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"We hope we're about to elect FDR," New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman told me earlier this week, "but we might be about to elect Grover Cleveland." He said he was referring to the front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

Grover Cleveland, for those who don't know their 19th century presidents, was the only Democrat who made it to the White House between 1860 and 1912, the decades when Republican big money ruled the country. Cleveland, elected in 1885 and again in 1893, mobilized the army to crush the 1894 Pullman strike of railroad workers, and joined Wall Street in supporting the gold standard. "He was what they called a ‘Bourbon Democrat,' as in the French royal family," Krugman explained. "He wasn't that different from the Republicans at the time."

Krugman said it appears that the key issue in the 2008 election will be health care, and that the Democrats have a health care plan that will work. His "biggest concern," he said, was "whether the next occupant of the White House will triangulate it into oblivion." He reiterated that he was talking about Hillary.

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With President Bush's original goal of establishing "a beacon of liberty in the Middle East" no longer operative, what, exactly, is the administration's goal for Iraq?

An independent government report released yesterday said there isn't one. The U.S. doesn't have a "National strategy for victory in Iraq" and, more specifically, a plan to rebuild the country's government and oil-based economy.

The Government Accountability Office report assailed "the lack of strategies with purpose, scope, role and responsibilities and performance measures" in securing and stabilizing Iraq. And the U.S. is not following through on the three broadly agreed upon strategies it previously outlined:

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Today the Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on President Bush's spying bill, which could validate warrantless domestic surveillance, immunize potential crimes by telecommunications companies and preempt related state investigations. The legislation was already approved by the Intelligence Committee, and Harry Reid said he wants a full floor vote "before the end of this year." But the FISA Amendments Act also faces filibuster threats from several Senators, including presidential candidates Dodd, Biden, Obama and Clinton, who oppose letting companies off the hook for their allegedly illegal surveillance of American citizens. Immunity is also a huge issue for Democratic and civil liberties activists – today the ACLU delivered petitions signed by 250,000 voters organized by MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and several liberal blogs.

The big news in today's hearing was Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy came out against immunity for the first time. (As recently as yesterday, his spokeswoman told The Nation he had not yet reached a position.) "A retroactive grant of immunity or preemption of state regulators does more than let the carriers off the hook. Immunity is designed to shield this Administration from any accountability for conducting surveillance outside the law," said Leahy. Many legal experts agree that retroactive immunity would fortify the administration's strategy to shirk accountability and maintain secrecy around domestic spying. Yet other Senate Democrats who have criticized Bush's spying still support immunity, including the majority of Democrats on the Intelligence Committee.

Intelligence Chairman Rockefeller has been waging the legislative battle on behalf of Bush. He not only pushed immunity through his committee, but last week he came very close to officially endorsing the administration's radical legal claim that the 2001 authorization of force (AUMF) against Afghanistan also authorized domestic spying – even though the legislation does not contain any reference to surveillance or spying. (Under this theory, administration officials have even cited the AUMF as a basis to invade Iraq and Syria without any congressional approval. Get ready to hear the same theory for attacking Iran.) Rockefeller's legislative report, which can guide judicial interpretation if the bill becomes law, appears to raise the AUMF as a possible basis for Bush's domestic spying. This drew a sharp rebuttal from several members of his committee, including Republican Senators Hagel and Snowe, who used the report's minority section to break down the issue:

We do not believe that the AUMF provided this authorization. We have seen no evidence that Congress intended the AUMF to authorize a widespread effort to collect the content of Americans' phone and email communications, nor does the AUMF refer to the subject. Furthermore, FISA already contained a provision that clearly governed surveillance actions in a wartime situation – a 15-day authorization for warrantless surveillance following a declaration of war. So this was not an uncontemplated question following September 11 and the passage of the AUMF.

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It was supposed to be the night Barack Obama took Hillary Clinton down.

But, when all was said and done, Obama was a bystander.

The opening question in Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate was a softball pitch from NBC's Brian Williams to the senator from Illinois. Noting Obama's interview in the Sunday New York Times, in which the senator from Illinois promised to get tough with Clinton for acting like a Republican, Williams asked him detail the votes and statements from Clinton to which he objected.

