Moyers: Political pork and the military-industrial complex--

Nick Langewis and Mike Aivaz

PBS' Bill Moyers Journal profiles Seattle Times investigative reporters David Heath and Hal Bernton in their investigation of congressional earmarks, and their recipients, in the Pacific Northwest.

So far this year, members of Congress have appropriated 12,881 earmarks for "pet projects," some to be conducted by campaign contributors, which would cost taxpayers over $18 billion.

David Heath, for the Seattle Times' 'Favor Factory' feature, had to build his own database, now available online, in order to research the recipients of earmarks in the 2007 defense budget...

...

One such product was Microvision Corporation's "Nomad," a helmet with a mounted computer display, meant to flash maps and relevant data to a soldier in combat. In 2001, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), who would later join Microvision's board, earmarked $8 million for the development of the "Nomad."

Democratic Senator Patty Murray, his successor, would appropriate a total of $11.5 million more to buy the helmets.

"Junk," one Army commander called the helmets, which have never seen combat; a contractor called Rockwell Collins was awarded the contract instead, but Senator Murray awarded Microvision $6 million for the purchase of their product anyway...[Open in new window]

SMU to host Bush library, will 'celebrate his accomplishments'

Despite resistance from some Methodists and persistent protests by faculty members, a center honoring the papers and policies of George W. Bush's presidency will be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, officials announced Friday.

"How fitting is it that this storied political life that began here in Texas will write its final chapters right here in the good old Lone Star State and right here at this campus?" said Donald L. Evans, chairman of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation and a longtime friend of Bush.

Evans added that the center would "celebrate this great president, celebrate his accomplishments."...[Open in new window]

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"celebrate this great president, celebrate his accomplishments."???

If you understand what this guy's talking about, please write & tell me.

No, on second thought, don't. If you know what this guy's talking about, I don't want to hear from you. I have no time for idiots.

Siegelman Speaks! Alabama Ex-Gov Calls ‘02 Election “Stolen” by the White House!
by Mark Crispin Miller

Here is some amazing video: a very candid interview with Don Siegelman, who spoke to Julie Sigwart of Take Back the Media on Sept. 13, 2004–months before the Governor was finally put away on trumped-up charges by the Alabama GOP.

As he himself makes clear, Siegelman’s ordeal began back in 2000, when he came out early on, and publicly, against the presidential bid of his fellow governor, George W. Bush, and backed Al Gore instead. It was a move that Karl Rove never did forget, and never would forgive, says Siegelman.

Rove’s long drive to destroy the Alabama governor resulted in the theft of the 2002 election for Republican Bob Riley. Here Siegelman describes that theft–which took place primarily in Baldwin County–and also talks about his handling of that matter.

So far, the mainstream press coverage of Don Siegelman’s ordeal has pointedly ignored the theft of the 2002 election. Clearly, Siegelman himself does not regard that theft as a side issue, but as a major crime, and one that is quite relevant to his whole story.

Today, the Alabama governor is not allowed to speak up on his own behalf. He’s locked away inside a federal prison cell, and, for good measure, has been silenced by the Alabama courts. As Scott Horton has so aptly put it, Don Siegelman is the Man in the Iron Mask.

So let’s do everything we can to get this interview played far and wide, so that his fellow citizens can finally hear him, and see him, talk about the criminal campaign against him...[Open in new window]

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As of this hour CBS plans to run a piece about Seigelman on 60 MINUTES tonight.

If Karl Rove is associated with your political party, get out of that party or you're scum too.

Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!: Paris, May 1968

It began with a demand by students for the right to sleep with each other. And it ended in one of the greatest upheavals in French society since the revolution. John Lichfield goes in search of the spirit of ’68

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!"

It took a dead British poet to understand May 1968. The conventional French politicians of the time did not have a clue what was going on, even the left-wing politicians. The student and worker revolt in France 40 years ago this spring was a cultural revolution, even a sexual revolution, before it was a political one.

The young William Wordsworth wrote the above lines about a much bloodier French revolution. They express perfectly, all the same, the mood of May 1968: the idealism, the whimsy, the zeal, the humour, the self-righteousness, the excitement.

The photographs tell the story. On the first night of rioting in the Paris Left Bank, on 3 May 1968, the riot police wore old-fashioned uniforms and old-fashioned helmets. They looked rather like French soldiers from the 1914-18 war.

The male students wore jackets and ties or neat jumpers and short hair and well-pressed trousers. The women had long hair and sensible skirts and hair-bands. There were few jeans or sandals or beards.

This, remember, was more than a year after Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was the year after the Flower Power revolution had begun in San Francisco. No self-respecting, revolting student in America or Britain or Germany would have worn a jacket and tie on a barricade in the first days of May 1968. Before the end of the student revolt in early June, the French students looked more convincingly revolutionary: they were scruffier, more hirsute and more psychedelic. They had lost politically but they had won culturally and maybe even spiritually.

May 1968 was, in its origins, a revolt against the stifling papa-knows-best conservatism, and dullness, of General Charles de Gaulle's economically booming 1960s France. It was, at one level, a catch-up, fast-forward revolution for the right to wear long hair and purple trousers. It began in March, at the new Nanterre University west of Paris, as a demand for the rights of boy and girl students in their late teens and twenties to sleep together.

There were other student revolts in Europe and America, before and after May 1968. In no other country did a student rebellion almost bring down a government. In no other country did a student rebellion lead to a workers' revolt, one that rose up from the blue-collar grass roots and overwhelmed the paternalistic trade-union leadership as much as the paternalistic, conservative government...[Open in new window]

Bush is right about something

Bush is right about something

From Paul Krugman's blog:[Open in new window]

Hate to say this, but he’s right when he says

I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs…because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy’s adjusting.

In fact, I’d say that the sources of the economy’s expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and — very much in third place — tax cuts.

Of course, we could have gotten just as much or more stimulus by spending $10 billion a month on actually useful stuff– think how much domestic infrastructure could have been built or repaired for the cost of this miserable war. But the war was what we got.

