak image on defense and patriotism - to end Republican control of the House.

Six Months Later

The Storm This Time
Natural and Unnatural Disaster in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
Writing and Photography by David Helvarg
eMagazine March 2006

Cigar Holder for Golf Cart

After trying several brands and models, the best one I've come up with is the "GripClip".
They are available at a variety of Pro Shops, or you can order one from GF Enterprises for $14.95 (which includes S&H). Their address is: 5205 S.Trimble Road, Atlanta, GA, 30342 - or email them at: GripClip@comcast.net

TomPaine.com
Paying The Price Of Security
Robert B. Reich
March 02, 2006

"Before we go nuts about an Arab company taking over some of our ports—or for that matter a Chinese company taking over one of our oil companies or, say, a Russian company taking over an American nuclear power plant, or a Turkish company taking over an American chemical plant, or a Bulgarian company taking over a military supplier—we’ve got to know what it means for them to “take over” something of ours.

In the global economy, who’s them? Who’s us? And what’s a “takeover?” There’s a world of difference between ownership, management, day-to-day operations and control.

Ownership depends on who puts up the money. And these days money is coming from all over. The Emir of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, owns Dubai Ports World. He has invested worldwide in casinos, shipping lines, hotels, financial companies—wherever he can get the best return. He’s even bought the Essex House in New York.

Yes, there are some people in Dubai who hate America. A few of the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center came from there. But face it: There are some people in lots countries who hate America, and a few of these people could become terrorists. Yet this frightening fact has almost nothing to do with the issue of ownership.

About 80 percent of American ports are already run by foreign companies. These companies usually hire Americans to do the day-to-day management. After all, global companies want the best talent they can get. Dubai Port World’s chief operating officer is Edward Bilkey, who’s an American. Its former American executive, David Sanborn, was just nominated to be U.S. Maritime Administrator.

And if this deal goes through, Dubai Ports World will probably keep most of the American executives who have been working for the British company that now runs the six ports in question because they’ve made the company lots of money, which is why Dubai Ports wants to buy it.

Whatever the arrangement, the day-to-day operations at the ports will still be done by American longshoremen, clerks and technicians. And control over port security will remain with the U.S. government, the Coast Guard, Customs, harbor police, and port authorities, who make and enforce the rules.

I don’t mean to minimize the real danger that a terrorist might sneak into an American port or plant a nuclear bomb in a container heading toward an American port, or a container mounted on a truck that crosses an American border headed for Kansas City.

But if that happens it won’t be because of the nationality of the company that has a contract to run a port, or of its managers, or even its workers on the ground.

It will be because this nation didn’t want to pay for the gamma-ray monitors and radiation scanners and inspectors necessary to oversee more than a tiny percent of containers heading into America. Because we didn’t want to bother with security checks and special ID cards with fingerprints and other biometrics for workers at all ports and border crossings. Because all of this would cost about $7 billion a year, out of a defense and homeland security budget of hundreds of billions, and might slow down commerce through our borders just a bit, and reduce some corporate profits.

You see, the real issue here isn’t about nationality. It’s about what we’re prepared to pay for our security, and whether we pay mostly for a war in Iraq or we finally get serious about security here at home."

Robert Reich is professor of public policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.

This commentary originally appeared on Marketplace, public radio's only daily business news program, and is reprinted via a special arrangement between TomPaine.com and Robert Reich. Marketplace is produced by Minnesota Public Radio and is heard on 322 public radio stations nationwide. More online at www.marketplace.org

Withdrawal Symptoms: Quitting Iraq won't undo the real damage of the war.

MotherJones.com
James K. Galbraith
March/April 2006 Issue
...
"It appears we are beginning a long, slow, painful retreat from Iraq.

But are we drawing the full and correct lessons from this disaster? Some former liberal hawks now take refuge in what Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias call “the incompetence dodge”: that things would have turned out okay if only the neocon cabal were not in charge. Such libhawks would withdraw U.S. forces only to use them again, in another (but, of course, more justified and better planned) war. And that would mean a bigger war, with a bigger force on the ground, and a much bigger budget to support it.

