The History You Don't Know

Official Army History - Bush Administration Neglected Afghan War, Diverted Resources to Iraq

2010-01-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

When conservatives are not lying us into a war based on WMD and terror connections that did not exist, they are rewriting history. Having sold themselves as the experts on national security, their motivations are obvious enough. Covering their asses for getting thousands of U.S. troops killed because of their arrogance and incompetence. Former White House adviser Karl Rove, our former MBA president George W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ( and his kowtowing spokesperson Keith Urbahn) have all made blatant lies about troops in Afghanistan getting all the resources they needed. These neo-conservative stooges swear they did not short change going after Bin Laden in their squandering of life and money to shock and awe Iraq. The military disagrees, Bush Administration Neglected Afghan War, Diverted Resources to Iraq

Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, Rove and their neo-con allies, the Army’s official history of the first four years of the war completely contradicts their claims. The New York Times reported this week that according to the official history, as early as late 2003, the Army historians assert, “it should have become increasingly clear to officials at Centcom and [the Department of Defense] that the coalition presence in Afghanistan did not provide enough resources” for a proper counterinsurgency campaign. Paraphrasing the history, the Times notes that American forces were “hamstrung by inadequate resources” and thus “missed opportunities to stabilize Afghanistan during the early years of the war.”

“A Different Kind of War,” the title of the account, to be published this Spring, is written by a team of seven historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth and covers the period from October 2001 until September 2005. Rumsfeld was secretary of defense during this entire time. The Army writes such reports after major military engagements in order to train future commanders.

Contradicting Rove and Rumsfeld, the historians blame the Iraq war for the lack of resources in Afghanistan, as well as top Bush officials and the president himself...

Army History Finds Early Missteps in Afghanistan

In the fall of 2003, the new commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, decided on a new strategy. Known as counterinsurgency, the approach required coalition forces to work closely with Afghan leaders to stabilize entire regions, rather than simply attacking insurgent cells.

But there was a major drawback, a new unpublished Army history of the war concludes. Because the Pentagon insisted on maintaining a “small footprint” in Afghanistan and because Iraq was drawing away resources, General Barno commanded fewer than 20,000 troops.

As a result, battalions with 800 soldiers were trying to secure provinces the size of Vermont. “Coalition forces remained thinly spread across Afghanistan,” the historians write. “Much of the country remained vulnerable to enemy forces increasingly willing to reassert their power.”

That early and undermanned effort to use counterinsurgency is one of several examples of how American forces, hamstrung by inadequate resources, missed opportunities to stabilize Afghanistan during the early years of the war, according to the history, “A Different Kind of War.”

This year, a resurgent Taliban prompted the current American commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to warn that the war would be lost without an infusion of additional troops and a more aggressive approach to counterinsurgency. President Obama agreed, ordering the deployment of 30,000 more troops, which will bring the total American force to 100,000.

But as early as late 2003, the Army historians assert, “it should have become increasingly clear to officials at Centcom and D.O.D. that the coalition presence in Afghanistan did not provide enough resources” for proper counterinsurgency, the historians write, referring to the United States Central Command and the Department of Defense.

“A Different Kind of War,” which covers the period from October 2001 until September 2005, represents the first installment of the Army’s official history of the conflict. Written by a team of seven historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and based on open source material, it is scheduled to be published by spring.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the manuscript, which is still under review by current and former military officials.

Though other histories, including “In the Graveyard of Empires” by Seth G. Jones and “Descent Into Chaos” by Ahmed Rashid, cover similar territory, the manuscript of “A Different Kind of War” offers new details and is notable for carrying the imprimatur of the Army itself, which will use the history to train a new generation of officers.

The history, which has more than 400 pages, praises several innovations by the Pentagon, particularly the pairing of small Special Operations Forces teams with Afghan militias, which, backed by laser-guided weapons, drove the Taliban from power.

But, once the Taliban fell, the Pentagon often seemed ill-prepared and slow-footed in shifting from a purely military mission to a largely peacekeeping and nation-building one, fresh details in the history indicate.

“Even after the capture of Kabul and Kandahar,” the historians write, “there was no major planning initiated to create long-term political, social and economic stability in Afghanistan. In fact, the message from senior D.O.D officials in Washington was for the U.S. military to avoid such efforts.”

In one telling anecdote from 2004, the history describes how soldiers under General Barno had so little experience in counterinsurgency that one lieutenant colonel bought books about the strategy over the Internet and distributed them to his company commanders and platoon leaders.

In another case, a civil affairs commander in charge of small-scale reconstruction projects told the historians that he had been given $1 million in cash to house and equip his soldiers but that bureaucratic obstacles prevented him from spending a penny on projects. It took months to reduce the red tape, the historians say.

The historians also say that such anecdotes underscore the resourcefulness of commanders faced with unclear guidance and inadequate resources. But limited manpower still had an impact on operations, the history indicates.

When the Taliban was on the run in the spring of 2002, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the incoming commander of American forces, traveled to Washington seeking guidance. The message conveyed by the Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Jack Keane, was, “Don’t you do anything that looks like permanence,” General McNeill recalled. “We are in and out of there in a hurry.”

Largely as a result of that mandate, General McNeill took only half of his headquarters command from the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C. But as the conflict became more complicated, requiring diplomatic and political operations as well as military ones, General McNeill lacked enough planning personnel, the history suggests. He was replaced in 2003 by an even smaller headquarters unit, the history says.

The lack of resources was also apparent in the training of Afghan security forces, the history shows.

Early in the war, the training program was hampered by poor equipment, low pay, high attrition and not enough trainers. Living conditions for the Afghan army were so poor that Maj. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry likened them to Valley Forge when he took command of the training operation in October 2002.

“The mandate was clear and it was a central task, but it is also fair to say that up until that time there had been few resources committed,” Mr. Eikenberry, now the ambassador to Afghanistan, told the historians, referring to the army training program.

The historians say resistance to providing more robust resources to Afghanistan had three sources in the White House and the Pentagon.

First, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had criticized using the military for peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans during the 1990s. As a result, “nation building” carried a derogatory connotation for many senior military officials, even though American forces were being asked to fill gaping voids in the Afghan government after the Taliban’s fall.

Second, military planners were concerned about Afghanistan’s long history of resisting foreign invaders and wanted to avoid the appearance of being occupiers. But the historians argue that this concern was based partly on an “incomplete” understanding of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

Third, the invasion of Iraq was siphoning away resources. After the invasion started in March 2003, the history says, the United States clearly “had a very limited ability to increase its forces” in Afghanistan.

The history provides a detailed retelling of the battle of Tora Bora, the cave-riddled insurgent redoubt on the Pakistan border where American forces thought they had trapped Osama bin Laden in December 2001. But Mr. bin Laden apparently escaped into Pakistan along with hundreds of Qaeda fighters.

The historians call Tora Bora “a lost opportunity” to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But they concluded that even with more troops, the American and Afghan forces probably could not have sealed the rugged border. And they deemed the battle a partial success because it “dealt a severe blow to those Taliban and Al Qaeda elements that remained active in Afghanistan.”

I probably will not be updating this blog very often.

here are some other blogs worth a visit,

inkbluesky

Think Progress

The Reality-Based Community

Talking Points Memo

Conservatives Revive Modern Witch Trials To Persecute ACORN

2009-11-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

Andrew Breitbart Trying To Blackmail The Obama Administration With ACORN And Other Videos

In the latest video (really two videos of one encounter), Los Angeles ACORN employee Lavelle Stewart is shown talking to the undercover filmmakers, “abused prostitute” Hannah Giles and her “boyfriend” James O’Keef,e in a setting that is obviously not ACORN but in a hallway outside of an office called, “Program for Torture Victims” where Stewart thought Giles would be better served than at ACORN. There is a point where Stewart offers to help the pair, though I could not tell from the edited video what, exactly, she was going to help them do. But Stewart also made it clear she was acting on her own, not on behalf of ACORN. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Los Angeles ACORN has refuted the video, saying, “The tapes are clearly doctored and highly edited and it is our hope this will be responsibly reported on should this become a news story… It is hard to respond to this tape. It is so heavily edited that it may be constructed to conceal the reality of the interaction… We are going to reserve judgment on the actions of the former employee (Stewart no longer works for ACORN) on this tape until we see the full, unedited version of this interaction.”

The only thing missing is the stakes and stacks of straw where ACORN and its employees are burned after their trial by edited mash up tapes and trial by media insinuation. Our foundinf fathers would be so proud.

A genuinely smart man that had some rgeard for his country and his own honor would on occasion manage to get one fact straight. Not so for the far Right's conservative golden boy Glenn Beck, Beck advanced dubious claim that "[n]owhere in the Constitution can you find" authority for health reform legislation

The Truth Reviled - Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe, BigGovernment.com and Andrew Breitbart all partners in framing ACORN

Right wingers Condemn Attorney General Holder, Two Reasonable Conservatives Defend Him

2009-11-20T07:51:00.000-08:00

Holder's reasonable decision

Mohammed is many things: an enemy combatant in a war against the United States whom the government can detain without trial until the conflict ends; a war criminal subject to trial by military commission under the laws of war; and someone answerable in federal court for violations of the U.S. criminal code. Which system he is placed in for purposes of incapacitation and justice involves complex legal and political trade-offs.

A trial in Manhattan will bring enormous media attention and require unprecedented security. But it is unlikely to make New York a bigger target than it has been since February 1993, when Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef attacked the World Trade Center. If al-Qaeda could carry out another attack in New York, it would -- a fact true a week ago and for a long time. Its inability to do so is a testament to our military, intelligence and law enforcement responses since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In deciding to use federal court, the attorney general probably considered the record of the military commission system that was established in November 2001. This system secured three convictions in eight years. The only person who had a full commission trial, Osama bin Laden's driver, received five additional months in prison, resulting in a sentence that was shorter than he probably would have received from a federal judge.

One reason commissions have not worked well is that changes in constitutional, international and military laws since they were last used, during World War II, have produced great uncertainty about the commissions' validity. This uncertainty has led to many legal challenges that will continue indefinitely -- hardly an ideal situation for the trial of the century.

By contrast, there is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder's critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including "shoe bomber" Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again.

In terrorist trials over the past 15 years, federal prosecutors and judges have gained extensive experience protecting intelligence sources and methods, limiting a defendant's ability to raise irrelevant issues and tightly controlling the courtroom. Moussaoui's trial was challenging because his request for access to terrorists held at "black" sites had to be litigated. Difficulties also arose because Moussaoui acted as his own lawyer, and the judge labored to control him. But it is difficult to imagine a military commission of rudimentary fairness that would not allow a defendant a similar right to represent himself and speak out in court.

In either trial forum, defendants will make an issue of how they were treated and attempt to undermine the trial politically. These efforts are likely to have more traction in a military than a civilian court. No matter how scrupulously fair the commissions are, defendants will criticize their relatively loose rules of evidence, their absence of a civilian jury and their restrictions on the ability to examine classified evidence used against them. Some say it is wrong to give Mohammed trial rights ordinarily conferred on Americans, but a benefit of civilian trials over commissions is that they make it harder for defendants to complain about kangaroo courts or victor's justice.

*Authors: Jim Comey, a deputy attorney general and U.S. attorney in Manhattan during the Bush administration, is general counsel of Lockheed Martin Corp. Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general during the Bush administration, teaches at Harvard Law School and is on the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law

If Sarah Palin Was Pinokio She Would Need a Truck to Haul Her Nose

2009-11-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Summary Before The Next Round
On the eve of Palin's latest version of reality, the Dish offers a recap of all the demonstrable lies she has told in the public record. We reprint the list as a public service and invite readers to run the new "book" through exactly the same empirical wringer, so we can compile an up-to-date and comprehensive list of the fantasies, delusions, lies and non-facts that Palin is so pathologically and unalterably attached to. Remember: we are not including contested stories that we cannot prove definitively one way or another or the usual spin that politicians use, or even hypocrisy or shading of facts. We are merely including things she has said or written that can be definitively proven as untrue, by incontestable evidence in the public record.

After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?

Palin lied when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.

Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.

Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.

Palin lied when she claimed in her convention speech that an oil gas pipeline "began" under her guidance; in fact, the pipeline was years from breaking ground, if at all.

Palin lied when she told Charlie Gibson that she does not pass judgment on gay people; in fact, she opposes all rights between gay spouses and belongs to a church that promotes conversion therapy.

Palin lied when she denied having said that humans do not contribute to climate change; in fact, she had previously proclaimed that human activity was not to blame.

Palin lied when she claimed that Alaska produces 20 percent of the country's domestic energy supply; in fact, the actual figures, based on any interpretation of her words, are much, much lower.

Palin lied when she told voters she improvised her convention speech when her teleprompter stopped working properly; in fact, all reports showed that the machine had functioned perfectly and that her speech had closely followed the script.

Palin lied when she recalled asking her daughters to vote on whether she should accept the VP offer; in fact, her story contradicts details given by her husband, the McCain campaign, and even Palin herself. (She later added another version.)

Palin lied when she claimed to have taken a voluntary pay cut as mayor; in fact, as councilmember she had voted against a raise for the mayor, but subsequent raises had taken effect by the time she was mayor.

Palin lied when she insisted that Wooten's divorce proceedings had caused his confidential records to become public; in fact, court officials confirmed they released no such records.

Palin lied when she suggested to Katie Couric that she was involved in trade missions with Russia; in fact, she has never even met with Russian officials.

...........many more at the link.

Today's Reasons Why Conservatives Have Their Panties in a Wad

2009-11-15T06:27:00.000-08:00

Why does Sarah Palin hate the United States of America judicial system, Palin Calls Decision To Try 9/11 Defendants In Federal Court ‘Atrocious,’ Wants To ‘Hang ‘Em High’

But the U.S. justice system apparently isn’t good enough for former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (who believes that the White House has a “Department of Law“). Last night she went on Facebook and posted a message calling the Obama administration’s decision “atrocious”

If Sarah would watch fewer soap operas and read more newspapers she might learn that the United States has prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court. Most, if not all of whom will die in prison.

What else is bothering the fascist-lite crowd. What is not included in a movie, 2012 Offends Catholics, Dimwits, Ex-Cons

The huge new disaster movie 2012 opens this Friday. Everyone but HuffPost blogger John Cusack drowns, but not before a statue of Jesus crumbles, a crack opens in the Sistine Chapel roof -- right between the fingers of God and Adam -- and St. Peter's Basilica falls over on a lot of Italians. These images have offended the usual people in the I'm Offended Industry, but not for the reason you'd think.

The offense takers are offended because 2012 forgot to offend any Muslims.