Keynes had something to say about this:

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly “wasteful” forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict “business” principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

Rolling Stone: The Myth of the Surge

Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq

NIR ROSEN

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs. The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama's, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

"The Mahdi Army was killing people here," Osama says, pointing to a now-destroyed Shiite mosque that in earlier times had been a cafe and before that an office for Saddam's Baath Party. Later, driving in the nearby district of Baya, Osama shows me a gas station. "They killed my uncle here. He didn't accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him." Under siege by Shiite militias and the U.S. military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance. Others turned to Al Qaeda and other jihadists for protection.

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

At least 80,000 men across Iraq are now employed by the Americans as ISVs. Nearly all are Sunnis, with the exception of a few thousand Shiites. Operating as a contractor, Osama runs 300 of these new militiamen, former resistance fighters whom the U.S. now counts as allies because they are cashing our checks. The Americans pay Osama once a month; he in turn provides his men with uniforms and pays them ten dollars a day to man checkpoints in the Dora district — a paltry sum even by Iraqi standards. A former contractor for KBR, Osama is now running an armed network on behalf of the United States government. "We use our own guns," he tells me, expressing regret that his units have not been able to obtain the heavy-caliber machine guns brandished by other Sunni militias.

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups." But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power...[Open in new window]

Exclusive: U.S. urges Pakistanis to keep Musharraf, despite election defeat
Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: February 20, 2008 07:24:01 PM

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan _The Bush administration is pressing the opposition leaders who defeated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to allow the former general to retain his position, a move that Western diplomats and U.S. officials say could trigger the very turmoil the United States seeks to avoid.

U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, said this week that they think Musharraf, a longtime U.S. ally, should continue to play a role, despite his party's rout in parliamentary elections Monday and his unpopularity in the volatile, nuclear-armed nation.

The U.S. is urging the Pakistani political leaders who won the elections to form a new government quickly and not press to reinstate the judges whom Musharraf ousted last year, Western diplomats and U.S. officials said Wednesday. If reinstated, the jurists likely would try to remove Musharraf from office.

Bush's policy of hanging on to Musharraf has caused friction between the White House and the State Department, with some career diplomats and other specialists arguing that the administration is trying to buck the political tides in Pakistan, U.S. officials said...[Open in new window]
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Bush puts the 'mock' in Democracy.

My dream. A war crimes tribunal. A new 'Nuremberg'. It'd be a slam-dunk conviction.

Inside the world of war profiteers

From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

By David Jackson and Jason Grotto | Tribune reporters
February 21, 2008

Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors' pockets, records show...

...In the absence of oversight, some Middle Eastern businessmen would offer "Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and the KBR guys weren't shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff," said Paul Morrell, whose firm The Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor...[Open in new window]

Can the U.S. Brace Its Fall?

Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (IPS) - "Is the American era over?" That was the big question that launched a lengthy analysis by veteran international affairs reporter James Kitfield in the influential ‘National Journal’ last May. Significantly, the article -- which featured interviews with an all-star cast of former top U.S. policy-makers -- was titled "The Decline Begins."

Nine months later, the notion that Washington has entered a "New American Century" -- a phrase used by the nationalist and neo-conservative unilateralists who championed the Iraq war -- in which the U.S. can do whatever it wants, where it wants, and when it wants, without consulting anyone else, seems largely to have gone the way of the dodo bird.

"We are in a multi-polar world," Defence Secretary Robert Gates told a Washington Post columnist recently in what has to be considered the ultimate heresy to pro-war hawks led by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.

Indeed, last month’s image of President George W. Bush imploring King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to boost the battered U.S. economy helped bring home the notion that the commander-in-chief’s word no longer serves as an imperial command.

"It’s affected our families. Paying more for gasoline hurts some of the American families," Bush told reporters just before his meeting with the king. After the meeting Saudi Arabia’s oil minister made clear that Riyadh would increase production only "when the market justifies it" and not before.

Almost as pathetic in their own way were the recent exhortations by Gates -- the steward of a military establishment that spends more money each year than the combined defence budgets of all of the world’s other nations -- for Washington’s NATO allies to contribute 7,000 more troops to help U.S. forces pacify Afghanistan six years after Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisers contemptuously spurned their offers of help...[Open in new window]

Yes We Can WHAT?

By Craig Crawford | February 18, 2008

The news media’s long-awaited scrubbing of Barack Obama’s concrete plans for governing has begun and, not surprisingly, it doesn't take long. The Democratic presidential contender’s famously inspirational speeches offer little sustenance for wonks.

In a rare and much-heralded policy address last week, Obama attempted to get specific on economics but the details turned out to be so reminiscent of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposals that an aide to Republican nominee-to-be John McCain stepped in to cry foul. “He basically took Clinton's words and Clinton's policies and called them his own,” McCain economic advisor Kevin Hassett said.

Obama’s supporters and advisers refer pesky policy inquiries to the campaign web site, but it is difficult to connect the dots between this internet data dump and a candidate whose public comments reveal little evidence that he has read it himself. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, an Obama fan, concluded after examining the web site, “I'm still puzzled about where to locate Obama on this policy map.”

No one expects Obama to use every opportunity to wade through the policy thicket that Clinton seems to enjoy navigating in her often mind-numbing stump speeches. The Illinois senator apparently intends to be a motivational president who stays above the fray. But on the stump he provides little guidance to the occasional voter who might be curious about exactly what he would do as president.

Politically speaking, it is probably true that Obama does not need to sweat the policy details. He has so far made it to the brink of success in the Democratic race without specifics. Instead, his admiring crowds appear content to chant “Yes We Can” without bothering to finish the sentence...[Open in new window]

McCAIN: Dumb as Bush, Feeble as Reagan.

McCAIN: If you want things to stay fucked up.

As disappointed as I am in the Democratic choices I can always comfort myself by thinking of John McCain.

Has he ever held a position that he hasn't caved in on in the last year?

Poverty Is Poison

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned...[Open in new window]

Book Review: Marching Toward Hell
America and Islam After Iraq
By Michael Scheuer FREE PRESS; 364 PAGES

Todd Oppenheimer

Sunday, February 17, 2008

At this point in President Bush's "war of terror" (as Borat, uh, mistakenly put it), plenty of writers and political analysts have described this campaign's historic miscalculations. Few have done so more lethally than Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who held the unique distinction of directing the agency's Osama bin Laden unit, until he took early retirement in 2004. Scheuer's latest book, "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq," his third in a kind of anti-neoconservative trilogy, is no exception. Born out of frustration with six years of grievous American mistakes, it is the angriest of the three.