But the reality is that the Iraq war could not be won by a force of any size or by an expenditure of any amount. Against determined opposition, occupations in the modern world cannot prevail. They haven’t for more than 60 years. The reason is that the basic economics of warfare have changed. Here are six reasons I gave to the officers in Germany—a pure exercise in stating what they already knew.

Sixty years ago the then-colonial world was mostly rural; today it consists of enormous cities. These urban jungles of concrete provide vast advantages—concealment, fortification, communication, intelligence—to the defender. In cities, troops on patrol are isolated and exposed; their location is always known, while that of the enemy is not. More patrols mean more targets. The superior firepower of the occupiers just means that a lot more innocent people get hurt.

So does the “crude” weaponry of insurgents. Car bombs, booby traps, and suicide belts are cheap and effective. Detonated by radio or wire from within a nearby building, roadside bombs equalize the insurgent and the invader. Detonated by fanatics, suicide bombs are extremely difficult to stop. Shaped explosives, which have started to appear in Iraq, are able to burn right through armor plate. To prevent these attacks means emphasizing force protection; this gets in the way of everything else.

The violence in Iraq is horrific, but it’s the media that makes it intolerable. Indeed, the violence is horrific only by modern standards. To truly cow a colonial population (as in British India in 1857, or on the American plains in the late 19th century) requires mass murder on a far larger scale. The presence of the media makes this most inconvenient. As we demonstrated at Fallujah, the sure way to subdue a hostile city is to destroy it. But that’s no way to win a political war back home—or hearts and minds in Iraq.

Jet travel is a military mixed blessing. Today’s army works on rotations; soldiers are deployed for about a year and then (in principle at least) they come home. When that happens, local liaisons and intelligence relationships must be rebuilt. On the other hand, if soldiers are denied the right to rotate home, their morale is going to suffer far more than in the old days when there was no such expectation. Email and blogs make sure that morale problems get home fast when the soldiers do not.

As if that were not enough, war today cannot escape the free market. When we invaded Iraq, the borders collapsed and import restrictions were eliminated. Imports surged, notably of electrical appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators. By the time the electricity supply was rebuilt, demand had skyrocketed, and the power could run for only a few hours a day. Without control over electrical demand, the reconstruction effort was crippled, and the Americans couldn’t win the Iraqi people’s respect and support. They were expecting miracles, after all, and they didn’t get them.

Finally, there has been a fundamental change of expectations: call it the presumption of independence. The British may have believed that their empire would always be the “dread and envy of them all,” but today no one believes the American presence in Iraq can endure over the long term. So unless you are in a safe zone (like Kurdistan) or part of an exiled elite with a posh flat in London, it does not pay to cuddle up to the occupying power. The retribution could be most unpleasant.

These are now the fundamental facts of wars of occupation. They tell us that foreign military power cannot long prevail over the territory of a people—in this case, the Sunnis of central Iraq—who are prepared to resist it to the death. This does not necessarily mean that the new Iraq will collapse when we leave. But if we cannot defeat the insurgency, then the insurgents will have to be accommodated, somehow, politically. Or else we leave the country to fight it out even more brutally in our absence.

We should have known we’d face this situation. In tiny East Timor, a ragtag band of resisters harried the Indonesian army for more than 25 years; that band (splendid people, by the way) now runs the world’s newest independent state. In Afghanistan, U.S.-assisted guerrillas drove out the Red army; their successors now make most of the country ungovernable. In Chechnya, the country has been destroyed but the rebellion hasn’t been subdued. And then there was Vietnam.

During the Cold War, we ringed the world with bases—but always in alliance with existing governments that were legitimate, at least up to a point. One may disapprove of the regimes we supported, but this model for the projection of military power works. It is called “containment.” It works as long as the host regimes remain viable and as long as the military power it projects isn’t tested in actual combat. When these conditions failed—in Iran, in the Philippines, in Vietnam—so did the strategy.