They also did not destroy any ant hills, thus ants are offended. Conservatives could take some of their cash and make their own movies, but oops, they seem to spend it all on lobbyists to stop ordinary working Americans from getting health insurance.

Conservatives have a terrible case of tunnel vision the poor things. They imagine President Obama violating diplomatic protocols. The same violations which seemed to be OK when his holiness King George Bush did much worse - with pictures - Almost Everything You Need to Know About Conservatives and Bowing

The Mental and Ethical Break Down of Lou Dobbs

2009-11-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Mental and Ethical Break Down of Lou Dobbs

Thanks to the crusade mounted against him by Media Matters for America, Presente.org and a host of other progressive and ethnic organizations, Dobbs is known most widely these days for his inflammatory attacks on illegal immigrants. Stoking nativist paranoia, he has blamed undocumented workers for problems both real and imaginary, from lost jobs and violent crime to increasing leprosy and conspiracies against U.S. sovereignty. On more than one occasion, he has encouraged far-right suspicions about Barack Obama's citizenship, allowing the "Birthers" to spout their theories on a network that had already discredited them (even on his own program). As those incidents were documented repeatedly and amplified by his critics, the tension between Dobbs and CNN executives inevitably rose toward a breaking point.

But in Lou's own mind, at least, there is more to the Dobbs brand than stoking white fears and resentments. Unlike Patrick Buchanan, a populist who more or less admits that he is a racist and Nazi sympathizer, Dobbs resents accusations of prejudice (and happens to be married to a Mexican-American woman -- with whom he lives on a 300-acre horse farm in New Jersey).

So, what really happened to Lou Dobbs?

Since CNN's Lou Dobbs first began spreading false, racially charged conspiracy theories about President Obama's birth certificate in July of this year, Media Matters for America has published 299 research items, video/audio clips, column, and blog posts about his misinformation and hate speech. Below are some of the most significant examples of work Media Matters has done -- this year and in the past -- to combat Dobbs' pernicious influence on the national dialogue.

The Drop Dobbs campaign and other efforts. Media Matters played a leading role in the Drop Dobbs Coalition (DropDobbs.com), which was launched to call attention to Dobbs' incendiary hate speech and falsehoods.

RNC Attacks Women's Rights to Full Health Coverage, The Kind the RNC Has

2009-11-13T10:04:00.000-08:00

RNC employee health insurance plan covers abortion.

Last week, 176 House Republicans joined with 64 Democrats in voting for the so-called Stupak amendment, which could “could effectively stop many employer-provided health insurance plans from covering abortions for tens of millions of Americans” and restrict any private plan in the insurance exchange from offering abortion coverage. However, Politico reports today that the RNC’s own employee health care plan covers elective abortion — “a procedure the party’s own platform calls ‘a fundamental assault on innocent human life’”:

Federal Election Commission Records show the RNC purchases its insurance from Cigna. Two sales agents for the company said that the RNC’s policy covers elective abortion.

Informed of the coverage, RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho told POLITICO that the policy pre-dates the tenure of current RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

“The current policy has been in effect since 1991, and we are taking steps to address the issue,” Gitcho said. [...]

According to several Cigna employees, the insurer offers its customers the opportunity to opt out of abortion coverage — and the RNC did not choose to opt out.

Recently it was also revealed that the health insurance plan used by the right-wing, anti-choice organization Focus on the Family also covered “abortion services.”

Bush, probably a semi-sociopath in regards his ability to feel sympathy for the pain and suffering of others shows an outward display of sympathy after leaving office and other conservatives fall all over themselves talking about what a sensitive guy he is, Bush Feigns Sorrow at Ft Hood, Conservatives Swoon

The NYT and David Brooks Illustrate MSM's Self Delusions

2009-11-10T07:27:00.000-08:00

Denying Responsibility for the Wars One Cheers On - The NYT columnist who has supported 4 wars on Muslims in 6 years decries the Islamic disregard for human life.

David Brooks' column today perfectly illustrates what lies at the core of our political discourse: namely, self-loving tribalistic blindness laced with a pathological refusal to accept responsibility for one's actions. Brooks claims there is a unique evil that one finds in the "fringes of the Muslim world":

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don't see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," and then start murdering.

But Brooks himself was a vehement, vicious advocate for the attack on Iraq, which caused this:

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of many Iraqi civilians . . . Many international organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations have counted excess civilian casualties using such methods; however all have reported different numbers. Reports range from 128,000 to 1,033,000.

That's at least 128,000 innocent human beings -- at least -- whose lives were eradicated by the war Brooks repeatedly cheered on. It also resulted in this: "More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country." But Brooks accuses Islamic fanatics -- but not himself -- of "causing incredible amounts of suffering."

Brooks also justified the Israeli attack on Gaza, including its worst excesses -- a war that wiped out the lives of 1,400 Palestinians (including 252 children under the age of 16) and that entailed "the shooting of [Gazan] civilians with white flags, the firing of white phosphorus shells and charges that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian men as human shields," all of which, according to a U.N. investigation, were "the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers." He also cheered on the Israeli bombing campaign of Lebanon and derided those calling for a cease-fire, even as the war wiped out more than 1,000 Lebanese people, at least 300 of whom were women and children, during which "Israeli warplanes also targeted many moving vehicles that turned out to be carrying only civilians trying to flee the conflict." And Brooks is now demanding escalation of the war in yet another Muslim country, this one in Afghanistan -- making it the fourth separate war on Muslims he's cheered on in the last six years alone.

So here's a person who is constantly advocating and justifying the killing, bombing, and slaughtering of Muslims, including well over 100,000 innocent civilians. And yet today he writes a column saying: Look over there at those radical Muslims; can you believe how degraded and inhumane they are? In fact, he says, "they" -- those Muslims over there -- "don't see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so." That's from the same person who cheerleads for the endless deaths of Muslims and destruction of the Muslim world while thinking that it makes him strong, resolute, Churchillian, righteous and noble -- exactly that which he accuses "fringe Muslims" of doing. And even as he blames the U.S. for "absolving" radical Muslims for the "evil" of their choices, Brooks will never make the connection between what he does and its results because he believes he is free from accountability and that his righteousness justifies the killings he desires -- again, exactly that which he says today is the hallmark of Islamic monsters ("They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so").

The tribalistic narcissism and depraved refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of one's actions on vivid display here is hardly unique to Brooks. The very same people who express such moral outrage and self-righteous horror over events like the Fort Hood shootings themselves have immense amounts of innocent human blood on their hands, but they simply avert their eyes from what they have caused or believe that they are too inherently Good to be responsible, let alone culpable, for what they unleash.

A Couple Different Perspectives on Ft. Hood

2009-11-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

10 Suicides a Month at Ft. Hood -- War Stress Is Taking Soldiers to the Brink

Responding to the allegations in the media that the attack was based on his Muslim faith, Kern told IPS that he did not know of anyone on the base who felt this was the case.

"We all wear the same uniform here, it's all green. I've seen the news, but most folks here assume it's just a soldier that snapped," Kern explained. "I have not talked to anyone who thinks what he did has anything to do with him being a Muslim. There are thousands of Muslims serving with dignity in the US military, in all four branches."

Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is one of the largest US military bases in the world. It contains up to 50,000 soldiers, and is one of the most heavily deployed to both occupations.

Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month - at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.

In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon at the time that the shootings had occurred in a place where "individuals were seeking help".

Mullen added, "It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress ... It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments."

Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.

The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide and other forms of self-destructive violent behaviors as a direct result of their experiences in Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude on a base in the US.

To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades did not come as a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military retains religious zealot, boots gays

President Obama correctly stated that people should not "rush to judgment" regarding the motivation of Nidal Hassan -- the individual who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base. Unfortunately, the public often races to assign a collective narrative to extremely violent events. Typically, the earliest narratives rest on gross stereotypes and, consequently, miss the mark. For example, many commentators assumed that Arab terrorists bombed the Oklahoma federal building, until they learned that Timothy McVeigh -- a disgruntled, white, former member of the military -- committed the heinous crime.

Recent acts of mass violence have pitted liberals and conservatives against one another. Both sides have argued that the killers' ideologically laced statements prove the bankruptcy of the others' political views. Neither side, however, seems to understand or appreciate the deep psychosis that causes acts of mass violence.

While mass murderers often embrace extreme political or religious views, mental illness makes them susceptible to extremism in the first place.

Tea Baggers Go Too Far with Holoacaust Comparisons

2009-11-07T08:39:00.000-08:00

Jewish Organizations Condemn GOP For Standing By As Tea Party Protesters Waved ‘Vile’ Anti-Semitic Signs

The National Jewish Democratic Council also criticized the “vile invocations of Nazi and Holocaust rhetoric” and called out GOP leaders who stood in plain view of the signs but ignored them. The Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded that the rally organizers “publicly repudiate the use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery.” Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) made similar comments in a video he posted on YouTube, singling out the rally’s organizer, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN):

I can’t believe that Congresswoman Bachmann would stand where she stood, and see those images, and not have the common decency to say, “I disagree with the use of those images.” I think that she owes the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust an apology. She owes us all an apology. And I’m waiting. We’re all waiting.

WorldNutDaily falsely claimed alleged Fort Hood shooter "advised Obama transition"

Fort Hood Looking Beyond the Stereotypes

2009-11-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

Scholars contribute to the year of Darwin with publications in BioScience

To celebrate the 150th anniversary this month of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is publishing open access two peer-reviewed articles about Charles Darwin and his historic insights into evolution.

Fort Hood Looking Beyond the Stereotypes

After an American soldier's tragic outburst of violence at Fort Hood, Texas -- the army's largest US post, with some 40,000 troops -- dominates the headlines, a fear-mongering hysteria concerning his supposed religious motivations is taking priority over questions regarding his mental health.

Although the facts, and clues about motive, are still being uncovered, we know that the alleged shooter, 39-year-old Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is an American-born medical doctor and licensed psychiatrist, who also happens to be a Muslim born to Palestinian immigrant parents.

When Hasan's Arabic name was revealed as the alleged shooter, the blogosphere and message boards lit up with the predictable assortment of anonymous bigoted bile vilifying Islam and questioning the loyalty of American Muslims.

Thankfully, most mainstream voices, such as Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, urged caution and moderation, stating: "It is imperative that we take the time to gather all the facts, as it would be irresponsible to be the source of rumors or inaccurate information regarding such a horrific event."

But some, such as Republican US Representative Michael McCaul of Austin, Texas, alarmingly responded with inflammatory histrionics: "Whether it was domestic or foreign, clearly when a US military base is attacked in this fashion, that is an act of terror in my book."

If it is discovered that this lethal rampage was motivated by an inexcusable and misplaced sense of religiosity, it would provide ammunition to those extreme right wing, minority voices in America who are convinced their Muslim neighbors are stealth jihadists ready to commit suicide bombings at a moment's notice. These proponents of modern day McCarthyism find their allies in members of the "Birther movement," who remain convinced President Obama is not an American citizen. Their esteemed colleagues include those who pontificate about Obama being a closet Muslim and an agent of socialism.

Reports of an image taken hours before the killings showing Hasan in a prayer cap seem to insinuate that a common article of clothing worn by many Muslims before they are about to pray somehow conclusively proves an religious intent behind the violence. A blog note attributed (though this is unconfirmed) to Hasan -- comparing terrorist suicide bombings to suicidal acts during war to protect fellow soldiers and inflict damage upon the enemy, such as Japanese kamikaze missions -- is being pointed to on the net as his potential justification for the alleged shootings.

It should comfort most Americans that mainstream Muslim American organizations, which often espouse a sense of victimhood and unnecessary rationalizations, unequivocally denounced Hasan's alleged actions as "heinous" and incompatible with Islam. The Council of American Islamic Relations issued a statement saying: "No political or religious ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence."

Ultimately, this use -- or misuse -- of fear and rumors over Hasan's Islamic faith should be moot in light of the record of the thousands of Muslim American soldiers who have served and made sacrifice -- such as Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, awarded the prestigious Purple Heart and Bronze Star and praised by Colin Powell, who now rests in Arlington cemetery after giving his life to protect and serve his country in Iraq. There are currently 20,000 Muslims serving with honor in the US military, according to the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. If Hasan's faith is ultimately proven to be the misguided inspiration for his violence, then the brave and patriotic service of thousands of Muslim American soldiers renders him an isolated and aberrant exception.

Sadly, although yesterday's violent outburst against fellow soldiers was the most deadly in US history, it was not the first of its kind. In May this year, five soldiers were shot dead at Camp Liberty in Baghdad by Sergeant John Russell. In February 2008, an Air Force sergeant diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) upon returning from Iraq fatally shot his son and daughter after a domestic argument with his ex-wife. Religion was not the common link between these soldiers; it was mental instability. Even if such individuals purported to be religious, their wanton acts of barbarism reflect rather their tenuous grasp on sanity.

60 Minutes Flobs Health Care Fraud Report

2009-11-04T08:32:00.000-08:00

Loose with numbers: Medicare fraud report a fiction

I haven't watched CBS' "60 Minutes" in years. But it was one of those stories that stops you in your tracks: Medicare fraud is "a $60 billion crime."

[ ]...McCaleb and the attorney general were wrong, too. GAO has never estimated total Medicare fraud. It investigates targeted programs within Medicare, finding fraud in the millions, not billions. And it's not total federal expenditure that those estimates McCaleb referred to are based on. It's total public and private expenditure on health care. The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, a partnership between private insurers and the federal government, says that it "estimates conservatively that 3 percent of all health care spending -- or $68 billion -- is lost to health care fraud." The association bases that figure on 2007 total health care spending of $2.27 trillion in the United States. It's an unscientific, very dubious way of making estimates. But even if you go with it, well over half that spending is private sector.

Also, our deepest sympathies to the pathetic Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) and GOP presidential hopeful for 2012 Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty that they endorsed a rightwing conservative nut job that lost and this special election was in no way a referendum on Obama or Democrats.

How to stop an economic recovery

2009-11-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

How to stop an economic recovery
As unemployment continues to rise, deficit hawks are upping their efforts to use the economic crisis as a pretext for gutting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The idea keeps surfacing for a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, supposedly insulated from politics, which would agree to mandatory caps on spending and perhaps increased taxes as well. Social programs would take the biggest hit. Congress would then take an up or down vote on the whole package.

The latest ploy to promote such a commission is to use the upcoming vote on increasing the national debt, scheduled for late November. Democratic deficit hawks such as Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota are working with Republicans such as Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, to condition an increase in the debt on creation of a panel. They have some allies in the White House such as Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, who has intermittently signaled support for such a plan. The Senate Budget Committee will be holding hearings on this idea in mid-September, according to The New York Times.

