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Mini-Ed: Bush And Terrorism: A Neglected Back Story, Jerry Politex

In the opinion piece by William Fisher that follows, we learn that on Tuesday "A former Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, 47, accused of helping to lead a terrorist group that has carried out suicide bombings against Israel, was acquitted on nearly half the charges against him and the jury deadlocked on the rest including charges he aided terrorists. The case was seen as one of the biggest courtroom tests yet of the Patriot Act's expanded search-and-surveillance powers."

While this story is being reported in the U.S. mainstream press this week, what we're not being reminded of is its previous news reports: Al-Arian, a Muslim leader and Democrat, worked to get out the Bush vote in Tampa during the 2000 presidential campaign (Washington Post), Newsweek published a photo of Bush, Laura, and the Al-Arian family at a Florida campaign stop (Boston Globe) [photo here], where Bush called Al-Arian's son "Big Dude" (Newsweek), and Al-Arian discussed the Justice Department's terrorism policy on secret evidence with Bush. "When he debated Al Gore later in the year, Bush even made a point of bringing up the secret-evidence issue."(MSNBC). According to the National Review, " The Bush campaign in 2000 very determinedly reached out to Muslim voters. Indeed, Muslim-Americans may have tipped the election to George Bush. One survey suggests that the 50,000 Muslim voters of Florida, normally staunch Democrats, reacted to Al Gore's selection of Joe Lieberman as his running mate by voting 80% for Bush."

In 2001 Al-Arian was invited to the White House to attend a briefing of Muslim-American leaders, his son was given a congressional internship, and, when "Big Dude" was later ejected from a White House meeting on faith-based initiatives, Bush sent the Al-Arians a letter of apology (Washington Post) "and ordered the deputy director of the Secret Service to apologize as well." (National Review) In Mike Isikoff's MSNBC story, we learned that the "Secret Service had flagged Al-Arian as a potential terrorist prior to his visit to the White House." One would think the mainstream press would have found all of this to be an interesting back story to this week's turn of events. (documentation) --Politex

You Be The Judge: Progress In U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions? , William Fisher

Amidst charges that President Bush and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) are inflating the number of criminal prosecutions for terrorism, five cases shed light on the administration’s mixed record of convictions during 2005....These cases provide context for assertions by President Bush, his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and many other senior administration officials, that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."

But, according to an analysis of the DOJ’s own records by the Washington Post, the numbers are misleading. The paper claimed that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied – have been convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security”. “Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism”, the analysis shows. “For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.” Said The Post, “Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government's effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here.

The DOJ’s campaign to round up and detain alleged terrorists began under then Attorney General John Ashcroft almost immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. During that period, large numbers of people -- primarily Arabs and other Muslims as well as South Asians – were arrested by the DOJ and held without charges or lawyers in jails run by immigration agencies. No one caught up in this dragnet was ever accused of any terror-related crime. Some were released, often after being held incommunicado for months. Some claimed to have been beaten or otherwise mistreated. Most were deported for immigration violations – not a criminal offense under U.S. law. David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and author of "Enemy Aliens," asserts that the "centerpiece of the domestic war on terrorism has been preventive detention."

"In the first seven weeks after Sept. 11, the DOJ admitted to detaining nearly 1,200 men as suspected terrorists, nearly all foreign nationals," he said. "It subsequently adopted two anti-terrorism immigration initiatives that were aimed at men from Arab and Muslim countries on the theory that they were more likely to be terrorists. Those programs led to the detention of nearly 4,000 more people. Yet of these, not one stands convicted of any terrorist offense. The administration's record is zero for 5,000." In a number of cases since then, the DOJ has conducted numerous high-profile press conferences accusing people of terror-related offenses, only to be prevented from bringing these charges in court because torture had been used to extract confessions from the targets. Evidence obtained through torture is not admissible as evidence in a U.S. court....

Xmas: How The Theocon Grinches Are Trying To Steal Christmas, Adam Cohen (excerpts)

Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda. The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.

The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing." Throughout the 1800's, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because "they do not accept the day as a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states. Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" and Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly drawings, which created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened religious leaders' worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. By the 1920's, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the "Christmas shopping season."

Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: "the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism." A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a "profit-seeking period." This ethic found popular expression in "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy's advice to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find" and her assertion that Christmas is "a big commercial racket," and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day. This year's Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating commercialization - they're insisting on it....The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools. It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own.

Verse: Would Jesus?, Doug Long

George, you've done a lot of killing.
And you do it with aplomb.
Perhaps you would be willing
to say: Who would Jesus bomb?

You've killed thousands in Iraq,
And you keep on killing more.
There's some info that we lack:
Would Jesus start a war?

You knew before your war began
Your reasons wouldn't fly.
So won't you tell us if you can:
To whom would Jesus lie?

It's almost time now to adjourn,
So won't you let us court your
Opinion on this big concern:
Who would Jesus torture?

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Insta-Ed: Who does Judge Samuel Alito Jr. think he's fooling by presenting himself as a reasonable jurist? Here's a guy whose entire career seems to be based on interfering with women's lives. He wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, condoned the strip search of a 10-year-old girl and belonged to a conservative alumni club that resisted the admission of women to Princeton. --Maureen Dowd

Opinion: How To Stop Bully Bush, Bernard Weiner

During the campaign [Bush] almost always appeared before hand-picked supportive audiences, and how he almost never gives major foreign-policy speeches these days except before supportive military audiences. Ordinary American civilians who may or may not agree with all his policies are not to be included in the democratic process; as Bush famously told one citizen who expressed mild disapproval, "What do I care what you think?"...

It's plain that the Bush Administration believes (or at least suspects) that its own arguments, if presented straight, won't pass muster with the American populace, or, in the case of the purchased news stories in Iraq, that country's public. The Administration's versions of the truth won't be enough to convince readers, viewers or voters-- for good reason, as they derive from a greedy, mean-spirited ideology -- so propaganda is employed to fool the public. You'll recall that the White House Iraq Group, the unit established to "market" the war to the American people, had a devil of a time coming up with a successful selling tool. Should they tell the truth, that the war was necessary as part of a long-term campaign to control the huge oil/gas energy fields in the Mideast and to alter the geopolitical map of that region? No, that wouldn't fly with the citizenry, they figured; nobody wants their kids killed or maimed for imperial adventures created by ivory-tower ideologues who made sure never to put on their country's uniform in times of war....

Bush may make a few accommodations prior to the 2006 election -- withdraw thousands of Guard and Reserve troops, for example, and promise more withdrawals -- in order to seem to be in line with the public mood. But the war will continue, with bombing from the air taking the place of any boots missing on the ground, and the imperial goals of dominating the region and controlling the energy fields will remain operative. No matter how long it takes, Bush is willing to sacrifice the lives of U.S. troops and spend the treasury into bankruptcy for "the mission"; he believes the war against radical Muslims is his holy work and he won't back down unless absolutely required to do so. Besides, keeping the American citizenry on a constant fear-boil, Rove believes, provides openings through which to slip Bush&Co.;'s domestic agenda. In short, it's long since time for us to respond to the bullies in charge of our foreign and domestic policy, to remember the lessons of history when insecure leaders are not confronted early enough...

Opinion: Condi's Tortured Prose, Maureen Dowd (excerpts)

Our secretary of state's tortuous defense of supposedly nonexistent C.I.A. torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.... But in Bill's case, he was only talking about smoking a little joint, while Condi is talking about snatching people off the street and throwing them into lethal joints. "The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said. It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees." Ms. Rice also claimed that the U.S. did not transport terrorism suspects "for the purpose of interrogation using torture." But, hey, as Rummy likes to say, stuff happens.