The successful use of military power—as Mao Zedong understood when he called America a “paper tiger”—entails a large element of bluff. Vietnam deflated the image that American power could never be challenged. To some extent, the Gulf War of 1991 restored that image, but the restoration was achieved by the limited aims and quick termination of that war. The Clinton successes in the Balkans came in part because all sides bought this lesson of the Gulf War. (With Serbia, the bluff came close to being called again; the Kosovo bombing campaign took 80 days and Russian diplomacy rescued us in the end.)

But now Iraq has once again exposed what military power cannot achieve, short of nuclear weapons. Iran and North Korea have taken notice. Meanwhile, our friends, the Europeans and the Japanese, must be asking themselves: Exactly what sort of security does the American alliance buy, and at what price?

Bush and Cheney have done more than merely bungle a war and damage the Army. They have destroyed the foundation of the post-Cold War world security system, which was the accepted authority of American military power. That reputation is now gone. It cannot be restored simply by retreating from Iraq. This does not mean that every ongoing alliance will now collapse. But they are all more vulnerable than they were before, and once we leave central Iraq, they will be weaker still. As these paper tigers start to blow in the wind, so too will America’s economic security erode.

From this point of view, the fuss over whether we were misled into war—Is the sky blue? Is the grass green?—stands in the way of a deeper debate that should start quite soon and ask this question: Now that Bush and Cheney have screwed up the only successful known model for world security under our leadership, what the devil do we do?"

James K. Galbraith teaches economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. He previously served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including executive director of the Joint Economic Committee.

MoJo Blog: Predicting the Insurgency: "Or was it just that the insurgency was inevitable and unstoppable and no amount of forewarning by U.S. intelligence could have changed any of that? I certainly don't know, and it's an important question, at least for those debating whether the occupation of Iraq was a catastrophe because it was a good idea that was completely bungled in the execution (as many a disgruntled hawk now believes) or because it was a bad idea that was bound to fail from the start.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 03/01/06 at 02:35 PM | E-mail | Print"

Appeal To PDA Activists: Defend Progressive Front-Runner Against Beltway Betrayal

Christine Cegelis

January 13, 2006--Henry Hyde, arch conservative congressman, was pushed into retirement by the 2004 grassroots campaign of Christine Cegelis. Cegelis came closer to defeating Hyde than anyone in his 32 years in Congress, earning 44.2% of the vote in this traditionally Republican district. She is now the front runner for his open seat, against a former staff aide to Tom Delay, Peter Roskam. Roskam's positions are farther to the right than Hyde's.

You might expect Beltway Democrats to be lining up enthusiastically behind Cegelis in this great opportunity to capture a Chicago suburban area Congressional seat. Instead, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has recruited a candidate to oppose Cegelis for the Democratic nomination.

The reason Party bosses are opposing Cegelis is they fear another independent progressive in Congress. Cegelis is a progressive Democrat: she's anti-war, pro-choice, pro-renewable energy and opposes NAFTA-like trade deals. She supports a definite timetable for the quick and safe withdrawal of troops. The DCCC prefers candidates who are centrist and pro-business, and they want their recruits to be veterans who are moderate on the war.

PDA members should not tolerate this insulting and counterproductive attack on Cegelis. It is an attack on the progressive potential of the Democratic Party. Cegelis has a realistic chance to add another Democratic seat to our Congress. We urge you to go all out for Cegelis. Yesterday PDA officially endorsed Cegelis, and the most helpful thing we can do right now is give to Cegelis generously and immediately to propel her to victory in the March primary.

Click here to donate to the Christine Cegelis campaign.

More on This Betrayal

To block Cegelis, the DCCC drafted an Iraq war veteran, Tammy Duckworth. Duckworth has never been involved in political activity, and has never lived in the district. The only basis for Duckworth's candidacy is that she is an Army Reserves member who lost both her legs in Iraq. Duckworth's most notable comment on the war is that there is good and bad in everything. She echoes President Bush's views on a timetable. She is running, not against the war, but as a symbol of patriotism.

Behind the scenes, the Beltway bosses have put every obstacle in front of Cegelis: they have pressured people listed as her contributors, they have called her volunteers to plant rumors about her candidacy, and they have turned the Party establishment, which had endorsed her in 2004, away from her.