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Most fish-out-of-water stories are told at the expense of the poor fish. But not so with Aliens in America, which may well be the best television show you're not watching. Well, you'd first have to find that misbegotten offspring of the WB/UPN marriage, the CW channel.

Your efforts will be well rewarded with a very funny comedy that takes on racism, the war on terror, Islam, and that most hallowed of American institutions: high school. How can you resist a show that throws together a devout Pakistani teenager and small-town America?

Hollywood is usually at its excruciatingly racist worst when it comes to any plot that involves foreign exchange students of the non-white variety -- think Long Duk Dong slobbering over Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles. The joke is always at the expense of the "fish."

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Here's an important question:

Valerie Wilson has reminded us there was, in fact, a crime committed by the vice president‘s office, a multi-count crime that led to years of imprisonment, except the president commuted it. [But people] allowed the president to erase the blackboard and say it never happened, [as if] there has been no criminality in the vice president‘s office, or in the White House… That‘s the way people [sound], is everybody a jug-head now in politics?!

I mentioned criminality in the vice president‘s office a few weeks ago, and some reporter said he didn‘t know what I was talking about. Is it amnesia? Is it just bad reporting? I think it‘s probably the latter. Anyway, according to a new field poll in California, Rudy Giuliani is only at 25 percent. But he‘s double digit over the pack. I‘m amazed by that, Anne, because here we have Schwarzenegger, a pro-choice, moderate Republican in many ways--many, many ways--Maria Shriver‘s husband in many ways…

It's not just Matthews, either. The New York Times is still ignoring the new face-off over the surveillance bill. When the Times thought the entire Democratic caucus would roll over, the news was trumpeted in a front-page story "Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers," which reported that Democrats were "nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence." That turned out at least partially incorrect. The next day, October 12, the Times ran a more measured article, "House Panels Vote for More Scrutiny Over Foreign Eavesdropping," which it buried on A29. (Also note how "Democrats" turns to "House Panel" depending on the news.)

Does this mean that Chris Dodd, the leader of the fight against telecom amnesty, is getting no coverage in the Times?

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Attention shoppers: With the holiday season fast approaching isn't it time to give your child a doll or toy-train not made in a sweatshop?

That's the message labor rights advocates are now trying to get across- that consumers fretting about unsafe toys should also be alarmed about unsafe toy-making conditions. And they are directing part of their energy toward supporting "The Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act", a bill with 13 Senate co-sponsors, including Hillary Clinton, that calls for a ban on importing all sweatshop-made products.

"If you move production to Chinese factories that cut every possible corner to lower costs," said bill co-sponsor and North Dakota Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan at a Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing today, "You end up with young women worked to death in China and products that end up poisoning our kids here at home."

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Before the invasion of Iraq, while millions demonstrated in the streets, often waving homemade placards with "No Blood for Oil"--or equivalents like "Don't Trade Lives for Oil" and like "How Did USA's Oil Get under Iraq's Sand?"--the Bush administration said remarkably little about the vast quantities of petroleum on which Saddam Hussein's regime was perched. The President did, however, speak reverently about preserving not Iraq's "energy reserves" but its "patrimony," as he so euphemistically put it. The American mainstream media followed suit, dismissing arguments about the significance of Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil as the refuge of, if not scoundrels, then at least truly simpleminded dissidents who knew not whereof they spoke. Generally, in our news pages and on the TV news, with Iraq at the edge of a shock-and-awe invasion, Iraqi energy reserves were dealt with as if no more than a passing thought, as if the Middle East's main export was hummus.

Little has changed. When former Fed chief Alan Greenspan recently indicated in passing in his memoir that the war was "about oil," there was a brief firestorm of scorn in Washington; an administration spokesperson termed it "Georgetown cocktail party analysis" ("A refill of crude, please, straight up…") and Greenspan quickly began to backtrack under the pressure. Oil? Who us? The Bush administration's plans to protect the Oil Ministry in Baghdad and Iraq's major oil fields amid otherwise unchecked chaos in April 2003 were certainly noted in the news, but went largely uncommented upon (unless you were an Internet news jockey).

