Comedy Central's See the Video: Stephen Colbert Visits Washington: April 2006 for the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Maybe the Heirs Aren't Apparent
NY Times
By DAN MITCHELL
Published: April 29, 2006

THE watchdog group Public Citizen (citizen.org) and the advocacy group United for a Fair Economy (faireconomy.org) issued a report this week saying that 18 superwealthy families are largely responsible for financing the lobbying campaign aimed at repealing the estate tax; the Senate is scheduled to take up repeal next month.

The families, worth $185.5 billion, have financed and coordinated the campaign and have, until now, managed to hide their participation behind the trade associations and business groups they have formed to represent their interests, Public Citizen reported. The families include those behind some of the nation's biggest and best-known companies, like Wal-Mart, E.& J. Gallo Winery, Nordstrom and Koch Industries.

In a news release presenting the 58-page report, available on its Web site, Public Citizen pulls no punches. "This report exposes one of the biggest con jobs in recent history," Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, said in the release. "This long-running, secretive campaign funded by some of the country's wealthiest families has relied on deception to bamboozle the public not only about who must pay the estate tax, but about how repealing it will affect the country."

Gas pains will require more than quick fix
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Published on: 04/30/06

Gasoline at $3 a gallon is a tipping point. Once the price breaks that barrier, a politician's instinct to pander blossoms into absolute, mind-numbing silliness.

Last week, it provoked Senate Republicans into proposing a $100 "rebate" check to ease Americans' pain at the gas pumps, while Democrats responded by suggesting a two-month suspension of the federal gas tax. Both proposals presume that this is some passing phenomenon rather than a fundamental change in energy economics.

And President Bush — in the least likely investigation since O.J. Simpson promised to find out who really killed his wife — announced he was launching a probe of the oil industry to make sure that U.S. consumers weren't being gouged.

High gas prices aren't just a temporary problem, but this spate of absurdity by our elected leadership better be. This problem is too important for the American people to let themselves be distracted by nonsense any longer. It's time for serious talk about serious solutions.

For example, as much as I hate to admit it, it's time to rethink nuclear power. The industry has come a long way in making modern nuclear plants safer than their predecessors, but it has made little or no progress toward resolving its waste problems. We still don't have the technology or facilities to safely store the deadly and enormously long-lived radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation.

Until now, that was reason enough to downplay the nuclear approach. But in recent years, it has become all too clear that we also don't know how to handle the carbon waste produced by burning so much oil, coal and natural gas. Every year we dump another 7 billion tons of carbon into our planet's atmosphere, where it is almost certainly wreaking havoc with global climate. The potential consequences of that problem are large enough to make the problems of nuclear waste seem manageable by comparison.

But nuclear power alone can't solve our energy problems. Alternative forms of energy will have to be developed, and a renewed emphasis on conservation is essential. For example, it's a scandal that the fuel efficiency of U.S. automobiles is lower today than it was 20 years ago.

But rather than address that reality, too many political leaders try to steer the debate into meaningless dead-ends.

For example, any politician who suggests that our oil crunch could be eased if Congress would just allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is either trying to fool you or is a fool himself. ANWR exists as a political issue solely to give the Republican Party something to talk about when the topic turns to energy. Drilling in ANWR would change absolutely nothing about our situation.

The reason is simple. The oil market is a global market — all oil sells at the world price, regardless of where it comes from, and that price is determined by the balance of worldwide supply and demand.

For example, if the world price for light crude is $75 a barrel, Americans do not get some magical bargain rate on light crude pumped out of Texas or Alaska. We still have to pay $75 a barrel for that oil, the same as everybody else.

Given that reality, ANWR could lower the price that Americans pay at the pump only if it produces enough oil to lower the cost of oil worldwide. Numbers produced by the U.S. Department of Energy say that's impossible. According to those estimates, if drilling began today, by 2025 ANWR would reach maximum oil production of 900,000 barrels a day.

That may seem like a lot of oil, but by 2025, total world oil demand is estimated to reach about 119 million barrels a day. In other words, even in its few years of maximum production, ANWR would account for just 0.75 percent of world demand.

Nor would ANWR change our strategic situation. According to the U.S. government, if we don't drill in ANWR, we will be forced to import 70 percent of our oil by 2025. If we do drill in ANWR, we will be importing 66 percent of our oil, a change of no significance whatsoever.

There are no easy answers, and no quick answers. But it's no accident that the major challenges confronting this country — from global warming to soaring oil prices to our military predicaments in Iran and Iraq — all have oil and energy as their common element. It is the challenge that will define the 21st century.

"What is Web 2.0"

Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
by Tim O'Reilly
09/30/2005

The 1% - The 99th Percentile

Note: In economic discussions there is the 1% group, and in educational realms there is the 99th percentile. Rarified air isn't it. If you make more than $1.3M per year in California - you're in; but in Ohio all you need to be in the 1% group statewide is to make $600K per year. Not smart enough to get into Mensa; sorry you're not in the top 1%. Scored less than 750 on the GMAT? If so, you're not in. If you filed for bankruptcy and had less than $1.2M in debts, you're also not in the top 1%. Last year, nationwide, if you made less than an AGI (annual adjusted gross income) of $1.05M for your household - sorry, you're not there.

Thus to be blunt, if you are not making a million dollars a year, have an IQ above 140, have less than 15% body fat (male, or 22% female), and are conversant in more than two languages you are not in the top 1% nationwide. Yes, you can be in one area; but perhaps not in another.

Educational institutions like to advertise their instructors are in the 99th percentile; yet many of those claims are meaningless because of the sample group used to determine the "Top 1%". According to a recent survey, 19% of random sampled respondents thought they were in the top 1% financially. Politicians and political types like to assert the Kerry/Edwards 2004 ticket failed to effectively identify the 1% target, and consequently had 20% of the population thinking they were talking about them.

So the next time you hear someone talking about the 'Top 1%" or the "99th Percentile" - pay attention to the standard who/what/when/where/why/how mitigating considerations.

Related to this is the tax related discussions; wherein various entities will talk about different ratios. One salient set of figures that should be considered in these discussions is: "In 2003 the IRS accepted 129 million personal Federal Income Tax Reports. Of these, 90 million paid taxes of varying amounts; but approximately 30 million did not pay any taxes, or got a refund." The latter group can theoretically consist of low-income wage earners, and high-income persons who can afford the services of tax consultants/lawyers/accountants et al.

So to say 1% of everyone filing a Federal tax return did X, compared to 1% of of those paying taxes did Y is another of those questionable logic situations where one must know about the sample being used in the discussion. Ot in other words: "One percent of who/what/when/where/why/how".

And, incidentally, Mensa was having a membership problem several years ago, so they have since allowed in the "Top 2%" - ie: minimum score on tests in the 98th percentile.

Projected Iraq War Costs Soar
By Jonathan Weisman
The Washington Post
Thursday 27 April 2006

Total spending is likely to more than double, analysis finds.

The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

The analysis, distributed to some members of Congress on Tuesday night, provides the most official cost estimate yet of a war whose price tag will rise by nearly 17 percent this year. Just last week, independent defense analysts looking only at Defense Department costs put the total at least $7 billion below the CRS figure.

Once the war spending bill is passed, military and diplomatic costs will have reached $102 billion this fiscal year, up from $87 billion in 2005, $77 billion in 2004 and $51 billion in 2003, the year of the invasion, congressional analysts said. Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional $371 billion during the phaseout, the report said, citing a Congressional Budget Office study.

"The costs are exceeding even the worst-case scenarios," said Rep. John Spratt (S.C.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

Such cost estimates may be producing sticker shock on Capitol Hill. This year, the wars will consume nearly as much money as the departments of Education, Justice and Homeland Security combined, a total that is more than a quarter of this year's projected budget deficit. Yesterday, as the Senate debated a $106.5 billion bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing hurricane relief, 59 senators voted to divert $1.9 billion from President Bush's war-funding request to pay for new border patrol agents, aircraft and some fencing at border crossings widely used by illegal immigrants.

Defense specialist Amy Belasco, the CRS study's author, stressed that the price tag is only an estimate because the Defense Department has declined to break out the cost of Iraqi operations from the larger $435 billion cost of what the administration has labeled the global war on terrorism. That larger cost applies to military, diplomatic and foreign aid operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, enhanced security efforts begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and related medical costs of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"Although DOD has a financial system that tracks funds for each operation once they are obligated - as pay or contractual costs - DOD has not sent Congress the semiannual reports with cumulative and current obligations for [Iraq] and [Afghanistan], or estimates for the next year, or for the next five years that are required by statute," the CRS noted.

The report goes on to outline a series of "key war cost questions" for Congress to pursue and "major unknowns" that CRS has not been able to answer: How much has Congress appropriated for each theater of war? How much has the Pentagon obligated for each mission per month? What will future costs be? How much will it cost to repair and replace equipment? And how can Congress receive accurate information on past and future troop levels?

Such questions are highly unusual for a congressional research agency report, congressional budget aides said yesterday, and they point to growing frustration in Congress with a Pentagon that has held war-cost information close to the vest.

Lt. Col. Brian Maka, a spokesman for the Defense Department's comptroller, said the Pentagon will study the report before commenting on it.

The report details how operations, maintenance and procurement costs have surged from $50 billion in 2004 to $88 billion this year, citing rising expenditures for body armor, oil and gasoline; equipment maintenance; and training and equipping Afghan and Iraqi security forces.

"These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50-percent increase of over $20 billion in operating costs," the report states.

War-related investment costs have more than tripled since 2003, from $7 billion to $24 billion, as money has been spent on armored vehicles, radios, sensors and night-vision goggles, as well as equipment for reorganized Army and Marine Corps units.

"These reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the level of increases," the report states again.

Other analysts are also scratching their heads. Michael O'Hanlon, a defense budget expert at the Brookings Institution, suggested that the military may be slightly padding its request for fear that Congress will be less giving on future emergency spending bills.

"I don't think these guys would make things up, but there is an assumption in the military that these supplementals might dry up, and if there are things that might be considered even Iraq-related, they should get them funded right now," he said.

Of the total war spending, the CRS analysis found $4 billion that could not be tracked. It did identify $2.5 billion diverted from other spending laws in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion.

That discovery helped push the CRS cost estimate higher than estimates from independent budget analysts. The CRS total also includes expenditures on foreign aid and diplomacy not counted in the military cost tallies by groups such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Retired Generals & Calls for Rumsfeld's Resignation

From ThinkProgress Blog
It’s one thing to protest when you’re retired, and an entirely different thing to protest and refuse when you’re part of the machine.
Comment by David B — April 24, 2006 @ 3:56 pm

---

Blog Entry on TP
April 26th, 2006

"Indeed.

For those who question this thinking, I offer an analogy of sorts. For 13 years I worked in the customer service field, placing orders for Sears catalog customers in the early 1990’s and most recently providing tech support for several Internet providers. Over the years I talked to thousands of consumers all across the country. For anyone who has ever performed this kind of work, you know that on average you get many more complaints than compliments about the company you are working for.

If you value your job, and the money and security and benefits that come along with it, one thing you never, EVER do is agree with the customer when they are trashing your company. Nor do you publicly volunteer any information that will portray the company in a negative light. If you do, and are caught doing it, you won’t be cleaning out your desk. Your supervisor will. After you’ve been escorted out the front door.

Now if you do agree that there is something wrong with the way things are going, then in most cases you were free to bring it to management’s attention. Only thing is, if you suggested a remedy was in order or offered a different viewpoint, in many cases your concerns were noted and ignored.

The same goes for these generals while they are still working for the government. If you don’t understand that, well, then I can’t help you.

Comment by WC — April 24, 2006

---

Eighth General Calls for Rumsfeld's Resignation - On Faux News !!

What is the value of a tree?
christiansciencemonitor.com
By Ethan Gilsdorf
Wednesday, 04/26/06

"Conventional wisdom is that just one shady tree can save a homeowner $80 a year in energy costs, but Campbell claims her bills skyrocketed once the oak disappeared - up to $120 more some months.

Yes, humble street trees cool the air, reduce pollution, and absorb storm-water runoff, say forestry experts. But the benefits aren't only ecological, they say. Property values are 7 percent to 25 percent higher for houses surrounded by trees. Consumers spend up to 13 percent more at shops near green landscapes. One study even suggests patients who can see trees out their windows are hospitalized, on average, 8 percent fewer days.

But efforts like these aren't a moment too soon. Overall, urban trees in America are threatened, says Deborah Gangloff, executive director of American Forests. "Every city we've looked at, about three dozen, shows a decline of about 30 percent of the urban tree canopy in the past 10 to 15 years," she says. In some cities, the loss from disease, development, and neglect has been catastrophic. In Washington, D.C., for example, 64 percent of heavily forested areas disappeared between 1973 and 1997 - forest that once covered a third of the district now covers a tenth.

And the creep of suburban sprawl seems unstoppable. In the next 50 years, total American land mass reclassified from forest to urban is expected to equal the size of Montana, suggests US Forest Service data. To reverse the trend, cities like Jacksonville, Fla., San Francisco, Albuquerque, N.M., Des Moines, Iowa, and Indianapolis have ambitious reforestation plans. Los Angeles wants to plant 1 million trees. The Sacramento region has a goal to double the urban canopy in 40 years; Baltimore plans to double its own a decade sooner. Washington, D.C. is partnering with tree-planting groups and nonprofits like the Casey Trees Endowment Fund, an organization with a $50 million grant to combat the precipitous canopy decline.