The president said he was opposed to torture and then effectively issued regulations to allow what any normal person - and certainly a victim - would consider torture. Alberto Gonzales et al. have defined torture deviancy downward to the point where it's hard to imagine what would count as torture. Under this administration, prisoners have been hung by their wrists and had electrodes attached to their genitals; they've been waterboarded, exposed to extreme heat and cold, and threatened with death - even accidentally killed.

Does Ms. Rice think anyone is buying her loophole-riddled defense? Not with the Italians thinking of rounding up C.I.A. officers to ask them whether they abducted a cleric in Milan. And with Torquemada Cheney slouching around Capitol Hill trying to circumvent John McCain, legalizing torture at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, by preventing Congress from requiring decent treatment for U.S. prisoners.... When Ms. Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip. Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about W.M.D., she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition.

Quips: Rejected Pentagon stories for Iraqi papers:
"Osama's Orgy: The Tape Al Jazeera Won't Show You"
"Iraqi Security Forces Cheer Tot With Kitten Rescue"
"Bomber's Report From Afterlife: No Virgins!" --John Tierney

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Tuesday, December 6, 2005

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Inside Bush Watch: Today's Opinions and Features From Bush Watch Columnists,
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Insta-Ed: Just in time for Christmas travel, our Department of Homeland Security will allow scissors with 4" blades to be taken on board airplanes, along with screwdrivers up to 7" to unscrew them, turning the scissors into 2 knives that looked just as lethal as boxcutters when a congressman showed the makeshift weapons on TV last night. The excuse for providing take-on weapons to would-be terrorists given by a government rep was limited funds for security checks. I guess that 1% of the population that received the lion's share of the Bush tax cuts travels in private or government jets. Australia has announced it will not follow the U.S. lead. --Politex

Opinion: THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF FAKE NEWS, William Fisher

The story of the Pentagon’s latest PR efforts was revealed last week by the Los Angeles Times. It said that many of the articles were presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. The Times reported that while the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year, the newspaper wrote. The articles are received from the military and translated into Arabic and then placed with Iraqi media, both print and broadcast, by the Lincoln Group, a Washington D.C.-based public relations firm which is under contract to the Pentagon. Lincoln’s website boasts of its extensive network of relationships with Iraqi journalists....

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) recently returned from a trip to Iraq and wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal in which he pointed to Iraq's "independent television stations and newspapers" as evidence of the "remarkable changes" there. “I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. Last week, I was thrilled to see a vigorous political campaign, and a large number of independent television stations and newspapers covering it.” In coordination with President Bush’s speech last week at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, the administration published a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq". Among its claims: "A professional and informative Iraqi news media has taken root…More than 100 newspapers freely discuss political events every day in Iraq.”...

Congressional Democrats said the Lincoln Group’s activities were the latest example of questionable public relations practices by the administration. In an earlier case, payments were made to columnists, among them conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, who secretly received $240,000 for promoting “No Child Left Behind”, the administration's education initiative. "From Armstrong Williams to fake TV news, we know this White House has tried multiple times to buy the news at home," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said. "Now, we need to find out if they've exported this practice to the Middle East."...

Martin Kaplan, Associate Dean at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and director of its Norman Lear Center, told IPS, “Anyone who recalls the good-news propaganda than ran in the state-run communist press even as the Soviet Union was collapsing will find what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq creepy.  It sends a deeply troubling message about what they think democracy is.  But given their demonization of dissent in the United States, it sadly comes as no surprise.”

Opinion: Fight Theocon Illiteracy By Studying Science, Nicholas Kristof (excerpt)

The best argument against "intelligent design" has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for "mediocre design. But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole. One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people. "The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had," C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, "The Two Cultures."

Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors* and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines....This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn't realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we're risking our planet's future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change. In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the U.S. over the last 20 years, to 40 percent from 45 percent. Jon Miller, a professor at the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the U.S...."

*Of course there's no guarantee that having more doctors in Congress will improve the scientific sophistication of that august body. Senate majority leader Bill Frist is a doctor; yet, he was perfectly willing to throw out what he learned in med school to get evangelical votes during the Schiavo fiasco. --Politex

Big Bush Lies: Definition of a Lie: "2. Something that misleads or deceives" (Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary)
Bush Lie #4 (of 55): "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Source: Interview of the President by TVP, Poland, White House (5/29/2003).
Why This Statement is A Lie: This statement was misleading because it claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.

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Monday, December 5, 2005

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Insta-Ed: Want to be an op-ed writer in the mainstream press but want to tell the truth? Be like the clown in King Lear: write comedy. That way, you can be truthful and your readers can pretend they don't believe you. Who's going to believe a clown! Here's an example to get you started. --Politex

South America: Why American Corporations Say "No MAS" to Morales , Jason Miller

According to an entry in Wikipedia, " As of December 4th, 2005, [Socialist Evo] Morales is consistently ahead in the [Bolivian presidential polls] at around 32% of the vote. There have been over 100,000 election judges sworn in as the country prepares for the elections on December 18th....Preliminary polls have placed Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism in an uncomfortable three-way tie with center and right wing forces and urban majority leaders Jorge Quiroga and Samuel Doria Medina, with only a few points' difference, showing how much of a "close call" the 2005 Bolivian presidential election will be." What follows is a defense of Morales by Jason Miller, an American activist whose affiliations include Amnesty International and the ACLU....

Opinion: What's Trickling Down Isn't Cash, Paul Krugman (excerpt)

it's hard to convince people that the economy is booming when they themselves have yet to see any benefits from the supposed boom. Over the last few years G.D.P. growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared. But that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans. Back in August the Census bureau released family income data for 2004. The report, which was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina, showed a remarkable disconnect between overall economic growth and the economic fortunes of most American families.

It should have been a good year for American families: the economy grew 4.2 percent, its best performance since 1999. Yet most families actually lost economic ground. Real median household income - the income of households in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation - fell for the fifth year in a row. And one key source of economic insecurity got worse, as the number of Americans without health insurance continued to rise. We don't have comparable data for 2005 yet, but it's pretty clear that the results will be similar. G.D.P. growth has remained solid, but most families are probably losing ground as their earnings fail to keep up with inflation.

Behind the disconnect between economic growth and family incomes lies the extremely lopsided nature of the economic recovery that officially began in late 2001. The growth in corporate profits has, as I said, been spectacular. Even after adjusting for inflation, profits have risen more than 50 percent since the last quarter of 2001. But real wage and salary income is up less than 7 percent. There are some wealthy Americans who derive a large share of their income from dividends and capital gains on stocks, and therefore benefit more or less directly from soaring profits. But these people constitute a small minority. For everyone else the sluggish growth in wages is the real story. And much of the wage and salary growth that did take place happened at the high end, in the form of rising payments to executives and other elite employees. Average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, are lower now than when the recovery began.

So there you have it. Americans don't feel good about the economy because it hasn't been good for them. Never mind the G.D.P. numbers: most people are falling behind....

Tom Tomorrow: A Neocon Dialogue

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Sunday, December 4, 2005

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Mission Accomplished: Big Oil's Occupation Of Iraq, Heather Wokusch

The Bush administration’s covert plan to help energy companies steal Iraq’s oil could be just weeks away from fruition, and the implications are staggering: continued price-gouging by Big Oil, increased subjugation of the Iraqi people, more US troops in Iraq, and a greater likelihood for a US invasion of Iran. That’s just for starters. The administration’s challenge has been how to transfer Iraq’s oil assets to private companies under the cloak of legitimacy, yet simultaneously keep prices inflated.