Here's the strange thing about the Iraq oil "debate" in our media world. Call me crazy, but if you were going to invade Iraq and oil wasn't right at the forefront of your brain, you would be truly derelict, even if you hadn't run a major energy services corporation or hadn't had a double-hulled oil tanker named after you. Jack Miles, author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book God: A Biography, has just recently suggested that the oil endgame in Iraq is in sight -- of which, except in the Web world, there has largely been neither a beginning game. nor a middle game.

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Domestic violence cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute.

But every once in a while, prosecutors get handed the tools for a conviction on a silver platter: An impartial eyewitness who just happens to be a police officer.

Such was the case in a domestic violence trial that made the local papers here in Maryland last week. A cop pulling into an Exxon station saw a man hit his girlfriend in the face three times, called in back-up and had the man arrested.

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The federal government will spend $2.4 trillion by 2017 for waging the "War on Terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the most mind-boggling statistic to come from the Congressional Budget Office's estimate released today on the rapidly rising costs of Bush's war.

The number assumes that the current 200,00 U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will be reduced to 75,000 by 2013 and remain at that level by 2017. At a hearing of the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, CBO Director Peter Orzag described just how much money we're talking about:

-$11 billion a month is being spent in funding for Afghanistan and Iraq-- of which $9 billion goes to Iraq. In 2003, President Bush's Budget Director, Mitch Daniels, estimated the cost of the Iraq War would be $50 to $60 billion.

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"Hillary's fear of humiliation, her fear of secrets being revealed, absolutely permeates her life," Carl Bernstein told a packed auditorium at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, earlier this week.

Bernstein is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter on Watergate, and author of a new book on Hillary, A Woman in Charge. His appearance in Yorba Linda was a historic moment of sorts, as he himself noted: if he had said in 1999, when he started doing research on Hillary, "that I would be invited to speak at the Nixon Library, and that I'd be talking about Hillary as possibly the next president of the United States, I'd be accused of smoking something--and inhaling."

The event marked the transformation of the Nixon Library from a private institution run by Nixon loyalists to a public one run by the National Archives, under the direction of historian Tim Naftali. Bernstein spoke to a full house--300 people--including many students from nearby colleges getting extra credit for showing up.

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They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war -- and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further; rogue states like Saddam's rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in the old fight, eager to make sure that the "Evil Empire," already long down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure that any new evil empire like, say, China's would never be able to stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle East, where Saddam's Iraq, planted atop the planet's third largest reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall -- with other states in the region visibly not far behind.

It looked like it would be a coming-out party for one--the debutante ball of the season. It would be, in fact, like the Cold War without the Soviet Union. What a blast! And they could still put their energies into their fabulously expensive, ever-misfiring anti-missile system, a subject they regularly focused on from January 2000 until September 10, 2001.

They were Cold Warriors in search of an enemy--just not the one they got. When the Clintonistas, on their way out of the White House, warned them about al Qaeda, they paid next to no attention. Non-state actors were for wusses. When the CIA carefully presented the President with a one-page, knock-your-socks-off warning on August 6, 2001 that had the screaming headline, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," they ignored it. Bush and his top officials were, as it happened, strangely adrift until September 11, 2001; then, they were panicked and terrified -- until they realized that their moment had come to hijack the plane of state; so they clambered aboard, and like the Cold Warriors they were, went after Saddam. In the process, they crashed that plane of state into Iraq, creating a classic Cold War disaster (which is why Vietnam analogies always come to mind) in another era. No small trick.

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Rebecca Solnit, as usual, offers plenty of food for thought in her essay, "Finding Time." As often with Solnit, I was both impressed by her insight, and impatient of her tendency to draw tenuous connections to all her pet issues/peeves, irrespective of the subject at hand.

Who can resist a piece that begins, "The four horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons."

Solnit offers some wonderful insights into the ways in which our lives are shaped by the tyrannical regimen of these four values, but the only downside is that much of it leads inexorably to a litany of the standard complaints against automobiles, commerce, McMansions, consumerism etc. There's even the obligatory admiring nod to those darned Europeans.

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It's not suprising that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized 18-term Congressman Pete Stark for his heartfelt and emotional comments about the Republican's failure to override Bush's veto of S-CHIP. In a blog last week, I predicted that Pelosi would do just that.