As befits someone of his background, Scheuer's arguments are hyper-practical, almost coldblooded. To foster what he calls a new America First policy, he believes the United States should stop intervening in trouble spots around the world - even if this means watching hordes of innocents being slaughtered, women's rights being trampled and Middle Eastern oil going to other countries. This has led many experts to call Scheuer (now famous as the anonymous author of the 2004 book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror") an irresponsible isolationist. Scheuer doesn't care. Those experts - journalists, academics, civil servants, military officers, pundits, preachers, philanthropists and politicians from both parties - are what Scheuer calls "the governing elite." Their collective blindness, timidity and, in some cases, their duplicity are the central targets of "Marching Toward Hell."

To make his case against foreign entanglements, Scheuer quotes America's Founding Fathers, the U.S. Constitution and the man he considers our greatest president, George Washington: " passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils," Washington once wrote. It creates "the illusion of an imaginary common interest <...> and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and Wars of the latter."

To Bush administration leaders, our successful involvement in the 20th century's two world wars discredits such isolationism. Scheuer, like many administration critics, considers the comparison false. If we had responded to 9/11 the way we did to Pearl Harbor - with "a thorough, north-to-south military flaying of our Islamist enemies in Afghanistan," as Scheuer puts it - and had stopped there, the analogy, at least to World War II, might hold. The problem, and Scheuer's chief complaint, is that Bush didn't complete that mission, and instead diluted and bastardized it into a campaign to create the Middle East of his fantasies.

Scheuer derives his view through a painstaking historical account drawn from hundreds of sources, including numerous al Qaeda statements and actions - a record so public that Scheuer can't forgive political leaders for not reaching the same conclusions. First, he argues, American actions in the Middle East - by all three recent presidents - have sent Muslims an unintended but consistent message: The United States does not understand the shifting dynamics of modern warfare, and is unsuited to win its battles. His examples begin with Vietnam and continue with the former Bush administration's failure to "destroy Saddam's state when they had the chance," President Clinton's failure to act on repeated CIA warnings about terrorists and their plans, and the current President Bush's half-fought wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq...[Open in new window]

The Fun and Excitement of Civilization Wars (fought from afar)

Believing that one is waging paramount war against the Most Evil Enemy Ever is a garden-variety psychological need, not a political or ideological conviction.

Glenn Greenwald

...This is why our nation's faux-warriors can never be reasoned with. It's why their greatest fear is having the Threats from Our Enemies be put into rational perspective, alongside all the other garden-variety manageable threats we face. To argue that they are exaggerating and melodramatizing the Enemy and the threat is to take away from them that which is most personally important to them.

Just consider the grandiose, baroque rhetoric they employ. What they are defending -- today's U.S. -- is not merely good. It's not even great. It's not even the greatest thing there is on the Earth right now. No -- it's much more grand than that: it's the Greatest Country ever to exist on the Earth in all of human history. That's what they're defending; that's the magnitude of the burden they bear, the incomparable importance of the crusade they lead.

Conversely, the Enemy they are facing down (from a safe distance) is not merely threatening or evil or scary or formidable. No, it's much, much more than that. This is the greatest Enemy that exists on the planet, the most cunning and nefarious and evil force the world has ever seen -- not just now, but for all of human history. There is nothing remotely like the depravity and power of this particular Enemy -- and there never has been. Ever. Everything these faux-warriors face and defend is superlative; there has never, ever been a war like the one they are waging. None of the old rules apply. This is all unique, unknown, the first and most important of its kind.

What's most confounding about all of this is that they completely evade the most basic instruments of self-evaluation. All they have to do is look back and realize that every generation, in every country, has been plagued by factions suffering from the same self-glorifying delusions -- that they alone are the Brave Warriors willing to engage in the Most Important Battle for Civilization Ever. None of it's new. Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described exactly this psychological affliction in his famous Harper's essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics:

"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point."...

...Over the past couple decades, prior to the Bush Era, the people who needed the sort of psychological fulfillment that comes from prancing around as Hofstadterian faux-warriors waging Civilization Wars obtained their fulfillment from playing board and video games or, at worst, dressing up on the weekend in camouflage costumes and -- rather than playing golf or going fishing -- marched around in militia formations, primed to defend the nation from Janet Reno and her squadrons of hovering U.N. black helicopters. It was equally pathetic, but at least the damage was minimal...[Open in new window]

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

By PATRICIA COHEN

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”...

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map...[Open in new window]

CIA's ambitious post-9/11 spy plan crumbles

The agency spent millions setting up front companies overseas to snag terrorists. Officials now say the bogus firms were ill-conceived and not close enough to Muslim enclaves.

By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — The CIA set up a network of front companies in Europe and elsewhere after the Sept. 11 attacks as part of a constellation of "black stations" for a new generation of spies, according to current and former agency officials.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA's principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.

The closures were a blow to two of the CIA's most pressing priorities after the 2001 terrorist attacks: expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.

The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as "nonofficial cover," meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government...

One of the CIA's commercial cover platforms was exposed in 2003 when undercover officer Valerie Plame was exposed in a newspaper by columnist Robert Novak. Public records quickly led to the unraveling of the company that served as her cover during overseas trips, a fictitious CIA firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates....[Open in new window]

Philip Giraldi: What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation

FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds has spilled her secrets, says PHILIP GIRALDI. Why is her story being covered up?

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, February 17, 2008

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will.

The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington's highest levels – sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Ms. Edmonds' account is full of dates, places and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Ms. Edmonds' case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation "could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States."

After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Ms. Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world – but not in the United States...[Open in new window]

*

Almost unbelievable. The Sibel Edmunds story in a major American metropolitan daily. In Texas, yet.