The whole approach is bad economics and bad politics on several grounds. First, there is no evidence for the premise that financial markets are anxious about the rising debt. As Dean Baker observes, they keep buying the Treasury's long-term bonds at a low 3.5 percent interest rate. If there were worry that the increased debt would spike inflation, investors would be demanding higher interest rates.

Secondly, it is not "entitlements" that have caused the big increase in the deficit and the debt. The cause is plummeting tax collections as a consequence of the recession. Social Security will be surplus for another generation, and both the House and Senate versions of the health reform bill do not add to the deficit, but help cut costs.

Third, obsessing about debts and deficits when the economy is still losing jobs has it exactly backwards. We probably need bigger deficits for a year or two, to propel a strong recovery. Higher growth will then bring the debt back down to tolerable scale. In World War II, deficits averaged about 25 percent a year (compared to under 10% this year.) But all of that war spending rebuilt the economy and powered three decades of economic boom and the big wartime debt was soon paid off.

Finally, the idea that such a commission could be "above politics" is a deception. The politics--very conservative politics--would be baked into the cake. Republicans on it would resist higher taxes except perhaps for regressive ones such a national sales tax or value added tax. The skids would be greased for deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--even before health reform took effect. This would gut all the promises candidate Barack Obama made for a more just America.

Instead of being Mr. Consensus, and trying to please both sides, President Obama needs to weigh in strongly against the idea of a commission before it gains further traction. The House Democratic leadership, mercifully, thinks the commission is exactly the wrong medicine, and has told the White House so.

Does Politico Have a Health Care Reform Conservative Bias

2009-11-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

SHOCK: House health care bill saves $260,000 per word!

Right-wing media have run with the Politico's Jonathan Allen misleading calculation that the House's recently announced health care reform legislation costs "about $2.24 million per word." In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 "would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $104 billion"; therefore, using Allen's formula, the bill would actually save $260,000 per word.

Why does Joe Lieberman oppose healthcare reform? Ask his wife

2009-10-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

Why does Joe Lieberman oppose healthcare reform? Ask his wife - Both Lieberman and Evan Bayh have spouses who have profited from the healthcare industry

If Democrats are disappointed by Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, they shouldn't be. Despite all of his past promises to support universal healthcare, nothing was more predictable than the Connecticut senator's fealty to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

Much the same can be said of Sen. Evan Bayh, who emerged from hiding on healthcare to announce that he too plans to filibuster against reform with the Republicans, regardless of what his constituents and Americans in general plainly want. Like Lieberman, his state is home to powerful corporations that want reform killed -- and like Lieberman, his wife has brought home very big paychecks from those same interests.

As and Bs for Obama's foreign policy

2009-10-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Obama's foreign policy report card

Why can't the administration of President Barack Obama get the word out about its policy successes? President Obama campaigned on an ambitious platform of withdrawing from Iraq, engaging Iran on its nuclear program and persuading the Pakistani government to take on the Taliban and al-Qaida. Despite the charge by critics from both the right and the left in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize that he has accomplished little so far, in fact he has already set in motion significant change on several of these fronts -- despite the enormous domestic tasks that have inevitably preoccupied his administration. Yet you'd never hear about these successes from the mainstream media.

Professor Cole gets into the details at the link.

It hasn't been a good week for the Church of the Weird, Director Publicly Quits Church of Scientology Over Their Support For Calif's Prop 8

Something Else Obama Will Not Get Credit For

2009-10-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

Early reports: Job gains signal stimulus impact
States have reported using stimulus money to create or save more than 388,000 jobs so far this year, buttressing the Obama administration's claim that the $787 billion plan has had a significant impact on the economy.

That total, based on a USA TODAY review of reports from 33 states and Puerto Rico, includes teachers, construction workers, and others whose jobs were funded by stimulus money awarded to states. The administration plans Friday to release reports from all 50 states, providing the broadest accounting yet of the stimulus plan's impact.

FORECAST: Jobs may rebound in 2010

It might not be pretty on the way there but liberals will have the last word on health-care reform.

Training Right-wing Extremists Your Tax Dollars at Work

2009-10-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

Right-Wing Extremist Group on Active Military Duty?
By Rob Waters, Southern Poverty Law Center

Oath Keepers, the militia/“Patriot” extremist group made up of law enforcement officers, military personnel and veterans, has posted a photo on its site showing (it says) “an active duty Oath Keeper in Mosul, Iraq” wearing two Velcro-attached “tabs” or patches, one saying “Oath Keeper” and the other “Three percent.” The flag patch beneath them is also an insignia of the “Three Percenters,” an informal alliance of hard-line gun owners.

The Oath Keepers figured prominently in a recent special report by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the resurgence of the antigovernment militia movement. The report described the group as “a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival.” Oath Keepers is fully on board with all the standard right-wing conspiracy theories, as evidenced by its official list of 10 “Orders We Will Not Obey,” in which it vows to resist any government efforts to “disarm the American people” or turn cities into “giant concentration camps.”

In July, the SPLC also presented Congress with growing evidence that extremists are infiltrating the U.S. military and urged Congress and the military to take steps to ensure that the armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic terrorists.

Some may remember that the Oklahoma City bombers were involved in the militia/Christian identity movement.

Who Declared War on Who. Fox's Attacks on Obama Started From Day One.

2009-10-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch's media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama's election, the cable channel's hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an "arm" of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox "is operating basically as a talk-radio format," and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

Yet that's just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda -- who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

He even has his own community organizer, a fellow named Glenn Beck, who can turn out a mob on a dime at your local town-hall meeting. His big ratings-getter, Bill O'Reilly, is a professional bully, handsomely paid to physically intimidate progressive commentators -- on video -- and to vilify others.

Murdoch's agenda is simple: He's against regulation of any kind. Famous for smashing the unions at his U.K. properties, Murdoch also has a pronounced disdain for labor.

In essence, Murdoch's agenda tracks closely with that of the current GOP, that far-right rump of a party that once claimed to embrace a range of views under the canvas of a big tent. So he uses the Fox airwaves to raise funds for Republican political action committees.

We've seen the Fox News-branded hosts and pundits -- such as Michelle Malkin and John Stossel -- sent out gin up the fearful folk gathered by astroturfing groups funded by corporations that seek to derail government intervention of any kind, whether in the nation's dysfunctional health care system or in its increasingly compromised environment.

Murdoch saves money by farming out the investigative-journalism functions of his alleged news enterprise to Republican Party entities, whose error-laden press releases are passed off as original Fox News research.

When you watch Fox News Channel, what you see is the advancement of that agenda through a media organ that seeks to turn regular people against their own interests -- the better to enrich the coffers of Murdoch and his heirs -- and that actively organizes those whose paranoia it has fed with lurid and untrue tales.

How else would you turn their fear of a bitter economy and an unstable world into rage against a president who ran for office on an economic platform geared toward the needs of everyday people?

Here we list a few of the reasons why Fox News Channel is anything but a news operation in the hope of shedding light on what it actually is: a massive media campaign for the consolidation of wealth through unfettered markets.

Why Fox News is not a news operation:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer -- No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation's capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer.

Through his 9-12 Project, which he promotes on his Fox News Channel program, that's exactly what Beck did, organizing with other right-wing organizations the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington -- AlterNet reported marchers sported signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also instrumental in turning out angry mobs to disrupt this summer's town hall meetings, where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After participants in a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., town hall named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site stopped accepting comments.

Despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from The Glenn Beck Show, thanks to a campaign by Color of Change, which targeted the show's sponsors after Beck claimed the president had "a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture," Beck remains on the air at Fox. Could that be because he's more valuable to his boss-daddy as an organizer than as a conduit for advertising dollars?

After all, defeating government regulation of any kind could assure billions for Murdoch the investor, while advertising profits for a show with 3 million viewers would at most bring in millions. It's all about the zeros -- how many.

2. Fox's alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity -- We've scratched our heads trying to come up with an analogous relationship between a cable news channel and a corporate-funded group that organizes fearful people to disrupt public meetings, but we came up empty.

Americans For Prosperity, a group that received funding from Koch Industries, an oil-and-energy company and major polluter, also organized this summer's town hall disrupters. Although they kicked off their rabble-rousing campaign by galvanizing opposition to health care reform, their real target appears to be energy reform, especially the cap-and-trade provision that will make dirty industries pay a pretty penny to pollute.

At an AFP conference in Pittsburgh in August, we noticed that the roster of speakers was heavily populated by News Corp. personalities, including Fox News contributors Malkin and Jim Pinkerton, and Wall Street Journal columnists John Fund and Stephen Moore. (News Corp. also owns WSJ.) AFP Policy Director Phil Kerpen, who also addressed the crowd, has a column at FoxNews.com, and he was quick to use it to take credit for the resignation of White House adviser Van Jones, against whom he helped orchestrate a smear campaign in collusion with other Fox personalities, including Beck.

............the full article at the link. Unlike G.W. Bush, Obama has made a huge effort to reach out across party lines.

Before Buying “Tampering with Nature” for the Classroom, Know the Truth about John Stossel

2009-10-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Before Buying “Tampering with Nature” for the Classroom, Know the Truth about John Stossel
As unsuspecting teachers look to enlighten their students this fall, they just might pay the $29.95 for Tampering with Nature, from the collection of John Stossel Videos. The question for teachers is: do they know that John Stossel is playing them as chumps Look at how Tampering with Nature was deceitfully made and maybe instead of writing that check, teachers and parents will email ABC and John Stossel with indignation and contempt.

While in St. Louis in March of 2001, at a National Science Teachers? Convention, I stumbled upon Michael Sanera peddling a book titled Facts Not Fear. For those of you who don't know, Sanera is the anti-eco-education point-person for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a think-tank funded by the likes of Dow Chemical, General Motors, Texaco, and those true friends of education and moral values, Philip Morris. Sanera has a forum in major newspapers from Seattle to New York from which he denounces the environmental movement. Amongst all those teachers of our children, Sanera was like a carnival hack. His manifesto was heavy on fear, and Rush Limbaugh-like on facts. Jeering at everything from ozone loss to species extinction, his was a transparent attack on ecological and environmental education for our nation?s children.

Intrigued, I looked up CEI on the net. There I found a reference to SaveJohnStossel.org. Stossel is a reporter with ABC news and the 20/20 news program. He is also a known critic of environmental regulations. CEI was dismayed at the tongue-lashing Stossel received when, incredibly, he reported that organic foods are no safer than foods sprayed with pesticide. As evidence for his claims, Stossel referred to test results, which an independent inquiry found not to exist! In defense of Stossel, CEI claims in their web page that he is entitled to his ?right to free speech?. They warn supporters that politically correct causes and special interests? are prepared to place that freedom in jeopardy. Excuse me, but what freedom are they referring to Are these charlatans discussing the freedom to lie when youre supposed to be telling the truth on national TV In my world, investigative reporters are held accountable to verifiable sources and factual reporting. Stossel neglected these.

As an environmental science teacher and concerned citizen, I try to stay current with what industry and government groups have in store for us. Early in 2001 I was forwarded an urgent email from RISE (Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment) beckoning its members to support Mr. Stossel and Mr. Saneras jihad against eco-education. RISE is affiliated with the American Crop Protection Institute, a trade group founded to defend urban usage of pesticides. The urgent email explained that Michael Sanera who was working with John Stossels 20/20 producers on a program to expose the ?evils? of environmental education had contacted RISE. In the email RISE beckons its members to find parents and their children who have been ?scared green? and are willing to be interviewed. The last line of the email is telling: Lets try to help Mr. Stossel. He treats industry fairly in his programs.

Just to see what would happen, my wife responded to the RISE email using her maiden name, stating that she is not sure about the environmental data our daughters are receiving in school. Soon we received an email back, giving us Michael Sanera?s phone number and urging us to contact him.

I was pondering all of this on April 9th, 2001 when, incredibly, producer Ted Balaker of ABC News called me out of the blue. He told me that ABC respected my editorials on environmentalism and they wanted to ask me questions about ecological issues. Point-blank I asked if there was a Sanera connection He told me he'd never spoken to Sanera. I asked did ABC call me to entrap me in a Scared Green environmental education piece, where Stossel could manipulate the truth? He said no, there was no such project.

Suspicious, I called Michael Sanera as soon as I was off the phone with Balaker, following up on my wifes email exchange with RISE. I told him my children brought home environmental education information from school and what should I do about it. Sanera was very enthusiastic, asking me if I would speak about this with ABC. He assured me that John Stossels producer from ABC would call me. The producer? name? None other than a Mr. Ted Balaker.?Balaker had lied to me and I had to find out why.

Corporate Web of Deceit: The Big Picture

The last several years have seen corporate America attempt to manufacture consent by flooding schools with dubious environmental materials. From MTV style videos to ?mono-syllabic fill-in sheets and activities that disparage everything from global warming to deforestation. These passive educational materials are a subterfuge designed to keep our youngest citizens comfortably numb. With critical thinking dulled, how could any warning about impending environmental woes be taken seriously, when children have been assured by the timber, chemical and tobacco industries that its all good

Games People Play

Those who procure children as pawns, which exploit their innocence for profit, and pervert truth for self-serving gain, are usually met with repulsion from society. Such abuse of children is at its worst when the victimizer is a supposed friend. But there is one class of citizens in our society that is apparently exempt from this community standard: corporate citizens.

Case in point: Media titan Disney Corporation, using its television outlet, ABC, is seeking to drive a stake through the collective heart of environmental education. Their strategy is simple: get some of the most notorious polluters to fund think-tanks to produce data and promote it as good science. Then stage events that show kids scared green by doomsday education. Let John Stossel, popular investigative reporter for 20/20, manipulate the kids, creating a prime time illusion, a proverbial TV moment.

by John F. Borowski - the complete article at the link. Since this article was published it has become well established that Stossel is a far right libertarian extremist.He says he is a crusader against bad science, but in fact peddles junk science paid for by corporations and right-wing think tanks.

O'Keefe does not dispute Philly police report filed after his visit to ACORN office

2009-10-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

In "heavily edited" video rebuttal, O'Keefe does not dispute Philly police report filed after his visit to ACORN office

In a heavily edited video released on October 21, conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe purported to rebut statements made by Philadelphia ACORN worker Katherine Conway Russell about O'Keefe's and Hannah Giles' visit to the Philadelphia ACORN office, but O'Keefe did not dispute the authenticity of the police report ACORN filed with Philadelphia police following their visit. The filing of the police report by ACORN -- Russell can be seen holding a copy of it in O'Keefe's video -- indicates the Philadelphia ACORN office had no intention of helping O'Keefe and Giles conduct any illegal activities, and ACORN said the police report "proves our clear understanding of this scam that was being portrayed."