Still, it's downright disappointing. Maybe the DCCC should bring on board MSNBC's feisty Keith Olbermann to give it some backbone. I think Olbermann got it right when he called Stark's remarks "refreshing."

The way Pelosi turned on Stark is bound to turn people off of politics--which are already so canned and scripted, and devoid of human feeling and emotion. Look what happens to someone decent like Pete Stark, who steps out of the mold to express his anger and passion about what he believes, sincerely, is being doing to harm our kids.

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In a speech before 2,000 "Value Voters" today, Rudy Giuliani decided to cherry-pick from his past instead of entirely ignoring it. Giuliani's decision to draw upon his time as New York Mayor had some success though it was a less crowd-pleasing approach than Mitt Romney, who last night gave little indication he used to be Massachusetts Governor.

The usually bellicose Giuliani spoke in soothing, conciliatory tones to an audience that vehemently disagrees with his pro-choice, gay-rights positions. "We don't lose trust with our political leaders when they're not perfect," Giuliani reasoned. "We lose trust when they're dishonest." And he gave a long explanation of Christianity as a "religion of inclusion."

The characterization was met with silence. Giuliani failed to get the crowd going until he recalled kicking out pornographers in Times Square. Indeed, Giuliani's speech seemed to reveal more about the narrow set of issues of deep importance to summit attendees than the candidate himself. Conservative but not explicitly Christian conservative subjects like welfare reform and law enforcement were met with just polite applause.

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The Los Angeles Times ran an eyebrow-raising story this morning about how Hillary Clinton is raising money from a highly unlikely source: New York's Chinatown.

"Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton's campaign treasury," the paper reports. "In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000."

According to the article, powerful Chinese neighborhood associations pushed residents to donate to the Clinton camp. The source of many of these donations remains a mystery.

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Has George Bush ever been to a bar mitzvah or eaten a blintz? Rudy Giuliani has -- dozens of times.

The Bush family has been never been very popular with Jews, but Giuliani won a big majority of the Jewish vote, in the world's biggest Jewish city, both times he ran for mayor. He's the Republican front runner; if he wins the nomination, could the Republican relationship to Jewish voters be transformed? That question lurked in the background when Giuliani and other GOP candidates spoke earlier this week in Washington at a forum sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The traditional Republican stance was expressed eloquently back in 1992, when James Baker, at the time Secretary of State to President George H. W. Bush, said "[Expletive] the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway."

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"This is a big deal because we have way too much concentration of media ownership in the United States," Senator Byron Dorgan (ND, Dem.) said at a hearing on Wednesday. "If the [FCC] chairman intends to do something by the end of the year," Dorgan boomed, " then there will be a firestorm of protest and I'm going to be carrying the wood."

In 2003, millions of people--across partisan lines--from the NRA to CodePink stood tall to reclaim the airwaves for democracy--telling Congress and the FCC that they did not want to live in informational company towns where one media conglomerate might own all the media. The backlash hit the FCC like a tidal wave--and it seemed, for once, that the forces of democracy and diversity were winning. It is that force that needs to recreate itself--and grow in this perilous period--in order to stop the FCC's anti-democratic and destructive step.

Good citizens are not alone. They have, in FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a stalwart ally who has stated his adamant opposition to this move. In a letter published in the Washington Post last month, Copps wrote eloquently of the importance of fighting media consolidation in the context of media minority ownership and, specifically, how it related to the Jena 6 case. Referring to Eugene Robinson's invaluable column, "Drive Time for the Jena 6," which rightly concluded that black radio hosts played a vital role in bringing attention to what happened in Jena, La., Copps write that "these radio hosts are to be commended. But I worry, " he added, " that as the media grow ever more consolidated, they are doing less and less to serve people of color.

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The privatization of the federal government during the Bush administration has snowballed to the point that the work of private contractors is evaluated by other private contractors. A report released today by the Government Accountability Office shows that the Department of Homeland Security [DHS], for example, is contracting out what GAO official John Hutton calls "inherently government functions" such as deciding the Department's policies and regulations and monitoring its effectiveness.