SUNSET OVER CRAWFORD
Bush Country Fades Into the Landscape
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page A12

CRAWFORD, Tex. -- From certain angles, this town looks as if it already got hit by a recession. The gift shop next to the police station closed about a year ago, and there's a "Building For Sale" banner flapping from the cornice. Two other gift shops have long since gone out of business. Another one is open now only on weekends. Two more are still going, but they sometimes close early in the day during the lonely winter months. The Bush boom is over. "It didn't last. You can only sell so many souvenirs," says the former mayor, Robert Campbell.

When the then-governor of Texas bought a ranch outside of town in 1999, Crawford suddenly became more than just a crossroads west of Waco. When George W. Bush became president of the United States, the village sprouted signs declaring itself the Western White House. Property values spiked. World leaders made regular appearances. A new bank branch opened on the main intersection.

But Bush is now a lame duck, and this little piece of Bush Country is in a transitional moment just as Texas is about to play a pivotal role in the presidential race....

***

You don't see any yard signs around here -- not one -- with a presidential candidate's name. You might, though, see a campaign sign for someone like "Doc" Anderson, who's running for state representative, or Stan Hickey, who's running for Precinct 5 constable.

But the politics of Crawford are more complicated than you might think.

"This was a Democratic town before Bush came here," says Joe Cuff, who owns a general store and gift shop.

Several other locals mentioned the same thing -- it's almost Crawford's dirty little secret. The town had a Democratic mayor well into Bush's tenure. But the town voted overwhelmingly for Bush in both 2000 and 2004. "All the people like him. You know. Just the person, you know. I think it was better before 9/11. After 9/11, things kind of went to hell," Cuff says....[Open in new window]

The Guardian-- BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince

Spectre of 'another 7/7' led Tony Blair to block bribes inquiry, high court told

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family...[Open in new window]

Tomgram: Jonathan Schwarz, Bill Kristol's Obscure Masterpiece

As Eric Alterman has written, he's the "journalist" of "perpetual wrongness" (as well as an "apparatchik" of the first order and a "right-wing holy warrior"). And for that, he's perpetually hired or published: Fox News, the Washington Post op-ed page, Time Magazine, and most recently, the New York Times where, in his very first column, he made a goof that had to be corrected at the bottom of column two (and where, with his usual perspicacity when it comes to the future, he predicted an Obama victory in the New Hampshire primary). Liberal websites devote time to listing his many mistakes and mis-predictions. In a roiling mass of neocons, right-wingers, and liberal war hawks, he's certainly been in fierce competition for the title of "wrongest" of all when it came to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. ("Iraq's always been very secular…") I hardly have to spell out the name of He Who Strides Amongst Us, the editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard. But, okay, for the one person on the planet who doesn't know -- it's Bill Kristol. The notorious Mr. Kristol, the man whose crystal ball never works...

The Lost Kristol Tapes

What the New York Times Bought
By Jonathan Schwarz

Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn't merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper's. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you'd want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.

That's how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have "terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East"? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us "respected around the world" and his classic statement that there's "almost no evidence" of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I've got something that will blow your mind!

I'm talking about Kristol's two-hour appearance on C-Span's Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can't even fish it out of LexisNexis. It's not there. Yet it's a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you've heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It's a performance for the history books -- particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.

Read More >>

A Question of Human Dignity

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, February 14, 2008; 1:36 PM

Who are we as a nation? Are we who we used to be? Did one terrorist attack really change all that? Can it be changed back?

Those, at heart, are the questions raised by the Senate's passage yesterday of a bill that would ban harsh interrogation tactics used by the CIA -- a bill already passed by the House, and a bill President Bush has vowed to veto.

The debate is not just about waterboarding. It's about whether other tactics -- such as prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, mock executions, the use of attack dogs, the withholding of food, water and medical care and the application of electric shocks -- should be part of our official interrogation toolkit.

Whether you call them torture or not, they are undeniably cruel. They are undeniable assaults on human dignity.

They are all prohibited by the Army Field Manual, which covers all military interrogations. They are all off limits to the FBI. Now Congress wants the CIA to adhere to the same restrictions.

But Bush says no...[Open in new window]

House finds White House officials in contempt of Congress
By Alexander Bolton and Klaus Marre
Posted: 02/14/08 02:21 PM


The House voted Thursday to hold White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before a panel investigating the firing of several United States attorneys.

Ahead of the vote, Republicans had walked out in an effort to show that they want to work on a permanent update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rather than be part of a “partisan fishing expedition,” as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) put it.

The contempt vote raises the stakes between the White House and Congress in the battle over the fired U.S. attorneys and could set up a constitutional showdown between the legislative and executive branches.

The matter will now be referred to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

If the fight comes to a head without a compromise having been reached, it could pit Congress’s power to hold White officials in contempt against the president’s right to assert executive privilege...[Open in new window]


House Contempt Order against Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten PASSES

Source: C-SPAN

H.RES.982 - PASSED by 223-32 - Most Republicans walked out

Title: Providing for the adoption of the resolution (H. Res. 979) recommending that the House of Representatives find Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten, Chief of Staff, White House, in contempt of Congress for refusal to comply with subpoenas duly issued by the Committee on the Judiciary and for the adoption of the resolution (H. Res. 980) authorizing the Committee on the Judiciary to initiate or intervene in judicial proceedings to enforce certain subpoenas.

Hate Springs Eternal

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight Eisenhower, tried to make the political style of his opponent’s vice president, a man by the name of Richard Nixon, an issue. The nation, he warned, was in danger of becoming “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.”

The quote comes from “Nixonland,” a soon-to-be-published political history of the years from 1964 to 1972 written by Rick Perlstein, the author of “Before the Storm.” As Mr. Perlstein shows, Stevenson warned in vain: during those years America did indeed become the land of slander and scare, of the politics of hatred.

And it still is. In fact, these days even the Democratic Party seems to be turning into Nixonland.

The bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination is, on the face of it, bizarre. Both candidates still standing are smart and appealing. Both have progressive agendas (although I believe that Hillary Clinton is more serious about achieving universal health care, and that Barack Obama has staked out positions that will undermine his own efforts). Both have broad support among the party’s grass roots and are favorably viewed by Democratic voters.

Supporters of each candidate should have no trouble rallying behind the other if he or she gets the nod.

Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.

What’s particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” — the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.

The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A small, failed land deal became the basis of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, which never found any evidence of wrongdoing on the Clintons’ part, yet the “scandal” became a symbol of the Clinton administration’s alleged corruption.

During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.

And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.

I call it Clinton rules, but it’s a pattern that goes well beyond the Clintons. For example, Al Gore was subjected to Clinton rules during the 2000 campaign: anything he said, and some things he didn’t say (no, he never claimed to have invented the Internet), was held up as proof of his alleged character flaws.

For now, Clinton rules are working in Mr. Obama’s favor. But his supporters should not take comfort in that fact.

For one thing, Mrs. Clinton may yet be the nominee — and if Obama supporters care about anything beyond hero worship, they should want to see her win in November.

For another, if history is any guide, if Mr. Obama wins the nomination, he will quickly find himself being subjected to Clinton rules. Democrats always do.

But most of all, progressives should realize that Nixonland is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.

One of the most hopeful moments of this presidential campaign came last month, when a number of Jewish leaders signed a letter condemning the smear campaign claiming that Mr. Obama was a secret Muslim. It’s a good guess that some of those leaders would prefer that Mr. Obama not become president; nonetheless, they understood that there are principles that matter more than short-term political advantage.

I’d like to see more moments like that, perhaps starting with strong assurances from both Democratic candidates that they respect their opponents and would support them in the general election.

Exclusive! The FBI Deputizes Business

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm...

...FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine...

...“We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions,” the whistleblower says. “It gave me goose bumps. It chilled me to the bone.”

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Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret.

That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, a federally financed center that conducts research for the military.

After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.

But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key...[Open in new window]

Rupert Cornwell: Out of America

Whoever wins the presidency will most likely fail to take on the unholy trinity of arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, and Congress

That, of course, is precisely what George W Bush would like you to think of his "war on terror", even though the closest the average citizen here ever gets to it is a security line at an airport. But those commercials are part of another struggle, less violent but no less relentless. It is being fought out by companies like Lockheed over the lucrative and effectively captive US government arms market.

Obscured by the great Obama-Hillary battle and the drama of Super Tuesday, the final budget of the Bush era was published last week. It covers the 2009 financial year, and contains one startling fact. If this President has his way, the US will next year be spending more on its military (adjusted for inflation) than at any time since the Second World War.

The raw figures are mind-boggling. The official Pentagon budget for 2009 runs to $515bn (£265bn), or around 4 per cent of America's total economy (the equivalent figure for Britain is 2.5 per cent), and about the same size as the entire output of the Netherlands. Throw in an expected $150bn of supplementary outlays and you've got defence spending larger than Australia's entire gross domestic product.

Even that may be an understatement. Add in various "black items", such as military spending tucked away in other parts of government, and some claim that America's total annual spending on the military now exceeds a trillion dollars – roughly half the entire British economy.

Students of these matters claim that the wind-down of the surge in Iraq, and the likelihood that the Democrats will recapture the White House in December, mean that the latest growth cycle in Pentagon spending, that began at the end of the Clinton era, has probably peaked. But don't bet on it.

A faltering economy may be the biggest worry for voters this election year, but national security runs it close. On Thursday, Mitt Romney justified his decision to drop out of the Republican race for the White House by his party's need to set aside divisive internal squabbling "at this time of war". As for John McCain, the man now set to carry the Republican standard in November, maintaining the strength of the US military is his top priority. The economy, he freely admits, is not his strong suit. National security, however, is. If McCain wins, it will be because Americans deem him the candidate to keep them safe...[Open in new window]

No Country For Old Liberals - a Reagan-Era Parable
by: Living Liberally
Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 13:49

Screening Liberally Big Picture
by Ben Weyl

A sheer callousness toward human life pervades No Country for Old Men, an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture. That the film takes place in 1980 is perhaps no coincidence; the moral void of the Reagan Administration provides a perfect backdrop for this kind of inhumanity and begs an analysis of the film through the filter of the Reagan years.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the film's sort-of-hero, is a fine example of the rugged individual. Off hunting in the Texas desert, he stumbles onto a drug deal gone horribly wrong (where was Nancy?!). Half a dozen men and their dogs lie dead on the ground or in cars. But Moss is looking for the loot. He finds one man nearly dead, pleading for water, but ignores him, finds the money ($2 million) and makes his getaway.

Elsewhere, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is killing. That's what he does in this movie. With an eerie calm, he aims his air-gun - normally used on cattle - and slaughters people like, well, cattle. Hotel clerks, businessmen, chicken farmers, bounty hunters, they all get the same treatment. He is after the money and will kill whoever gets in his way. At the risk of mixing my 1980s movie metaphors, it's clear that for these characters, greed is good.

But the money is not Chigurh's only motivating factor; he clearly enjoys toying with his prey. In a memorable scene at a gas station, Chigurh asks the lonely and unsuspecting owner what the most was that he had ever lost in a coin toss. Chigurh denigrates the man's very worth as a human being to his face, and we await the demise of another innocent victim. But the coin toss comes up in the owner's favor and Chigurh spares his life. Life under the Reagan Administration was similarly chancy for the most vulnerable Americans. In 1981, Reagan cut in half the budget dedicated to public housing and Section 8 housing vouchers for low-income people, sending hundreds of thousands into homelessness. During the Reagan years, the number of people living in poverty grew by 25 percent in comparison to the previous administration.

Early on, (spoiler alert)...[Open in new window]

"What would it be like to walk into Oprah Winfrey's consciousness?"...[Open in new window]

Quelle Horreur!!!

Mem’ries, Light the corners of my mind Misty water-colored memories Of the way we were Scattered pictures, Of the smiles we left behind Smiles we gave to one another For the way we were Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line? If we had the chance to do it all again Tell me, would we? Could we? Mem’ries, may be beautiful and yet What’s too painful to remember We simply choose to forget So it's the laughter We will remember Whenever we remember... The way we were...
the way we were...

*

IS IT OK TO HATE A POLITICIAN? By Cenk Uygur

I know we're not supposed to use the word "hate" when talking about politicians. We're supposed to say we "dislike" their policies or even their tactics. We "disagree" with their positions and find their strategy "troublesome" and a "cause for concern."