Urban trees also reduce the runoff of pollutants into waterways, a problem caused by impervious surfaces like concrete. Foliage slows rain so it gets absorbed better, rather than overwhelming drainage systems, explains Ms. Gangloff. For example, a 2005 study of municipal trees in Boulder, Colo., found that the average tree intercepts 1,271 gallons of precipitation annually, saving the city $523,311 in storm-water retention costs.

For cities struggling to meet the Environmental Protection Agency's air quality goals and build adequate wastewater treatment facilities, trees offer high return on investment. The Boulder report estimates the city gets a $3.67 return on every dollar spent on the urban forest.

"It's worth considering the value of these trees when making policy decisions," explains Dan Smith, a Casey Trees spokesman. The value of tree maintenance, for example, can't be minimized, he says, because a 30-inch-diameter tree removes 70 times more pollution per year than a 3-inch tree does. This is why he's unhappy that over the past five years, federal support of urban greening - such as tree-cover analysis, goal-setting, and technical support - has declined.

Sugar or Sweetener?

Sucrose Has its Problems, But so do Artificial Substitutes
eMagazine: April 2006

"Consumption of sweeteners in the U.S. has risen from 113 pounds per person per year in 1966 to around 142 pounds per person per year in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Compare that to an average of 8.3 pounds of broccoli and 25 pounds of dark lettuces for 2003, according to U.S. News and World Report. Americans now consume an average of 61 pounds a year of high fructose corn syrup (especially in sodas), and we scarf down 20 teaspoons of added sugar a day (not including lactose or fructose naturally found in milk and fruit).

What’s wrong with sugar? In addition to its tooth-rotting properties, Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and public health at New York University, explains, “Sugar’s empty calories [meaning lack of nutrients] contribute to the big problem with the American diet: too many calories.” Sugar has also been widely linked to increasing risk for type II diabetes. Plus, the sweet stuff has a considerable environmental footprint (see EarthTalk, this issue).

Sticky Business

Closely related to sugar is the now ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup, which is prepared by treating cornstarch with acids or enzymes. The sticky, tooth-attacking syrup is often made with genetically engineered corn, and, like sugar, it contains no nutritional value beyond its caloric content. During the past few decades, corn syrup (which tastes sweeter than sugar) has become the sweetener of choice for many food processors, who load it into everything from baked goods to sauces, jellies, drinks and even frozen fruit. In fact, corn syrup recently overtook sugar itself as America’s most popular sweetener.

Corn syrup is a blend of fructose and glucose, while refined sugar is made of the larger molecule sucrose. Recent research suggests that fructose may be handled differently in the body than other sugars. “It appears to behave more like fat with respect to the hormones involved in body weight regulation,” Peter Havel, associate professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis, told the Washington Post. “Fructose doesn’t stimulate insulin secretion. It doesn’t increase leptin production [a hormone that helps regulate appetite and fat storage] or suppress production of ghrelin [which helps regulate food intake]. That suggests that consuming a lot of fructose, like consuming too much fat, could contribute to weight gain.”

Partly because they are also sweeter than sugar pound for pound, a number of artificial sweeteners have been on the U.S. market for years, and are ubiquitous in such foods as diet soda and “sugar-free” candy. Perhaps echoing the sentiment of many environmentalists, Nestle cautions, “I don’t like artificial sweeteners because I do not like artificial anything when it comes to food.” Observers have also questioned whether the widespread adoption of artificial sweeteners has made much of a dent in the ever-growing American waistline.

Less popular than it once was, saccharin (often known as Sweet ‘N Low) has long raised red flags among food safety scientists after it was definitively linked to bladder cancer in male rats. The industry denies those studies have any application to human beings, but the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) points out, “In some studies, saccharin has caused bladder cancer in mice and in female rats and other cancers in both rats and mice.”

The group also suggests staying clear of the German-made sweetener acesulfame-k, which it says has been linked to cancer and other ailments in lab animals. Safety tests of the chemical, conducted in the 1970s, were of “mediocre quality,” reports CSPI.

The sugar substitute aspartame, known as NutraSweet, Equal and Spoonful, accounts for 75 percent of adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. In recent years, aspartame has been at the center of an Internet firestorm, in which various advocacy websites have linked it to cancer, ADD, autism, Parkinson’s disease and other problems. CSPI cautions, “Most such claims are not supported by studies.” However, the group does point out that a 2005 study found that “even low doses of aspartame increased the incidence of lymphomas and leukemia in female rats and also might have caused occasional brain tumors.”

Other Options

A relatively new sweetener on the block is British-made Splenda, which was first approved in the U.S. in 1998. Splenda is the trade name of the patented sweetener sucralose, which is marketed solely by Johnson and Johnson subsidiary McNeil Nutritionals.

When it was first introduced, sucralose sparked considerable consumer excitement, because it is extremely low in calories. Sucralose is now appearing in everything from baked goods to sweetener packets, and makes up about 50 percent of the U.S. sugar substitute market, according to the Associated Press.

However, Splenda’s success hasn’t been entirely sweet. Lawsuits have been filed in several states against McNeil Nutritionals on behalf of the sugar industry, which claims the company misrepresents Splenda with its slogan “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” In fact, Splenda is made in a patented, highly industrial process that adds chlorine atoms to sucrose. McNeil countersued, claiming the sugar industry is waging a “malicious smear campaign”—including promotion of the slick Truth About Splenda website—by trying to convince consumers that Splenda is “unhealthy or unsafe” and that they “would be better off consuming refined sugar.”

Jim Murphy, a Sugar Association lawyer, told the Associated Press, “I think one of the concerns is that there really have been no long-term studies that resolve whether or not consumption of Splenda is healthy.” Echoing this concern, natural products retailer Whole Foods moved to ban sucralose from its stores on the basis that there aren’t enough studies to prove that it is safe and the fact that it requires heavy industrial processing.

The good news is a number of more natural alternatives are becoming widely available to help people enjoy their food without risking their health (see “How Sweet It Isn’t,” Eating Right, November/December 2003). Better choices include maple syrup, honey and date sugar, which at least provide some nutrients in the form of vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and minerals, even though their sugar content is very similar to regular sucrose.

Agave nectar absorbs more slowly into the bloodstream than traditional sugar, making it less likely to result in an energy “crash” after consumption. Natural birch sugar, called xylitol, packs fewer calories than cane or beet-based sugar. Some nutrients are also found in Sucanat, a brand name for organically grown, dehydrated cane juice.

The Taker

Lyrics by Kris Kristofferson

"He's a giver he'll give her the kind of attention that she's never known
He's a teacher he'll teach her to open the doors that she can't on her own
He's a lover he'll love her in ways that she never has been loved before
He's a getter he'll get her by gettin' her into the world she's been hungerin' for
He's a charmer he'll charm her with money and manners that I never learned
He's a leader he'll lead her across pretty bridges he's plannin' to burn
He's a talker he'll talk her right off of her feet but he won't talk for long
Cause he's a doer he'll do her the way that I never damned if he won't do her wrong
Cause he's a taker he'll take her to places and make her
Fly higher than she's ever dared to
He'll take his time before takin' advantage takin' her easy and slow
And after he's taken the body and soul that she gives him
He'll take her for granted
Then he'll take off and leave her taken all of her pride as she goes
Yes he's a taker..."

US Gasoline Prices: 1990 - 2006

From EIA.DOE.GOV Website

1999 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.11

1990 - 2000 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.11

2000 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.46

2001 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.38

2002 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.31

2003 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.52

2004 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $1.81

2005 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide was $2.24

2006 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide Jan - April is $2.41

April 24th, 2006 - Average Price for Regular Gas Nationwide is $3.12

---

EU Gasoline Prices: 1999 - 2006

1999 - Average Price for Regular Gas in Select EU Countries - $3.40

2006 - Average Price for Regular Gas in Select EU Countries - $6.04

---

Note: In short, the average price for gasoline during the period 2000 - 2006 in America increased 281%; while in select EU countries it increased 178%. The sEU 1999 rate was 3.06 times the US rate; however the 2006 rate was only 1.94 times the US rate. Thus, if present rates continue, by 2010 Americans will be paying over $5/gallon for regular gas.

---

Note: Current CAFE standards and experienced MPG rates for American cars/trucks/SUV's is currently in the low 20's, so a lot of suburbanites who commute 100 miles per workday can expect to pay over $100 a week just for gasoline. Housing, traffic flow, retail businesses, and a host of services will take a hit from this, and it will happen, the only variable is when it becomes pronounced enough to change behaviors.

60 Minutes: CIA Official Reveals Bush, Cheney, Rice Were Personally Told Iraq Had No WMD in Fall 2002:

Tonight on 60 Minutes, CIA analyst Tyler Drumheller revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

Watch it Online:

Continue reading "60 Minutes: Bush, Cheney, Rice Told Iraq Had No WMD Program Before War"

CSI: Trade Deficit

NY Times Commentary
by Paul Krugman
April 24th, 2006

Forensics are in. If you turn on the TV during prime time, you're likely to find yourself watching people sorting through clues from a crime scene, trying to figure out what really happened.

That's more or less what's going on right now among international finance experts. The crime in question is the U.S. trade deficit, which ... reached an amazing $805 billion last year. The mystery is how we've been able to run huge deficits ... with so few visible adverse consequences. And the future of the U.S. economy depends on which of two proposed solutions to the mystery is right.

Here's the puzzle: the trade deficit means that America is ... spending far more than it earns. ... To pay for the excess of imports over exports, the United States has ... borrowed more than $3 trillion just since 1999.

By rights, then, the investment income ... that Americans pay to foreigners should be a lot larger than the investment income foreigners pay to Americans. But according to official statistics, the United States still has a slightly positive balance on investment income.

How is this possible? The answer, almost certainly, is that there's something wrong with the numbers. ... But depending on ... what's wrong, the U.S. economy either has hidden strengths, or it's in even worse shape than it seems.

In one corner are economists who think the official statistics miss invisible U.S. exports ... of intangibles like knowledge and brand-name recognition, which allow U.S. companies to earn high rates of return on their foreign investments. Proponents ... claim that if we counted [this] ..."dark matter," much of the U.S. trade deficit would disappear. ... But ... U.S. companies operating abroad don't, in fact, seem to earn especially high rates of return.

Why, then, doesn't the United States seem to be paying a price for all its borrowing? Because according to the official data, foreign companies operating in the United States are remarkably unprofitable, earning an average return of only 2.2 percent a year.

There's something wrong with this picture. As Daniel Gros of the Center for European Policy Studies puts it, it's hard to believe that foreigners would continue investing in the United States "if they were really being constantly taken to the cleaners."

In a new paper, Mr. Gros argues — compellingly, in my view — that ... foreign companies are understating the profits of their U.S. subsidiaries, probably to avoid taxes, and that official data are ... failing to pick up foreign profits that are reinvested in U.S. operations.

If Mr. Gros is right, the true position of the U.S. economy isn't as bad as you think — it's worse. The true trade deficit ... isn't $800 billion — it's more than $900 billion. And America's foreign debt ... is at least $1 trillion bigger than the official numbers say.

Of course, optimists have a comeback: if things are really that bad, why are so many foreign investors still buying U.S. bonds? ... But I have two words for those who place their faith in the judgment of investors...: Nasdaq 5,000.

Right now, forensic analysis seems to say that the U.S. trade position is worse, not better, than it looks. And the answer to the question, "Why haven't we paid a price for our trade deficit?" is, just you wait.

Warning flags flutter on economy
Christian Science Monitor
By David R. Francis
April 22, 2006
Note: Chief among the worries are credit derivatives, risky mortgages, interest only loans, the real estate bubble, and the trade deficit.

Voting for Big Easy Mayor

23 candidates vying to lead New Orleans through rebuilding process
By John King
CNN
Friday, April 21, 2006 Posted: 2003 GMT (0403 HKT)

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The lawn signs advertising mold and debris removal companies are being crowded out all over New Orleans by political placards. Twenty three candidates, racial and class tensions, and the overarching question of how many people will actually vote.

More than half of the city's pre-Katrina population still lives elsewhere, forcing candidates who can afford it to campaign in places like Dallas and Houston and Atlanta. The state is mailing displaced residents and running television ads telling people how to vote by mail, fax, or in person.

The normal cost of a New Orleans mayoral election is $400,000. This one is approaching $4 million.

The election was delayed from February and some wanted it delayed even longer, arguing that tens of thousands of African-Americans are effectively disenfranchised because they have been displaced. But a federal judge ordered the election, and Ater says he believes it will withstand any future legal challenges.

About 133,000 people voted in the last mayoral election. Based on early voting and requests for absentee ballots, Ater predicts turnout could reach 120,000 on Saturday, which he said would be a remarkable achievement.

---

Big Easy heads into a runoff race
Mayor Ray Nagin faces Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu on May 20. Will the focus be on issues or race?
By Kris Axtman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW ORLEANS – New Orleanians sent a clear message Saturday that they want experienced leadership in their time of crisis when they sent both incumbent Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu to a runoff on May 20.