But according to Senate testimony by Hutton and Steven Schooner, the Co-Director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University, the Department of Homeland Security is not the only case of a privatized public sector. "The government currently has no short-term choice but to rely upon contractors for every conceivable task that it is understaffed to fulfill," Schooner told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

These tasks, Schooner said, vary from Hairston Construction building the houses for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina to Blackwater patrolling Iraq. Schooner argued that either there has to be a "massive expansion of the federal workforce or we constrain the very ambitions of government." Committee chair Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said Schooner's testimony was on the money. He then gave his own examples of contracting waste and fraud in the U.S. Air Forces like having the contractor Commonwealth Research Institute arrange a no-show job for a senior officer.

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"I made my arguments and went down in flames. History will prove me right."

Yes, that was George W. Bush. No, he wasn't talking about Iraq. The date was September 1993 and Bush, then managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, had voted against "realignment and a new wild-card system" at a Major League Baseball owners meeting. "Bush," writes Jerry Crasnick of ESPN.com, "was the lone dissenter in a 27-1 vote."

Skip a few years to February 2003, when Bush found himself involved in another owners' meeting involving "realignment" -- in this case, of the Middle East -- and what was certainly an attempt to install a new "wild-card system." Again, he cast his lone vote. At stake was the fate of the planet and, unlike in 1993, it didn't matter, in the end, how the other owners, then gathering at the United Nations, voted.

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Forty years ago, a handful of smart Americans had an idea how to end a war. They published a call for moral, political and financial support for those refusing to serve. Initially signed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Grace Paley, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin among others, eventually, 20,000 signed on and the indispensable RESIST foundation was formed.

Listening as it was read aloud at a 40th anniversary party this weekend, "Resist: A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" seems as relevant as ever. How about a second Call?

The Call:

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The Department of Homeland Security is moving at a glacial pace to safeguard trains, planes and automobiles from a terrorist attack and may not even have a coherent plan to work with. These accusations were made Tuesday by both Democratic and Republican senators who argued that the Transportation Security Administration, a DHS agency, spends far too much time on aviation security, but isn't even addressing the biggest terrorist threats concerning airlines.

At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill assailed TSA Assistant Secretary Kip Hawley for having no plan to audit foreign repair stations. McCaskill pointed out that five of these stations are in countries designated as terrorist safe havens.

"There is no rule requiring even background checks," McCaskill said, regarding individuals who enter and work at the station. "We might as well have terrorists working under the hood of these airplanes."

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Why is it that when a man leaves his wife and she retains custody of the kids we say, simply, "he is divorced?"

Yet when a woman, say Doris Lessing, leaves her husband and he retains custody of the kids we say "she abandoned her family?"

…just something to mull over as we read the New York Times tribute to Doris Lessing, the fabulous feminist writer and 87-year-old winner of the Nobel prize for Literature....Just something to consider, lest us feminists get too cocky and drift toward any you've-come-a-long-way-baby reflection on The Golden Notebook.

When Ann Coulter remarked on CNBC that Jews should become Christians, it wasn't "a faux pas," and she wasn't being "an idiot," as many commentators suggested. Instead she was playing her game -- provoking her critics to get her into the media spotlight that helps sell her books.

That raises the question: should the Republican candidates be asked whether they agree with Ann Coulter that America would be a better place if we were all Christians? Or is that simply playing Ann Coulter's game?

Many people are playing her game this time around: Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, denounced Coulter for speaking in "the classic language of anti-Semites throughout the millennia." The National Jewish Democratic Council asked broadcast news organizations not to give Coulter airtime. Then right wing talk radio got to yell at liberals for trying to deny Ann Coulter her right to free speech.

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How can we understand our world, if we have hardly a clue about the mini-worlds where planning for our future takes place? Just the other day, the Washington Post had one of the odder reports of the year. According to journalist Rick Weiss, demonstrators at protests in Washington DC and elsewhere have been independently reporting large "dragonflies" (with a bizarre "row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails") hovering near their rallies. ("'I'd never seen anything like it in my life,' the Washington lawyer said. 'They were large for dragonflies. I thought, is that mechanical, or is that alive?'")