Cegelis doesn't deserve this scandalous treatment. She is an experienced, grassroots campaigner. She recruited an army of volunteers and she never stopped campaigning after her near upset victory in 2004. And she is the stronger candidate to win in November.

Help Cegelis

PDA supporters are urged to go all out to help Christine Cegelis, not only to elect an outstanding candidate, but also to show the Beltway Democrats that their effort to block progressives within the party won't be tolerated. We must help raise significant funds for her, to offset the heavy Democratic spending that's been promised against her. Please send whatever you can afford, whether it's $15, $50, $500, or the maximum $2100. Click here and give on-line.

Click here to donate to the Christine Cegelis campaign.

This is probably the most important political contribution you can make in the current election cycle. With the help of PDA supporters, Cegelis will win the primary and go on to defeat Tom Delay's former staffer in November. The alternative -- letting an unqualified, inexperienced candidate become the Democratic nominee for this open seat -- would result in a Democratic defeat in November, with Tom Delay getting an additional seat in Congress, one that he will personally control.

American Progress Report : March 2nd, 2006

Toward a Two-Tiered Internet

"The Internet is one of history's most democratic forms of communication. In 1999, John Chambers, President and CEO of networking giant Cisco, called the Internet the great "equalizerbetween people, companies, and countries." But recent efforts by AOL and Yahoo to create a tiered Internet would tilt the system's level playing field in favor of large wealthy companies. The two e-mail providers have partnered with Goodmail Systems to "charge companies about 1/4 cent to send a message that will bypass spam filters." E-mails from paying companies will go straight to a user's inbox, but e-mails from non-paying companies will go through the "gauntlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links," even if they're not spam. AOL and Yahoo argue that this measure -- set to go into effect for AOL in 30 days -- will help reduce spam for users. But the reality is that this virtual express toll lane will increase profits for the providers, while stifling innovation and leaving behind small businesses and nonprofits that are unable to afford the extra cost. "This would literally be the end of the Internet," says Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who "fears that the next Google won't ever get the chance to establish itself -- because it would be stuck in the slow lane." Take action now and let AOL know that you want the Internet to stay open.

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NEW FEE WILL NOT REDUCE SPAM: AOL and Yahoo argue that this new "postage" measure will restore order to a spam-plagued system. Senders paying the certified fee "must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely." But as Timothy Karr of Free Press points out, Goodmail's scheme will not eliminate spam, but actually increase it: "AOL subscribers will receive certified email in addition to the regular traffic that clutters most inboxes." Additionally, AOL admits that spam isn't as troublesome as it once was. AOL users' spam complaints are down 75 percent from 2003, yet its sophisticated spam filters capture about 20 percent of legitimate mail. Gizmodo reports that "new systems for spam-resistant email have been in the cards for years," but no one can come to any agreement. In the meantime, e-mail providers shouldn't close the free Internet as a quick solution, because as prominent anti-spammer Richard Cox of Spamhaus notes, "[A]n e-mail charge will destroy the spirit of the Internet."

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A SYSTEM OF HAVES AND HAVE NOTS: Goodmail, AOL, and Yahoo will all fare well economically from this deal. Goodmail will charge 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, "with high-volume mailers getting the biggest discounts" and nonprofits also receiving discounts. Goodmail will pass on more than half of that amount to the e-mail provider. But not only will companies be hit hard for each e-mail they send, "the Goodmail technology will also be costly for senders to setup and use." MoveOn.org says that if an e-mail fee existed years ago, the advocacy group "would never would have gotten off the ground." Matt Blumberg, the chief executive of Return Path, a competitor of Goodmail, notes that Goodmail's price is unnecessarily expensive: "[I]t's bad for the industry and bad for consumers. A lot of e-mailers won't be able to afford it." Small businesses, unlikely to receive any type of discount, will be hit the hardest. "The Internet is the great equalizer for small businesses because they can partake in enterprise marketing activities on a smaller scale. Imposing a per-message fee will create a competitive advantage to companies that can afford to pay the fee."