The problem is I hate Mitt Romney. I don't just dislike him as a politician. I dislike him as a person.

Now you see, I'm not supposed to say that. That makes me sound angry and it's not allowed in the mainstream. On the other hand, of course, Mitt Romney can say anything he likes about us.

For example, today at CPAC, Romney said that if the Democrats won the election we would "surrender" to the terrorists. That's apparently perfectly acceptable thing to say. But I can't tell you what I really think of Mitt Romney.

First of all, I'd like to point out that his revered president never caught Osama bin Laden and said he was "not that concerned about him" (an idea Romney echoed at one point in the campaign). Can we call that surrendering? If Bush has given up trying, is there another word for it?

Of course, President Bush on Friday will say nearly the same thing at CPAC. He will say that our "prosperity and peace" will be jeopardized if we elect a Democrat. But we're supposed to respect this guy?

Remember this is a guy who got hundreds of thousands of people killed because he thought he was a messianic cowboy. His craven indifference to the lives of others cannot be mentioned in polite company. The fact that he is clearly a very, very stupid man is not a nice thing to say (watch Fred Kaplan of Slate and I debate this point here). And we are certainly not allowed to say that we hate him for getting all these people killed, for muddying the name of America, for authorizing torture and taking away our fundamental freedoms. No, that would be impolite and we can't have it.

Is what he did polite? Is his implication that Democrats are weak and would give in to the terrorists polite? Why are they allowed to be complete and utter assholes, but we're not allowed to call them out on it?

In the same CPAC speech, Romney implied that he was only in the race because America needed him. Please!!! Who doesn't hate this guy?

Remember this golden oldie below? Watch Mitt Romney pandering to the voters of Massachusetts when he was trying to prove he was more liberal than Ted Kennedy. As you watch him talk about abortion, remember that he switched positions and is now for imposing his personal beliefs on others.

And think about the relative he refers to here and how he used her death from an illegal abortion as a cheap political trick and then dumped her memory the minute he wanted to pander to pro-life conservatives and she was no longer useful: (Vid clip at link)

This is a bad guy. A guy who would say anything to get elected because he has no inner core. No morality and apparently no conscience whatsoever. But we're the bad guys if we point out how absolutely craven he is?

These are the type of people who rip the country apart for their own personal gain. Thank God Romney is out of this race. But the robo-candidate will be back. He is promising to run again in 2012, no matter who the president is, who the other candidates are, what the issues are and what the state of the country is. Because he doesn't give a shit about the state of the country. He just wants to be president sooooo bad.

Remember, America needs him. What would we do without him?...[Open in new window]

September 11th Advocates Speak Out on Shenon's THE COMMISSION:

Philip Shenon's new book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, serves to justify our suspicions and the concerns of the Family Steering Committee, that we attempted to publicly air during the course of the 9/11 Commission's tenure.

One of the most egregious revelations put forth by Mr. Shenon is the fact that Philip Zelikow was hired as the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, despite his direct ties to the Bush administration. In 2000-2001 he served as a member of Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council (NSC) transition team, where he was allegedly the "architect" of the decision to demote Richard Clarke and his counter terrorism team within the NSC. Furthermore he was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) from 2001-2003, where Zelikow drafted most of the 2002 "National Security Strategy of the United States," creating the pre-emptive Iraq war strategy. These areas were within the scope of the Commission's mandate and as such were of critical importance to determine what, if any, impact they had on the government's ability to prevent the 9/11 attacks...

... Despite our vehement objections, Mr. Zelikow was allowed to remain in his position as what seemed to be the "gatekeeper" of the 9/11 Commission. Mr. Shenon's book illustrates just how deeply and insidiously the Commission's basic fact-finding work was compromised by Zelikow's conflicts. He recounts that even after his recusal, Mr. Zelikow continued to insert himself into the work of "Team 3," of the Commission. This team was responsible for examining the White House, and therefore, the conduct of Condoleeza Rice and Richard Clarke during the months prior to 9/11.

According to the author, Team 3 staffers would come to believe that Mr. Zelikow prevented them from submitting a report that would have depicted Ms. Rice's performance as "amount[ing] to incompetence, or something not far from it."...

... Why, when this Congressionally mandated Commission could have done much to fix the fatal flaws in our in government by conducting a real investigation and making vital recommendations, would they instead allow it to become a sham. This investigation was meant to fix the loopholes that allowed our country to be so vulnerable. Why would they choose instead, to succumb to political machinations? What would we find out if a real investigation into September 11, 2001 were ever done?

The bottom line is that the most deadly attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor remains dangerously unexamined. This can only be remedied with an investigation guided by the facts and conducted outside the reach of those with a vested interest in suppressing the truth.

Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken

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He's got Obamaphilia
It's embarrassing to be among the fanatics of a relatively mainstream presidential candidate

February 8, 2008

You are embarrassing yourselves. With your "Yes We Can" music video, your "Fired Up, Ready to Go" song, your endless chatter about how he's the first one to inspire you, to make you really feel something -- it's as if you're tacking photos of Barack Obama to your locker, secretly slipping him little notes that read, "Do you like me? Check yes or no." Some of you even cry at his speeches. If I were Obama, and you voted for me, I would so never call you again.

Obamaphilia has gotten creepy. I couldn't figure out if the two canvassers who came to my door Sunday had taken Ecstasy or were just fantasizing about an Obama presidency, but I feared they were going to hug me. Scarlett Johansson called me twice, asking me to vote for him. She'd never even called me once about anything else. Not even to see "The Island." What the Cult of Obama doesn't realize is that he's a politician. Not a brave one taking risky positions like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, but a mainstream one. He has not been firing up the Senate with stirring Cross-of-Gold-type speeches to end the war. He's a politician so soft and safe, Oprah likes him. There's talk about his charisma and good looks, but I know a nerd when I see one. The dude is Urkel with a better tailor....