Is this the micro-equivalent of UFO madness? Folie à Philip K. Dick? Are these actual dragonflies, which do look robotic, or advanced "spy drones" loosed by some unnamed agency in search of homeland-security troublemakers?

As a matter of fact, militarized insects have been on the Pentagon's drawing boards for quite a while. Most recently, the British Times reported that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing cyborg moths, implanted with computer chips while still in their cocoons, that might someday soon flutter into an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan and beam back video and other information. (The Post's Weiss quotes DARPA program manager Amit Lal as saying: "You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic 'Lord of the Rings' used a moth to call in air support…. [T]his science fiction vision is within the realm of reality.") And don't forget those Pentagon-funded neural-implant experiments involving blue sharks in hopes that they might someday be turned into stealth spies of the oceans.

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With soldiers being endlessly deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the system that is supposed to provide the injured with disability benefits is broken. So says an independent commission report released this week. The report, put out by the Veteran's Disability Benefits Commission notes that there is inadequate information-sharing between government departments and there is little communication between doctors and government officials dealing with veterans claims. Worse, the information that needs to be shared is apparently often not very reliable in the first place.

A House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday reviewed the 544-page commission report which details how unresponsive the executive branch and military are to veteran's medical needs. James Terry Scott, chairman of the independent commission, said at the hearing that there is a lack of expertise among clinicians in army hospitals and that veterans frequently receive inadequate medical advice, especially concerning posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The report chronicled the stunning backlog in processing claims, which the Government Accountability Office first documented two weeks ago. The GAO report found disability payments were delayed an average of six months after the claim was made.

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When, in mid-September, General David Petraeus testified before Congress on "progress" in Iraq, he appeared in full dress uniform with quite a stunning chestful of medals. The general is undoubtedly a tough bird. He was shot in the chest during a training-exercise accident and later broke his pelvis in a civilian skydiving landing, but until he went to Iraq in 2003, he had not been to war. In the wake of his testimony, the New York Times tried to offer an explanation for the provenance of at least some of those intimidating medals and ribbons -- including the United Nations Medal (for participants in joint UN operations), the National Defense Service Medal (for those serving during a declared national emergency, including 9/11) and the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal (for… well, you know…). Petraeus is not alone. Here, for instance, is former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace, a combat Marine in Vietnam, with one dazzling chestful of medals and another of ribbons.

Medal and ribbon escalation has been long on the rise in the US military. Here, for instance, was General William Westmoreland, who commanded US forces in Vietnam, sporting his chestful back in that distant era. But the strange thing is: As you continue heading back in time, as, in fact, U.S. generals become more successful, those ribbons and medals shrink -- and not because the men weren't highly decorated either. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who oversaw World War II on the western front in Europe for the Allies seems, in his period of glory, to have chosen to wear between one and three rows. And General George C. Marshall, who oversaw all of World War II, after a distinguished career in the military, can be seen in photos wearing but three rows as well.

When it comes to ribbon display, in today's military the Marshall or Eisenhower equivalent would be Lynndie England, the infamous Abu Ghraib guard who was convicted by a military court in May 2005 for her abusive acts at that prison. By then, she had served four years in the Army Reserves and, as a photo just after her conviction indicates, she could already sport three rows of ribbons.

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On Friday, President Bush lied to the American people, as he has many times before, telling us that "this government does not torture people." But the metastasizing record shows that Bush and a compliant Justice Department have repeatedly authorized harsh CIA interrogation techniques, such as head slapping, frigid temperatures and simulated drowning. Such techniques have been condemned by many decent and reasonable people in these last years. But the critics who gathered this past weekend to denounce these methods made for an unusual group. Meeting for the first time since the 1940s, World War II veterans who had been charged with top-secret interrogations of Nazi prisoners of war lamented "the chasm between the way they conducted interrogation during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects." [See the Washington Post's cover story, "Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII," by Petula Dvorak} John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a foreign service and ambassador to Denmark, told the Washington Post, " We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice." Another World War II veteran--one of the few who interrogated the early 4000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, who were brought in to Fort Hunt, Virginia for questioning for days and weeks--spoke of how "during the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone. We extracted information in a battle of the wits." He added that he was proud that he "never compromised my humanity." Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist, told the Post, " We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or ping pong than they do today, with their torture." Several of the veterans used the occasion, upon receiving honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, to state their oppositon to the war in Iraq and methods used at Guantanamo Bay. Peter Weiss, a longtime friend of The Nation, a fearless champion of nuclear sanity, international law and human rights, spoke movingly. " I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war." Another veteran, Arno Mayer, a professor emeritus of European history at Princeton University and a longtime contributor to the Nation, refused the award out of concern that he and the others were being used by the military today to justify their acts. "We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now." But what the Veterans' revealed so strikingly was the disgust these former interrogators-- in a war that posed a greater threat to America's survival than the so-called "war on terror"--have for the cruel, inhuman, degrading and illegal techniques called for --and condoned-- by the Bush Administration.