A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism

2009-10-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism or the librul press is a myth

The debate over Afghanistan -- or, more accurately, the multi-pronged effort to pressure Obama into escalating -- is looking increasingly familiar, i.e., like the "debate" over Iraq. The New York Times is publishing articles filled with quotes from anonymous war advocates. Permanent war-justifier Michael O'Hanlon is regularly featured in "news accounts" as he all but blames Obama for increasing combat deaths due to his failure to escalate the moment the military demanded it. The New Republic is churning out pro-war screeds. Every option is on the proverbial table except one: not fighting the war. And there's a widening gap between (a) public opinion (which sees Afghanistan as "turning into another Vietnam" and which opposes more troops, with 49% favoring a full or partial withdrawal) and (b) the virtual unanimity of establishment punditry which, as always, is cheerleading for the war. The only difference is that, with a Democratic President, there seems to be more Democratic and progressive support for this war (though there was, of course, plenty of that for Iraq, too).

The primary rationale for remaining -- and escalating -- in Afghanistan is the same all-purpose justification offered for virtually everything the U.S. has done since 2001: Terrorism. Apparently, the way to solve the Terrorist threat is by sending 60,000 more American troops into a Muslim country and committing to at least five more years of war there. That, so the pro-escalation reasoning goes, will make us safer.

In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld directed the Defense Science Board Task Force to review the impact which the administration's policies -- specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- were having on Terrorism and Islamic radicalism. They issued a report in September, 2004 (.pdf) and it vigorously condemned the Bush/Cheney approach as entirely counter-productive, i.e., as worsening the Terrorist threat those policies purportedly sought to reduce. It's well worth reviewing their analysis, as it has as much resonance now as it did then

Glenn Beck Attacks Demonizes All of America's Volunteers

2009-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck Attacks Demonizes All of America's Volunteers

It takes a special man to attack volunteerism and community service as somehow un-American but Glenn Beck was more than up to the job yesterday (10/19/09). You might say he even relished the task as he mugged before the camera with his latest conspiracy theory – which looked a lot like his other conspiracy theories – that a television industry effort to promote volunteerism and service is somehow part of a communist plot by the Obama administration to stamp out capitalism and The American Way Of Life. With video.

“When you’re watching TV this week, you might notice a common theme on some of your favorite TV shows: service and volunteerism,” Beck sneered at the opening of the segment. He was referring to the same Entertainment Industry Foundation initiative that The O’Reilly Factor attacked last week in which more than 60 television shows will somehow showcase the benefits of volunteerism. “Not just public service announcements, but service and volunteerism will be worked into the plots...Your favorite character might volunteer at the dog shelter or at the park.”

“That’s great,” Beck added with disgust. “I just have one pesky question." Then he proceeded to ask a series of questions. "Are we running out of volunteers in this country?... Are we trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist? Are we creating a problem that doesn’t exist? To have an emergency that doesn’t yet exist?” Then, in his “rodeo clown” voice, Beck said, “or is it just a coincidence that all of this falls into line with President Obama’s Corporation for National and Community Service.”

Beck didn’t seem to care enough to answer his own questions but I did, at least the last one. As it turns out, the Corporation for National and Community Service was created in 1993. By my math, that’s about 15 years before Obama was elected president.

Furthermore, Beck forgot to mention that, according to USA Today, the EIF program, called “I Participate” morphed out of a bi-partisan call to action by then-candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.

The Boy Scouts of America disagrees,

The Boy Scouts of America relies on dedicated volunteers to promote its mission of preparing young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetime by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Scout Law. Today, nearly 1.2 million adults provide leadership and mentoring to Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Venturers.

Through the dedication of these many volunteers, the Boy Scouts of America remains the foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training in America.

To these volunteers we would like to say thank you for your dedication to Scouting.

And, to adults who are not currently Scout volunteers, we invite you to become a volunteer and share in the positive experiences of the Scouting programs.

The consequences of ocean acidification

2009-10-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

Swimming in a Sea of Acid

My latest film is a beautiful, independent documentary called Acid Test that explores the urgent problem of rising ocean acidity caused by our burning of fossil fuels. The 22-minute film premiered in August on Discovery Planet Green and is now available online.

The website enables you to see the whole film, take action to reduce carbon dioxide pollution, see extended interviews with top ocean scientists, learn about the science of acidification, and request a free DVD and action kit for home screenings with friends and family. (I hope many people will take advantage of this. Acid Test is a fascinating, frightening but ultimately hopeful film, and a home screening is a great way to begin making a difference for our oceans.)

Scientists have known for decades that when carbon dioxide mixes with ocean water it creates an acid, but only recently did they begin to realize what this growing quantity of acid would mean for ocean life. As you can see in the film, this new understanding has some of the world's leading ocean scientists quite freaked out.

What they can say with assurance is that if we continue burning fossil fuels as we are now, we will double the ocean's natural acidity by the end of the century. What's less clear is how damaging that will be for ocean life.

Scientists believe many organisms may not survive so radical a shift in chemistry. And some of those organisms -- plankton and corals, for instance -- form the foundation of the ocean food web.

If they perish, what happens to the hundreds of thousands of species further up the chain?

Scientists just don't know. But their fear is summed up in the film by Dr. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution: "We're moving from a world of rich biological diversity, essentially into a world of weeds."

The scientists are freaked out, but they still have hope, as do millions of other Americans. Hope that our policy makers, will listen to the scientific facts, take them to heart and begin America's transition to a clean energy economy. An economy based on efficiency and renewable power that will build a workable future for all living things. What could be more important now than telling our policy makers to move quickly and boldly to adopt strong, clean energy legislation? You can do that right here. - Sigourney Weaver

Uncivilization - US Healthcare History

2009-10-18T05:39:00.000-07:00

Uncivilization - US Healthcare History

Jenny Fritts was 24 years old. Jenny lived with her husband Sean for the past five years, and together they had a little girl named Kylee, 2. Jenny was seven-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child - a beautiful, baby girl.

Jenny is dead. Jenny's unborn baby is dead. They died because they were turned away for appropriate care at a for-profit hospital because they did not have health insurance. Sean rushed Jenny back to another hospital when her symptoms became even more severe, and he lied about having insurance to get her in the door. She was placed on a respirator in intensive care, but she didn't make it. She died. And so did her baby.

They become two more of the more than 45,000 Americans who die preventable deaths due to our broken healthcare system every year. Two more. Mother and child.

And the tragedy doesn't end there. Sean has been very depressed since he lost Jenny and their baby. The rest of his family and friends are worried about him. But he cannot get treatment either. He doesn't have insurance. (You can watch their story here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td802aj-7Sc) Imagine how you might feel. Imagine.

These are our killing fields. In America. In October 2009. In Barack Obama's America. That land full of hope and promise for those who can afford that hope and promise. Yet few in our government offices react as one might think you would when hearing of Jenny and the baby and Sean and Kylee.

I read these stories every day on the guaranteedhealthcare.org website. I read them and clean up a spelling glitch or two and then post them for the world to see. The website belongs to the nurses of the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee. Patients send their stories to the nurses in cascading waves of anger and frustration and desperation. They want someone to listen and to give a damn.

Does Greed Make Health Insurance Executives Dumb as a Rock

2009-10-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

The audacity of greed: How private health insurers just blew their cover

The health-insurance industry has finally revealed itself for what it is.

Background: The industry hates the idea that's emerged from the Senate Finance Committee of lowering penalties on younger and healthier people who don't buy insurance. Relying on an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurers say this means new enrollees will be older and less healthy -- which will drive up costs. And, says the industry, these costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Proposed taxes on high-priced "Cadillac" policies will also be passed on to consumers. As a result, premiums will rise faster and higher than the government projects.

It's an 11th-hour bombshell.

But the bomb went off under the insurers. The only reason these costs can be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums is because there's not enough competition among private insurers to force them to absorb the costs by becoming more efficient. Get it? Health insurers have just made the best argument yet about why a public insurance option is necessary.

Right now they run their markets and set their prices, and pass on any increased costs directly to consumers. That's what they're threatening to do if the legislation attempts to squeeze, even slightly, the colossal profits they plan to make off of 30 million new paying customers.

They want every penny of those profits. They demand every cent. And if the government dares raise their costs a tad higher than they expected when they first signed on to support the bill, they'll pass those costs on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. They can carry out their threat only because they have unaccountable, untrammeled market power.

Its a popular myth that the U.S. operates under a wild west style free market system. Health insurance companies are an oligopoly. The reason they have an army of lobbyists in Washington is not to protect their earned profits, but to guarantee their profits.

Nobel Peace Prize Causes Rabies

2009-10-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

Winger Madness: Obama Winning the Nobel Prize Proves that He's the Antichrist and the End is Near

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called it "Obama Derangement Syndrome."

"President Obama's critics railed today that winning the Nobel Peace Prize is somehow an insult. That international hope and encouragement for success for an American president is something to be ashamed of," Maddow said. "The American president just won the Nobel Peace Prize. By any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud."

But Maddow and other commentators are missing the undertones of religious fundamentalism, a major component to this story.

The people who consider themselves "Rapture ready" believe that a long list of events, as prophesied by the Bible, must occur before and after the Rapture. The Rapture itself is merely one event, at which the cream of the Christian crop is able to avoid seven years of hell on Earth ruled by the Antichrist and his pal the false prophet. The image of the Antichrist as charismatic and well-loved by the world, made very real-looking by movies and books such as Left Behind, Day of Deception and Vanished, easily fit into the "other" meme of Obama's presidency.

The Web site AreWeLivingInTheLastDays.com (hint: the answer according to them is a resounding yes) says this about the Antichrist (emphasis mine): "He will be super, not ordinary; everything about the Antichrist will be extraordinary. He will possess great eloquence, charm, wit, military genius, vision, and intelligence. He will be extremely influential, charismatic, a false champion of peace, and will possess strong leadership abilities. One could even say he's a rock star."

The conservative movement in the U.S. is generally very predictable. On hearing that something positive happened to America on a Democratic president's watch was sure to bring some rabid reaction. Its the looniness of the details that can be a surprise. No one in the real world actually sees Obama as a "rock star". Some of the most thoughtful criticism of him has come from liberals.

Despite the Insistence of Conservative Loons Hollywood is Not Supportive of Polanski

2009-10-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

Despite the Insistence of Conservative Loons Hollywood is Not Supportive of Polanski

The other day the Times ran a story titled “In Roman Polanski case, is it Hollywood vs. Middle America?” by John Horn and Tina Daunt. In that Mr. Horn and Ms. Daunt seem to believe that Hollywood exists as a monolithic entity, let me answer for Hollywood. No. It’s not. And thank you for asking. Sadly, I suspect that that isn’t the answer they were looking for. They state that “Hollywood is rallying behind the fugitive filmmaker.” Well, speaking as someone who actually lives and works right in the heart of the city and the business, I can assure you that this isn’t even remotely true.

And this is enough to make anyone nauseous, Limbaugh proudly claims to ‘have spawned’ Glenn Beck

Media's Fascist-Lite Pundits Continue to Smear Kevin Jennings

2009-10-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

Media's Fascist-Lite Pundits Continue to Smear Kevin Jennings

In recent weeks, the right-wing media have embarked on a witch hunt against Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, often advancing the repeatedly debunked falsehood that Jennings failed to report or even encouraged a 15-year-old student's relationship with an adult or the baseless smear that Jennings has "advocate[d]" for the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Media Matters for America has compiled some of the most egregious attacks on Jennings that conservative media figures have made based on these smears, including calling Jennings "sick and immoral," a "pervert," someone who "facilitated" statutory rape, and "a zealous advocate of NAMBLA."
Conservatives lash out with vicious, fact-free smears

RedState.com's Erick Erickson declared the "profoundly sick and immoral" Jennings "a zealous advocate of NAMBLA." In an anti-gay rant posted on his blog, Erickson wrote: "Kevin Jennings is a profoundly sick and immoral human being -- a proponent of statutory rape, an opponent of the Boy Scouts of America, and a zealous advocate of NAMBLA." He went on to add that Jennings is "not just a gay man, but a man who believes in the full gay rights agenda, where men and boys can have sexual relationships free of prudish moral people frowning" and called Jennings "a man who encourages predatory relationships between young boys and grown men." [RedState.com, 10/9/09]

Fox Nation embedded video calling Jennings a "Pervert." In an October 8 post, under the headline, "WH Laughs Off Questions on Czars," the Fox Nation embedded a video titled, "Gibbs Is Asked About the Pervert School Czar."

The so-called fair and balanced crowd knows that Jennings supposed victim has defended him in this letter,

Since I was of legal consent at the time, the fifteen-minute conversation I had with Mr. Jennings twenty-one years ago is of nobody's concern but his and mine. However, since the Republican noise machine is so concerned about my "well-being" and that of America's students, they'll be relieved to know that I was not "inducted" into homosexuality, assaulted, raped, or sold into sexual slavery.

In 1988, I had taken a bus home for the weekend, and on the return trip met someone who was also gay. The next day, I had a conversation with Mr. Jennings about it. I had no sexual contact with anybody at the time, though I was entirely legally free to do so. I was a sixteen year-old going through something most of us have experienced: adolescence. I find it regrettable that the people who have the compassion and integrity to protect our nation's students are themselves in need of protection from homophobic smear attacks. Were it not for Mr. Jennings' courage and concern for my well-being at that time in my life, I doubt I'd be the proud gay man that I am today.

- Brewster

For the millionth time right-wing demi-gods are intent on telling any lie that deem necessary to carry out yet another character assassination. maybe its because Sean Hannity, Redstate and Karl Rove among many others on the rabid Right, have no character.

Corporate Communism and Baseless Attacks on Obama Officials

2009-10-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

The Cost of Corporate Communism

Unfortunately, they use our wealth and laws not only to benefit their outdated, failed companies, but also spend a small pittance of their ill-gotten gains lobbying and favor-trading with politicians so the government will continue to protect them from competition and their well-deserved failure.

The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression have all resulted directly from the abdication of proper government.

Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it. Only true rules-based capitalism ensures constant adaptation and implementation of the latest and best practices for a given business, as those businesses that don't adapt fail, and those who deploy the latest innovations to their customers benefit, prosper.

Corporate communism is not a bad description, but corporate collective might be better. rather then the collective being directly run by the state it is run by corporations and their Congressional puppets. Mostly Republicans, but obviously a certain percentage of Democrats too.