"Voters are saying that they want someone capable of operating a government, someone who is steady at the helm," says Brian Brox, an assistant professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans. "And considering the challenge to the city right now, I don't think that's a fact that should surprise anyone."

FDA reject medicinal use of marijuana
NY Times
Friday, April 21, 2006
By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists.

The announcement inserts the health agency into yet another fierce political fight. Eleven states, including Washington, have legalized medicinal uses of marijuana, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and the nation's drug czar, John Walters, have opposed those efforts. A Supreme Court decision last year allowed the federal government to arrest anyone using marijuana, even in states that have legalized its use.

A 1998 voter-approved initiative legalized medical marijuana in this state. The measure allows residents with certain terminal or debilitating diseases such as cancer and AIDS to grow, possess or use marijuana for relief. But marijuana still cannot be legally bought here, and there is no identified legal way to distribute it. However, a 2003 ballot measure made small marijuana arrests the lowest priority for Seattle police

Congressional opponents and supporters of medical marijuana have each tried to enlist the FDA to support their views. Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., a fierce opponent of medical-marijuana initiatives, proposed legislation two years ago that would have required the FDA to issue an opinion on the medicinal properties of the drug.

Souder believes that efforts to legalize medicinal uses of marijuana are "a front" for efforts to legalize all uses of marijuana, said Martin Green, a spokesman for Souder. Tom Riley, a spokesman for Walters, hailed the FDA statement, saying that it would put to rest "the bizarre public discussion" that has led 11 states to legalize the drug's use.

The FDA statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific evaluative agency. That review found marijuana to be "moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting."

"I know what it does for me medically," said JoAnna McKee, co-founder of The Green Cross Patient Co-op, which connects people with marijuana for medical use. McKee, who lives in Seattle, smokes marijuana to control the pain caused by a spinal cord injury. "It lowers the pain. It stops the muscle spasms. It stops the nausea."

Dr. John Benson, co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana's effects, said in an interview that the FDA statement and the combined review by other agencies were wrong.

The federal government "loves to ignore our report," said Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "They would rather it never happened." Some scientists and legislators said that the agency's statement about marijuana demonstrates that politics is trumping science there.

"Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the FDA making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than by science," said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., who has sponsored legislation seeking to allow medicinal uses of marijuana, said that the statement reflected the influence of the DEA, which he said had long pressured the FDA to help in its fight against marijuana.

Dan Troy, the FDA's former general counsel, said that the FDA and DEA often disagree about drug policies, but marijuana "is a place where FDA and DEA can cooperate."

A spokeswoman for the DEA referred questions to Walters' office.

The FDA statement said that state initiatives that legalize marijuana use "are inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the FDA approval process."

But scientists studying marijuana said in interviews that the federal government has actively discouraged research into marijuana's benefits. Dr. Lyle Craker, a professor in the division of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, said that he submitted an application in 2001 to the DEA to grow a small patch of marijuana to be used for research because the government-approved marijuana, grown in Mississippi, is of poor quality. In 2004, the drug enforcement agency turned Craker down. He appealed and is awaiting a judge's ruling. "The reason there's no good evidence is that they don't want an honest trial," Craker said.

Dr. Donald Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, said that he has studied marijuana's medicinal effects for years but has been frustrated because the National Institutes of Health has refused to finance such work.

With funding from the state of California, he undertook what he said was a rigorous, placebo-controlled trial of marijuana smoking in HIV patients who suffered from nerve pain. Smoking marijuana proved effective in ameliorating patients' pain, but he is having trouble getting the study published, he said. "One wonders how anyone could" fulfill the FDA request for well-controlled trials to prove marijuana's benefits, he said.

Marinol, a synthetic version of a marijuana component, is approved to treat anorexia associated with AIDS and the nausea and vomiting associated with cancer drug therapy.

GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company, has received FDA approval to test in humans a sprayed extract of marijuana. Called Sativex, the drug is made directly from marijuana plants and is presently sold in Canada. Opponents of efforts to legalize marijuana for medicinal uses suggest that marijuana is a "gateway" drug that often leads users to try more dangerous drugs and become addicted.

But the Institute of Medicine report concluded that there is no evidence that marijuana acts as a "gateway" to harder drugs. And it said that there was no evidence that medical use of marijuana would increase its use among the general population.

Dr. Daniele Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California-Irvine, said that he had "never met a scientist would who will say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless." He said that studies clearly show that marijuana has some benefits for some patients. "We all agree on that."

---

Note: The argument against medicinal marijuana based on the concept that it's a "gateway drug" is assine in the extreme. Any researcher on the topic would quickly determine that millions of people have tried marijuana as some time in their life; yet only a tiny minority continue it's use. If it were a "gateway drug" researchers should detect a link between marijuana usage and other drugs in the opiate/narcotic family by previous pot smokers. But they have not. There is no credible evidence whatsoever that smoking pot leads, for example, to addiction to rock cocaine. Some crack addicts have smoked pot; but then some addicts have also gotten wasted on beer, refrigerant, and God knows what else. Abusers will use whatever they can to "get off". There simply is no scientific evidence to support the argument that smoking marijuana "leads to" abuse of other controlled substances.

For those who use marijuana in a medicinal manner, there simply is no reasoable alternative. There is no evidence whatsoever that a single person has died from an overdose of pot. The therepeutic index, the ratio of where effective dose and toxic dose relate, has never been calculated: other than a famous test in the mid-Seventies where it was stated that the toxic dose amounted to smoking approximately seven pounds of pot within an eight-hour time frame.

There are numerous legally prescribed drugs on the market that address some of the ills that marijuana is frequently used to abate; but none, absolutely none of these are free from serious side effects, and none are as popular with patients as pot.

No, what we have here is a continuation of an interventionist cabal of Federal agencies which demands that marijuana not be made available for consumption by citizens. WTF are they worried about? Distilled spirits, cigarettes, uppers/downers, and a host of prescription medications taken without suitable justification by millions of citizens seem to be acceptable to the FDA, DEA, DoJ, et al; but marijuna, (the number one cash crop in at least three States in the USA), has been treated as verboten since at least 1936.

The prohibition against marijuna usage, especially for medically justified care, is astonishingly draconian. Republicans who ostensively champion "states-rights" see no problem with the Federal government's actions against citizen approved referendums in Oregon, California, and Washington state in support of medically approved marijuana use.

Perhaps the Feds do have one thing in their approach, that they dare not affirm: if pot were readily accessible to anyone with the disposable income to buy a joint, a lot of the bullshit, falseness, tackiness, bad faith, vapidiousness, and social machinations of their fellow citizens, media, and Government would be seen in a different light or context; and it might not be so favorable for those pushing the TV version of citizenship.

Net Neutrality

MoveOn.org
April 21, 2006

"Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. Amazon doesn't have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to open more properly on your computer.

If Net Neutrality is gutted, MoveOn either pays protection money to dominant Internet providers or risks that online activism tools don't work for members. Amazon and Google either pay protection money or risk that their websites process slowly on your computer. That why these high-tech pioneers are joining the fight to protect Network Neutrality1—and you can do your part today.

The free and open Internet is under seige—can you sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Network Neutrality? Click here:

To save the Internet, there needs to be a public groundswell—so please forward this to 3 friends. Let them know protecting the free and open Internet is fundamental—it affects everything. When you sign this petition, you'll be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the heat on Congress. Votes begin in a House committee next week.

MoveOn has already seen what happens when the Internet's gatekeepers get too much control. Just last week, AOL blocked any email mentioning a coalition that MoveOn is a part of, which opposes AOL's proposed "email tax."2 And last year, Canada's version of AT&T—Telus—blocked their Internet customers from visiting a website sympathetic to workers with whom Telus was negotiating.3

Politicians don't think we are paying attention to this issue. Many of them take campaign checks from big telecom companies and are on the verge of selling out to people like AT&T's CEO, who openly says, "The internet can't be free."4

We need to let Congress know we are paying attention. Together, we must make sure they listen to our voices and the voices of people like Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet and Google's "Chief Internet Evangelist," who recently wrote this to Congress in support of preserving Network Neutrality:

"My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it. Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity...Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.4 "

---

If Congress abandons Network Neutrality, who will be affected?

* Advocacy groups like MoveOn—Political organizing could be slowed by a handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups to pay "protection money" for their websites and online features to work correctly.
* Nonprofits—A charity's website could open at snail-speed, and online contributions could grind to a halt, if nonprofits can't pay dominant Internet providers for access to "the fast lane" of Internet service.
* Google users—Another search engine could pay dominant Internet providers like AT&T to guarantee the competing search engine opens faster than Google on your computer.
* Innovators with the "next big idea"—Startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay Internet providers for dominant placing on the Web. The little guy will be left in the "slow lane" with inferior Internet service, unable to compete.
* Ipod listeners—A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service that it owned.
* Online purchasers—Companies could pay Internet providers to guarantee their online sales process faster than competitors with lower prices—distorting your choice as a consumer.
* Small businesses and tele-commuters—When Internet companies like AT&T favor their own services, you won't be able to choose more affordable providers for online video, teleconferencing, Internet phone calls, and software that connects your home computer to your office.
* Parents and retirees—Your choices as a consumer could be controlled by your Internet provider, steering you to their preferred services for online banking, health care information, sending photos, planning vacations, etc.
* Bloggers—Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips—silencing citizen journalists and putting more power in the hands of a few corporate-owned media outlets.

---

This excerpt from the New Yorker really sums up this issue well.

"In the first decades of the twentieth century, as a national telephone network spread across the United States, A.T. & T. adopted a policy of "tiered access" for businesses. Companies that paid an extra fee got better service: their customers' calls went through immediately, were rarely disconnected, and sounded crystal-clear. Those who didn't pony up had a harder time making calls out, and people calling them sometimes got an "all circuits busy" response. Over time, customers gravitated toward the higher-tier companies and away from the ones that were more difficult to reach. In effect, A.T. & T.'s policy turned it into a corporate kingmaker.

If you've never heard about this bit of business history, there's a good reason: it never happened. Instead, A.T. & T. had to abide by a "common carriage" rule: it provided the same quality of service to all, and could not favor one customer over another. But, while "tiered access" never influenced the spread of the telephone network, it is becoming a major issue in the evolution of the Internet.

Until recently, companies that provided Internet access followed a de-facto commoncarriage rule, usually called "network neutrality," which meant that all Web sites got equal treatment. Network neutrality was considered so fundamental to the success of the Net that Michael Powell, when he was chairman of the F.C.C., described it as one of the basic rules of "Internet freedom." In the past few months, though, companies like A.T. & T. and BellSouth have been trying to scuttle it. In the future, Web sites that pay extra to providers could receive what BellSouth recently called "special treatment," and those that don't could end up in the slow lane. One day, BellSouth customers may find that, say, NBC.com loads a lot faster than YouTube.com, and that the sites BellSouth favors just seem to run more smoothly. Tiered access will turn the providers into Internet gatekeepers.4

Sources:

1. "Telecommunication Policy Proposed by Congress Must Recognize Internet Neutrality," Letter to Senate leaders, March 23, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1653

2. "AOL Blocks Critics' E-Mails," Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1649

3. "B.C. Civil Liberties Association Denounces Blocking of Website by Telus," British Columbia Civil Liberties Association Statement, July 27, 2005
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1650

4. "At SBC, It's All About 'Scale and Scope," BusinessWeek, November 7, 2002
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1648

5. "Net Losses," New Yorker, March 20, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1646

6. "Don't undercut Internet access," San Francisco Chronicle editorial, April 17, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1645

The Worst President in History?
By Sean Wilentz
Rolling Stone
Friday 21 April 2006

One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush.

"George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty - and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton - a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole - a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled - and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating - reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled - nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success - flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt - about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.



How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties - Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush - have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures - an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.



The Credibility Gap

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age - a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 - a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton - a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections - but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff - a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition - represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.



Bush at War

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well - including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor - much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president - Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War - faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies - including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq - an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered - the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy - yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops - accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.



Bush at Home

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts - a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever - with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush - sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" - insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing - a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states - including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds - have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws - a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe - has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions - over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more - have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science - dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them - much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.



Presidential Misconduct

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law - most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers - HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger - left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon - a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison - investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration - in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" - threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases - using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law - that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" - a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.



Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious - much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents - Harry Truman was one - who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

The Essential Krugman: "The Great Revulsion"

NY Times Commentary
Paul Krugman

"I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country."

I wrote those words three years ago in the introduction to my column collection, "The Great Unraveling." It seemed a remote prospect at the time: Baghdad had just fallen to U.S. troops, and President Bush had a 70 percent approval rating.

Now the great revulsion has arrived. The latest Fox News poll puts Mr. Bush's approval at only 33 percent. ... The proximate causes of Mr. Bush's plunge in the polls are familiar: the heck of a job he did responding to Katrina, the prescription drug debacle and, above all, the quagmire in Iraq.

But focusing too much on these ... makes Mr. Bush's political fall ... seem like an accident, or the result of specific missteps. That gets things backward. In fact, Mr. Bush's temporarily sky-high approval ratings were the aberration; the public never supported his real policy agenda.