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Is the nearly 40-year-old, bipartisan "let's get tough on crime" mantra getting old-- even for politicians? On the campaign trail Barack Obama and John Edwards are now warning of the dire consequences stemming from the rise in the incarceration rates for African-American men and boys. This week the Supreme Court heard arguments against five-year mandatory minimum sentencing laws for crack cocaine dealers.

And on Thursday, the Senate Joint Economic Committee held the first hearing that reform advocates and legislative staffers can remember on the social and economic harms that come from having the highest percentage of incarcerated citizens in the world. Both lawmakers and witnesses explicitly connected the explosion in the prison population to the so-called "War on Drugs." One damning statistic after another was given:

-The number of incarcerated citizens has gone from 250,000 at the dawn of the drug war to a current 2.3 million.

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When George Bush and Dick Cheney talk about their plans to bomb Iran, they are told "You can't do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated"--that's what a Republican former intelligence official told legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "But," the former official went on, "Cheney doesn't give a rat's ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President."

I recently spoke with Hersh, whose new piece, "Target Iran," is featured in The New Yorker this week.

When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said "Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of – we might as well say it – Israeli and Jewish input." He added the obvious: "a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns" from Jewish contributors.

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Two days of Congressional hearings on Utah's recent mining tragedy made clear that when it comes to government competency, the Mining Health and Safety Administration is neck-in-neck with FEMA under Mike Brown. Whether the Department of Labor agency proves as hard to clean up is the less certain issue that Congress-and mineworkers- face.

The two hearings, which were held seperately by the House and Senate Education and Labor Committees, turned into a civics lesson on "When Government Doesn't Work." MSHA's failure to communicate with families after the explosion of Crandall Canyon's mine roof has been pretty well documented. But the hearings additionally indicated that the agency lacked an effective inspection system, had no way to get needed information from other federal agencies, and still lacks a good-faith effort to evaluate its shortcomings.

As New Jersey Democratic Representative Robert Andrews noted to relatives of the six miners and three rescue workers killed, "We are sorry that government has let you down in so many ways."

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The best read this morning is this amazing piece by Rolf Potts titled "Death of an Adventure Traveler" (via Arts and Letters Daily). The narrative traces his decision as a writer for what he describes as "a Major American Adventure Travel Magazine" to abandon his trade. The immediate reason: the disappearance, and perhaps death of a beloved Burmese friend.

The article delineates the stark and shameful contrast between the faux adrenalin-raising thrills sought by adventure tourists and the very real dangers faced by the people who call these "exotic" destinations home.

Here are some excerpts to encourage you to click through and read the article:

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The ongoing fallout over Bill O'Reilly's recent racial comments is stoking tensions between Fox News and NPR. Both channels employ Juan Williams, who got O'Reilly talking about race during their now-infamous radio interview, and Mara Liasson, who regularly appears on Fox to debate Republicans. Media Matters blogger Eric Boehlert argues that by aggressively defending O'Reilly, Williams is compromising NPR and his own journalistic integrity:

Williams, a prominent African-American journalist, strenuously defended O'Reilly on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor and accused his critics of launching a smear campaign. Then later in the week, Williams made news when he complained that NPR had turned down the White House's offer to have him interview President Bush and discuss race relations. Officials at NPR were uncomfortable having the White House handpick the interviewer, so they passed. Fox News though, quickly accepted the invitation, complete with restrictions, and Williams conducted the interview for the all-news cable channel.