Smears of "sick and immoral" "pervert" Jennings: the worst of the worst

In recent weeks, the right-wing media have embarked on a witch hunt against Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, often advancing the repeatedly debunked falsehood that Jennings failed to report or even encouraged a 15-year-old student's relationship with an adult or the baseless smear that Jennings has "advocate[d]" for the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Media Matters for America has compiled some of the most egregious attacks on Jennings that conservative media figures have made based on these smears, including calling Jennings "sick and immoral," a "pervert," someone who "facilitated" statutory rape, and "a zealous advocate of NAMBLA."

The rabid Right's game plan seems to be flooding the media with baseless attacks on Obama administration officials one by one in hopes of picking off at least a few.

Health Care and the failure of the free market

2009-10-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

The free market doesn't always work, Domestic violence as pre-existing condition? 8 states still allow it

Though domestic violence as a pre-existing condition isn't thought to be as widespread as it once was, lawmakers say it's yet another example of the need to overhaul the health care system.

"This is insane," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who's been trying to convince Congress to address the issue for roughly a decade.

Murray said she couldn't remember exactly when she first learned of it, but sometime in the 1990s she recalls a private conversation she had with a woman who broke down as she explained that she couldn't flee an abusive relationship because her children were covered under her husband's health care plan and she couldn't get her own. Another woman told Murray that she didn't report that she'd been battered because she feared losing her coverage.

"It infuriates me an insurance executive can sit in his safe world and decide how to make money," Murray said. "For them it's all about the bottom line. Abused women don't have a voice."

First lady Michelle Obama also took note, saying in a speech last month that insurance companies continue to practice gender discrimination.

Much of the evidence that domestic violence has been a factor in denying coverage is dated.

An informal survey by the House Judiciary Committee in 1994 found that half of the 16 largest insurers in the country considered domestic violence in deciding whether to approve health coverage. The Pennsylvania insurance Department reported a year or so later that nearly one out of four insurance companies factored in domestic violence when deciding whether to issue or renew policies.

2009 and suddenly sedition is popular

2009-10-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

A little hyperbolic, but there are several examples where conservatives cross the line from free speech into sedition, Treason and Sedition
You would think that Republicans, being the party of law and order, would move quickly to condemn this kind of speech. But in fact, they both enable and encourage it. Texas Governor Rick Perry famously invoked the spectre of secession against stimulus spending and health care reform; Republicans regularly stovepipe policy statements through FreeRepublic.com, whose founder openly advocates the overthrow and removal of the entire US government.

When Michele Bachmann asked listeners to be "armed and dangerous" on cap & trade, it wasn't her first use of a violent metaphor. She has spoken of "slitting our wrists" to become "blood brothers" in defeating health care reform.

Senator Al Franken Fights Back Against Government Contractors That Allow Employees to be Victimized

2009-10-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

Senator Al Franken Fights Back Against Government Contractors That Allow Employees to be Victimized

Credit new Senator Al Franken however, for introducing an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would punish contractors if they "restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." You'd think that this would be a no-brainer, actually, but that didn't stop Jeff Sessions from labeling Franken's effort a "political attack directed at Halliburton." Franken, of course, pointed out that his amendment would apply broadly, to all contractors, because otherwise, 'twould be a bill of attainder, right? Right?

This new legislation was necessary because of a Halliburton employee in Iraq who could not get justice. Some background here, Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

Fox's Sean Hannity Plays The Victim Card In Jennings Witch Hunt

2009-10-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

Hannity Plays The Victim Card In Jennings Witch Hunt
Reported by Ellen at Hewshounds

After engaging in a relentless witch hunt against President Obama’s “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings, even after his accusations against Jennings have been debunked, Sean Hannity has not only refused to drop his attacks, he has declared himself the victim. While he was at it, Hannity added a new smear against Jennings, comparing him to disgraced Congressman Mark Foley. But there are at least two big differences between Jennings and Foley that negate the comparison. Nobody on the panel, not even supposed liberal Nina Easton, pointed out the dissimilarities. With video.

As I posted previously, Hannity’s original pretext for attacking Jennings was that he had supposedly encouraged the “statutory rape” of a gay high school sophomore, 20 years ago, when the student told Jennings about an affair with an older man. Instead of reporting the incident to authorities, Jennings said he hoped the student knew to use a condom. Since then, the then-student has come forward with a driver’s license showing that he was 16, the age of consent, at the time. Instead of dropping the attack, Hannity moved on to smear Jennings for saying he admired Harry Hay, a respected gay rights activist. Why? Because Hay had been supportive of NAMBLA. Hannity never pointed to any indication that Jennings supported NAMBLA nor did he ever offer any evidence of any improper conduct since Jennings joined the Obama administration.

But as Hannity continued to smear Jennings again last night (10/6/09), he painted himself as the victim.

During the “Great American Panel” segment, Hannity announced, “I’m being attacked… relentlessly by the left because I’m saying that I think Kevin Jennings… should be fired.” Hannity declared “I’m not convinced” that the student was really 16 at the time. “But that’s neither here or there. Jennings was the one who said the kid was 15.” Yeah, and Jennings has since said he made a mistake. This happened 20 years ago and has absolutely nothing to do with his job now.
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Dear Blogger Admin,
This is in no way a spam blog. Note that the blog is not monetized in anyway. I go through some trouble and expense for the graphics, whether they're Photoshop enhanced photo art, historical photos or illustrations. The news content is meant for educational purposes and an alternative to the mainstream media. I suspect the later is why someone is trying to censor this blog.

Wellpoint Sues Maine to Guarantee Their Profits

2009-10-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Wellpoint Sues Maine to Guarantee Their Profits
Now, WellPoint's affiliate, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession.

Anthem Health Plans of Maine, a subsidiary of WellPoint, is suing the state because they want to increase premium rates by 18.5% on their 12,000 individual insurance policy holders, so they can guarantee themselves a 3% profit margin. This story shows how silly it would be to solely rely on regulation to rein in insurance industry practices.

Brave New Films has put together a video exposing the practices of Anthem and its parent company WellPoint. You can send your friends in Maine the news about this lawsuit, to highlight this practice. Maine Superior Court will consider this case on Wednesday.

Texas Lawmakers Who Voted Against The Recovery Act Now Beg For Stimulus Funds For NASA

Fox News tirelessly advanced false accusation that Jennings covered up "statutory rape"

Fox News and its websites Fox Nation and FoxNews.com repeatedly advanced the falsehood that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, in the words of Fox News host Bill Hemmer, knew of a "statutory rape" and "never reported it."

Conservative Majority in Supreme Court Threatens Constitution and Most Basic Freedoms

2009-10-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

Conservative Majority in Supreme Court Threatens Constitution and Most Basic Freedoms
October 5 marks the beginning of a new Supreme Court term, a session that will marked by high-profile cases that the Court's conservative majority could use to reshape the law. In its first full term together, the Roberts Court's conservative bloc immediately began cutting back on women's reproductive freedom, entrenching public school segregation, and undermining equal pay in the workforce, among other things, prompting retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to comment that she fears that some of her decisions "are being dismantled" by the current, more conservative-leaning court. "If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh, dear,'" she said. "But life goes on. It's not always positive." Yet while the conservative justices are perfectly willing to thumb their noses at precedent, they occasionally restrain themselves from politically-charged rulings likely to inspire a congressional backlash. Last term, for example, the Court pleasantly surprised the civil rights community by resisting the temptation to eviscerate two landmark prohibitions on race discrimination. This term, the Court has already agreed to hear more potentially-earthshaking cases than it has in years; the only question is how aggressive the Court will be in pushing its right-wing agenda.

PLAYING TO THE BASE: No one was more excited about President Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court than the right-wing "Justice Sunday" crowd, which crowed that by confirming Bush's judges, conservatives could "bring the rule and reign of the Cross to America and we can change America on our watch." This term, the conservative majority Bush built has plenty of opportunities to reward these supporters. The most famous case on the Court's docket is McDonald v. City of Chicago, which could overrule a 123 year-old rule holding that the states are free to regulate firearms. Conservatives, however, have far more than guns at stake this term. In United States v. Comstock, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will have their first opportunity to weigh in on the scope of Congress' power to enact laws that substantially affect interstate commerce. Should the Court roll back Congress' power, they would delight "tenthers" enraptured by the notion that every law conservatives disagree with somehow violates Congress' constitutional authority. Additionally, in a case called Salazar v. Buono, the Court could tear down the wall of separation between church and state. For years, O'Connor was the key fifth vote upholding the Constitution's ban on government endorsements of religion, and Alito is widely expected to provide the final vote to allow this ban to be whittled away into near non-existence.

A NEW BALANCE OF POWER: Two cases this term could also completely rework American election law, handing powerful conservative interests unprecedented power to manipulate elections. The first is Citizens United v. FEC, in which the conservative bloc appears poised to overrule a century-old rule permitting laws limiting the influence of corporate money in politics. Should the Court gut this rule, as it is widely expected to do, the health insurance industry will be free to spend billions to defeat lawmakers who support meaningful health reform; the tobacco industry will have free reign to spend limitless sums to elect politicians who will immunize them from accountability under the law; and Wal-Mart will be free to unleash its massive treasury to help elect a Congress which will strangle unions and freeze or eliminate the minimum wage. Also looming is the Court's decision in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which concerns the power of Congress to create "independent agencies" whose members cannot be fired at the whim of the president. Should the Court gut Congress' power to create such agencies, the next Karl Rove could pressure the FCC to fine the Rachel Maddow Show while ignoring the antics of Glenn Beck, and he could strongarm the FEC into manipulating elections to benefit a future president's party.

THE ILLUSION OF JUSTICE: Another unfortunate pattern in the Roberts Court's decisions is a belief that justice has been served if a rigid set of technical rules has been complied with. Thus, the conservative bloc held in its first full term together that an inmate who filed court documents two days late lost his right to appeal -- even though the untimely filing was caused by erroneous instructions from a federal district judge. Similarly, the Court held earlier this year that a potentially innocent man has no right to access DNA evidence that could exonerate him of a 1993 rape and kidnapping, even though he offered to pay for DNA testing himself. This term, several cases will show whether the justices still believe that unyielding rigidity is a substitute for justice. Among these are Wood v. Allen, which asks whether a capital defendant's right to an attorney was met when his life was placed in the hands of a brand new lawyer with little or no criminal experience, and Pottawattamie County v. Harrington, which asks whether a general rule protecting prosecutors from lawsuits also immunizes them from accountability when they willfully fabricate evidence against a defendant.

Is it True That Everything Bad That Happens is Obama's Fault

2009-10-04T06:59:00.000-07:00

Republicans know whom to blame for the problems in the world -- no matter when they started

he list of Republican complaints against President Obama is, by now, fairly long. He's leading the country into socialism. He's doing too many things at once. He's not bipartisan enough. He's an enemy of humanity. And, of course, he bailed out Wall Street and the auto manufacturers late last year.

If that last item sounds a little odd, you may have been paying more attention to recent history than some GOP lawmakers have. Republicans have gotten so carried away lately with objecting to whatever the White House is up to that their rhetoric has sometimes seemed to be tinkering with the past. Though the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the Detroit bailout were both started by the Bush administration before Obama took office, the GOP is happy to lump those policies in with other gripes if it means voters grumble more. And policy problems Obama inherited when he took office are slowly, but surely, being transformed into his fault.

"We may be one more bailout away, one more so-called reform away, from losing our way as a nation of the people for the people and by the people," Senate GOP boss Mitch McConnell told like-minded conservatives at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit a couple of weeks ago. He hinted that he knew the real facts, but papered them over pretty quickly: "These worries have been building for a long time, even before last year's election, but they reached a new level in recent months."

Other Republicans have sought to roll back TARP and end the assistance to G.M. and Chrysler -- both policies that began under Bush. (Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby actually blamed Obama explicitly for TARP over the summer.) Speaking at the same conference as McConnell recently, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota started talking about some nefarious, if nebulous, concept known as "bailout nation." Citing the work of an (unnamed) economist from Arizona State University, Bachmann said Obama was up to no good. "Prior to the inception of bailout nation -- in other words, less than one year ago -- 100 percent of private business profits were private. But since the inception of bailout nation ... with all the government takeovers -- the current mentality that rules Washington, D.C. -- 30 percent of private business profits are now owned or controlled by the federal government."

Of course, the problem with that line of attack is that TARP passed almost exactly a year ago, at Bush's urging and with votes from Republicans and Democrats alike. But why let logic get in the way of a good talking point? The GOP appears to be playing on voters' confusion for political gain. As far as some voters are concerned, the Wall Street bailout and the Detroit aid from last fall are just part of the Obama spending spree Republicans are always talking up.

"There's no question that there's some confusion about where [the bailouts] really started," one Democratic pollster said. "When people talk about the spending, mostly what they're talking about is those kinds of bailouts; it's the first thing they go to ... There's a certain amount of confusion between that and the stimulus. For some number of people, the bailouts are part of the stimulus. All those get conflated to some extent in people's minds."

Which could add up to bad news for Democrats. Obama's job approval ratings seem to be recovering from the bruising he took in surveys during August's town hall furor, but anything the GOP can do to pile lingering Bush resentment on Obama doesn't help. "Obama's [poll numbers] would be higher were it not for this bad economy," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. "People don't blame him directly [for Bush's economic policies], but it can't help but seep into their overall assessment."

The attempt to blame Obama for the whole state of the world isn't limited to TARP, though that's the most glaring example. Republicans routinely talk about the number of jobs lost since the administration took office, as if the entire recession started at the stroke of noon on Jan. 20. "Americans are asking, 'Where are the jobs?'" House GOP leader John Boehner said Thursday. "But since the 'stimulus' was signed, we've lost roughly 3 million private sector jobs, and we're nearing 10 percent unemployment." True enough. But you rarely hear the GOP mentioning that unemployment was at 7.6 percent in January 2009, Bush's last month on the job. Or that White House economists believe that without the stimulus, another million jobs would have been lost this year so far. Some GOP strategists even seem to have forgotten who was responsible for the federal government in August 2005. "Here is the government that gave us the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the Post Office, and the effectiveness of Katrina, and now they want to take over our healthcare?" Republican message guru Frank Luntz told Fox News' Sean Hannity after Obama's healthcare reform speech last month. "Sean, use those three together and you have got a powerful message." And sure enough, at the Values Voter Summit, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins used the same line.

For Republicans, any confusion among voters who don't like the way things are going is, of course, just fine. The public is "putting that all into one bucket of 'Washington spun out of control,'" said GOP strategist Kevin Madden. "It allows us to realign ourselves with Main Street anxieties about Washington's inattention to spending ... independents are very aware of things like deficits, and they want to puke in their hats when they hear that the federal budget deficit this year alone is $1.4 trillion already."