Remember, in 2000 Mr. Bush got within hanging-chad and felon-purge distance of the White House only by pretending to be a moderate. In 2004 he ran on fear and smear, plus the pretense that victory in Iraq was just around the corner... The real test of the conservative agenda came after the 2004 election, when Mr. Bush tried to sell the partial privatization of Social Security.

Social Security was for economic conservatives what Iraq was for the neocons, a soft target that they thought would pave the way for bigger conquests. And there couldn't have been a more favorable moment for privatization than the winter of 2004-2005: Mr. Bush loved to assert that he had a "mandate"... Republicans held solid, disciplined majorities in both houses of Congress; and many prominent political pundits were in favor of private accounts.

Yet Mr. Bush's drive on Social Security ran into a solid wall of public opposition, and collapsed within a few months. And if Social Security couldn't be partly privatized under those conditions, the conservative dream of dismantling the welfare state is nothing but a fantasy.

So what's left of the conservative agenda? Not much.

That's not a prediction for the midterm elections. The Democrats will almost surely make gains, but the electoral system is rigged against them. ... As a result, Democrats would need a landslide in the popular vote — something like an advantage of 8 to 10 percentage points over Republicans — to take control of the House of Representatives. That's a real possibility, given the current polls, but by no means a certainty.

And there is also, of course, the real prospect that Mr. Bush will change the subject by bombing Iran.

Still, in the long run it may not matter that much. If the Democrats do gain control of either house of Congress, and with it the ability to issue subpoenas, a succession of scandals will be revealed in the final years of the Bush administration. But even if the Republicans hang on to their ability to stonewall, it's hard to see how they can resurrect their agenda.

In retrospect, then, the 2004 election looks like the high-water mark of a conservative tide that is now receding.

Part of Heisler's Pulitzer Prize Winning Photos - 2006

Pulitzer Prize Coverage from Le Monde

---

Link to the US Pulitzer Prize Website for coverage of nominees, etc.

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." -Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

CEOs cash in, but how many are worth $100 million?

At least a dozen chief executive officers received $100 million or more last year as part of an overall surge in pay that began in the 1990s. In 2005, the median package among the nation's 100 largest companies soared 25% to $17.9 million, dwarfing the 3.1% average gain by typical U.S. workers.

By any measure, executive pay has reached absurd levels. Top executives in the USA get far more than their counterparts abroad. In many cases, their pay isn't even related to performance. What's more, top executives are pulling in several hundred times the pay of rank-and-file workers after decades when that ratio stayed in the range of 50 to 75.

Harder to rationalize are the big paydays for less stellar performers. Investors in Cendant have known little but misery. Yet CEO Henry Silverman took home $133 million from pay, bonuses and options last year while his company, a diverse real estate and travel conglomerate, lost 21% of its value.

Also hard to justify are pricey “golden parachutes” paid to CEOs who relinquished their positions as the result of mergers or acquisitions. These payments are, at bottom, admissions that CEOs who give up their jobs are unlikely to find comparable pay elsewhere.

Companies often justify their bloated pay by arguing that relatively few executives exist with top-level credentials. But companies that have tried to keep their salaries within reasonable limits have hardly been punished.

For example, James Sinegal, CEO of Costco Wholesale Corp., makes considerably less than do most of his peers. Yet Costco shares have prospered. Even more remarkable is the success of upscale grocer Whole Foods Markets. A $10,000 investment in this company a decade ago is now worth more than $140,000. Yet CEO John Mackey and other executives there make less than $1 million a year apart from their soaring stock.

But Sinegal and Mackey are exceptions. Until corporate boards put shareholder interests above crony capitalism, investors will suffer. The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed greater disclosure on compensation. That's helpful. Better still would be to give shareholders greater power to choose directors who represent their interests, and to oust those who do not.

Giant U.S. embassy rising in Baghdad
Posted 4/19/2006 12:51
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY

"Three years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, only one major U.S. building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: the massive new American embassy compound. The $592 million facility is being built inside the heavily fortified Green Zone by 900 non-Iraqi foreign workers who are housed nearby and under the supervision of a Kuwaiti contractor, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. "We are confident the embassy will be completed according to schedule (by June 2007) and on budget," said Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman.

The same cannot be said for major projects serving Iraqis outside the Green Zone, the Senate report said. Many — including health clinics, water-treatment facilities and electrical plants — have had to be scaled back or in some cases eliminated because of the rising costs of securing worksites and workers. "No large-scale, U.S.-funded construction program in Iraq has yet met its schedule or budget," the committee report said.

The 104-acre complex — the size of about 80 football fields — will include two office buildings, one of them designed for future use as a school, six apartment buildings, a gym, a pool, a food court and its own power generation and water-treatment plants. The current U.S. Embassy in Iraq has nearly 1,000 Americans working there, more than at any other U.S. embassy.

Reverend Sun Myung Moon

From Wikipedia

From Alternet

From the Unification Church

From rotten.com

From the Unification Church website - Main Page

"This country desperately needs a God-centered president, senators and congressmen. America's intellectual establishment is liberal, godless, secular, humanistic, and anti-religious. We are declaring war against three main enemies: godless communism, Christ-less American liberalism, and secular-humanistic morality. They are the enemies of God, the True Parents, the Unification Church, all of Christianity, and all religions. We are working to mobilize a united front against them."
Rev. Sun Myung Moon, August 29, 1985

Rev. Moon's Coronation, Washington D.C., March 23, 2004

Moon Over Washington
Why are some of the capital’s most influential power players hanging out with a bizarre Korean billionaire who claims to be the Messiah?
the gadflyer website
by John Gorenfeld, Contributor
6.09.04

"Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd, 2004 a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah – with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?"

Center for Studies on New Religions

Founder's Address: 15th Anniversary of the Washington Times: June 16, 1997

Frontline: The Ressurection Of Reverend Moon

"In the Shadow of the Moons": a book by Nansook Hong

Apologetics Index: Resource Materials, Speeches, and Christian articles about the Moon cult.

"Sushi and Rev. Moon: Chicago Tribune, April 12th, 2006

Government-Funded Care Is the Best Health Solution

by Benjamin Brewer, M.D.,
Commentary, Wall Street Journal:

"A recently approved Massachusetts plan designed to force all residents to get health insurance was a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough. ... there will still be a maze of plans provided by any number of insurers. That multiplicity is the problem. Multiple insurers and multiple plans create layers of unneeded expense and bureaucracy related to billing, collections and the entire assembly line of middlemen between the service rendered and the payment.

The solution ... would be a single-payer system -- namely, government-funded health coverage for all. It took me a while to conclude that a single-payer health system was the best approach. My fear had been that government would screw up medicine ... But increasingly I've come to believe that ... health care ... could be dramatically better with true single-payer coverage; not just another layer -- a part D on top of a part B on top of a part A, but a simplified, single payer that would cover all Americans...

Doctors in private practice fear a loss of autonomy with a single-payer system. ... I see that autonomy is largely an illusion. Through Medicare and Medicaid, the government is already writing its own rules for 45% of the patients I see. The rest are privately insured under 301 different insurance products (my staff and I counted). The companies set the fees and the contracts are largely non-negotiable by individual doctors.

The amount of time, staff costs and IT overhead associated with keeping track of all those plans eats up most of the money we make above Medicare rates. As it is now, .... I suspect I could go from four people in the paper chase to one with a single-payer system.

It would be simpler and better ... if the patient could choose a doctor, bring their ID card with them, swipe it in a card reader ... No preexisting conditions to worry about. No indecipherable hospital bills. One formulary to deal with and one set of administrative rules to learn instead of 300.

With a single-payer system, there are concerns about waiting times ... and not getting access to the "best doctors." These are real issues, but not unsolvable ones. We have these disparities now. Fact is, they are mostly a matter of geography, insurance status and personal wealth.

A single-payer system would increase access to care for the uninsured and the underinsured... It would lower total health costs, in part by replacing 50 different state Medicaid programs and umpteen insurers with one system. This approach has the potential to improve quality and lower costs by improving care for chronic illnesses such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease ... Better tracking of chronic diseases [and] outbreaks ... would also be benefits.

There are powerful forces that oppose a single-payer system -- the health insurance industry for one. The insurance industry got its share of the Medicare drug benefit pie, as did the pharma industry. ... Doctors have been supportive of ... universal access to care, but not necessarily a single-payer system. Some fear delays in obtaining necessary testing and surgeries. What I suspect they fear most is a loss of income and the fear of the unknown.

A single-payer system would admittedly lower fees for subspecialty care, such as radiology and cardiology. But if more doctors went into family medicine or obstetrics ..., that shift might help correct the physician ... imbalances that exist now. That wouldn't necessarily break my heart. I suspect doctors would be more likely to support a single-payer system if national malpractice reform was part of the package...

I used to think a single-payer system would keep my income down and inject bureaucracy into my medical decision-making. But with the efficiency it could bring, it would at worst be an economic wash; more likely, the trimmed costs would more than make up for any foregone revenue. As for autonomy, I'm already struggling to maintain it amid the interference of insurers. On the whole, the efficiency -- and equality -- that a single-payer system would provide would more than compensate for its shortcomings."

E-Scrap 2006 to take place in Austin

The fourth annual electronics recycling conference, now the world's largest such event, will take place in Texas at the beautiful Austin Hilton, located just one block from the always-fun Sixth Avenue music district. E-Scrap 2006 will take place October 18th and 19th.

Agenda ideas are being solicited. Just drop Jerry Powell a note at jpowell@resource-recycling.com.

This newsletter is sent to subscribers of E-Scrap News and selected additional recipients. If you are not a newsletter subscriber and wish to receive both the electronic and printed editions, go to www.resource-recycling.com. If you do not wish to receive further newsletters or if you have problems receiving it in an HTML format, simply let us know. Write to: info@resource-recycling.com.

E-Scrap News
P.O. Box 42270
Portland, OR 97242-0270
(503) 233-1305; 233-1356 (fax)
www.resource-recycling.com
info@resource-recycling.com

"Fasten your seatbelts...it's going to be a bumpy night

Gold storms to new 25-yr high, silver surges
Mon Apr 17, 2006 3:09am ET13
By Chikafumi Hodo

TOKYO (Reuters) - Gold surged to a new 25-year high on Monday, buoyed by concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions and surges in oil prices, while silver powered to its highest since May 1983 on hopes for the first silver exchange-traded fund.

Hedge funds and operators investing in the short term were anxious about shifting their funds into gold and silver for the purpose to diversify and to raise higher returns.

Spot gold rose as high as $606.10 an ounce -- the highest since December 1980, while silver rose to $13.33 per ounce, its loftiest since May 1983.

---

JANUARY 3, 2006
Fasten your seat belts in '06
By Michael Mandel
Business Week

Forecasting is a fool's game. The economy has enough unpredictable twists and turns to make anyone look stupid. But in the spirit of the New Year, I'm going to give in to temptation and offer up not one, but two predictions: 2006 will be a terrible year for housing. However, it will be a great one for technology. (Take notes out there, all you home buyers and stock market investors.)

Let's look at the facts:

Fact #1: The housing bubble is now officially bigger than the tech bubble ever was. At the peak of the frenzy in 2000, consumer and business spending on tech software and hardware absorbed 6% of economic output. Today, residential construction takes 6.1% of output -- that's the biggest share of the economy devoted to housing since 1955. And remember, that was smack-dab in the middle of the postwar baby boom. (For a chart, see my blog.)

Fact #2: The share of the economy going to technology, at 5%, is no higher today than it was in 1997, before the Internet boom really got going. To put it a different way, in the midst of a technological revolution of historic proportions, spending on tech has grown no faster than the overall economy. It's hard for me to believe that this pattern will continue.

Fact #3: Home-building stocks have quadrupled in price since 2001. That's almost as great as the runup in tech stocks from 1997 to the peak in 2000. Haven't we learned anything?

Fact #4: Tech stocks overall are no higher than they were at the beginning of 2004. The same is true for telecom stocks.

I put this all together and draw several conclusions. The housing bubble could well trace the same path as the tech bubble: A big rise that convinces even the skeptics to invest -- this time in real estate -- followed by a sharp decline that exceeds even the worst of fears.

Just as the overspending on tech and telecom in the late 1990s set the stage for the big tech bust, the rapid pace of residential construction suggests that we could easily end up with a nationwide oversupply of housing, even if mortgage rates don't rise much.

BUYING SPREE. And don't listen to people who tell you that because everyone needs a place to live, housing is more bust-resistant than technology. In 2000 and 2001, the conventional wisdom said that technology spending was recession-proof because companies couldn't afford to cut back.

In fact, businesses suddenly realized that they were spending more on info tech than they needed, even as the tech industry was assuming that the 1990s buying spree would continue and expanded its capacity. Oversupply met reluctant demand, and the bust followed.

This time, the result of oversupply will be equally grim: Home prices will fall sharply in many areas, not just go flat. I even expect the national price for homes to decline by a bit. Construction and mortgage lending will slow sharply, and the whole psychology of the real estate market will change. Homebuilding stocks will give back most if not all of their astonishing gains. This will not be pretty.

ON THE UPSWING. On the other side of the ledger, there's a good chance the tech sector will finally snap out of its post-bust funk. Here are some encouraging signs: Telecom is actually adding jobs, on a year-over-year basis, for the first time since 2001. Computer systems design firms are expanding as well, and wages for programmers are apparently on the upswing, especially in Silicon Valley.