But Bush & Co. and their Big Oil cronies might have found a simple yet devious solution: production sharing agreements (PSAs). Here’s how PSAs work. In return for investment in areas where fields are small and results are uncertain, governments occasionally grant oil companies sweetheart deals guaranteeing high profit margins and protection from exploration risks. The country officially retains ownership of its oil resources, but the contractual agreements are often so rigid and severe that in practical terms, it can be the equivalent of giving away the deed to the farm.

Since Iraq sits on the world’s third largest oil reserves, the PSA model makes little sense in the first place; Iraq’s fields are enormous and the exploration risks are accordingly miniscule, so direct national investment or more equitable forms of foreign investment would be in order. But as a comprehensive new report by the London-based advocacy group PLATFORM details, the PSA model “is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost.”...

On Bob Woodward: All The President's Media Whores, Frank Rich (excerpt)

Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends....In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.

What remains unrecorded in [Woodward's] "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.

Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A....

Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli....

We're Watching: Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" (MGM)

Sunday Funnies:

A story by Republican House leaders (By Mark Fiore)
America: A Brief Parable (By Tom Tomorrow)
Nixon vs. Cheney (By Ward Sutton)
Cartoon: Bush's "Victory" Strategy, Steve Bell

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Saturday, December 3, 2005

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Chaos In Iraq: Gross Incompetence or Sinister Policy?, Chris Floyd

The recent revelations about the virulent spread of death squads ravaging Iraq have only confirmed for many people the lethal incompetence of the Bush Regime, whose brutal bungling appears to have unleashed the demon of sectarian strife in the conquered land. The general reaction, even among some war supporters, has been bitter derision: "Jeez, these bozos couldn't boil an egg without causing collateral damage."

But what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy?

Investigative journalist Max Fuller marshals a convincing case for this conclusion in a remarkable work of synthesis based on information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents. Piling fact on damning fact, he shows that the vast majority of atrocities attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias are in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets, Global Research reports.

Opinion: Bush Failing Democracy At Home And Abroad, Maureen Dowd (excerpts)

When Bush officials weren't telling us fairy tales about the big, bad W.M.D. in Iraq, they were assuring us that the unprovoked war would be a kindness for Iraq, giving it democracy. But they are not just failing to bring democracy to Iraq as they help Iranian-backed mullahs install an Islamic republic with Saddamist torture chambers. They are also degrading democracy in America. They've tarnished American moral leadership with illegal detentions, torture, secret C.I.A. prisons in countries only recently liberated from the Soviet gulag, and Soviet-style propaganda both at home and in Iraq.

Guess the Bush administration didn't learn anything this fall when federal auditors said it had violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of its education polices. Bush officials got right back into the fake news business, paying to plant propaganda in the Iraqi press. They outsourced this disinformation campaign to something called the Lincoln Group - have they no shame? You have to admire Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman. He kept a straight face when he called the U.S. "a leader when it comes to promoting and advocating a free and independent media around the world." He added, "We've made our views very clear when it comes to freedom of the press."

Exceedingly clear. The Bushies don't believe in it. They disdain the whole democratic system of checks and balances.

We're Listening: John Taverner's "Akathist Of Thanksgiving" (Sony)

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Friday, December 2, 2005

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Impeachment: Faith-Based Bush Vs. His Reality-Based Job, Walter C. Uhler

...Like America's evangelicals, we should have taken Bush at his word in 1999, when he smugly asserted: "Nobody needs to tell me what I believe. But I do need somebody to tell me where Kosovo is." Unfortunately, too few of us failed to state that what he was offering us—a core of ignorance and incompetence, especially in foreign affairs, shrouded by faith in Jesus—was inadequate for presidential decision making. As a consequence, America not only got a President to whom God supposedly confides, but also a President who permitted a cabal led by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and a handful of Zionist neocons to show him where Iraq is. Now—given his debacle in Iraq—it should be obvious to all Americans that even confiding with God doesn't compensate for Bush's brain....

But while the American public has allowed its views to be influenced by facts—even if belatedly—President Bush has not. And that's...why Americans should pay no attention to his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It's based upon pure faith! His record as a candidate and as President richly supports the conclusion that no set of facts can compete with the faith Bush places in his faith.... Readers of Ron Suskind's excellent New York Times Magazine article, "Without a Doubt" (October 17, 2004) will recall Bruce Bartlett's troubling observation about Bush. Although a Republican and former adviser to Ronald Reagan, Bartlett nevertheless said: Bush 'truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can't run the world on faith."

A senior adviser to Bush told Ron Suskind that guys like Suskind were "'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'" Then he added: "'That's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors …and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Is there anyone out there who can't envision an Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin implementing such evil, totalitarian practices? For me, it's simply the...reason to refuse to take Bush's "new" strategy seriously. It's simply one more "new reality" that "history's actors" want us to study.

Why attempt to sort out this bogus document when we know both the dishonesty inside it and the totalitarian tactics behind it? And, if it's true (as "current and former military and intelligence officers" have told Seymour Hersh) that Bush "disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding," then there is no alternative for us fact-based folks—other than pressuring Congress to remove him (and the nefarious Cheney) from office by way of impeachment.

Big Bush Lies: Bush Lied In Iraq "Victory" Speech, Think Progress (excerpt)

[In his recent "victory" speech,] President Bush claimed that Iraqi security forces “primarily led” the assault on the city of Tal Afar. Bush highlighted it as an “especially clear” sign of the progress Iraq security forces were making in Iraq: "The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year’s assault in Fallujah. In Fallujah, the assault was led by nine coalition battalions made up primarily of United States Marines and Army — with six Iraqi battalions supporting them…This year in Tal Afar, it was a very different story. The assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces — 11 Iraqi battalions, backed by five coalition battalions providing support. "

[After the speech,] TIME Magazine reporter Michael Ware, who is embedded with the U.S. troops in Iraq who participated in the Tal Afar battle, appeared on Anderson Cooper. He said Bush’s description was completely untrue: "I was in that battle from the very beginning to the very end. I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with al Qaeda. They were not leading. They were being led by the U.S. green beret special forces with them. Green berets who were following an American plan of attack who were advancing with these Iraqi units as and when they were told to do so by the American battle planners. The Iraqis led nothing."

Cartoon: Bush's "Victory" Strategy, Steve Bell

We're Reading: Paul Waldman's "Fraud: The Strategy Behind The Bush Lies..." (Sourcebooks, Inc.)

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Thursday, December 1, 2005

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Opinion: New Bush Iraq War Plan Divorced From Reality, NYT Editorial (excerpts)

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war....

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat....

Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory." His strategy document defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure"; and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, and "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."...A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

Opinion: "Complete Victory" Doesn't Square With Bush Plan, Burns and Filkins (excerpts)

Shortly after formal Iraqi sovereignty was restored in June last year, a new American commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., joined with a new American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, to order a complete review of the way the Iraq war was being fought. At that point, officers involved in the review have acknowledged, the war on the ground, with insurgents running rampant in Falluja and elsewhere, bore little relationship to what one senior commander called the "illusionist" version put out by the American occupation authority, or by Mr. Bush and other top officials in Washington....

[In his Annapolis speech Bush] acknowledged problems that have hobbled the American enterprise since the 2003 invasion: An American effort to build up Iraqi forces that went through a top-to-bottom makeover after early deployments of Iraqi troops saw them "running from the fight." Iraqi units that are "still uneven," despite the new American effort to train and equip them that has cost more than $10 billion. A Sunni Arab community that remains largely unyielding, despite months of efforts by Americans seeking to draw them back into the corridors of power....