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FIGHTING FOR NET NEUTRALITY: A coalition of 50 groups with about 15 million members has formed against the Goodmail scheme, calling it the "first step down a slippery slope that will harm the Internet itself." The group -- including strange bedfellows such as the Gun Owners of America, RightMarch.com, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund -- represents four million of AOL's 19.5 million customers. The Gun Owners have threatened that its members will leave AOL if the new fee materializes. A recent poll conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and Free Press found that "70 percent [of responders] were concerned about providers blocking or impairing their access to Internet services or sites" and 54 percent wanted Congress to write legislation preserving net neutrality. Large technology companies, such as Google, are also fighting against a tiered Internet. "New innovation in the marketplace increases our business," says Google's Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's creators. If start-ups can't go fast, he says, the Internet will be a "zero-sum game."

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ANOTHER TOLL LANE: Broadband providers, such as AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon, are also looking for ways to make money by destroying net neutrality. Internet sites willing to pay high fees would be given preferential treatment on web, resulting in faster load times for users. "High-bandwidth sites that refused to pay, however, could see their traffic slowed to a crawl, or even blocked in some cases." Telecom firms argue that they have the right to be compensated for building networks. John Thorne, Verizon's senior vice president and deputy general counsel, told a conference that Google shouldn't be enjoying "a free lunch." But Ben Scott at Free Press argues that if the broadband providers get their way, "The next great idea, the next Google or eBay or Napster or whatever, won't have the capital to get themselves in the fast lanes right away. ... The reason the big e-companies were so successful were that they started on the same level playing field as everyone else."

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CONGRESSIONAL ACTION: Today the Senate takes up the issue of net neutrality. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) will be introducing legislation, the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, calling for a "toll-free" Internet and prohibiting "Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others." Wyden said that his legislation "will make sure all information (transmitted overbroadband networks) is made available on the same terms so that no bit is better than another one."

The Saddam - Al Qaeda - 9/11 Link Was Really Important in One Regard

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Zogby - NewsWire
In the U.S. & Canada 1-877-GO-2-POLL
NY phone 315.624.0200
Mar. 1, 2006

WASHINGTON -
An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

* Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay “as long as they are needed”
* While 58% say mission is clear, 42% say U.S. role is hazy
* Plurality believes Iraqi insurgents are mostly homegrown
* Almost 90% think the war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11,
* Most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks
* Majority of troops oppose use of harsh prisoner interrogation
* Plurality of troops pleased with their armor and equipment

Note: Consider again the Administration's effort put into linking Saddam with Al Qaeda and the 9/11 episode. While this Feb. 2006 study shows 90% of US troops believing there was a linkage, much smaller percentage of American's believe there was linkage. In a Sep. 2003 Washington Post poll, 70% of Americans believed in a link; but after the 9/11 Commission found no linkage in their June 2004 report, the percentage started slipping.

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Bush 'clears'Saddam of 9/11
Sep 18, 2003 - (SA)
Washington - President George W Bush said on Wednesday there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 - disputing an impression that critics say the administration tried to foster to justify the war against Iraq.

"There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties," the president said. But he also said, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

Note: This statement is meaningless except as political babble: ie, the 9/11 hijackers were organized and financed by Al Qaeda. If Saddam had links to Al Qaeda then he was "involved". If Bush was saying "we have no evidence" Saddam was involved with 9/11, then the first part of his statement has to be false. Bush made it a point, on several occasions, to attempt a link between Saddam, Al Qaeda, and the 9/11 hijackers.


The president's comment was the administration's firmest assertion that there is no proven link between Saddam and September 11. It came after Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday clouded the issue by saying, "It's not surprising people make that connection" between Saddam and the attacks.

Cheney, on NBC's Meet the Press, also repeated an allegation - doubted by many in the intelligence community - that Mohamed Atta, the main September 11 attacker, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague five months before September 11.

"We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it," Cheney said on Sunday. However, other US authorities have said information gathered on Atta's movement show he was on the US East Coast when that meeting supposedly took place.