Online advertising is projected to rise by more than 30% in 2006. And there's a sense of excitement that hasn't been present since the boom years, as companies like Google (GOOG ) and Apple (AAPL ) dominate the headlines. The end result should be a rise in tech and telecom stocks -- not of biblical proportions but certainly enough to be enjoyable for investors.

What will this mean for the whole economy? Overall, growth should continue and the stock market should rise. But when a bubble bursts, the turbulence hits everyone. Hold on tight for a rough ride.

Bring it on...

Oracle bid for Novell will put a rocket under Suse Linuxl
IT Wire Website
By Stan Beer
Tuesday, 18 April 2006

"The last time Larry Ellison mulled over buying a company, a corporate war erupted. However, in the end Larry got his way and PeopleSoft is now Oracle. Is the same thing going to happen to Novell? If so, it will be good for Linux and the best thing to happen to desktop computing in 20 years.

Probably the biggest inhibitor to Linux take-up right now, aside from Microsoft lock-in, is the lack of third party vendor support. Not enough vendors have taken the time to develop the necessary drivers to make the Linux distros plug and play. Novell’s Suse Linux is about as close as you can get today. However, with Oracle behind it, that would change very quickly, as would the enthusiasm of software developers to develop for the platform.

Anyone who has played with a Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop for any length of time should be able to see the possibilities for extricating themselves from Windows lock-in. The system already provides users with transparency to their Microsoft Office files. There is also a bridge between Microsoft Outlook and the Linux equivalent Evolution. That’s about 80% of the battle. The other 20% hinges on drivers and web services that some providers have foolishly tied to Microsoft specific products such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Once again, however, with the rising popularity of the Firefox browser, that is changing."

After Guantanamo: A Progressive Method of Providing Justice for Detainees

From American Progress Action

"After Guantanamo: A Special Tribunal for International Terrorist Suspects
U.S. policy on detainees captured during the war on terrorism must achieve each of the following

• Ensure that detainees who pose a real security threat remain securely imprisoned;
• Make accurate determinations of guilt or innocence, and assess the proper punishment
• Restore the United States to its traditional leadership position in the promotion of human rights and respect for the rule of law;
• Strengthen the alliance against terrorism; and,
• Establish sustainable structures that increase the capacity of states allied against international terrorism to handle these types of cases in the future.

Guantanamo fails to meet any of these goals. In the interest of U.S. national security, President Bush should close the prison at Guantanamo, take decisive steps to regain the offensive against terrorists, and demonstrate that the United States can protect itself while expanding freedom and democracy and deepening respect for human rights and the rule of law. The best solution to the challenges of Guantanamo lies in working with our allies to create a Special Tribunal for International Terrorist Suspects in order to share the responsibility of detaining, trying, and imprisoning terrorists. This Tribunal should capitalize on the experiences of previous tribunals that have handled some of the most serious threats to international peace and security. It should encompass

• Two separate Divisions to reflect the two general classes of detainees; one led by the United States to deal with al Qaeda and other international terrorist suspects that pose an ongoing threat to the American people; the other operated in partnership with the Afghan government and other key allies that will hear cases of detainees connected only to the war in Afghanistan but who were not combatants against the United States;

• An international team of investigators to assess the security threat of detainees and develop evidence for trials;

• Internationally recognized trial procedures that reliably reach accurate, fair, and legitimate verdicts and that dispense appropriate punishment;

• A database on all released prisoners that is shared by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of states allied against terrorism;

• A mandate to build capacity in the judicial and prison systems in nations allied against terrorism; and,

• A host country, such as Turkey, that can act as a bridge between the West and the Muslim world and help bring together players that want to be part of the solution.

The debate about the future of Guantanamo has lacked legitimate and substantive alternatives. Supporters of the prison refuse to accept that it is a liability and insist that the status quo must be maintained. Opponents are quick to call for its closure, but often fail to take into account the difficult and unique challenges of detaining and putting on trial terrorist suspects. This proposal addresses each of those challenges with practical policy solutions and presents a concrete alternative to the fatally flawed policy President Bush has pursued on detainees.

What we say, and what we do

"...any lesson offered a child in an abstract manner that isn’t backed up by deeds is not going to work very well. We live out what we presumably want taught to our children. And our children are taking constant notice, and they’re measuring us not by what we say but what we do."
---Robert Coles---

"What you are thunders so loudly that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Raising Children With Character
by Jill Weinlein

The ancient Greeks believed good character consists of four virtues: Wisdom, Justice, Fortitude and Self-Control.

Wisdom

Wisdom is good judgment that allows us to make good decisions in life. It enables us to know when and how to act.

Justice

Justice is respecting the rights of others. Treating people as we wish to be treated is found in cultures and religions around the world. Parents must be good role models, because children pay more attention to what parents do than what they say. Teaching respect, empathy and courtesy strengthens a strong social conscience and promotes compassion for others. Parents who instill giving back to their community through volunteering offer invaluable positive lessons to their children. Delivering meals to the homebound with your child, volunteering at a woman’s shelter, or adopting a grandparent to visit an assisted living facility are good examples.

Fortitude

Fortitude is an inner toughness enabling us to overcome hardship, defeat, pain and inconvenience. Courage, patience and a healthy self-confidence are elements of fortitude. Parents should teach their children that we develop our character more from suffering than our successes. Setbacks in life make us stronger when we learn from them.

Self-Control

Children who control their temper and resist temptation have better character values. Parents can provide children with hands-on personal experiences on which they can draw from whenever they need to practice self-control and make ethical decisions. Their inner voice whispers, “Who I am, what I do, and what I say matters.”

10 Tips For Raising Children of Character
by Dr. Kevin Ryan

"It is one of those essential facts of life that raising good children--children of character--demands time and attention. While having children may be "doing what comes naturally," being a good parent is much more complicated. Here are ten tips to help your children build sturdy characters:

1. Put parenting first. This is hard to do in a world with so many competing demands. Good parents consciously plan and devote time to parenting. They make developing their children’s character their top priority.

2. Review how you spend the hours and days of your week. Think about the amount of time your children spend with you. Plan how you can weave your children into your social life and knit yourself into their lives.

3. Be a good example. Face it: human beings learn primarily through modeling. In fact, you can’t avoid being an example to your children, whether good or bad. Being a good example, then, is probably your most important job.

4. Develop an ear and an eye for what your children are absorbing. Children are like sponges. Much of what they take in has to do with moral values and character. Books, songs, TV, the Internet, and films are continually delivering messages—moral and immoral—to our children. As parents we must control the flow of ideas and images that are influencing our children.

5. Use the language of character. Children cannot develop a moral compass unless people around them use the clear, sharp language of right and wrong.

6. Punish with a loving heart. Today, punishment has a bad reputation. The results are guilt-ridden parents and self-indulgent, out-of-control children. Children need limits. They will ignore these limits on occasion. Reasonable punishment is one of the ways human beings have always learned. Children must understand what punishment is for and know that its source is parental love.

7. Learn to listen to your children. It is easy for us to tune out the talk of our children. One of the greatest things we can do for them is to take them seriously and set aside time to listen.

8. Get deeply involved in your child’s school life. School is the main event in the lives of our children. Their experience there is a mixed bag of triumphs and disappointments. How they deal with them will influence the course of their lives. Helping our children become good students is another name for helping them acquire strong character.

9. Make a big deal out of the family meal. One of the most dangerous trends in America is the dying of the family meal. The dinner table is not only a place of sustenance and family business but also a place for the teaching and passing on of our values. Manners and rules are subtly absorbed over the table. Family mealtime should communicate and sustain ideals that children will draw on throughout their lives.

10. Do not reduce character education to words alone. We gain virtue through practice. Parents should help children by promoting moral action through self-discipline, good work habits, kind and considerate behavior to others, and community service. The bottom line in character development is behavior--their behavior.

As parents, we want our children to be the architects of their own character crafting, while we accept the responsibility to be architects of the environment—physical and moral. We need to create an environment in which our children can develop habits of honesty, generosity, and a sense of justice. For most of us, the greatest opportunity we personally have to deepen our own character is through the daily blood, sweat and tears of struggling to be good parents.

Ready to Bitch n Moan about eBay?

eBay User: reston_ray

"Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that everything you have said in this and other related threads is valid and has a significant negative impact on you and many other eBay sellers. As a mentor of mine was prone to ask "So what?"

It was his way of trying to get me past the problem and into solutions.

Don't know what the solutions might be for you but I would encourage you to turn your frustrations into positive efforts towards finding them. I got caught in the vortex several years ago and spent too much time "tilting at windmills". After being disappointed in the results of joint efforts to influence eBay, organize sellers and/or establish other venues I went off in the direction of establishing a flea market booth identity at an upscale location.

While I've come to accept that it is not a promising direction for me, it did give me an opportunity for a positive outlook and to channel energies into constructive building rather that battling in a losing cause. I also came to accept that hard physical work and my advancing age are not compatible, that snow, rain and 98 degree heat do make a difference and are not factors encountered at the computer; and a specialty makes a difference.

Now I'm much more at peace with using eBay for what it does offer and exploring other online options including a website.

I do believe there is a huge number of sellers that will support alternative venues when they materialize. They will do so for all the valid business reasons and because of what I believe is a deep reservoir of resentments. The path may be through Google and Foogle to venues and websites or it could come from a direction not yet visible.

In the meantime I try to focus on what is available and what still works for me. I believe your right and eBay is wrong but it doesn't make any difference....for now.

eBay Items (http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewListedIt ems&userid=reston_ray&include=0&since=-1&sort=2&rows=0)
Yahoo Items (http://user.auctions.yahoo.com/user/reston_ray?)

Customer Service

by Mary-Heather at: http://www.rainyday.squarespace.com/

"They say customer service is getting so bad these days...well do "they" realize that the service they get is brought about in the way they treat people who work in customer service? I am so sick of hearing people bitch about how the customer service stinks. Maybe if they used some manners and common sense when entering a place of business they would get better service. I myself have reached the end of being Mr. Nice Guy....you come into my business and treat me like shit...be prepared for equal treatment."

McCarthyism: Standard Operating Procedure
by Eric Alterman

Commentary: The essence of the tactic of McCarthyism is to de-legitimize one’s opponent so as to avoid addressing the substance of his argument.

Disengenious Rumsfeld

Note: In response to the call by seven retired Generals for the replacement of Sec. Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld, (as well as Press Secretary McClennan yesterday) said "there are thousands of admirals and generals..." ..."so if one or two have a complaint...etc, etc".

What this ignores is that these seven generals, not two or three, have all had large-scale personal involvement and responsibility for the operation in Iraq. They are not armchair generals at USCONARC. Both Sckwartzkopf and Zinni formerly lead Centcom and both have called for Rumsfeld to resign. And as has been pointed out elsewhere: Gen. Billy Mitchell's courts martial for insubordination gives active duty generals a distinct reason to keep a tight reign on their criticisms.

As for the 'voluntary' retirement of Gen. Franks, there is a side story to that as well. The 'voluntary' retirement of Army Chief of Staff Shinsheki is another example of Rumsfeld's iron fisted rule.

It's also no surprise that Pres. Bush would assert that Rumsfeld has Bush's full support, and admiration. If Rumsfeld goes, Bush knows the turkeys will come to roost at his doorstep.

Canned Hunting & Sith Lords

What Are Canned Hunts?

Canned hunting operations, also referred to as "shooting preserves" or "game ranches," are private trophy hunting facilities that offer their customers the opportunity to kill exotic and native animals that are trapped within enclosures.

The animals killed in canned hunts may come from private breeders, animal dealers, or even zoos. These animals are frequently hand-raised and bottle fed, so they have lost their natural fear of people. In many facilities, the animals expect to be fed at regular times by familiar people—and the shooters will be there waiting for them.

Semi-tame animals make easy targets, so canned hunt operators can offer their customers a guarantee of, "no kill-no pay." The animals are guaranteed something as well—that there will be no escape.

---

Cheney Goes Hunting

"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."

---

These Guys Can't Manage Anything!

Government Spending Hit Record High in March
The Associated Press
Wednesday 12 April 2006

Outlays push budget deficit up significantly from year-ago levels.

Washington - Government spending hit an all-time high for a single month in March, pushing the budget deficit up significantly from the red-ink level of a year ago.

In its monthly accounting of the government's books, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday that federal spending totaled $250 billion last month, up 13.7 percent from March 2005.

Government receipts also were up, rising 10.6 percent from a year ago, to $164.6 billion. That left a deficit for the month of $85.5 billion, a record imbalance for March.

Treasury Department officials said that half of the growth in outlays for March represented a $15 billion shift in payments for certain government benefit programs, including Medicare, into March rather than April. The benefit payments were made early because April 1 fell on a Saturday.

The March outlay record of $250 billion surpassed the old mark of $232 billion set in February.

Even though the deficit was a record for March, it was below the all-time monthly high of $119.2 billion, which was set in February.

So far through the first six months of this budget year, which began in October, the deficit totals $303 billion, an increase of 2.8 percent over the deficit in the first six months of the 2005 budget year.

Rehashing the 'biological weapons trailers'

The Essential Krugman: "Weapons of Math Destruction"

Weapons of Math Destruction, by Paul Krugman, Budget Lies Commentary, NY Times

"Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.