Mr. Bush closed with a vow to "settle for nothing less than complete victory," without saying how that squared with the plan to hand over the main burden of the war to the newly trained Iraqi troops who, American field commanders say, have done well in some recent battles but much less impressively in others. Nor did the president say how his rejection of "artificial timetables" would be sustained politically if the plan for American troops to step back decisively in 2006, and for Iraqi units to step forward, falters in the face of the unrelenting insurgency.

Opinion: Bush Defines Victory In Iraq. Yeh, Right, Bob Herbert (excerpts)

"We will never back down," said Mr. Bush in his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy yesterday. "We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory." I don't think there were many people who believed him. Members of Mr. Bush's own party are nervously eyeing next year's Congressional elections. They would abandon Iraq in a heartbeat if it meant the difference between getting re-elected or having to hunt for a real job. This war (which has already cost the lives of more than 2,100 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis) was cynically launched (it was never about Sept. 11) and incompetently fought (we have never sent enough troops or sufficient equipment), and will be brought to a close by people obsessed not with the security of the United States and the welfare of the troops, but with the political calendar.

"I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," said Mr. Bush. He then dutifully defined victory as follows: "Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation." Those were some of yesterday's talking points. Here's today's reality: the $6-billion-a-month U.S. military mission in Iraq is unsustainable, as is the political support for the war. There is now a virtual consensus that a significant American troop withdrawal will get under way in 2006. Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are ill equipped, understaffed and widely infiltrated by private militia members and insurgents. In many ways, it's an amateurish operation....

The picture in Iraq is not a pretty one, and there is no indication that substantial improvements are coming soon. If the president gets any of this, you couldn't tell it by his appearance yesterday. He stuck to his talking points. "To all who wear the uniform," he said, "I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief." We may not cut and run in Iraq, but with the G.O.P. sweating out next year's elections, the plans are already under way for American forces by the tens of thousands to cut and speed-walk toward the exits. Mr. Bush could have been honest about this yesterday, but he chose not to be....A president who's little more than a bundle of talking points cannot possibly maintain the long-term trust and confidence of the public. There's a disturbing remoteness to President Bush that seems especially odd in a politician who was selected by his party because of his supposed ability to project warmth and the kind of fundamental authenticity that his Democratic opponents lacked.

Opinion: Key Pillar of Bush Middle East Democracy Initiative Has Collapsed, William Fisher

A key pillar of the much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative of President George W. Bush has collapsed – brought down by Egypt’s insistence that Arab governments should have more control over grants from a new fund designed to help indigenous pro-democracy organizations. At an international conference attended by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and designed to strengthen local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society in the Middle East, Egyptian officials pressed for language stipulating that only organizations legally registered with their governments were covered by the new fund, known as the Foundation for the Future.

Egypt’s law governing NGOs places numerous restrictions on these organizations. The U.S. characterized the Egyptian position as inappropriate. "In our view and in the view of other delegations, this would have circumscribed NGO activity," said a senior U.S. official, who briefed reporters traveling with Rice. The U.S. delegation expressed disappointment with Egypt, which has been a major American ally on key issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Bush administration's international fight against terrorism. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit reportedly left before the conference ended The foundation has commitments of over $50 million to help nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions and professional associations foster freedom and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. The United States has pledged $35 million.

Verse: Bush's Recent Speech In Mongolia, Jerry Politex

Papers at home are talking trash
So I came here to give you cash
You folks still back me in Iraq
And I really love your yaks
(Ya' don't talk back!)

Just help me finish up my mission
And we'll have those Chinese wishin'
They helped us out in Iraq
And I really love your yaks
(Ya' don't talk back!)

Even though you drink that rancid milk
And Genghis Khan is of your ilk
You smoke lots of our tobac
And I really love your yaks
(Ya' don't talk back!) more

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

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Opinion: Bush's Leaving Will Not Be Pleasant, Chris Floyd

Last week, America's troubled sleep was shattered by a trumpet blast of truth sounding deep in Washington's corridors of power, where the rule of the Lie has held sway for so long. This intrusion of reality into the bloodstained fantasyland of the Bush Regime comes late in the day for the moribund Republic -- perhaps too late -- but it has struck a mighty blow against the Lie's adherents, driving them into spasms of hysterical panic, like rats exposed suddenly to the light. The unlikely instigator of this historic upheaval was U.S. Representative John Murtha, the 73-year-old conservative Democrat and war hawk, one of many "opposition" leaders who once strongly backed President George W. Bush's murderous folly in Iraq. Murtha, a Vietnam vet, has been a stalwart of the military-industrial complex for decades, supporting U.S. wars around the world and showering legislative largess on the weapons industry -- which has obligingly kicked back lobbying contracts to his kin and friends, The Los Angeles Times reports.

But a penchant for typical backroom grease is not necessarily incompatible with political courage. And Murtha showed plenty of the latter when he rocked Washington with a truly revolutionary act in these degraded times: stating the obvious. Calling Bush's war "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion," Murtha said U.S. forces should "redeploy" out of Iraq immediately; otherwise, Iraqis will never feel free, the insurgency will grow, terrorism will spread and the United States will sink further into debt and dishonor, putting the nation's very survival at stake....

None of this means the Bush nightmare is over, of course; not by the longest shot. This gang will grow ever more vicious as their support crumbles; in fact, it's a good bet that the worst is yet to come. The Bushists know that they have prison sentences hanging over their heads if they ever lose their grip on power. They will either do "whatever it takes" to keep holding the whip hand -- in which case we are in for political and social strife the likes of which America has not seen since the Civil War -- or, at the very least, they will make things bad enough that the nation's power elite will negotiate a settlement, as in Richard Nixon's day: We won't prosecute you if you'll just go away. In any case, it won't be pleasant....

Opinion: Vice Vader Won't Give George Back To His Father, Maureen Dowd (excerpts)

Things had been going so smoothly. The global torture franchise was up and running. Halliburton contracts were flowing. Tax cuts were sailing through. Oil companies were raking it in. Alaska drilling was thrillingly close. The courts were defending his executive privilege on energy policy, and people were still buying all that smoke about Saddam's being responsible for 9/11, and that drivel about how we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. Everything was groovy.

But not anymore. Cheney could not believe that Karl had made him go out and call that loudmouth Jack Murtha a patriot. He was sure the Pentagon generals had put the congressman up to calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Is the military brass getting in touch with its pacifist side? In Wyoming, Vice shoots doves. How dare Murtha suggest that Cheney dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged the draft? Murtha thinks he knows about war just because he served in one and was a marine for 37 years? Vice started his own war. Now that's a credential!

Now all these idiots are getting caught, even Scooter. DeLay's on the ropes and the Dukester is a total embarrassment, spending bribes on antique commodes and a Rolls-Royce. Vice should never have let an amateur get involved with defense contracts....And now John Warner wants Junior to use fireside chats to explain his plan for Iraq. When did everybody get the un-American idea that the president is answerable to America? Vice is fed up with the whining of squirrelly surrogates like Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson on behalf of peaceniks like George Senior and Colin Powell. If Poppy's upset about his kid's mentor, he should be man enough to come slug it out. Poppy isn't getting Junior back, Vice vowed, muttering: "He's my son. It's my war. It's my country."

Quip: "Your Honor, Mr. Libby thought it was legal. He wrote it on a legal pad."