But there could be another side to the blame game come November 2010, if the economy starts to recover and voters think the stimulus had an effect. A Democrat painted a picture of next fall: TARP funds being repaid, new jobs being created, the White House grabbing credit for all of it. "People are going to say, 'Well, I am seeing an impact, so it was a pretty good idea,'" the strategist said. If that all comes to pass, "the boil that is the bailout also gets lanced." Which basically means this particular political problem for Democrats, like most, could solve itself as the economy heals. Until then, though, don't expect Republicans to give up on revisionist history. After all, it's working so far.

****************************************************************************
About those deficits that suddenly after eight years of Bush and Republicans spending like "drunken sailors", The 4 percent solution

Let me take as a starting point OMB’s Mid-session review, specifically its projections for 2019. To the extent that these projections are either too optimistic or too pessimistic, what follows would have to be adjusted; but OMB is, I believe, trying to be reasonable and intellectually honest, so it’s a useful jump-off point.

One measure of OMB’s honesty is that it doesn’t try to pretend that all will be well, even by 2019. As of 2019, according to the projection, we’ll have a federal deficit of 4% of GDP, and federal debt net of financial assets of about 70 percent of GDP.

Would this be sustainable? No, although it’s not too bad. A simple criterion for sustainability is that the government at least stabilize the debt-GDP ratio. Assume that the economy’s long-run growth rate is 2.5 percent, and that inflation is 2 percent. Then this implies nominal GDP growth of 4.5%. To stabilize debt at 70% of GDP would require a budget deficit of no more than 0.7 times 4.5 = 3.15 percent of GDP — call it 3 percent. So the terminal deficit in the OMB projections is too large.

If that were all there were to it, however, it wouldn’t look so bad. Finding 1 percent of GDP in higher taxes and/or spending cuts shouldn’t be that hard — and won’t be, if America has a sane political scene by 2019. (Let’s hope.)

But that isn’t the end of the story, of course. There are two factors that make longer-term budget projections look much, much worse: (1) an aging population (2) “excess cost growth” in health care — the tendency for health spending to grow faster than GDP.

We can do something about (2) — and in fact, we’d better, or there’s no hope for the budget. So let’s assume that by 2019 health reform has actually brought excess cost growth to zero. Oh, and also assume that we have a can opener. Whatever. Seriously, we basically have to solve the health cost problem, or nothing else matters.

But that still leaves (1). Now, by 2019 many but not all of the baby boomers will already have retired, so that there won’t be all that much demography still in the pipeline. But the demographic effect will still be substantial. SSA projects about a 25% rise in the ratio of retirees to workers between 2019 and 2050. This would imply, other things equal, a roughly 25% rise in the ratio of age-related social insurance spending to GDP. The mid-term review has Social Security and Medicare taking up 8.7% of GDP in 2019; add in some of Medicaid (nursing care, etc.) and we’re talking maybe 10%, rising over time to 12.5%. Hey, this is back-of-the-envelope; it’s supposed to be rough.

What I read from this is that between the slightly unsustainable deficit in 2019 and the demography to follow, we’ll eventually have to find 3.5% — call it 4 — in fiscal consolidation even if health reform ends excess cost growth.

That’s a big but not disastrous number. We could raise that much in taxes alone without inflicting huge economic damage. We could make up some of the number if health reform does more than end excess cost growth, and rolls spending as a percent of GDP part way back toward European levels. We could cut Social Security benefits — although if you look at the numbers, it would take draconian cuts to make a major dent that way.

The point, though, is that if we get real health care reform AND we get a sane political scene the long-term fiscal outlook is serious but not scary.

But will President Glenn Beck be willing to sign the necessary legislation?

CIA's 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques Were Counterproductive

2009-10-04T06:44:00.000-07:00

CIA's 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques Were Counterproductive
The author of a new report suggests the belief that harsh interrogation and torture techniques are effective is a form of folk neuroscience that is not supported by scientific evidence, and does not fit with what we know about how the brain works.

The new paper was published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Professor Shane O'Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin. The paper reviewed previously secret scientific documents that were released in April, to determine the effect on memory and brain function of the severe interrogation techniques used by the CIA during the Bush administration.

Professor O'Mara found that so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques, such as prolonged sleep deprivation, exploiting phobias, being confined in stressful or painful positions, and waterboarding, result in the production of the stress hormones cortisol and the catecholamines.

The scientific evidence shows that areas of the brain most concerned with memory, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, can be damaged by the stress hormones, and there can be tissue loss if the stress is continued. This makes it less likely for the subject to accurately recall information, and more likely for false memories to replace real ones. If the stress continues long enough the subject becomes unable to distinguish between the real and false memories.

Techniques of this nature are still defended by some intelligence officers, who consider them able to extract useful information from suspects. Other intelligence officers consider the practices counterproductive because victims supply the information they think the interrogators want to hear in order to make the torture stop.

The same phenomenon was also found in investigations of almost 250 police interrogations in which the accused was convicted and often pleaded guilty even though DNA evidence later proved they were innocent. In many cases the interrogated person had come to believe the police allegations and incorporated them into their own memories as if they were true.

Professor O'Mara's review of the literature on interrogation techniques reported that there is a wealth of literature showing that the extreme stress of severe interrogation and torture compromises brain function and memory. According to O'Mara these techniques are based on bad science, and they actually destroy memories they are supposed to reveal. There is no way to determine whether information revealed during the interrogation is true or not.

Capitalism is Great But America's Brand of it is Broken

2009-10-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Forbes 400 Shows Why Our Nation Is Falling Apart
It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Had we kept those high progressive taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53 trillion, were available for the public good.

What does $1.53 trillion buy?

It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It's more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here's my favorite: It's more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

Instead, we embarked on a grand experiment to see what would happen if we deregulated finance and changed the tax code so that millionaires could turn into billionaires. And even after that experiment failed in the most spectacular way, our system seems trapped into staying on the same deregulated path.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

Slide Show: The Far-Right Fringe

Republican S.C. Gov. Sanford doesn't want ethics report released

2009-10-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

S.C. Gov. Sanford doesn't want ethics report released

Gov. Mark Sanford(R) has asked the South Carolina Supreme Court to block a state ethics panel investigating the governor from releasing its initial findings to lawmakers who could decide to remove him from office.

Sanford, who vowed to fight "tooth and nail" any effort to remove him from office, argues that releasing the report to lawmakers could be used for political purposes and could compromise his defense.

Sanford argues that only prosecutorial bodies can gain access to the State Ethics Commission's preliminary report, which is akin to an indictment and does not contain the governor's full defense.

The Ethics Commission maintains that the S.C. House would become a prosecutor, and therefore entitled to the report, if it opens impeachment proceedings against Sanford.

Sanford has been under scrutiny since returning from a secret five-day trip to Argentina in June and admitting to an extramarital affair with a woman who lives there.

Attorney General Henry McMaster asked the Ethics Commission to review Sanford's use of state and private planes, his purchase of business-class airfare and his use of campaign funds.

ACLU: FBI ‘manipulating’ debate on Patriot Act reform

The FBI is abusing the powers given to it under the Patriot Act in a way that is stifling the current debate about reforming that law, says the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The FBI continues to use the gag order provision of the Patriot Act’s national security letter (NSL) statute to suppress key information about the agency’s misuse of NSLs,” the group said in a statement released Wednesday.

National security letters (NSLs), created under the Patriot Act security bill that was passed in the aftermath of 9/11, allow the FBI to demand sensitive information about users of facilities like libraries and Internet service providers, and then bar those organizations from revealing that the order was ever given.

The ACLU’s claim comes weeks after Senate Democrats introduced the Justice Act, an omnibus security bill its authors, including Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), say is designed to protect civil rights threatened by the Patriot Act.

Intelligence Veterans Back Probe of Bush Era Torture

2009-09-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

Intelligence Veterans Back Probe of Bush Era Torture
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Five former CIA officers established Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003, when we saw our profession being corrupted to justify an attack on Iraq. Since then, our numbers have grown to 70 intelligence professionals, mostly retired, who have served in virtually all U.S. civilian and military intelligence agencies.

In our first Memorandum for the President (George W. Bush), dated February 5, 2002, we provided a same-day commentary on Colin Powell’s U.N. speech. We warned the president that “an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future [and that] far from eliminating the [terrorist] threat, it would enhance it exponentially.”

We strongly urged the former president to widen the discussion on Iraq “beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” VIPS’ second pre-war Memorandum for the President was titled, “Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem” — a reference to the bogus intelligence we saw being ginned up to “justify” war.

President Bush ignored our warning and the warnings of other informed individuals and groups. The corporate media uncritically echoed the Bush administration’s misuse and misrepresentation of the intelligence, despite the questions raised — including those raised by our unique movement.

(It was the first time an alumni group of intelligence officials had formed expressly to chronicle and to halt the corruption of intelligence.)

The cheerleading for war had begun — a war that would fit the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal’s description of a “war of aggression.” Nuremberg defined such a war as “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Torture: An Accumulated Evil

Torture is one of those accumulated evils. Violating domestic laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is another.

You were right to unceremoniously jettison former CIA director Michael Hayden, who betrayed the thousands of NSA professionals who, until he directed that domestic law could be ignored, had adhered scrupulously to the 1978 FISA law as NSA’s “First Commandment” — Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court Warrant.

In contrast, we believe you were badly misguided in giving a prominent White House post to former CIA director George Tenet’s protégé John Brennan, who has publicly defended “extraordinary rendition” in full knowledge that its purpose was torture.

Brennan also had complicit knowledge of the lengths to which Tenet conspired with the Department of Justice to distort history and the law in drafting opinions that attempted to “justify” torture.

With all due respect, Mr. President, it would be another mistake for you to believe what you are hearing from the likes of Brennan and Hayden and the journalists they have fed and domesticated.

Please do not be deceived into thinking that most intelligence officials, past and present, condone torture — still less that they are angry that you have put a stop to such techniques.

We are referring, of course, to what President Bush called “an alternative set of procedures” involving cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that violates domestic and international law.

We focus on torture in the VIPS statement that follows these introductory remarks.

The Senate Armed Services Committee recently concluded that it was President Bush himself who, by Executive Memorandum of February 7, 2002 exempting al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Geneva protections, “opened the door” to the abuse that ensued.

You need to know that the vast majority of intelligence professionals deplore “extraordinary rendition” and the other torture procedures that were subsequently ordered by senior Bush administration officials.

Sadly, President Bush was not the first chief executive to find a small cabal of superpatriots, amateur thugs, and contractors to do his administration’s bidding. But never before in this country were lawless thugs given such free rein. The congressional “oversight” committees looked the other way.

Tenet and his acolytes successfully ingratiated themselves with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the faux lawyers who devised what actually amounts to a very porous “legal” shield for those who carried out the torture.

It was a shield designed for and applied exclusively to those “just following orders” at the CIA black sites, and not for the low-ranking soldiers doing similar things at Abu Ghraib.

Some of the latter have done time in prison; one is still there. It would appear that some are less equal than others. And, to this day, the organizers and apologists for torture have managed to escape the consequences of their actions.

No doubt you appreciate better than anyone that the official Department of Justice memoranda you insisted be released last week are a national disgrace. Worse still are the first-hand accounts by young soldiers at Guantanamo of perversions like “rape by instrumentality.”

You should be aware that this was a practice adamantly defended by former White House lawyers when Congress attempted to draft legislation expressly prohibiting it.

Asked to explain their objection, Bush administration lawyers acknowledged that they were worried that such legislation might subject practitioners to prosecution under state and federal criminal statutes.

The Morale Myth

Finally, we want to address the self-serving myth being propagated by Brennan, Hayden, and others to the effect that exposing torture and other abuses would damage morale at the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

You may recall that Hayden, while still CIA director, was already going around town telling folks he had warned you “personally and forcefully” that if you authorize an investigation into controversial activities like waterboarding, “no one in Langley will ever take a risk again.”

Hayden was blowing smoke, as we say in the trade, but also gravely insulting all those who have served, and continue to serve, with honor. You need no help from us in interpreting Hayden’s outrageous threat. But the red herring about damage to agency morale does need to be addressed.

On April 28, former Vice President Walter Mondale exposed the speciousness of that argument during an interview in Minneapolis. Mondale was one of the senators on the Church Committee, which during the mid-Seventies unearthed the unlawful activities of COINTELPRO and other abuses by intelligence agencies.

Speaking from that experience, Mondale noted that concern over the effect on agency morale — a concern that is widely expressed now — was also voiced both before the Church investigation got under way and while it was proceeding.

The concern proved totally unfounded, according to Mondale, as it quickly became apparent that agency personnel called before the Church Committee were thankful for the chance to get the truth out, get a heavy burden off their shoulders, and put the scandal behind them.

Most important, the truth that was brought to light made it possible for the country to resolve how national security issues should be addressed in the future. Much of that wisdom and many of the legal protections introduced at that time were simply disregarded by your predecessor and the people he picked to run his administration.

As for the need for holding people to account, Mondale had this to say:

"Holding people responsible in some way for what happened is very important. If the verdict here is that you can do these kinds of things and there are no consequences, then that leaves a precedent. I've been around the federal government long enough to know that if there is a bad precedent, it's like leaving a loaded pistol on the kitchen table. You don't know who is going to pick it up and pull the trigger. There need to be consequences for violating the law.”

* * *
Statement of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity on Torture
Interrogation Abuses and Those Responsible Must Be Fully Exposed

Inasmuch as we have gone on record as strongly opposed to torture, both on moral and practical grounds, from the first public awareness that the Bush administration had decided to violate international and domestic law, treaty provisions, and American tradition;

As former intelligence officials we understand that unless intelligence is “actionable” — accurate, specific, and timely enough to be acted upon with some confidence — it is ineffective.

Equally important, we acknowledge our responsibility to expose fallacious reasoning regarding the utility of torture in acquiring actionable intelligence. This issue comes to the fore especially in the celebrated, but specious “ticking time-bomb hypothetical”—a regular feature of Jack Bauer TV fiction.

The fact that the exploits of Jack Bauer have injected a dangerous level of fiction and fear among impressionable viewers, and have misled not only interrogators at Guantanamo but also the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes — not to mention Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — leaves no doubt that such illusionary scenarios need to be addressed by professionals with real-life experience.