The lies included Mr. Cheney's assertion, more than three months after intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren't bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two "mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox."

The damned lies included Mr. Bush's declaration, in his "Mission Accomplished" speech, that "we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda."

The statistics included Mr. Bush's claim, during his debates with John Kerry, that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans." ... deceptions about taxes can seem like a minor issue. But ... my early sense that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between the administration's sales pitch for the Iraq war — with its evasions, innuendo and constantly changing rationale — and the selling of the Bush tax cuts.

Moreover, the hysterical attacks ... against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley ... once compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent ... to, yes, Adolf Hitler.

And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.

How do I know what the administration's tax analysts know? The facts are ... hidden in one of the administration's propaganda releases.

The Treasury Department has put out an exercise in spin called the "Tax Relief Kit," which tries to create the impression that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income families. Conspicuously missing ... are any actual numbers about how the tax cuts were distributed ... Yet ... there's enough information in the "kit" to figure out what they discovered.

An explanation of how to extract the administration's estimates ... is here. Here's the bottom line: about 32 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of Americans... About 53 percent of the tax cuts went to the top 10 percent...

And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say that the wealthiest 1 percent ... will receive 40 percent of the tax cuts? Although the "Tax Relief Kit" asserts that "nearly all of the tax cut provisions" are already in effect, that's not true: ...elimination of the estate tax, hasn't taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation... This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.

Again, the point isn't merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about other, graver matters.

Generals demand Rumsfeld's resignation
Thu Apr 13, 2006 10:57 PM ET
By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two more retired U.S. generals called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign on Thursday, claiming the chief architect of the Iraq war and subsequent American occupation should be held accountable for the chaos there.

As the high-ranking officers accused Rumsfeld of arrogance and ignoring his field commanders, the White House was forced to defend a man who has been a lightning rod for criticism over a war that has helped drive President George W. Bush's public approval ratings to new lows.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni told CNN Rumsfeld should be held responsible for a series of blunders, starting with "throwing away 10 years worth of planning, plans that had taken into account what we would face in an occupation of Iraq."

The spreading challenge to the Pentagon's civilian leadership included criticism from some recently retired senior officers directly involved in the Iraq war and its planning.

Six retired generals have now called for Rumsfeld to step down, including two who spoke out on Thursday.

"I really believe that we need a new secretary of defense because Secretary Rumsfeld carries way too much baggage with him," said retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, who led the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq.

"Specifically, I feel he has micromanaged the generals who are leading our forces," he told CNN.

Retired Major Gen. John Riggs told National Public Radio that Rumsfeld had helped create an atmosphere of "arrogance" among the Pentagon's top civilian leadership.

"They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that's a mistake, and that's why I think he should resign," Riggs said.

But at the White House, the 73-year-old Rumsfeld drew unflinching support. "Yes, the president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a very fine job during a challenging period," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq before his retirement, urged Rumsfeld on Wednesday to resign.

Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold and Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton have also spoken out against Rumsfeld.

The outcry came as opinion polls show eroding public support for the 3-year-old Iraq war in which about 2,360 U.S. troops have died and Bush is struggling to bolster Americans' confidence in the war effort.

IGNORING THE CALLS

Rumsfeld has offered at least twice to resign, but each time Bush has turned him down.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff said Rumsfeld is ignoring the calls for him to quit and they have not been a distraction.

"Has he talked to the White House? The answer is no, he's not. And two, the question of resignation: was he considering it? No."

Ruff added: "I don't know how many generals there are -- a couple thousand, at least. And they're going to have opinions."

Critics have accused Rumsfeld of bullying senior military officers and disregarding their views. They often cite how Rumsfeld dismissed then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's opinion a month before the 2003 invasion that occupying Iraq could require "several hundred thousand troops," not the smaller force Rumsfeld would send.

But retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong rejected the idea that new leadership was needed at the Pentagon.

"Dealing with Secretary Rumsfeld is like dealing with a CEO," he told CNN. "When you walk in to him, you've got to be prepared. You've got to know what you're talking about. If you don't, you're summarily dismissed. But that's the way it is, and he's effective."

The White House pointed to comments supportive of Rumsfeld from Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said criticism was to be expected at a time of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We are a nation at war and we are a nation that is going through a military transformation. Those are issues that tend to generate debate and disagreement and we recognize that," McClellan said.

Websites devoted to debunking pseudo-science, exposing false claims, and detailing questionable logic

CSICOP   -Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

Quackwatch   -Dedicated to debunking dubious health information

Urban Legends   -Website devoted to examinations of email and web-based scares and scams

SCIRUS   -Scientific information clearinghouse

FAS   -Federation of American Scientists

Wikipedia   -First stop for encyclopedic overview of any topic

FactCheck   -Annenberg School of Communications Political Fact Check

MCBI   -Marine Conservation Biology Institute specializes in deep sea research

Popular Science Article Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Claims

James Randi Educational Foundation   -Home website for James Randi's writings on the paranormal

MediaMatters   -reviews print and electronic media

Astronomical Society of the Pacific   -Debunks astronomical pseudo-science concepts

Hall of Ma'at   -Archeological oriented website devoted to examinations of historical and cultural claims

Cosmetics Cop: aka: Paula Begoun   -maintains a website related to cosmetics, and claims made about cosmetics

Groklaw   -covers the business, practices, and legal aspects of electronic media companies

CJA   -The Committee for Justice for All; oriented toward the Civil Justice System

Open Directory Project    -Sub-sectioned branch off main website, devoted to skeptical inquiry

Intersessional Prayer

Study: Prayer doesn't affect heart patients
CNN.COM & Others
Thursday, March 30, 2006; Posted: 2:26 p.m. EST (19:26 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

---

From Duke University: Prayer and Mortality
Journal of Gerontology

"During a median 6.3-year follow-up period, 1177 subjects died. Low levels of private religious activity (meditation, prayer, or Bible study) were a significant predictor of mortality in healthy but not disabled subjects. After the investigators controlled for demographics and health status (including depression and stressful life events), persons with no disability and little or no private religious activity in 1986 were 63% more likely to die during the follow-up (HR [hazard ratio] 1.63, 95% CI 1.20-2.21).

Even after controlling for social support and health behaviors, investigators found that lack of private religious activity continued to predict a 47% greater risk of dying (HR 1.47, 95% CI 1.07-2.03). This study is important because it is one of the first to show an association between private religious activities and longer survival in certain population subgroups. For more information contact: Judy C. Hays (jch@geri.duke.edu) or Harold G. Koenig (koenig@geri.duke.edu)."

---

Prayer Request Website is here

---

Researchers Look at Prayer and Healing
Conclusions and Premises Debated as Big Study's Release Nears
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 24, 2006; A01

In churches, mosques, ashrams, "healing rooms," prayer groups and homes nationwide, millions of Americans offer prayers daily to heal themselves, family, friends, co-workers and even people found through the Internet. Fueled by the upsurge in religious expression in the United States, prayer is the most common complement to mainstream medicine, far outpacing acupuncture, herbs, vitamins and other alternative remedies.

"Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism -- every religion believes in prayer for healing," said Paul Parker, a professor of theology and religion at Elmhurst College outside Chicago. "Some call it prayer, some call it cleansing the mind. The words or posture may vary. But in times of illness, all religions look towards their source of authority."

The outpouring of spiritual healing has inspired a small group of researchers to attempt to use the tools of modern science to test the power of prayer to cure others. The results have been mixed and highly controversial. Skeptics say the work is a deeply flawed and misguided waste of money that irresponsibly attempts to validate the supernatural with science. And some believers say it is pointless to try to divine the workings of God with experiments devised by mortals.

Proponents, however, maintain the research is valuable, given the large numbers of people who believe in the power of prayer to influence health. Surveys have found that perhaps half of Americans regularly pray for their own health, and at least a quarter have others pray for them.

"It's one of the most prevalent forms of healing. Open-minded scientists have a responsibility to look into this," said Marilyn J. Schlitz of the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.

The contentious enterprise is at something of a crossroads. Two new studies are about to report no benefit of having people pray for the sick, the only study underway is nearing completion, and the largest, best-designed project is being published in two weeks. Its eagerly awaited findings could sound the death knell for the field, breathe new life into such efforts, or create new debate.

"I will guarantee you that study will have a very interesting impact on a lot of people's thinking," said Mitchell W. Krucoff of Duke University, who wrote an editorial that will accompany the closely guarded findings in the American Heart Journal. "But how you interpret the results will probably depend on your point of view."

Many studies done over the years indicate that the devout tend to be healthier. But the reasons remain far from clear. Healthy people may be more likely to join churches. The pious may lead more wholesome lifestyles. Churches, synagogues and mosques may help people take better care of themselves. The quiet meditation and incantations of praying, or the comfort of being prayed for, appears to lower blood pressure, reduce stress hormones, slow the heart rate and have other potentially beneficial effects.

But the most controversial research focuses on "intercessory" or "distant" prayer, which involves people trying to heal others through their intentions, thoughts or prayers, sometimes without the recipients knowing it. The federal government has spent $2.2 million in the past five years on studies of distant healing, which have also drawn support from private foundations.

San Francisco cardiologist Randolph Byrd, for example, conducted an experiment in which he asked born-again Christians to pray for 192 people hospitalized for heart problems, comparing them with 201 not targeted for prayer. No one knew which group they were in. He reported in 1988 that those who were prayed for needed fewer drugs and less help breathing.

William S. Harris of St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and colleagues published similar results in 1999 from a study involving nearly 1,000 heart patients, about half of whom were prayed for without their knowledge.

But these and other studies have been called deeply flawed. They were, for example, analyzed in the most favorable way possible, looking at so many outcomes that the positive findings could easily have been the result of chance, critics say.

"It's called the sharpshooter's fallacy," said Richard Sloan, a behavioral researcher at Columbia University. "The sharpshooter empties the gun into the side of a barn and then draws the bull's-eye. In science, you have to predict in advance what effect you may have."

Other studies have been even more contentious, such as a 2001 project involving fertility patients that became mired in accusations of fraud.

"I would like to see us stop wasting precious research dollars putting religious practices to the test of science," Sloan said. "It's a waste of money, and it trivializes the religious experience."

Even some advocates of incorporating more prayer and spirituality into medicine agree.

"I don't see how you could quantify prayer -- either the results of it or the substance of it," said the Rev. Raymond J. Lawrence of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. "God is beyond the reach of science. It's absurd to think you could use it to examine God's play."

Perhaps most important, many scientists say, is that there is no rational explanation for how this kind of prayer might work.

"There's nothing we know about the physical universe that could account for how the prayers of someone in Washington, D.C., could influence the health of a group of people in Iowa -- nothing whatsoever," Sloan said.

But supporters say that much about medicine remains murky or is explained only over time. They say, for example, that it was relatively recently that scientists figured out how aspirin works, although it has been in use for centuries.

"Yesterday's science fiction often becomes tomorrow's science," said John A. Astin of the California Pacific Medical Center.

Proponents often cite a phenomenon from quantum physics, in which distant particles can affect each other's behavior in mysterious ways.

"When quantum physics was emerging, Einstein wrote about spooky interactions between particles at a distance," Krucoff said. "That's at least one very theoretical model that might support notions of distant prayer or distant healing."

Krucoff, a cardiologist, published a study last summer involving 748 heart patients at nine hospitals. That study failed overall to show any benefit. But Krucoff said he did find tantalizing hints that warrant follow-up: A subset of patients who had a second group of people praying that the prayers of the first group would be answered may have done better.

That underscores one of the many difficulties that critics and advocates say makes studying prayer problematic: There is no way to quantify the "dose," and no way to know whether people outside the study may be praying for its subjects, diluting the effects.

Two smaller, more recently completed studies illustrate yet another problem. Each involved about 150 patients with brain tumors or AIDS. Only some were targeted by "distant healing" and only some knew they were the recipients. But in addition to traditional prayers, many of the dozens of "healers" used other approaches, such as visualizing patients and sending a "healing intention" or "energy" or "light." Both studies, which will be published later this year, did not show any effect. But neither of the researchers who led them is advocating giving up, saying their studies may have been doomed by including too many healing variations.

The only ongoing study is also testing whether a spectrum of healers can help -- in this case, women who are recovering from reconstructive surgery after breast cancer. Doctors are inserting tiny tubes under the skin of about 90 women to measure the growth of collagen, which is necessary for healing, to see if those targeted by healers accumulate more than those who do not. The study will end this spring.

Krucoff and others say it is also important to study prayer as an adjunct -- not a replacement -- to standard medical care, to make sure it is safe.

"Human physiology is a very delicate equilibrium. When you throw energy you don't understand into this, it would be naive to think you could only do good," he said.

In the hope of shedding light on that and other questions, researchers are awaiting the results of the study led by Herbert Benson of Harvard University, which involved about 1,800 heart-bypass patients at six centers who were divided into three groups. Only some of them knew whether they were receiving prayer.

"What that study finds will help tell us which way to go -- whether there are intriguing findings or the book ought to be closed on this topic," said Harold Koenig of Duke University.

But researchers on both sides, as well as those who believe in prayer, say the results of that and other studies are unlikely to change many minds.

"I don't think it will alter my beliefs one way or the other," said Trish Lankowski, who started a healing room at Immanuel's Church in Silver Spring this past Sunday night. "I believe in the power of prayer wholeheartedly. I know it works."