With his often over-excited and misleading defense of O'Reilly, as well as his need to publicly side with Fox News and badmouth NPR's decision regarding the Bush interview, it seems Williams no longer straddles [his] peculiar media divide. Instead, he's deliberately marched over into the Fox News camp and in the process has stripped away some layers of his journalistic integrity. Worse, real damage is being done to NPR by having its name, via Williams, associated with Fox News' most opinionated talker. In fact, Williams' recent appearance on The O'Reilly Factor almost certainly violated NPR's employee standards, which prohibit staffers from appearing on programs that "encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis" and are "harmful to the reputation of NPR."

Boehlert offers a detailed critique of Williams' recent campaign to defend O'Reilly -- which included a Time magazine essay, a spirited radio segment with Fox's John Gibson and the follow-up appearance on The Factor -- and emphasizes that Fox has not even aired the parts of the pilfered Bush interview addressing race. So Williams is getting played by Fox, in Boehlert's narrative, and now NPR should force the commentator to "choose between the two media outlets."

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House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair Henry Waxman finally got to the heart of the Blackwater contract-killing scandal when he reviewed emails detailing how the U.S. State Department worked with the private security firm to hide bloody trail of its mercenaries.

Noting that after an intoxicated Blackwater thug shot and killed an Iraqi guard last December, the State Department counseled the corporation on how much to pay the family of the Iraqi to keep silent and then arranged for the Blackwater employee to exit Iraq without facing any consequences for his actions, Waxman produced records of internet communications detailing the cover up.

"It's hard to read these e-mails and not come to the conclusion that the State Department is acting as Blackwater's enabler," Waxman told a hearing that saw Blackwater founder Erik Prince claim with a straight face that his company "acted appropriately at all times" during an incident last month that left 11 Iraqis dead and inspired an effort to force the country to withdraw its mercenaries from Baghdad.

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The long-awaited publication of Clarence Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," out Monday, makes you wonder: how come none of the presidential candidates have said a word about the Supreme Court in any of their debates? Three sitting justices are expected to resign in the next four years--and they're all on the liberal side: John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The publication facts behind Thomas's book ought to be discussed by all the candidates: he received an advance of $1.5 million in 2003 from HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you thought the Court dealt with any issues of relevance to Murdoch, you might call it a conflict of interest for Thomas to accept that payment--far more than any sitting justice ever received from any single source. At least you might mention the fabled "appearance of impropriety." You might call the $1.5 million a thank-you gift from Murdoch for services rendered. You might even wonder if it might be a subtle suggestion to other justices who will be ruling on Murdoch-related issues in the future.

Of course Thomas could avoid that "appearance of impropriety" by recusing himself for the rest of his career from any case raising issues concerning Murdoch, Fox, the First Amendment, copyright law, libel, or any other issues in media or communications law. That would give him a lot of time off.

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Sometime during the demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, which renominated George W. Bush in August 2004, I went on a media protest march down the Valley of the Imperial Media, Sixth Avenue, in the Big Apple. I had certainly been on enough marches in my life, but I was amazed. Back in the Vietnam era, when the police photographed peaceful demonstrators, they tended to do it surreptitiously and out of uniform. Here, police in uniform with video cameras were proudly out in the open shooting what looked like continuous footage of us all. And that was the least of it. We demonstrators were surrounded by a veritable army of police, on horseback, on motorbike, on foot. As I wrote at the time:

"The 'march,' which you might want to imagine as a serpentine creature heading south on New York's Sixth Avenue, had actually been chopped into a series of one-block long segments by the New York Police Department. Each small segment was penned on its sides by moveable wooden barricades and on either end by the wheel-to-wheel bikes of a seemingly endless supply of mounted policemen backed up by all manner of police vehicles… To 'march,' that is, actually meant to step from pen to pen, hemmed in everywhere, your protest at the mercy of the timing, tactics, and desires of the police."

As a light would turn red, your group on your block would be cut off from the group behind and in front of you. There was never a moment when we weren't, quite literally, penned in. If this was the "freedom" to demonstrate, it managed to feel a lot like being jailed right out on the street.

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