Inasmuch as the recently released legal memos that comprised part of the “golden shield” constructed by Bush Administration lawyers do shed some light but also provide inadequate information on “harsh interrogation tactics,” and that the memos sow confusion regarding which officials were responsible for institutionalizing those methods — not to mention whether they were actually effective, as former Vice President Cheney continues to insist;

Inasmuch as it has come to light that two detainees were waterboarded at least 266 times, throwing strong doubt on various rationalizations regarding the effectiveness of waterboarding in providing timely actionable intelligence (in a “ticking time-bomb” scenario, for example);

Whereas CIA Director Leon Panetta has insisted that the “harsh interrogation tactics that some officials have declared to be torture” (the circumlocution now in vogue in the corporate media) might again be used in a future “ticking time-bomb hypothetical;”

Whereas, when the torture technique of waterboarding, a practice with antecedents in the Spanish Inquisition, was applied by Japanese troops in WWII to American and British prisoners — Japanese officers were later tried and executed;

Whereas there has been no better system devised — despite some shortcomings — to ascertain the truth of potential wrongdoing than the criminal investigative and judicial adversary process, which provides the right to attorney and right to jury and is governed by judicial rules which attempt to ensure fairness;

Whereas we recognize that the criminal justice process serves the important goal of stopping and deterring criminal actions and cannot be dismissed as merely “retribution;”

Whereas 92 videotapes showing application and results of the “harsh interrogation tactics that some officials have declared to be torture” have already been destroyed, and there is understandable concern that other evidence is being destroyed as the days go by;

Whereas other civilian and military intelligence professionals have also gone on record (see Annex below) with respect to how torture tactics are not only ineffective in terms of getting reliable, actionable intelligence but have fueled recruitment by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to the point that, arguably, more U.S. troops have been killed by terrorists bent on revenge for torture than the 3,000 civilians killed on 9/11;

Whereas the false confessions that were elicited by the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, were used by the president, vice president, and the secretary of state (at the U.N.) to claim that proof existed of operational ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and whereas such false confessions also diverted limited investigative resources to pursue bogus leads;

We of VIPS call for a full, truthful and public fact-finding process to begin without delay. We ask that you give careful consideration to Senator Carl Levin’s suggestion that the attorney general appoint retired judges with solid reputations for integrity to begin the process.

Another viable possibility would be the appointment of an independent “blue-ribbon commission,” perhaps modeled on the Church Committee of the mid-Seventies, to assess any illegal or improper activities and make recommendations for reform in government operations against terrorism.

We commend the administration for releasing the Department of Justice memos attempting to legalize torture. We believe the remaining relevant information must be released promptly so that the citizenry can make informed judgments about what was done in our name and, if warranted, an independent prosecutor can be appointed without unnecessary delay.

We believe strongly that any judgments regarding amnesty, forgiveness or pardon can only be made on the basis of a fully developed, public record — and not used as some sort of political bargaining chip.

Finally, we firmly oppose the notion that anyone can arrogate a right to ignore the Nuremberg Tribunal’s rejection of “only-following-orders” as an acceptable defense.

(signatories are listed alphabetically with former intelligence affiliations)

Gene Betit, US Army, DIA, Arlington, VA
Ray Close, National Clandestine Service (CIA), Princeton, NJ
Phil Giraldi, National Clandestine Service (CIA), Purcellville, VA
Larry Johnson, CIA & Department of State, Bethesda, MD
Pat Lang, US Army (Special Forces), DIA, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council, Linden, VA
Tom Maertens, Department of State, Mankato, MN
Ray McGovern, US Army, CIA, Arlington, VA
Sam Provance, US Army (Abu Ghraib), Greenville, SC
Coleen Rowley, FBI, Apple Valley, MN
Greg Thielmann, Department of State & Senate Intel. Committee staff, Arlington, VA
Ann Wright, US Army, Department of State, Honolulu, HI

Annex

We list below additional experienced intelligence personnel and a few others, who have spoken out/written publicly about the inefficacy and counter productiveness of torture:

FBI: Ali Soufan, Dan Coleman, Jack Cloonan

CIA: John Helgerson (former Inspector General), Bob Baer, Haviland Smith, Mel Goodman

The Public Health-Care Option is Freedom

2009-09-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Public Health-Care Option is Freedom
by Dean Baker

Back in the good old days, the conservatives were the folks who favoured individual choice. Not any more. In the current healthcare debate, the top priority of the so-called conservatives is to deny people choice. They want to make sure that Americans do not have the option to buy into a Medicare-type public healthcare plan. These alleged conservatives have come up with a variety of arguments against allowing people the Medicare-type option, but the only one that makes sense is that they work for the insurance industry.

The argument against a Medicare-type option always begins with the assertion that the government can't do anything. This is a peculiar claim given the popularity of Medicare, but it also makes no sense as an argument against giving people a buy-in option. Suppose the government gives people the option to buy into its really bad plan. Everyone would just stick with the good private plans we have now, right?

The so-called conservatives then tell us that people will end up buying into the bad Medicare-type plan instead of the good private insurance options because the government will subsidise the Medicare-type plan. A little bit of arithmetic is sufficient to dismiss this argument.

How much money would be needed to get people to choose a bad healthcare plan rather than a good one? This would have to involve some serious subsidies. People are not going to sacrifice their health and the health of their families for another cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Suppose it took a subsidy of $1,000 a year to get people to choose the bad Medicare-type plan over the good private sector plans. With a non-Medicare population of more than 250 million, this would imply government subsidies of more than $250bn a year, if the Medicare-type plan was to fully replace private sector plans, as the so-called conservatives warn.

Is it really plausible that Congress will approve $250bn a year in subsidies ($2.5tn over a 10-year budget window) for a Medicare-type plan that everyone thinks is awful? Is there another altogether wasteful programmes that gets public subsidies even one-tenth of this size?

This one just doesn't pass the laugh test. If conservative politicians don't think they can prevent such an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars being perpetuated year after year for the indefinite future, they should probably consider another line of work.

In short, there is no genuine conservative argument against allowing people the option of buying into a Medicare-type plan. If the plan proves to be inferior to private insurance plans, as is often argued, then the consequences will be relatively minor. Some number of people who choose to sign up with this plan will find that they don't like it, and then will switch to a better alternative. In time, a bad public plan will soon flounder, since few people will buy into it. There may be some effort to provide subsidies to even a bad public plan, but it is not plausible that the subsidies could be large enough to displace private plans.

It is also clear that the opposition to a Medicare-type public plan does not stem from townhall-type mass opposition. A recent New York Times poll found that by an overwhelming majority, 65% to 26%, the public favours giving people this option. If there is a member of Congress that risks defeat by supporting a public plan, it is not because of their constituents' views.

The opposition to a Medicare-type option is not based on public sentiment or the fear that the plan will be bad. Rather the opposition is based on the fear that the plan will be good and that people will choose to buy into it. This will cost the insurance industry tens of billions of dollars in profit over the next decade and could mean the end of big paycheques for the industry's CEO's and other high-level executives.

But the people who oppose giving the public the opportunity to buy into a Medicare-type plan should not be called conservatives. Honest conservatives would have no objection to giving the public a choice. The people who oppose a Medicare-type plan are doing the bidding of the insurance industry - there is no conservative principle at stake. And we all know what Joe Wilson has to say about people like that.

Where is the Defund Blackwater Act

2009-09-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

Where is the Defund Blackwater Act By Jeremy Scahill

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working-class people. Their campaign has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, which has now passed the House and Senate. Yet the bill was written so broadly that, as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has pointed out, it could "plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex."

The legislation applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or others affiliated with a group charged with any of the above.

According to the Project on Oversight and Government Reform, this legislation could potentially eliminate a virtual Who's Who of defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and KBR and other corporations like AT&T, FedEx and Dell.

Perhaps one of the most jarring comparisons here is the fact that ACORN is being attacked. Yet the Obama administration continues to contract with Blackwater, the Bush administration's favorite mercenary company, which is headed by Erik Prince. Prince was a major donor to Republican causes and campaigns, including those of some of the Defund ACORN bill's sponsors, like Indiana Republican Mike Pence, one of the key figures hunting down Van Jones. A former employee recently described Prince as a man who "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe" and said that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Blackwater has a $217 million security contract through the State Department in Iraq--a contract just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. It also holds a $210 million State Department "security" contract in Afghanistan, running through 2011 and another multimillion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for "training" in Kabul. This is on top of Blackwater's clandestine work for the CIA, including continuing work on the drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This also does not take into account Blackwater's lucrative domestic work training law enforcement and military forces in the United States at the company's compounds in North Carolina, California and Illinois, nor the private "security" work it does for entities like the International Republican Institute, nor the work it does in training "faith-based organizations." Nor does it include the contracts doled out to Prince's private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions, which works for foreign governments and Fortune 500 corporations.

Then there is this fact: Blackwater was paid more than $73 million for federally funded, no-bid security contracts with the Department of Homeland Security in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, billing taxpayers $950 per man per day, a spending decision the Bush administration called "the best value to the government." In the wake of the hurricane ACORN, meanwhile, only helped poor people who were suffering as a result of the government's total failure to respond.

A recent federal audit of Blackwater, compiled by the State Department and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, suggests the company may have to repay some $55 million to the government for allegedly failing to meet the terms of just one federal contract in Iraq--which, it is important to note, is $2 million more than the total amount allotted by the government to ACORN over the past fifteen years. (The company also cannot account for one federally funded "deep fat fryer" in Iraq, according to the audit.)

Since 2003 Blackwater has raked in well over $1 billion in security contracts alone--all of which were kicked off by a no-bid contract to guard former Coalitional Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer. Let's also remember that Blackwater was estimated in Congressional hearings in 2007 to earn some 90 percent of its revenue from the government. Prince refused to disclose his salary but said it was more than $1 million. Blackwater has been or is being investigated by Congress, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department and the IRS, among other agencies, for a range of issues from arms smuggling to manslaughter to tax evasion. One of its operatives pleaded guilty to killing an innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilian, while five others have been indicted on manslaughter and other charges stemming from the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, during which seventeen Iraqi civilians were gunned down. The company is also facing a slew of civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings in Iraq.

Here is a question for the Democratic lawmakers that voted in support of the Defund ACORN Act: how do you justify making this a major league legislative priority while Blackwater continues to be armed and dangerous around the globe on the US government payroll? Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?

The NYT David Brooks shameful war record should discredit him for life. Why does the opposite happen?

2009-09-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

The NYT David Brooks shameful war record should discredit him for life. Why does the opposite happen? by Glenn Greewald

In today's New York Times, the grizzled warrior David Brooks performs a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War. It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong. No more hiding like cowards in our bases. It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places." Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path." Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars: "all out or all in." The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

Needless to say, Brooks was writing all the same things in late 2002 and early 2003 about Iraq -- though, back then, he did so from the pages of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Kristol's The Weekly Standard. When I went back to read some of that this morning, I was -- as always -- struck by how extreme and noxious it all was: the snide, hubristic superiority combined with absolute wrongness about everything. What people like David Brooks were saying back then was so severe -- so severely wrong, pompous, blind, warmongering and, as it turns out, destructive -- that no matter how many times one reviews the record of the leading opinion-makers of that era, one will never be inured to how poisonous they are.

All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past. But they're not. They're the opposite. The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all. They're doing the same things now that they did then. When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy. David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say: because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard. According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman. Charles Krauthammer came in third. Ponder that for a minute.

Just read some of what Brooks wrote about Iraq. It's absolutely astounding that someone with this record doesn't refrain from prancing around as a war expert for the rest of their lives. In fact, in a society where honor and integrity were valued just a minimal amount, a record like this would likely cause any decent and honorable person, wallowing in shame, to seriously contemplate throwing themselves off a bridge:

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 6, 2003:

I MADE THE MISTAKE of watching French news the night of Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council. . . . Then they brought on a single "expert" to analyze Powell's presentation. This fellow, who looked to be about 25 and quite pleased with himself, was completely dismissive. The Powell presentation was a mere TV show, he sniffed. It's impossible to trust any of the intelligence data Powell presented because the CIA is notorious for lying and manipulation. The presenter showed a photograph of a weapons plant, and then the same site after it had been sanitized and the soil scraped. The expert was unimpressed: The Americans could simply have lied about the dates when the pictures were taken. Maybe the clean site is actually the earlier picture, he said.

That was depressing enough. Then there were a series of interviews with French politicians of the left and right. They were worse. At least the TV expert had acknowledged that Powell did present some evidence, even if he thought it was fabricated. The politicians responded to Powell's address as if it had never taken place. They simply ignored what Powell said and repeated that there is no evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that, in any case, the inspection system is effective.

This was not a response. It was simple obliviousness, a powerful unwillingness to confront the question honestly. This made the politicians seem impervious to argument, reason, evidence, or anything else. Maybe in the bowels of the French elite there are people rethinking their nation's position, but there was no hint of it on the evening news.

Which made me think that maybe we are being ethnocentric. As good, naive Americans, we think that if only we can show the world the seriousness of the threat Saddam poses, then they will embrace our response. In our good, innocent way, we assume that in persuading our allies we are confronted with a problem of understanding.

But suppose we are confronted with a problem of courage? Perhaps the French and the Germans are simply not brave enough to confront Saddam. . . . Or suppose we are confronted with a problem of character? Perhaps the French and the Germans understand the risk Saddam poses to the world order. Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women--rather than French and German men and women--dying to preserve their safety. . . . Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists--so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 7, 2003:

I do suspect that the decision to pursue this confrontational course emerges from Bush's own nature. He is a man of his word. He expects others to be that way too. It is indisputably true that Saddam has not disarmed. If people are going to vote against a resolution saying Saddam has not disarmed then they are liars. Bush wants them to do it in public, where history can easily judge them. Needless to say, neither the French nor the Russians nor the Chinese believe that honesty has anything to do with diplomacy. They see the process through an entirely different lens.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, January 29, 2003:

This was speech as autobiography. President Bush once again revealed his character, and demonstrated why so many Americans, whether they agree with this or that policy proposal, basically trust him and feel he shares their values. Most Americans will not follow the details of this or that line in the address. But they will go about their day on Wednesday knowing that whatever comes in the next few months, they have a good leader at the helm.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 21, 2003:

I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002:

In dealing with Saddam, then, we are not dealing with a normal thug or bully . . . The Baathist ideology requires continual conflict and bloodshed. . . . The CIA and the State Department might think otherwise, but we are not all game theorists. Human beings are not all rational actors carefully calculating their interests. Certain people--many people, in fact--are driven by goals, ideals, and beliefs. Saddam Hussein has taken such awful risks throughout his career not because he "miscalculated," as the game theorists assert, but because he was chasing his vision. He was following the dictates of the Baathist ideology, which calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, September 30, 2002:

EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs . . .

You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. . . . For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 17, 2003:

So now we stand at an epochal moment. The debate is over. The case has gone to the jury, and the jury is history. Events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac. . . . But there are two nations whose destinies hang in the balance. The first, of course, is Iraq. Will Iraqis enjoy freedom, more of the same tyranny, or a new kind of tyranny? The second is the United States. If the effort to oust Saddam fails, we will be back in the 1970s. We will live in a nation crippled by self-doubt. If we succeed, we will be a nation infused with confidence. We will have done a great thing for the world, and other great things will await.