My mom, a passionate Hillary Clinton supporter, immediately attacked Obamamania. "Some part of me wants to say, 'People wake up. He has no plans.' I get frustrated listening to his speeches after awhile," she said. She also said that the new vacation house in Key West is really great and her vertigo hasn't been acting up. I started to feel a little more grounded again. Did I want to be some dreamer hippie loser, or a person who understands that change emerges from hard work and conflict? "People are projecting an awful lot onto him," Mom said. "Almost like what was that movie with, oh, the movie, oh God. That English actor, he practically said nothing. Oh shoot. He was the butler and everybody loved him and what he was thinking and feeling. Do you know the movie I'm talking about? You don't." Hers, of course, is the demographic most likely to vote. But she's right. Obama is Peter Sellers in "Being There." As a therapist, she's seen the danger of ungrounded expectations. "You feel young again. You feel like everything is possible. He helps you feel that way and you want to feel that way; it's a great marriage. Unfortunately, the divorce will happen very quickly." Mom is the kind of realistic tough-talker who isn't afraid to make divorce analogies to a child of divorce....[Open in new window]

NY Times: Editorial

Divided They Run

Americans have made it clear that they are fed up with partisan division. But there has been no healing in the 2008 campaign, despite many candidates’ promises. The primary season has created stark intramural divisions that pose risks for both Democrats and Republicans. And the real interparty race hasn’t even begun.

Polls of Democratic voters on Tuesday made it clear that the politics of identity — race, gender, class — was driving the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the Republican contests, the far-right fringe is trying to maul their party’s front-runner, Senator John McCain.

Since the voting did not produce dead-certain winners, the coming contests in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Washington and Virginia may only increase the pressure on campaigns that are more than willing to bare their fangs.

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will face the gargantuan task of winning over the other’s voters. While Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have few policy disputes, voter polls showed gulfs between their core supporters: men for Mr. Obama and women for Mrs. Clinton, and so on with black voters and Hispanic voters, more educated voters and less educated voters, richer and poorer, those driven by the idea of change and those looking for a candidate who cares about their problems.

Mrs. Clinton fired the first divisive shots of this campaign, and we have said before that if she is the nominee she will have to stretch herself to connect with Mr. Obama’s supporters. Many of the most passionate of them are getting involved in politics for the first time. Mr. Obama will have that same formidable challenge with Mrs. Clinton’s supporters if he wins, and an even more vexing one if he loses.

Having run on the idea of broad participation across society’s divisions, Mr. Obama’s campaign often seems to teeter on becoming a cult of personality — a feeling that the candidate and those around him do nothing to dispel. In an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” on Monday, Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, was asked if she would work to support Mrs. Clinton if she won. “I’d have to think about that,” she replied.

Mrs. Obama quickly got back on her talking points, stressing party unity. But her unguarded answer was similar to what we heard from Obama supporters in e-mail messages that we received after endorsing Mrs. Clinton. Many of those readers said they would not bother to vote if Mr. Obama lost the nomination. That is not the way democracy is supposed to work.

Among the Republicans, as Mr. McCain has pulled ahead, he has been shrilly attacked by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who have said they’d rather lose the White House than have a nominee who does not pass all of their litmus tests. That is not the way democracy is supposed to work. Their claim that Mr. McCain is not a conservative (based largely on his willingness to actually talk to Democrats) is ludicrous, but it’s damaging to a party bloodied by eight years of the politics of George Bush and Karl Rove.

There has been much wrong with this campaign: too much money spent on advertising, too many soft-money donations. There is still a chance, at least, to save the race from leaving the country even more divided than in the Bush years. Any candidate, and any party, presuming to unite this country must first unite their own. That is how democracy is supposed to work...[Open in new window]

WP: The Repudiation of Rove
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 6, 2008; Page A19

....A more direct affront to the Republican strategy devised by Karl Rove -- to build support within the party's right-wing base and then try to win over just enough moderates to carry elections -- cannot be imagined. McCain's whole campaign is anti-Rovian. His core supporters are Republican moderates and Republican-inclined independents, and then he picks off enough conservatives to prevail....

With his preemptive war and seemingly permanent occupation in Iraq, and his attempt to privatize Social Security, George W. Bush pushed American conservatism past the point where the American people were willing to go -- pushed them, in fact, to the point where they recoiled at the conservative project. And with that, American conservatism shuddered to a halt. In the 2005-06 congressional session, Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress, yet they introduced no major legislation.

This exhaustion of conservatism has been apparent all along in the Republican presidential contest, where the chief point of agreement among the leading candidates has been to make permanent both the Bush tax cuts for the rich and our occupation of Iraq. The conservative agenda has been winnowed down to supporting what remains of Bushism. That's not only a losing formula for November, it also means that intellectually, conservatism is running on empty.

Huckabee's legions have their own cause -- a pious populism that doesn't have much sway in urban areas. But consider what animates conservatives' support for Mitt Romney. It's not that they have warmed to his shifting agenda or his elusive charisma. They simply hate John McCain, who threatens their cosmology by waging a campaign that does not put them at the center of the political universe. That, certainly, is what animates Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talkocracy, who feel their power ebbing with each McCain success....[Open in new window]

Wednesday 6 February 2008
Guy Rundle

The search for a feelgood president

...When policy differences narrow, the primary system encourages an identification with the personality of the candidate. Energy is poured into intra-party competition, rather than a focus on battling the other party. Nowhere has this been clearer than at the ‘stand for change’ rallies that Barack Obama has been barnstorming all over the country. Big events, often in university auditorimums, indoor sports arenas and the like, they draw an overwhelmingly black crowd – at one I attended in South Carolina, there wouldn’t have been three white people in a crowd of 2,000. Obama puts on a hell of a show, with gospel choirs, actors and rappers such as Chris Tucker and Usher, local fire-breathing activists, before the man himself, surrounded by a phalanx of secret service agents, moves through the crowd. The events are expertly designed, but they don’t need to be – the energy is there already. When rapper Usher appeared, the predominantly young crowd in the upper tiers rushed forward to the edge of the balcony; when Obama finally appeared, they almost threatened to tip over it. There seemed almost a desire to touch his hem.