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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

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The Crusade: Bush Public Diplomacy Czarina "In Dangerous Denial", William Fisher

America’s newest public diplomacy czarina, Karen Hughes, is in dangerous denial and needs professional help. She believes that how we treat prisoners in the ‘global war on terror’ is unlikely to have a serious adverse affect on how people think of the United States. Ms. Hughes, longtime Bush confidante and now Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, told the House of Representatives International Relations Committee that the United States treats detainees humanely and in compliance with US laws and values. In response to a question from Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York, she added, "We were sickened as the rest of the world was by the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Democracies are not perfect, but we do hold people responsible."...

 One of the Congressmen reminded Ms. Hughes that the people of the Arab Street are smart – they know when they’re being conned. They should; they’ve been being conned for years by their own repressive and authoritarian governments. And, despite the self-serving propaganda of government-owned media, they also know that their governments rarely hold anyone responsible or accountable for mistreating prisoners, much less sending them to jail....

It should not come as a surprise to Karen Hughes that, thanks largely to the Internet, an awful lot of people in the Middle East and elsewhere know that the Justice Department lawyer, Jay Bybee, who wrote the now-famous memo justifying torture, got promoted to a lifetime appointment as a Federal judge. Or that then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who sold that memo to President Bush, was elevated to Attorney General of the United States. Or that some of the more egregious prisoner interrogation practices were approved by none other than our Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Or that others were okayed by General Ricardo Sanchez, our top Army field commander in Iraq, who is now awaiting his fourth star. Or that General Geoffrey Miller, our commandant at Guantanamo, was sent to Iraq to “migrate” GITMO’s interrogation methods to Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan – and that a top Army general overruled a military investigator’s recommendation that he be reprimanded. Or that Vice President Dick Cheney has been lobbying Congress to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from Senator John McCain’s anti-torture proposal. Or that the Bush Administration will neither confirm nor deny press reports that the United States runs a network of ‘black site’ prisons in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia....

The Crusade: Bush's Holy War In Iraq, Seymour Hersh

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose....

“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”...

Current and former military and intelligenc officials have told me that the President remain convinced that it is his personal mission to brin democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious t political pressure, even from fello Republicans. They also say that he disparage any information that conflicts with his view o how the war is proceeding....The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer. “I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

Big Bush Lies: Definition of a Lie: "2. Something that misleads or deceives" (Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary)
Bush Lie #3 (of 55): "Here's what -- we've discovered a weapons system, biological labs, that Iraq denied she had, and labs that were prohibited under the U.N. resolutions."
Source: President Bush, Russian President Putin Sign Treaty of Moscow, White House (6/1/2003).
Why This Statement is A Lie: This statement was misleading because it claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.

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Monday, November 28, 2005

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Rewriting History: Bush's Scorched Earth Policy, W. David Jenkins III

This administration has a history of attacking its critics on any level, be it personal or professional. Its members are capable of unleashing such usually successful, coordinated firestorms of vitriol against their enemies that they escape accountability time and time again. They are doing now what they have always done when caught with their political pants down – they spin, lie, stone-wall and cover up.

That’s what they did with 9/11, Valerie Wilson, the Energy Task Force, ties to Enron, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Operation Able Danger, Sibel Edmonds, Campaigns 2000 and 2004, Rendition and Torture, Cindy Sheehan, the Information Awareness Office, Patriot Act abuses, Guckert/Gannon, Katrina, Bunnatine (Bunny) Greenhouse, Halliburton, the Downing Street Memos and, of course, Iraq and the suppression of intelligence that did not fit their criteria.

That’s quite a list and I’m certain I’ve missed a few examples but when you look back on all of these episodes, you have to wonder how it’s possible that almost a third of the country can still support this administration. Maybe Dr. Joseph Mengele was right when at Nuremberg he stated, "The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it."...

Opinion: The Myth Of The Corporate Deal, Paul Krugman (excerpt)

Many of the corporate giants of the 1960's, companies whose pre-eminence seemed permanent, have fallen on hard times, their places in the business hierarchy taken by new players. General Motors is only the most famous example. So what? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: why does it matter if the list of leading corporations turns over every couple of decades, as long as the total number of jobs continues to grow? The answer is...corporations can't provide their workers with economic security if the companies' own future is highly insecure.

American workers at big companies used to think they had made a deal. They would be loyal to their employers, and the companies in turn would be loyal to them, guaranteeing job security, health care and a dignified retirement. Such deals were, in a real sense, the basis of America's postwar social order. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens. Still, the system more or less worked for several decades after World War II.

Now, however, deals are being broken and the system is failing. Remember, Delphi was once part of General Motors, and its workers thought they were totally secure. What went wrong? An important part of the answer is that America's semi-privatized welfare state worked in the first place only because we had a stable corporate order. And that stability - along with any semblance of economic security for many workers - is now gone....Instead of trying to provide economic security through the back door, via tax breaks designed to encourage corporations to provide health care and pensions, we should provide it through the front door, starting with national health insurance....Workers can no longer count on loyalty from their employers.

Tomorrow: Parable: Failure Is Our Middle Name

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Sunday, November 27, 2005

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France: New Brownies In The Wings, William Fisher

Years from now, we’re likely to remember two things about Hurricane Katrina: The massive human suffering caused by the incredibly dysfunctional response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, and President Bush’s iconic kudo to FEMA’S clueless head: “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie!” The ‘Brownie’ the president was referring to was, of course, Michael Brown, then FEMA’s hapless director. Days after Bush’s remark, Brownie was ordered back to Washington and later fell on his sword and resigned in disgrace (though he attempted to defend himself before a Senate hearing and remained on the payroll as a “consultant” for several more months).

But in Washington, there’s always a long line of mediocrities waiting in the wings to serve their country. And President Bush seems to have a particular knack for nominating them. Here are three of the more recent:...

Big Bush Lies: Bush, Cheney Lie About Present As Well As Past, Frank Rich (excerpt)

The cover-up is failing. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration. The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie?...

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s....

We're Watching: "Foyle's War, Season Two" (BBC)

Sunday Funnies:

Stay-the-Course Man! Leader of the free world (By Mark Fiore)
George Bush, Cheney's Meat Puppet (By Tom Tomorrow)
Thanksgiving Cartoon: Turkey Pardons Bush, Steve Bell
War Cartoon: Bush Bombs Al Jaeera, Steve Bell

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Saturday, November, 26, 2005

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Review: Don't Know Anything? Become A D.C. Consultant, Walter Brasch

“Michael Brown is now a consultant for emergency preparedness,” said a smug Marshbaum.

    “Michael Brown?” I said unbelieving. “You sure we’re talking about the same Michael Brown? The incompetent that Bush appointed to run FEMA? The guy who was more worried about what he looked like than what a catastrophic storm was doing to New Orleans? The one who disregarded every advance notice and blankly told us a couple of days after Katrina hit that the storm was bigger than anyone anticipated? The guy who hid out from the storm just as his boss had once hid out from the Vietnam War? That Michael Brown?”

    “Same one. All suited up and ready for action.”

    “Who’d hire that idiot?!”

    “Bunch of companies already have. Hadn’t been off the government payroll more than a month when he started lining up clients. Told the Rocky Mountain News, ‘If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses—because that goes straight to the bottom line—then I hope I can help the country in some way.’ Now, that’s altruism. He’s a real patriot. Will probably make more from consulting than he ever did on the federal payroll. Even has a fancy office in Washington, D.C.”