---

A debate between two Scientists about the value of intersessional prayer.

---

Note: My preliminary opinion after reviewing the preceeding is that intersessional prayer is somewhat like funeral services; ie, it does not affect the outcome for the target; but it is quite helpful for the one(s) offering the prayers and services.

Are you keeping score...

Microsoft warns of three "critical" security flaws
Tuesday 11 April 2006, 4:32pm EST

SAN FRANCISCO, April 11 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp.(MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Tuesday warned of three "critical" security flaws in its Windows operating system that could allow attackers to take control of a computer.

The latest patches can be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/security

The Essential Krugman: "Yes He Would"

Yes He Would, by Paul Krugman
Commentary, New York Times:
April 10th, 2006

"But he wouldn't do that." That sentiment is what made it possible for President Bush to stampede America into the Iraq war and to fend off hard questions about the reasons for that war until after the 2004 election. Many people just didn't want to believe that an American president would deliberately mislead the nation on matters of war and peace.

Now people with contacts in the administration and the military warn that Mr. Bush may be planning another war. The most alarming of the warnings come from Seymour Hersh... Writing in The New Yorker, Mr. Hersh suggests that administration officials believe that a bombing campaign could lead to desirable regime change in Iran — and that they refuse to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons. ...

As it happens, rumors of a new war coincide with the emergence of evidence that appears to confirm our worst suspicions about the war we're already in.

First, it's clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British government memo reporting on a prewar discussion... In that conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.

Second, it's becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that the case he was presenting for war — a case that depended crucially on visions of mushroom clouds — rested on suspect evidence. For example, ... Mr. Bush cited Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas reports ... that Mr. Bush had been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that assessment.

Was the difference between Mr. Bush's public portrayal of the Iraqi threat and the actual intelligence he saw large enough to validate claims that he deliberately misled the nation into war? Karl Rove apparently thought so. According to Mr. Waas, Mr. Rove "cautioned ... that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged" if the contents of an October 2002 "President's Summary" containing dissents about the significance of the aluminum tubes became public.

Now there are rumors of plans to attack Iran. Most strategic analysts think that a bombing campaign would be a disastrous mistake. But ... Mr. Bush ignored similar warnings, including those of his own father, about the risks involved in invading Iraq...

Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.

And it's not just Mr. Bush's legacy that's at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.

Does this sound far-fetched? It shouldn't. Given the combination of recklessness and dishonesty Mr. Bush displayed in launching the Iraq war, why should we assume that he wouldn't do it again?

Accomplishment of Previous Administrations via Wikipedia

William Clinton: 1993-2000 - Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, Health Care Reform Effort

George H. W. Bush: 1989-1993 - 'New World Order'

Ronald Reagan: 1981-1989 - 'Supply Side Economics'

James Carter: 1977-1981 - Camp David Accords, SALT II

Gerald Ford: 1974-1977 - 'The Pardon'

Richard Nixon: 1969-1974 - Environmental Legislation

Lyndon Johnson: 1963-1969 - The Great Society

John Kennedy: 1961-1963 - Man On The Moom

Dwight Eisenhower: 1953-1961 - Interstate Highway System

---

In 1979, Robert E. DiClerico polled 93 historians to find the ten greatest presidents. He reported them in his The American President: Lincoln (greatest) Washington, FDRoosevelt, Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, Jackson, Truman, Polk and J. Adams.

The flip side of DiClerico's ten greatest was offered by Nathan Miller in his 1998 work Star-Spangled Men: American's Ten Worst Presidents: Nixon, Harding, Buchanan, Pierce, A. Johnson, Grant, Coolidge, B. Harrison, Taft and Carter.

---

Scholars rate worst presidential errors
USA Today: Feb 18th, 2006

LOUISVILLE (AP) — From engaging in sexual relations with an intern to letting the Vietnam War escalate, U.S. presidents have been blamed for some egregious errors.

So who had the worst blunder? President James Buchanan, for failing to avert the Civil War, according to a survey of presidential historians organized by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center.

The survey's top 10 presidential blunders were announced Saturday during a President's Day weekend conference called "Presidential Moments."

"We can probably learn just as much — or maybe even more — by looking at the mistakes rather than looking at why they were great," said political scientist and McConnell Center Director Gary Gregg.

Scholars who participated said Buchanan didn't do enough to oppose efforts by Southern states to secede from the Union before the Civil War.

The second worst mistake, the survey found, was Andrew Johnson's decision just after the Civil War to side with Southern whites and oppose improvements in justice for Southern blacks beyond abolishing slavery.

"We continue to pay" for Johnson's errors, wrote Michael Les Benedict, an Ohio State University history professor emeritus.

Lyndon Johnson earned the No. 3 spot by allowing the Vietnam War to intensify, Gregg said.

Where does Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal rank? Many scholars said it belonged at No. 10, saying that it probably affected Clinton's presidency more than it did American history and the public.

The rest of the top 10 blunders:

•4: Woodrow Wilson's refusal to compromise on the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

•5: Richard Nixon's involvement in the Watergate cover-up.

•6: James Madison's failure to keep the United States out of the War of 1812 with Britain.

•7: Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, a self-imposed prohibition on trade with Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.

•8: John F. Kennedy allowing the Bay of Pigs Invasion that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

•9: Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra Affair, the effort to sell arms to Iran and use the money to finance an armed anti-communist group in Nicaragua.

---

C-Span's 20th Anniversary TV Series 1999: American Presidents-The First 41

- Bill Clinton Ratings:
Fifth best "Economic Management"
Fifth best "Pursued Equal Justice for All"
Eleventh best "Public Persuasion"
Thirty Sixth "Relations with Congress"
Forty First "Moral Authority"

Experiments in Obedience to Authority
"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." - S.Milgram(1974)
<------------------------------------->
In the 1960s in America, Stanley Milgram, a Professor of Psychology became interested in the dynamics of this distortion of obedience to authority and proceeded to conduct experiments both at Yale and in the field in Bridgeport, observing how far normal people would go in harming another person if they thought they were under orders and that another would take responsibilty.*

He first had student 'volunteers' sit at a panel of buttons,each of which was supposed to deliver a small 'shock' to a 'learner' in another part of the room behind a partition or door. As the 'learner' got questions on a list incorrect, the panel-operator was to deliver progressively greater shocks for each wrong answer. The learner was actually a confederate or 'planted' staff member who pretended to experience distress at the shocks. In the end of the session with many incorrect responses, the reaction feigned was that of a impending heartattack with the 'learner' hammering on the door begging the 'shocker' to stop.

The experimenter, dressed in a white coat at a lab at Yale, calmly told each 'shocker' to continue despite the reaction. (the participants thought they were delivering shocks up to 500volts). One might think that only a few would continue to deliver the shocks all the way to the end, with violent reactions from the 'learners' and only a 'reassurance' to continue from the experimenter. Over 80% continued to deliver what they thought were real shocks, despite the confederate weeping, screaming and begging to be let out of the experiment.

When the experiment was taken out of the lab and into the community without white coats, a university-sanction and lab, and with the population at large from a newspaper ad instead of psychology classes, still a phenomenal number of 'shockers' continued to shock their confederate victims all the way to near-death. Even Milgram was surprized at the results, determining that even in a free society such as ours, the same dynamics of blind obedience could occur.

These results were in peacetime, without anymore penalty for disobedience than possible social disapproval (not death) and still, most participated in what they thought was cruelty for the sake of obedience or small reward. Similar Results were found in the Zimbardo Prison experiments at Berkeley.

National Security & The Führerprinzip

Leaker-In-Chief
American Progress Action Fund: April 7th, 2006

Yesterday, a court filing disclosed that President Bush specifically authorized Vice President Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby to disclose classified information in an effort to discredit Joseph Wilson, a former CIA adviser whose criticisms undermined the administration's case for war. According to the 39-page document submitted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on late Wednesday night, Libby testified that Cheney "advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose relevant portions" of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.), the key CIA document that the administration used to persuade Congress and the American public into war. The court filing "for the first time places Bush and Vice President Cheney at the heart of what Libby testified was an exceptional and deliberate leak of material designed to buttress the administration's claim that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons." While the document does not address the issue of whether Bush was personally involved in specifically leaking Valerie Plame's identity, it is clear from the timing of the leak authorization by President Bush that he was personally involved in the administration-wide effort to smear Joseph Wilson by any means necessary.



BUSH AUTHORIZED LEAKING DESPITE REPEATED ASSURANCES TO THE CONTRARY: Throughout the past two and half years, while the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's identity has been ongoing, Bush has made numerous public statements indicating his desire to crack down on leakers. For instance, on September 30, 2003, Bush said, "There's just too many leaks, and if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." He added, "I want to tell you something -- leaks of classified information are a bad thing." And on October 28, 2003, the president said, "I'd like to know if somebody in my White House did leak sensitive information." Bush never indicated that he was engaged in leaks, instead casting "himself as a disinterested observer, eager to resolve the case and hold those responsible accountable." The new revelations by Fitzgerald, however, demonstrate Bush was personally authorizing highly-sensitive intelligence leaks and has therefore been engaged in a cover-up about the extent of his own involvement in the leak case. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, "The president has always stood so strong against leaks. If he leaked himself, he should explain why this is different than every other leak."



BUSH WAS INVOLVED IN THE CAMPAIGN TO SMEAR WILSON: "The White House did not challenge the prosecutor's account of Bush's and Cheney's role in orchestrating the effort to discredit Wilson yesterday." Previously, the administration claimed it had not engaged in a smear campaign against Wilson. Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's attorney, previously claimed that the facts were being spun "in an ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to try to get them to report negative information about Plame." But Fitzgerald made clear that Libby's disclosure took place as the result of "a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House, to repudiate" Wilson's claims, adding, "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson." Bush has now been placed at the center of those efforts. (The Progress Report has previously documented why Wilson was smeared -- simply put, because his public criticisms of the administration set into motion a series of events that were not only politically damaging but began to expose how the nation was misled into war. See our timeline.) "If the disclosure is true, it's breathtaking. The president is revealed as the leaker-in-chief," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA). While it is clear that Bush was engaged in the campaign to "punish" Wilson, it is unclear what knowledge he had of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. At the very least, Bush should now be asked when he personally learned of Plame and whether he authorized the leak of her covert identity.



N.I.E. BOLSTERED WILSON'S ARGUMENT: Libby testified that he was given specific authority by the president to "disclose certain information in the N.I.E." to former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and others. The administration decided to disclose only "relevant portions" for a very obvious reason -- disclosure of the full N.I.E. would have undermined the administration's argument and bolstered Joseph Wilson's. Recall, Wilson attacked Bush's 2003 State of the Union claim that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson wrote in July 2003, "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," specifically stating he saw no evidence of a uranium transaction. The N.I.E. bolstered Wilson's claim. The CIA gave "low confidence" to the uranium claim and said "we cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore." The estimate further said the intelligence on Iraq's uranium acquisition was "inconclusive."



BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S DEFENSE FULL OF LEAKY HOLES: At the heart of the White House and Libby's defense of their actions is the claim that a March 2003 executive order allows both the president and vice president to unilaterally declassify intelligence documents. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated yesterday that Bush has "inherent authority to decide who should have classified information." The White House maintains Bush's decision to disclose classified information means he declassified it. But it was unclear if that was the President's intention in this case. First, the action to leak the October 2002 N.I.E. was apparently done "without notifying Cabinet officials or others in the administration, including the CIA authors of the National Intelligence Estimate," raising questions about whether a real declassification ever occurred. Moreover, as Fitzgerald writes in the court filing, then-deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was engaged in a process to get the N.I.E. officially declassified at the same time Libby was leaking classified portions of the N.I.E. to reporters. On July 18, 2003, the administration decided to officially disclose the contents of the full N.I.E. at a White House press briefing, "suggesting the information had not been declassified until that time." Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, argued on National Public Radio yesterday, "At a minimum, it is grossly improper for the president to order a subordinate to disclose a highly classified document to an uncleared reporter and then have that document treated as continuing to be classified."



CASE AGAINST LIBBY NOT AFFECTED: The new disclosures do not affect the legal case against Scooter Libby. Libby is on trial for having allegedly lied to FBI investigators and the federal grand jury about how he learned of Plame's identity. As special prosecutor Fitzgerald said at his October 2005 press conference announcing the indictments against Libby, "At the end of the day what appears is that Mr. Libby's story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true. It was false." The court filing reasserts that the "central issue at trial will be whether defendant lied when he testified that he was not aware that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the CIA prior to his purported conversation with Tim Russert about Mr. Wilson's wife on or about July 10, 2003."

---

Note: Also today, the Bush Administration said, in effect, that the President can instruct aides to pass any information he selects on to the press at his discression.

W. House does not dispute leak claim
Fri Apr 7, 2006 4:31 PM ET12
By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday left unchallenged a prosecutor's disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized a former top official, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to share intelligence data on Iraq in 2003 with a reporter to counter Iraq war criticism.

Spokesman Scott McClellan insisted that Bush had the authority to declassify intelligence and rejected charges from Democrats that he did so selectively for political purposes.

"Declassifying information and providing it to the public when it is in the public interest is one thing," McClellan told reporters during a combative briefing. "But leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious, and there's a distinction."