There’s no doubt that a lot of the appeal to Obama’s supporters comes from his physicality, his youthful popstar looks, his physical ease. His sheer comportment communicates generational change, especially in comparison to the civil rights veterans in their fifties, sixties and seventies, who tend to be powerful, heavy-set men. Obama dresses in a high style but – unlike Huckabee – preserves all the oracular and prophetic power of distance and call to duty. It’s in the context of this bearing and rhetoric – a relentless call to sacrifice and struggle – that Obama’s relentless insistence on ‘hope’ and ‘change’, and the occasional Ghandian message of ‘being the change you want to be in the world’, strikes such a chord. To anyone with memories of the 1980s, this tone is redolent of the rhetoric of anti-nuclear social movements and the like, which sought to energise people by calling on their inner goodness and sense of duty rather than their external sense of a collective process. This taps into the deepest Protestant traditions of American self-conception, but it also has a therapeutic dimension. It’s a strategy designed to address in part the doubly beaten-down feel of much black politics: beaten down by the continued existence of widespread black poverty, but also by the somewhat deadened rhetoric of much of the previous generation of black leaders, who tend to focus on an old model of simple racist oppression, a problem that has long since yielded to more complex and less visible dilemmas.

There’s nothing wrong with inspiring people, but as numerous commentators have noted, Obama’s rhetoric never goes beyond that. ‘We are in a historic moment of transformation’, he tells the South Carolina crowd, hanging on to his every word, ‘and the time has come when we will stand up and make a difference’. And? Yes? What? The actual difference we would or should make never arrives. Obama studiously avoids anything more than vague references to the health system, to housing, to education. What’s lacking is not so much a shopping list of reforms, as a material account of how the world works. This used to be the stock in trade of the political leader – to connect the ethical to the actual in a way that allowed people to make sense of the world such that they can act in it. Without that, the encounter necessarily remains passive, a spectacle, part of a tour.

Though Obama’s crew – many of them young white professional activists from his home state of Illinois – were assiduous in signing up volunteers for phone-banking during the campaign, those who I spoke to had no real idea of what they might do once Obama left town. Join the Democrats, a remote machine party? No chance. ‘I just support Obama – he’s the hope’, said one, on-message. ‘I think he’s the one who can make the change’, said another. What was overwhelming was the degree to which people’s account of their support was impressionistic, partial, grasping for something, and finding an expression of subjective feeling....[Open in new window]

Obama basic training
Volunteers told to share personal conversion stories with voters - not policy views.
By John Hill

In a storefront on Q Street in Sacramento, Kim Mack told a crowd that spilled out onto the sidewalk how she came to back Barack Obama. With a son serving in the Iraq war, which she opposed, Mack was looking for a like-minded presidential candidate. She was impressed by the Illinois senator's books. But the clincher came on March 17, when she met the Democratic contender face to face. She describes how he lit up the room with his wide smile, shook her hand and thanked her for volunteering.

"He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words," said Mack, now a regional field organizer. Obama hugged her and whispered something in her ear – she was so thrilled she doesn't remember what it was.

Then Mack brought home the point of her story for the crowd of 100 or so eager volunteers, sipping coffee and watching a PowerPoint presentation in the Obama campaign office on a recent Saturday.

"Did that make more impact on you than if I had talked about his health care plan or his stance on the environment?" she asked.

On the verge of a hectic few weeks leading to Super Tuesday, the crucial Feb. 5 multistate primary including California's, Mack wanted to drill home one of the campaign's key strategies: telling potential voters personal stories of political conversion. She urged volunteers to hone their own stories of how they came to Obama – something they could compress into 30 seconds on the phone.

"Work on that, refine that, say it in the mirror," she said. "Get it down."...[Open in new window]

Democratic Death Wish
By Larry Johnson

Save this post. I will be telling you, “see, I told you so” or you will be feeding me a healthy helping of crow. But I am confident it will be, “I told you so.”If Democrats choose Obama they are signing the death warrant for their party’s presidential aspirations in November. Normally, given the Bush record of the last eight years, Republicans in general would not have a snowball’s chance in a blast furnace of winning in November. But this year will not be normal. The virtual lack of national scrutiny to Obama’s record and the media adulation for his bullshit “change” mantra will come to a screeching halt. When it does, expect the following:BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.

Unless he sets up shop in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he’ll have a tough time shedding the label that he’s a muslim (even though he isn’t). Although, as the media starts looking at his father’s side of the family in Kenya they will find practicing muslims and a relationship with the Kenyan opposition leader, who also happens to be a muslim. That could have been a heartwarming story except cousin Odinga is in the middle of an ethnic/tribal war pitting Luo against Kikuyu and muslim against christian. Not so sweet. If fighting in Kenya continues to escalate it won’t be the inspirational backstory Barack may have counted on.

Then there is the fairy tale fantasy about Obama opposing lobbyists. He’s against them unless they represent the nuclear industry in his state and then he will take their money. And that is just for starters. I don’t begrudge Obama taking money from lobbyists. It is how Washington works. But he is so disingenuous and sanctimonious. Just wait till the national media starts sorting through his past record of contributors. The shine will come off. They love going after preachers who decry homosexuals and then score a hummer from a male hooker...

...The real crock of shit is the praise of Obama’s brilliance. There is not a “there” there. That is the point of Susan’s piece below, challenging his backers to tote up the list of “accomplishments.”It would be one thing if he was getting busted up on a daily basis by Hillary. No way. Many of the Dems are such a bunch of whining pussies that any effort to challenge Barack on anything of substance was batted down as “gutter” politics. Jesus Christ!!

I would be prepared to make the case that Obama can resist the shit storm that will hit him in a few months if he had in fact conducted an effective defense of himself this last month and a half. But that has not happened. The Obama supporters, with the enthusiastic support of the mainstream media, are enabling the Senator...[Open in new window]

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I'll tell you something, I'm glad Clinton won the CA, MA & NY primaries tonight.

Policy-wise I don't really like her but she, at least, knows what's coming in the general election; the worst the Rethuglican attack dogs can dish out. You know, she's a lesbian sorceress who murdered Vince Foster & eats puppies with a side of infant every Sunday. The kind of crap the 'thug base eats up. Loony Pat Robertson will be selling DVDs on his 700 Club.

I hope she's got some surprises in store for them. I bet she does. 'Hope' & 'change' are fine but first you have to win.