    That fancy office, I learned, was in the high-rent posh office suite of Joseph Allbaugh, who ran George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign. For his loyalty, but certainly with almost no knowledge of emergency management, Allbaugh became Bush’s first FEMA director before he resigned to become a consultant and lobbyist, bestowing the nation’s disaster response to his college buddy Michael Brown. One of  Allbaugh’s clients, the Shaw Group, received two $100 million contracts, much of it for nailing FEMA blue tarpaulins on houses and buildings at a cost about ten times the normal rate.

    “So, you see, it’s all so simple. If you can’t do anything right, just be a consultant,” said Marshbaum.

    For once, I had to agree with him.

Opinion: Hey, It Won't Be Bush's Problem! Dave Zweife

These haven't been a good couple of months for President Bush. His approval ratings have plummeted so far that even staunch members of his own party are admitting they disagree with him on several key issues and some are now openly challenging some of his policies. As I predicted after the 2004 elections, we're going to have trouble in a couple of years finding people who will admit to having voted for him, just as nobody would fess up to having voted for "Tricky Dick" Nixon's re-election in 1972.

But Bush's personal political problems are nothing compared to the problems that now face our country, problems brought on by a reckless administration that seems to have little regard for the country's future. In a word, it's scandalous. A front page of USA Today last week showed it all in graphic detail. If we continue on the same track we are today, our annual $319 billion deficit will be more than $4 trillion in 2050, when our grandkids are nearing retirement. "We face a demographic tsunami," insists David Walker, the U.S. comptroller general. He compares the United States to Rome before the fall of the empire. The country faces deficits in its budget, its balance of payments, its savings and its leadership, he told USA Today.

And he's far from alone. Both conservative and liberal economic experts are starting to sound the alarm. We can't keep spending on everything from an incredibly expensive war to a Medicare drug program that mainly benefits insurance companies and cut taxes by hundreds of billions at the same time. As Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, wrote in the Chicago Tribune last week:

"For too long, the philosophy in Washington has been that you can spend without consequence or sacrifice. That we can fight a war in Iraq and a war on terror, protect our homeland, provide our citizens with Medicare and Social Security and maintain our domestic priorities, all while cutting taxes for the wealthy and funding every local project there is."

It's not a sustainable future for America, he added.

Now we have Alan Greenspan lumping the country's record trade deficit on top of all our other problems. There's going to come a time - perhaps earlier than we realize - that foreign lenders are going to stop funding that deficit we keep growing. As Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget told USA Today, "I want to see a presidential election where the candidates are talking about what taxes they'll raise and what spending they'll cut." >What's for sure is that we simply cannot keep on the path we've been following the past five years.

Copyright 2005 The Capital Times

We're Listening: Count Basie, "100th Birthday Bash (Roulette Jazz)

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Friday, November 25, 2005

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Opinion: Reality Vs. The "Theory" Of Biblical Infallibility, Ernest Partridge

Heretofore, American society has been, in a sense, schizoid.   Educated elites, with the support of  enlightened commercial interests and government subsidies, have flourished atop a mass culture that was suspicious and dismissive of intellectual "eggheads," and stubbornly attached to traditional "old time religion."  And yet, the entire national economy has benefited enormously from scientific research, technological development and application, and public higher education, facilitating the opportunity for gifted and enterprising young people of modest means to join the elites -- a Jeffersonian "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue." But now that order has been overturned by the regressive right.  It has done so with the enlisted support of a faction of religious fundamentalism that is hostile to science and that demands and receives unprecedented influence in public policy....

There is a great deal at stake here. And yet scientists, secular scholars, and even liberal and moderate churches have been reluctant to challenge the fundamentalists, holding that such pre-modern beliefs should be “respected” as “private” and “personal.” Unfortunately, for their part, the fundamentalists have not displayed reciprocal respect and tolerance for contrary views about theology, scripture, or the grounds of morality. The fundamentalists take the issue of Biblical infallibility very seriously. As one of their leading spokesmen, Rev. Jerry Falwell warns,  if Christians are “able to say out loud that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God--that its inspiration is not really different from that of the Bhagavad-Gita or Thoreau's Walden or Maya Angelou's poems--then a great number of conservative and fundamentalist idols begin to topple."

In this case, I agree completely with the good Reverend: challenge “inerrancy,” and those “idols” become vulnerable. Which is precisely why I propose to criticize and refute the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible. Once that is accomplished, the progressive will be better equipped to topple those conservative and fundamentalist idols.

Thanksgiving Cartoon: Turkey Pardons Bush, Steve Bell

Wall St. Journal: Fed Abramoff Probe Expands To Include 4 Lawmakers, 12+ Aides, 2 Former Bush Officials (excerpt)

WASHINGTON -- A Justice Department investigation into possible influence-peddling by prominent Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is examining his dealings with four lawmakers, more than a dozen current and former congressional aides and two former Bush administration officials, according to lawyers and others involved in the case. Investigators want to know whether Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying firm partners made illegal payoffs to lawmakers and aides in the form of campaign contributions, sports tickets, meals, travel and job offers, in exchange for helping their clients.The Justice Department's probe is far broader than previously thought....

Prosecutors in the department's public integrity and fraud divisions -- separate units that report to the assistant attorney general for the criminal division -- are looking into Mr. Abramoff's interactions with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Bob Ney (R., Ohio), Rep. John Doolittle (R., Calif.) and Sen. Conrad Burns (R., Mont.), according to several people close to the investigation. Messrs. DeLay and Ney have retained criminal defense lawyers. Spokespeople for Messrs. Doolittle and Burns said they haven't hired lawyers....

It had been widely assumed in Washington that prosecutors were scrutinizing Mr. DeLay's dealings with Mr. Abramoff, who were longtime political allies. Mr. Abramoff took Mr. DeLay and several of his then aides on an expensive golf trip to Scotland several years ago. Mr. DeLay stepped down as House majority leader two month ago after he was indicted in Texas on unrelated campaign-finance charges. Until this week, prosecutors seemed to be focused primarily on whether Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, had bilked a half-dozen Native American tribes out of $80 million over four years. But a plea agreement made public Monday between prosecutors and Mr. Scanlon, and interviews with individuals and lawyers close to the investigation, show that the Justice Department is pursuing a much broader influence-peddling and bribery case....

Mr. Scanlon's guilty plea suggests that prosecutors may be setting a low threshold for bringing bribery charges. Mr. Scanlon pleaded guilty to bribing Mr. Ney by contributing just $4,000 to his campaign account in 2000 and an additional $10,000 to a separate Republican campaign fund. Prosecutors told Mr. Scanlon that if he made the contributions in exchange for some action or public statement by Mr. Ney, the donations amounted to bribery. That argument put pressure on Mr. Scanlon to plead guilty. Despite the surge in donor-financed campaign spending, the Justice Department, at least in the past 30 years, hasn't charged a lobbyist with bribery based on political contributions. The Justice Department won't discuss its tactics, but Washington lobbyists are watching closely. If it were to use a similar standard for other prosecutions, it might be easier for the Justice Department to bring cases against Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying partners.

We're Reading: John Hodgman's "The Areas Of My Expertise" (EP Dutton)

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Thursday, November 24, 2005

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Opinion: Three Views On Thanksgiving

The dinner was delicious, no matter what some people wrote later in Zagat, and after the football game, Miles Standish brought forth Jonathan Edwards, Puritanism's leading motivational speaker, who energized the crowd with his famous talk, "Cower Before God's Wrath, Ye Slimy Pusballs of Sin!"

And Governor Bradford reminded his flock that all honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, which must be overcome with answerable courages, and all ignored him because "CSI: Salem" was on. But all Americans owe much to those brave folk who supped that day.