---

From Josh Marshall at TPMCafe - April 7th, 2007

"Peel back all the individual arguments from Al Gonzales and the president and whomever else they put forward, the underlying idea is not so much that the president is above the law as that he is the law. He embodies it, you might say, even embodies the state itself. And thus what he does can't be illegal. What he does is simply the state cogitating and defending itself."

---

Führerprinzip

From Wikipedia

"The ideology of the Führerprinzip sees each organization as a hierarchy of leaders, where every leader (Führer, in German) has absolute responsibility in his own area, demands absolute obedience from those below him and answers only to his superiors. The supreme leader, Adolf Hitler, answered to no one. Giorgio Agamben has argued that Hitler saw himself as an incarnation of auctoritas, and as the living law itself. The Führerprinzip paralleled the functionality of military organizations, which continue to use a similar authority structure today. The justification for the civil use of the Führerprinzip was that unquestioning obedience to superiors supposedly produced order and prosperity in which those deemed 'worthy' would share.

This principle became the law of the Nazi party and the SS and was later transferred onto the whole German totalitarian society. Appointed mayors replaced elected local governments. The Nazis suppressed associations and unions with elected leaders, putting in their place mandatory associations with appointed leaders. The authorities allowed private corporations to keep their internal organization, but with a simple renaming from hierarchy to Führerprinzip. In practice, the selection of unsuitable candidates often led to micromanagement and commonly to an inability to formulate coherent policy.

"If two men are standing next to each other, and one runs a mile and a half off to the the right then demands that the other meet him half way; that's not compromise."

Posted on economistsview.com by: ken melvin | Apr 7, 2006 4:51:46 AM

Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989–2004

Arthur Kennickell
Federal Reserve Board Senior Economist & Project Director
Jan. 2006

Ownership shares.
"For some assets, the distributions of the amounts held are far more disproportionate than the differences in ownership rates. Most striking is the 62.3 percent share of business assets owned by the wealthiest 1 percent of the wealth distribution in 2004 (table 11a); the next-wealthiest 4 percent owned another 22.4 percent of the total. Other key items subject to capital gains also show strong disproportions: the wealthiest 5 percent of families owned 61.9 percent of residential real estate other than principal residences, 71.7 percent of nonresidential real estate, and 65.9 percent of directly- and indirectly-held stocks. For bonds, 93.7 percent of the total was held by this group.

The lowest 50 percent of the wealth 28 distribution, which held only 2.5 percent of total net worth in 2004, came close to its population share only in holdings of installment debt (46.2 percent of the total) and credit card debt (45.7 percent of total outstanding balances). Although the 50th-to-90th percentile group held only 27.9 percent of total net worth, they came closer to holding their population share than any of the other wealth groups. In the case of principal residences and associated debts, vehicles, and credit card balances, they exceeded their population share; note that their income share was equal to their population share in 2004.

Relative to the balance sheet for the wealth percentile groups in 1989 (table 11b), there were substantial changes in amounts by 2004—for example total net worth rose 94.4 percent over the period. At the same time, there was remarkably little change in ownership shares that was statistically consistent. However, for principal residences and other residential real estate, the data do show a significant increase in the share of the wealthiest 1 percent, which was mainly offset by declines for the 50th-to-90th percentile group.

Telephone Surveillance Permission Form
The Atlantic Monthly | May 2006
Humor by Bruce McCall

Note: Your telephone may be tapped in the course of conducting official surveillance business. If you hear clicking, hang up immediately and call your lawyer. Click here for the cartoon (in PDF format.)

Biodiesel Basics
How to Run Your Car on Used Salad Oil
eMagazine.com
by Erica Gies
April 2006

For financial, political and environmental reasons—including the fact that we may soon reach the peak of oil production, after which fossil fuels will get increasingly expensive—Americans are trying out biodiesel, both in their vehicles and (mainly in the Northeast) for home heating.

Note:This article includes consideration of several concerns about bio-diesel's desireability as a user, and environmentally friendly fuel.

Gen. Anthony Zinni's Speech: "The Future of the Middle East", Mar. 23, 2005

Gen. Zinni's Comment:

"It’s the kind of stupid strategy that said the road to Jerusalem was through Baghdad, when the road to every capital in that part of the world is through Jerusalem."

Gen. Zinni's 60 Minutes Episode

They've Screwed Up...
May 21st, 2004

"“There has been poor strategic thinking in this,” says Zinni. “There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure.”

“I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning,” says Zinni. “The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. … He got the latter. He didn’t get the first two.”

Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time - with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: “This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don’t feel it needs to be done now.”

But he wasn’t the only former military leader with doubts about the invasion of Iraq. Former General and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki all voiced their reservations.

Zinni believes this was a war the generals didn’t want – but it was a war the civilians wanted.

“I can't speak for all generals, certainly. But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained. The no-fly, no-drive zones. The sanctions that were imposed on him,” says Zinni.

Last month, Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that he hadn't anticipated the level of violence that would continue in Iraq a year after the war began. Should he have been surprised?

“He should not have been surprised. You know, there were a number of people, before we even engaged in this conflict, that felt strongly we were underestimating the problems and the scope of the problems we would have in there,” says Zinni. “Not just generals, but others -- diplomats, those in the international community that understood the situation. Friends of ours in the region that were cautioning us to be careful out there. I think he should have known that.”

Instead, Zinni says the Pentagon relied on inflated intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi exiles, like Ahmed Chalabi and others, whose credibility was in doubt. Zinni claims there was no viable plan or strategy in place for governing post-Saddam Iraq.

“As best I could see, I saw a pickup team, very small, insufficient in the Pentagon with no detailed plans that walked onto the battlefield after the major fighting stopped and tried to work it out in the huddle -- in effect to create a seat-of-the-pants operation on reconstructing a country,” says Zinni.

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. “I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility,” he says.

“But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.”

Adds Zinni: “If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.”

A Brief Overview of the Major Flaws with Health Savings Accounts

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
April 5th, 2006

* HSAs would weaken the existing health insurance system and could actually increase the number of uninsured.

* HSAs shift risks to individuals, leave less-healthy individuals facing substantial costs, and potentially result in worse health outcomes.

* HSAs have little potential to improve the health insurance system.

* HSAs would significantly increase the federal budget deficit, especially in future decades when the nation already will be under fiscal strain.

* HSAs provide the largest tax breaks to those who least need help paying for health coverage.

---

Administration Defense of Health Savings Accounts Rest on Misleading Use of Statistics
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
By Edwin Park and Robert Greenstein
Feb. 16, 2006

---

Office of Personnel Management Introduction Web Page on HSA's

---

IRS Main Page for HSA Implementation & Guidance

---

Both Bush And Kerry Miss The Mark On Health Care From theconglomerate.org Website
Posted by Nick Infusino

II. President Bush's Health Savings Accounts

President Bush's plan sounds good in theory but it is impracticable in application. Bush aims to address the "root causes of rising health care costs" by establishing Health Savings Accounts (HSA), allowing small-businesses to establish Association Health Plans (AHP), allowing people and/or employers to shop across state lines for health insurance and tort reform.

In theory, a Health Savings Account (HSA) is supposed to allow individuals and/or small businesses to purchase low premium, high deductible health care plans while the individual and/or small-business contributes pre-tax dollars, up to the allowable limits (a per year limit of $2,600 for individual and $5,150 for families), in a HSA. The HSA is to be established early in one's life, when health care costs are minimal, thereby allowing the account to accumulate a large surplus due to the accumulation of tax-free interest and contributions. As one grows older, the account is supposed to have sufficient build-up to cover the high deductibles and the rising premiums of the plan.

The problem with HSA's is twofold: it assumes rational actors and it assumes that there is a point in one's life where health care costs are minimal, thereby allowing a surplus to accumulate. I will use myself as the prime example for this flaw. I am a 25-year-old male who eats fairly well, keeps in pretty good shape and have not been to a doctor in at least five years. I also have a large build-up of student loans and limited income. Though I consider myself a fairly rational actor, I also have a sort of youth induced "unbreakable" feeling. When I join the workforce, I will need substantial amounts of my income to start my life (i.e. purchase a home, car, furniture etc.), and the rest of my income will go towards paying off my student debt and maybe into a Roth 401K. Contributing money into an HSA will have a small priority on my list of income distribution.

The money can be better spent in other areas since I do not foresee a medical crisis in my immediate future. Now, when I get married, health care will rank higher on my priority list. I will start making contributions to my HSA because of this life-altering event. The problem is that I will also be looking to start a family. By starting a family, I will incur a substantial amount of health care related debt, most likely exceeding the maximum contribution levels to the account. Therefore, I will never see any account accumulation. Thus, the problem is that most people will not contribute to their HSA until they reach a point in their life where substantial health care costs are foreseeable, thereby making the account's accumulation minimal.

It could be argued that the employer would contribute to my account as part of an employment perk. This is an irrational argument given the statistics that I stated at the outset of this series. The trend is for fewer employers to offer health insurance because of the rising premiums. If an employer contributes to my HSA along with providing high deductible health insurance, then the employer will be spending as much money (if not more) than they are currently paying in insurance premiums. The trends clearly show that employers are becoming less willing to shoulder this burden (also the fact that most employers require co-pay is more evidence of this).

---

The Danger of Consumer-Driven Health Care.Crash Course
The New Republix
by Jonathan Cohn
Post date 10.31.05 | Issue date 11.07.05

---

The Bureau of Economic Affairs presents a graph showing America has a negative personal savings rate, which started in 2005

---

Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments
NY Times Business Section
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: April 5, 2006

The first data to document the effect of President Bush's tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000.

An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by The New York Times found that the benefit of the lower taxes on investments was far more concentrated on the very wealthiest Americans than the benefits of Mr. Bush's two previous tax cuts: on wages and other noninvestment income.

When Congress cut investment taxes three years ago, it was clear that the highest-income Americans would gain the most, because they had the most money in investments. But the size of the cuts and what share goes to each income group have not been known.

As Congress debates whether to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, The Times analyzed I.R.S. figures for 2003, the latest year available and the first that reflected the tax cuts for income from dividends and from the sale of stock and other assets, known as capital gains.

The analysis found the following:

¶Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.

¶These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.

¶Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years.

¶The savings from the investment tax cuts are expected to be larger in subsequent years because of gains in the stock market.

A Video Showing Why Sen. McCain will not be our next President

From John Stewart's Comedy Central Interview: April 2006

---

McCain's intervention
From: xoverboard.com: April 2006
Posted by August J. Pollak at 10:46 AM

"For the last few months I've been pretty solid in the camp that John McCain was poised to take the Republican nomination despite all the talk against him, based on a lot of major factors. For one thing, his competition is close to nil, unless another big name like Giuliani or Rice tries engages in a flight of fancy. A simple campaign of much of what he said in 2000, combined with a hammering over and over again of "I'm the best chance against Hillary" would bring enough right-wing "I'd never vote for him!" delegates to his side.

That pretty much got all wiped out in an incalcuable flop-sweat appearance on The Daily Show last night. There aren't any clips up yet, but if you missed it, the moment was just a spectacular embarassment for McCain.

McCain appeared, via satellite, to respond to Jon Stewart's questions about McCain's sudden conversion to right-wing gladhanding. (McCain, who routinely chastized the influence of Jerry Falwell, is now going to deliver the commencement address at Liberty University.) What defined the interview, of which there were maybe ten questions at most, was that Stewart became the legitimate political pundit asking honest questions and expecting an honest answer, and McCain the comedian, attempting to deflect every challenge to his credibility with a joke.

It was an eerie moment, watching two men who clearly like each other in real life doing their best not to blatantly insult the intelligence of the other. In the end, McCain just humiliated himself. It was just a back and forth of Stewart asking some form of "so, no offense, but why exactly are you a complete flip-flopping hypocrite who appears to be doing and saying anything to get elected?" followed by McCain refusing to actually answer the question at all and instead cracking a quip to Stewart like he wasn't serious.

The problem is that Jon Stewart obviously was serious. Serious the way a friend confronts another friend about his drug habit. And McCain's dodges we so open, so obvious, that I doubt a single voter in the country who watched it didn't immediately see McCain as that addict: mumbling, blocking, and pleading in some vain effort to claim he's not doing what everyone already knows he's doing.

This is of course a silly statement for most of the Western World, but it's a significant one for me: John McCain does not have a chance of winning the Republican nomination for president. Last night a fake news show totally revealed just who the fake really was."

Extremism

"It's this sort of insanity, of falsely declaring that fringe right-wing values are mainstream while mainstream views are extreme, that is sending the country over the cliff." Charles LNU - April 2006

Fascism Anyone?
Laurence W. Britt
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2.

Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

"We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.

From Walter Cronkite's RTNDA Speech - Sept 17, 1997
"Our only enemies are those who would erect barriers between the people and the truth. And the perpetual struggle against them--ah, my friends, there is a crusade that's worth the ride."

Excerpts: RTNDA Convention Speech by Edward R. Murrow - Oct. 15, 1958

RTNDA Convention
Chicago
October 15, 1958
[Full Text Here]
...
"But this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.

This instrument, [television], can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Fred. W. Friendly Speech -Accepting the Paul White Award

"If I Had My Career in Broadcast Journalism to Start Over Again in August, 1986…"
Salt Lake City
August 29, 1986