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The Harris Poll® #14, February 18, 2005
Iraq, 9/11, Al Qaeda and Weapons of Mass Destruction:
What the Public Believes Now, According toFeb. 2005 Harris Poll

The latest Harris Poll conducted following the recent elections in Iraq finds that on many aspects U.S. adults have not changed their basic views about Iraq with one important exception: The number of adults who favor bringing troops home in the next year has increased significantly to its highest level since October 2003 when Harris Interactive® first measured the public’s opinions on this issue.

Specifically, almost six in 10 (59%) adults now favor bringing most troops home in the next year and 39 percent favor keeping a large number of troops in Iraq until there is a stable government there. In November, less than half (47%) favored bringing troops home and half (50%) favored keeping troops in Iraq.

However, the public remains split on whether the invasion of Iraq strengthened (46%) or weakened (48%) the war on terrorism.

These are some of the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 1,012 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone by Harris Interactive between February 8 and 13, 2005.

On other issues concerning Iraq, the attitudes of large majorities of the public have not changed significantly in the past few months.

* 88 percent of U.S. adults believe that Saddam Hussein would have made weapons of mass destruction if he could have (down slightly from 90% in November).
* 76 percent believe that the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein (same as November).
* 64 percent believe that history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq (up slightly from 63% in November).
* 64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from 62% in November).
* 61 percent believe that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to U.S. security (down slightly from 63% in November).

More surprising perhaps are the large numbers (albeit not majorities) who believe the following claims not made by the president and which virtually no experts believe to be true:

* 47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).
* 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November).
* 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38% in November).

Another interesting finding is that only 46 percent believe that Saddam Hussein was prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction by the U.N. weapons inspectors, a fact which most reports now support.


Equally important, (from the same poll), was political party affiliation in how Americans viewed Saddam role: (Percent who agreed.)

Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to U.S. security

   Total: 63%   Republican: 92%   Democratic: 30%

Saddam Hussein had strong links with Al Qaeda

   Total: 62%   Republican: 84%   Democratic: 37%

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Many Americans Still Believe
Hussein Had Links to al Qaeda
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
December 29, 2005

Sizeable minorities of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had "strong links to al Qaeda," a Harris Interactive poll shows, though the number has fallen substantially this year.

About 22% of U.S. adults believe Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11, the poll shows, and 26% believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. Another 24% believe several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, according to the online poll of 1,961 adults.

However, all of these beliefs have declined since February of this year, when 64% of those polled believed Mr. Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda and 46% said Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11. At that time, more than a third said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and 44% said several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis.

Currently, 56% of adults believe Iraqis are better off now than they were under Mr. Hussein, down from 76% in February. Nearly half of those polled say they believe Iraq, under Mr. Hussein, was a threat to U.S. security, down from 61% in February.

See the full results of the Harris poll:

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Note: In short, today's soldiers in Iraq frame their war's justification on the "linkage" lie, just as my generation's grunts did about the Tonkin Gulf Incident lie for war in Vietnam. We had McNamara, they have Rumsfeld. Both had grand strategic plans and poorly conceived tactical plans; but most unfortunately for everyone concerned both knowingly supported a lie!

N.Orleans mayor "shocked" by pre-Katrina Bush video
Wed Mar 1, 2006 10:22 PM ET9
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on Wednesday he was shocked by video showing U.S. President George W. Bush being told the day before Hurricane Katrina hit that the city's protective levees could fail.

The tape contradicts the president's statement four days after the hurricane struck: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

"It surprises me that if there was that kind of awareness, why was the response so slow?" said Nagin, whose city was devastated when the storm struck on August 29 and causing massive flooding. "I have kind of a sinking feeling right now in my gut. I mean, I was listening to what people were saying and I was believing them that they didn't know. So therefore it was an issue of a learning curve.

"From this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware."

Nagin listened with headphones and watched an excerpt from the video for the first time as reporters stood around him.

The tape shows Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff being told on August 28 that the hurricane could trigger breaches of the levees that protect the city and threaten the Superdome, which became a chaotic shelter for storm victims.

Fuseli's Masterpiece: "Nightmare" - 1781