For it is from those Pilgrims, the last WASP's to truly look good in black, that we have inherited the essential elements of the American character - our ability to look honestly at ourselves and find other people less intelligent; our ability to endure moments of amazing hardship before resorting to litigation; our ability to build this nation, so broad and strong, which the Chinese will one day be proud to own. --David Brooks, NY Times

***

The banquet room reeks and coils and sighs. It is full of bleak energy and missed opportunities, spiritual paranoia and repressed desire and dishonest laughter. The turkey comes out dry. There is not enough pie for Dubya. Rumsfeld slurps his scotch, drunkenly. Dick eyes the dark thigh meat. Condi has to pee. There is little to be thankful for, inside this room.

Outside, however, among the nation's awakening throngs, gratitude and hope are beginning to swell and grow anew. Only three years left. It's long but not that long. Every person in that gloomy room will be gone. History. Nothing left but an ugly stain, oily residue, scar tissue. The room will be refreshed. The turkey will be moist. There will be more cranberry sauce. This dark, warmongering chapter will finally end. Pie all around. --Mark Morford, S.F.Chronicle

***

The one thing I cherish about Thanksgiving is that it has remained commerce-free. Almost all the other holidays, especially Christmas, have been corrupted by commercialism. Even Thanksgiving is threatened by its proximity to Christmas -- with the sinisterly named "Black Friday," when shoppers arrive before dawn to save a buck or two. But as they stampede through the doors, as they elbow one another out of the way, as their greed distorts their faces, I have to remind myself that this is about the Christmas that is coming and not the Thanksgiving that has passed. --Richard Cohen, Washington Post

Opinion: Celebrate Un-Thanksgiving, Mickey Z.

Until the federal penitentiary was closed in 1963, Alcatraz Island was a place most folks tried to leave. On Nov. 20, 1969, the island's image underwent a drastic makeover. That was the day thousands of American Indians began an occupation that would last until June 11, 1971.

Even today, Alcatraz Island remains part of Native American culture as every November since 1975, on what is called "Un-Thanksgiving Day," Indians gather on the island to honor the occupation and those who continue to fight today....

Verse: A Rep From Ohio Named Jean, Madeleine Begun Kane

A Rep from Ohio named Jean
Called John Murtha a coward. How mean!
The Dems were quite riled
At her unprovoked bile.
She beat Hackett? How sad and obscene!

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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

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Opinion: Extreme Bush: The Good, Bad & Ugly, Bernard Weiner

I watched the newscast footage of Bush addressing an election-eve rally in Virginia a few weeks ago, and the guy looked and sounded somewhat inebriated, slurring his words, a goofy grin on his face, oversized mannerisms. I had read recent articles about Bush's inability to handle the enormous stress he's under these days (screaming and ranting at his aides), and the likelihood of his being on anti-depressants and/or hitting the bottle again, but just assumed those were sensationalist bloggers spreading some dirty fictions. But, oh my, when I watched the video clips of his sad performance at that Virginia rally, I began to wonder. It can't be easy being Bush these days, when all is collapsing around him. Consider:...

Opinion: Bush: "The President Who Invited America's Decline," Thomas L. Friedman (excerpts)

When I watch Mr. Bush these days...he looks to me like a man who wishes that we had a 28th amendment to the Constitution - called "Can I Go Now?" He looks like someone who would prefer to pack up and go back to his Texas ranch. It's not just that he doesn't seem to be having any fun. It's that he seems to be totally out of ideas relevant to the nation's future....Mr. Bush has two choices. One is to continue governing as though he's still running against John McCain in South Carolina. That means pushing a hard-right strategy based on dividing the country to get the 50.1 percent he needs to push through more tax cuts, while ignoring our real problems: the deficit, health care, energy, climate change and Iraq. More slash-and-burn politics like that will be a disaster.

It was appalling to watch Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney using their bully pulpits to act like two Rove attack dogs, accusing Democrats of being less than patriotic on Iraq. For two men who have fought this war without deploying enough troops, always putting politics before policy, without any plans for the morning after and never punishing any member of their team for rank incompetence to then accuse others of lacking seriousness on Iraq is disgusting....

"We are entering the era of hard choices for the United States - an era in which we can't always count on three Asian countries writing us checks to compensate for our failure to prepare for a hurricane or properly conduct a war," said David Rothkopf, author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. "If President Bush doesn't rise to this challenge, our children and grandchildren will look at the burden he has placed on their shoulders and see this moment as the hinge between the American Century and the Chinese Century. George W. Bush may well be seen as the president who, by refusing to address these urgent questions when they needed to be addressed, invited America's decline."

Quip: "Relax Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Bush doesn't say "Ka-ching" until he signs the bill."

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Tuesday, November 22, 2005

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Opinion: "The Belly Of This [Bush] Beast Will Never Be Full", Chris Floyd

Four years ago, President George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an "enemy combatant," on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that befoul the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it.

With great self-fluffing fanfare, the Senate passed two measures ostensibly designed to stem the flood of torture and tyranny issuing from the White House. But the twinned amendments to a military spending bill have the curious effect of canceling each other out: The anti-torture measure leaves Bush's tyranny intact, while the anti-tyranny measure will allow torture to continue unabated. This switcheroo, we are told by one of the scam's sponsors, "will re-establish moral high ground for the United States," The Washington Post reports....

These draconian measures reach far beyond a handful of hard-core terrorists. According to the Pentagon's own figures, more than 21,000 innocent people have been caged without due process in Iraq alone, The Guardian reports. Hundreds more have been unjustly imprisoned around the world. A regime that thrives on fear requires a steady stream of "enemy combatants" to justify its unlimited "war powers." The belly of this beast will never be full.

Covert History: The Man Who Sold Us Bush's War, James Bamford

A clandestine operation — part espionage, part PR campaign — ...had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Thomas Twetten, the CIA’s former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. “The INC was clueless,” he once observed. “They needed a lot of help and didn’t know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in.” Acting as the group’s senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress [INC]. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. “The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama — so they were known,” recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA’s station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency’s successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington’s neoconservatives....

The key element of Rendon’s INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a “management fee” of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group’s failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. “The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days,” notes Bruner. “Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department.”

Rendon’s influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world’s perception of reality — and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior — and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. “The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration’s outlook concerning strategic influence,” notes one Army report. “Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group.”...

Big Bush Lies: Definition of a Lie: "2. Something that misleads or deceives" (Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary)
Bush Lie #2 (of 55): "We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents."
Source: President Talks to Troops in Qatar, White House (6/5/2003).
Why This Statement is A Lie: This statement was misleading because it claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.

Tom Tomorrow: George and Scott: Air Un-American

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Monday, November 21, 2005

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France: FRANCE AFTER THE RIOTS: 'Autism,' Repression -- and the Socialists' Impotence, Doug Ireland

This past week, the conservative Paris daily Le Figaro ran an opinion piece that was a rather surprisingly acute diagnosis of what caused France's violent rebellion of ghetto youth:...

What makes this acid diagnosis remarkable is that this guest commentary was written by Guy Sorman (left), a well-known conservative, free-market essayist who frequently appears on television. That a neo-Hayekian like Sorman endorses affirmative action by the State is powerful testimony indeed to the all-pervasive racism that was the principal root cause of the ghetto youths' rioting (see my own long analysis below: "Why is France Burning? The rebellion of a lost generation.")

Unfortunately, not a single major political figure or party supports adopting an affirmative action policy -- and it is unlikely to happen any time in the near future. Affirmative action runs counter to that "archaic republican discourse" which, in asserting all French citizens are "equal," refuses to recognize race or ethnicity as the basis for any government action --and which even prevents the government from gathering statistics based on race or ethnicity, making the socio-economic and educational progress of minorities impossible to measure, and rendering them officially invisible for all intents and purposes. (Unofficially, of course, people of color are routinely targeted by the police on the basis of ethnicity, and frequently discriminated against by government agencies.)...

News Report: Want More FEMA Aid? Vote GOP!

JACKSON, Miss., Nov. 19 Associated Press- When the federal government and the nation's largest disaster relief group reached out a helping hand after Hurricane Katrina blew through here, tens of thousands of people grabbed it. Crowds in Jackson, Miss., arrived at the Mississippi Trade Mart on Sept. 6, one week after Hurricane Katrina, only to discover that Red Cross caseworkers had handled as many claims as they could that day.

But in giving out $62 million in aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross overlooked a critical fact: the storm was hardly catastrophic here, 160 miles from the coast. The only damage sustained by most of the nearly 30,000 households receiving aid was spoiled food in the freezer. The fact that at least some relief money has gone to those perceived as greedy, not needy, has set off recriminations in this poor, historic capital where the payments of up to $2,358 set off spending sprees on jewelry, guns and electronics....

The donors all across this nation thought they were giving money to put food in the mouths of people who had nothing and clothes on the backs of people who had lost everything," said State Representative John R. Reeves, who represents Jackson. "But that is not what happened here. There was a feeding frenzy. Free money was being handed out."...

In Jackson and two nearby counties, only 50 to 60 homes were declared uninhabitable, local emergency departments said. About 4,000 sustained damage, they said. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the Bush administration declared a disaster area along 15 Mississippi coastal counties, as well as 31 parishes in Louisiana. Residents there were eligible for federal emergency grants, housing assistance and money for repairs, medical bills and other costs.

But by Sept. 7, at Mississippi's request, the disaster zone was expanded as far as 220 miles inland, reaching 32 counties, including several that never experienced sustained hurricane-force winds. The zone eventually reached 47 counties. The disaster area in Mississippi - which is led by a Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican ally of President Bush's - extends 200 miles farther north than that in Louisiana, which is led by Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat who at times criticized the federal storm response....

Local government officials were baffled by the payouts. Weeks after the storm, Larry J. Fisher, director of the Hinds County emergency department, got a call from a regional FEMA representative saying that staff members wanted to know why county officials had reported that so few homes were uninhabitable. FEMA has sent aid to thousands of county residents who claimed their homes were ruined, including 7,622 checks for $2,000 in emergency financial assistance. But Mr. Fisher counted only about 50 uninhabitable homes and perhaps 4,000 with any damage at all. To resolve the discrepancy, Mr. Fisher recalled, he was told: "You are going to increase your number."...When asked about the conversation, FEMA officials said they were not aware of it.

Rowson 'Toon: Done Deal: Bush White Phosphorus Sale

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Sunday, November 20, 2005

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France: The rebellion of a lost generation, Doug Ireland

As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of times, I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing....

Under the headline "Budget Cuts Exasperate Suburban Mayors," Le Monde reports on how Chirac and his conservatives have compounded 30 years of neglect of the ghettos by slashing even deeper into social programs: 20% annual cuts in subsidies for neighborhood groups that work with youths since 2003, cuts in youth job-training programs and tax credits for hiring ghetto youth, cuts in education and programs to fight illiteracy, cuts in neighborhood police who get to know ghetto kids and work with them (when [Minister of Religion as well as Interior Minister] Sarkozy went to Toulouse after the first riots there, he told the neighborhood police: "You're job is not to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!" With fewer and fewer neighborhood cops to do preventive work that defuses youth alienation and violence, the alternative is to wait for more explosions of violence and then send in the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, hard-line paramilitary riot police noted for rightwing political and racial prejudices). Budget cuts for social programs plus more repression is a prescription for more violence....

Opinion: Liar Bush Is Losing Both Wars, Frank Rich (excerpt)

While the war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the administration's vainglorious mission to make Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall, there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.

One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.

...Only since his speech about "Islamo-fascism" in early October has Mr. Bush started trying to make distinctions between the "evildoers" of Saddam's regime and the Islamic radicals who did and do directly threaten us. But even if anyone was still listening to this president, it would be too little and too late. The only hope for getting Americans to focus on the war we can't escape is to clear the decks by telling the truth about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is making us less safe, not more, and that we have to learn from its mistakes and calculate the damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.... The arguments about how we got into Mr. Bush's war and exactly how we'll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war we are losing, one that will be with us long after we've left the quagmire in Iraq.

We're Watching: Takeshi Kitano's "Kikujiro" (Sony)

Sunday Funnies:

'Majority of Americans are un-American' (By Ward Sutton)
This week: 'Hide & Go Secret' (By Mark Fiore)
(Apologies to Bil Keane.) (By Mark Fiore)
Republicans: Stupid or Lying? (By Tom Tomorrow)
As the Polls Turn . . . (By Ward Sutton)
War Cartoon: "Phosphorus Is A Plant Nutrient, Suh," Steve Bell

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Saturday, November, 19, 2005

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Review: Good News, Bad News, William Fisher

As George W. Bush’s poll numbers plummet, questions about how his administration ‘sold’ the invasion of Iraq to the American people and its treatment of prisoners continue to dog the beleaguered president, stalling his second-term agenda. More than two years after the invasion of Iraq, the President still finds himself facing questions about whether the his Administration exaggerated or lied about intelligence relating to Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

...The war in Iraq and other issues have also cast public doubt on the ethical standards of the Bush Administration....The toll paid by the Administration for war-related and other issues has been high. According to a new poll, almost six in 10 -- 57 percent - say they do not think the Bush administration has high ethical standards and the same proportion says President Bush is not honest. The Associated Press / Ipsos survey found that just over four in 10 say the administration has high ethical standards and that Bush is honest. 

Notes and Errata: George W. Bush Gives Me Hope, Mark Morford

We cannot afford any more wars. The environment has been sold to the bone. The national spirit has been beaten like an Alaskan baby seal and the GOP has worked our last nerve, passed through the karmic blood-brain barrier, reached saturation to the point where even moderate Repubs and gobs of intelligent Christians are finally saying, Oh my God, what have we done, and how did it all go so wrong, and how much Prozac and wine and praying to a very disappointed Jesus will it take to fix it?

Which is why I'm here to tell you hope abounds. In fact, George W. Bush gives me hope....He gives hope because his narrow and myopic political ideology is right this minute being proved wildly unsound across the board, and his vicious leadership circle is revealing its true bloodstained colors and his party is crumbling at the center due to some of the worst policy decisions you will see in your lifetime. Simply put, the collapse of BushCo represents the intrinsic unworkability of a war-hungry, thuggish ideology. It is the failure of the bully, the innate defect in any political philosophy that has at its heart dishonesty, and fiscal irresponsibility, and death....

I know, it ain't over yet. You could easily argue that there are three toxic years left and there are plenty of other countries we can vilify and invade (we'd be bombing Iran right now if we weren't fresh out of both disposable U.S. soldiers and cash reserves) and there will be plenty of opportunities in the next 1,000 days for Bush to suck up to his terrified fundamentalist base and cause even more damage as he hunkers down and pretends to know how to go about the business of running the nation....

We're Listening: Orff: Carmina Burana (Sony)

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GOP Words: Intelligence n: What Dick Cheney wants and the CIA must provide -- or else. (See, Iraq, weapons of mass destruction)

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