Look at that last paragraph. He proclaimed that "events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac." On the eve of the war he cheered on, as he celebrated the fact that "the debate is over" and war was imminent and inevitable, he identically vowed: "Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac." Soon we would know.

Did Brooks ever tell his readers what we found out about that? Did he ever acknowledge that the French -- whose opposition to attacking Iraq and skpeticism about WMD claims he attributed to cowardice, anti-Semitism, paranoia over American deceit, anti-American hatred, bad character, and lack of reason -- turned out to be right and Brooks and friends were miserably wrong? Did he ever retract his smears that the American "peace camp" was driven by hatred, anti-Semitism, and ignorance about Iraq, or acknowledge that his claims about Saddam -- that his ideology "calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time" -- were at least just as applicable to Brooks himself and his own neoconservative movement?

On the fifth anniversary of the attack on Iraq, Greg Mitchell noted that although Brooks "bears special blame -- shame -- not only for his writing, but for serving as senior editor of the most influential pro-war publication, The Weekly Standard," no such acknowledgment -- at least as of May, 2008 -- had ever issued from him. Instead, drinking from the well of the most accountability-free profession (punditry) in the most accountability-free nation for elites, he now just blithely moves on to the next war as though the last one never happened, though this time he's posing as an expert in the pages of The New York Times. Yet again, only he and people like him are strong and courageous enough to confront the towering enemy (by sending other people "outside the wire in dangerous places"). Those opposed to the war or even to escalation are cowards who want to "surrender to the Taliban." And even with the unbroken record he has on Iraq that should shame and discredit him for life (or at least until there's some serious examination, acknowledgment and repentance), he is the second-most influential commentator among "Congressional and political insiders" -- second to one of the very few commentators who did more to bring about that war than Brooks himself did. What type of nation do you think we will be if "insiders" have their views most shaped by people with the record of David Brooks and Tom Friedman?

Former Insurance Executive Lobbyists Make Empty Promises For Reform, Instead Trust CEOs Under Oath

2009-09-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Former Insurance Executive Lobbyists Make Empty Promises For Reform, Instead Trust CEOs Under Oath

NOTE: This is the fourth installment of our series — Meet Your Insurance Company Executive: An Interview with Wendell Potter.

Last week, ThinkProgress spoke with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about how insurance companies deceive the public with vague promises of “being at the table” for reform. Earlier this year, Karen Ignagni, the chief lobbyist and leader for AHIP, the trade group representing the health insurance industry, came to the White House and pledged to President Obama, “You have our commitment to play, to contribute and to help pass healthcare reform this year.” This trope, repeated by other representatives for the insurance industry, achieved the goal of persuading many that this year would be “different” for reform and that insurers would not torpedo legislation like in previous efforts. But as Potter notes, lobbyists and public relations professionals like Ignagni can make broad promises without ever being accountable. Individual insurance companies are not on board with what Ignagni is selling:

– AHIP says the industry will end the immoral practice of rescinding coverage of sick customers. But when asked this summer — under oath — by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) if they would “commit” to stopping this practice, executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and WellPoint all refused.

– AHIP says the health insurance industry is fully supportive of the idea of covering everybody, regardless of medical condition. However, in conference call with investors last month, Aetna CEO Ron Williams bluntly stated that he would pursue profits rather than add or keep enrollment. “We have a clear bias toward profitability over growth,” said Williams.

Potter continues by arguing that the public should be examining the business practices of insurers, not blindly accepting the promises of lobbyists:

POTTER: But if those companies are under oath, three different companies, including one of the largest in the land, that they will continue those, that’s who you should believe. That’s what will be the policy going forward. The trade association doesn’t have power to change practices of the insurance industry at the insurance company level. It can’t change a business model or a way of doing business.

Watch it: video at link.

The friendly, positive statements by Ignagni and her colleagues are part of the “duplicitous” campaign by the insurance industry to charm the public while secretly working to kill and undermine reform. ThinkProgress has documented this campaign and produced this page explaining the insurance industry tactics.
Update Writing for Vanity Fair, Matt Kapp reveals some key stats about health care profiteering:

With median annual compensation of more than $12.4 million, C.E.O.’s at the big health-care companies make two-thirds more than their counterparts in finance and are the highest paid of any industry. The health-care industry’s total annual profit has grown to an estimated $200 billion, and it doled out nearly $170 million in campaign contributions in 2007 and 2008. It now spends more than any other industry lobbying the federal government—$3.5 billion over the past decade and a record $263 million in the first six months of this year.

Could ACORN defunding bill strike military-industrial complex

2009-09-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

Could ACORN defunding bill strike military-industrial complex
Overly-broad language used by lawmakers intending to pull government funding for community organizing group ACORN may have the unintended effect of forcing the government to also pull funds from much of the military-industrial complex, a Tuesday report revealed.

"The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to 'any organization' that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things," wrote Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grimm.

"In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops."

Mother Jones was quick to note that could mean any firm in the Project on Government Oversight's contractor misconduct database could be facing a removal of government funds -- including the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide.

Last week the House of Representatives passed a GOP-written bill to defund ACORN by a vote of 345-75. A similar bill cleared the Senate by 83-7.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) praised the result, calling it a victory for a “united Republican effort.” The Associated Press referred to it as a “GOP-led strike.”

However, while the GOP managed to get 173 of its members to vote in favor of the measure, Democrats who crossed over almost made up the majority of the support, with a full 172 voting "aye" alongside the GOP.

A House roll call on the vote is available here.

Sensing a window of opportunity with the GOP's overly-broad language, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is looking to build a list of firms that may also be lumped in with ACORN under the legislation.

"You see, regardless of what you think of ACORN, it is laudable to stop taxpayer money from going to organizations that commit fraud against the government," he said in a statement. "So as per the bill's text, I'm going to put into the Congressional record a list of organizations who have committed fraud against the government or employs anyone who has."

Grayson's list is now online and growing, and he's soliciting the Internet's help to add firms which have committed fraud against the government.

The congressman continued: "Please nominate organizations and show me that they need to be in the record. To help, send me the name of the organization and proof in the form of a link to evidence that this organization should be in the Congressional record. I will also need your email address so I can follow-up with you if necessary. The proof you send needs to be easily verifiable, as in credible media reports, legal documents, government data, or otherwise."

The as-of-yet unverified list reads like a who's who list of the most influential American corporations, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Electric, Raytheon, L-3 Communications, Blackwater Worldwide (now known as Xe Services, LLC), Kellogg Brown & Root, Bank of America, IBM, Halliburton, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard Company, DynCorp International Inc., CACI International, Inc., Dell, Inc., Exxon Mobil and many, many more.

Will Tea Baggers Stand Up for Real Freedom

2009-09-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

The Justice Act

Tea Party Expressers who rallied in the capitol last week to protest big government will have another chance to defend "freedom of the individual in this great nation" next week when the Senate Judiciary Committee considers proposed amendments to federal surveillance laws. The Judicious Use of Surveillance in Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act introduced yesterday by Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold would limit the virtually unilateral power of law enforcement and national security agencies to conduct surveillance on American citizens, under the Patriot Act and FISA, with no meaningful judicial review. It would also repeal the retroactive immunity granted last year to telecom companies that broke the law by enabling the Bush Administration's warrant-less surveillance program.

Accountability

2009-09-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

Hold Ashcroft Accountable

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a "paradigm of prevention," by which the Justice Department would aggressively use federal law to take "suspected terrorists" off the streets. As he later admitted in his book Never Again, however, Ashcroft and those he oversaw had no idea where the next terrorist threat might lie. So the government locked up more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism preventive detention in the first two years after 9/11--not one of whom stands convicted of a terrorist offense today.

Most were locked up using immigration law. But when the government suspected a US citizen, immigration law was no help. So the Ashcroft Justice Department turned to the "material witness" law, which applies to citizens, and twisted it for ends it was never designed to serve--to lock up people "for investigation" even where the government lacked probable cause to believe they had engaged in criminal activity.

Abdullah al-Kidd was one of the many locked up under this law. A US citizen born in Wichita and once a star running back for the University of Idaho, al-Kidd was arrested as a material witness in 2003 and spent more than a year living under strict, parole-like conditions. He was never called to testify in any proceeding. Like many others, he was never charged with criminal conduct. He was a victim of Ashcroft's "paradigm of prevention."

Al-Kidd sued, and in September the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled that Ashcroft could be held personally responsible for this policy. This is a landmark decision for two reasons: it declares a central aspect of Ashcroft's policy clearly illegal, and it insists that accountability extends to those who authorize illegal policies, not just to the foot soldiers who carry them out.

Al-Kidd was subjected to an FBI investigation after 9/11; he was, after all, a Muslim. But the FBI found no evidence that he had engaged in criminal activity...

Rep. Joe ("You Lie") Wilson Authored Bill To Let Illegal Immigrant Stay In U.S.

Slide Show: The Far-Right Fringe

"[Right-wing extremists] live in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don't like established facts so they come armed with their own."— Gary Younge

Beltway Priorities and Selective Deficit Disorder

2009-09-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

Beltway Priorities and Selective Deficit Disorder

Watching the health care debate unfold these days is a little like watching scenes from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”—the ones showing a collage of strung-out, deranged or otherwise incapacitated patients rotting away in a squalid psychiatric ward.

As the insurance industry’s Nurse Ratched lurks in the background, congressional Democrats cower in the corner, fearing the phantom menace of their own shadows. Standing next to the window, suicidal Republican leaders rant about “death panels” and threaten to splatter their electoral prospects onto the pavement below. Nearby, White House officials struggle with multiple-personality ailments as they mumble contradictory statements about the public option. Meanwhile, tea party protesters lie on the floor in the fetal position, soiling their hospital diapers as they throw incoherent tantrums about everything from socialism to communism to czarism to Nazism. And, not surprisingly, Washington reporters just stare off into the distance, having been long ago lobotomized in the wake of their Watergate heyday.

Clearly, the inmates in America’s political sanitarium are each struggling with a different malady. However, they are all suffering from Selective Deficit Disorder—an illness whose symptoms can be particularly difficult to detect.

When we see tea party activists bemoan deficit spending or watch rank-and-file senators like Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., say, “I’m not going to vote for a [health care] bill that’s not deficit-neutral,” it is easy to think these poor souls are perfectly healthy. When President Barack Obama promises to “not sign a [health] plan that adds one dime to our deficit” and then New York Times writers such as David Brooks praise this “dime standard” as the epitome of “pragmatism” and “fiscal sanity,” these victims seem absolutely sane.

Yet, Selective Deficit Disorder is a sickness of omission. Attacking the neural synapses that maintain rudimentary logic, it presents itself not in what its carriers say and do, but in what they refuse to say and do.

Where, for instance, were the conservative protest marchers when President George W. Bush vastly expanded the deficit with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy? Where was Sen. Lincoln’s concern for “deficit neutrality” when she voted to give $700 billion to the thieves on Wall Street? Where was Obama’s “dime standard” when he proposed a budget that spends far more on maintaining bloated Pentagon budgets than on any universal health care proposal being considered in Congress? Where were demands for “fiscal sanity” by Brooks and other right-wing pundits when they cheered on the budget-busting war in Iraq? Where were the calls from these supposed “deficit hawks” to raise taxes when they backed all this profligate spending? And where were the journalists asking such painfully simple questions?

They were nowhere to be seen or heard, because those plagued by Selective Deficit Disorder (as the name suggests) are only selectively worried about deficits.

When it comes to spending on priorities like health care reform that would help ordinary Americans, the illness’ victims scream about deficits and overspending. But when it comes to handing over trillions of dollars to financial firms, defense contractors and other corporate interests, deficits suddenly don’t matter to the disease-addled politicians, protesters and journalists underwritten by those interests.

Luckily, while almost every significant voice in politics is stricken with Selective Deficit Disorder, the majority of the country’s citizens are not. That doesn’t mean Americans love unbalanced budgets, of course. It just means we know there is something very wrong with those who decry deficit spending on health care for millions of people, but ignore far bigger deficit expenditures on giveaways to a tiny handful of fat cats.

Now, all we have to do is stop flying over the cuckoo’s nest and start breaking into the asylum...

* David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book is "The Uprising." He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network-both nonpartisan organizations.

Health-care prescription - America needs an outburst of common sense

2009-09-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

Health-care prescription - America needs an outburst of common sense

If ever there were a time for comprehensive health care reform, it's now, and yet the forces of darkness are lining up against this urgent need, buttressed by lies, mobs inflamed by those lies and millions of dollars changing hands and changing votes in Washington, D.C.

The idea that doing nothing and going on without changing the way this country's health care is delivered works to the benefit only of the insurance companies, the giant health care providers and the big pharmaceutical companies.

That industry is now pouring $1.4 million A DAY into lobbying — read that buying or renting members of Congress — to water down or delay or preferably kill health care reform and hope it goes away for another 20 years or so.

Part of that high-dollar industry budget is going to the low end of Washington's K Street lobbying corridor, the firms and the folks who specialize in dirty tricks, panicking the uninformed and most vulnerable citizens, financing the creation and spread of lies written, spoken and spread like viruses by robot dialing machines.

The Republican Party, on life support itself, somehow sees an opportunity in encouraging and participating in this flim-flam operation. It ought to, and should, seal the GOP's fate.

Each night for the past week, we've been treated to the sight of mobs screaming and ranting and shouting down town hall meetings where congressional representatives had come to answer their constituents' questions.

No questions got answered. No information got provided. No one left more informed than he or she was when he or she arrived.

That's because they and their organizers were following online playbooks that are telling them where to go, where to sit, how to make it appear as if there are more of them than there are and, above all, to stop the program and allow no discussion of this issue.

They scream that any government-run health care is socialism or Communism. But look at them; look at their gray hair and thickened waists. At least half of them probably depend entirely on Medicare, a government-run program and a damned good one, for their own health care.

They scream that the bills still being written and amended in Congress will deny vital treatments for older Americans and doom them to an early and unnecessary death. Some dare call it euthanasia.

What utter, unadulterated BS.

The only outfits in America that have the right to refuse you treatment for an illness or deny you an organ transplant are the health care corporations, if you're unlucky enough to have to depend on that wonderful private insurance the right wingnuts are so loudly praising and defending.

This is the same wonderful health coverage that's driven hundreds of thousands of American families into bankruptcy because their private insurers refused to pay for urgently needed surgery or cancer treatment, or simply cancelled their coverage.

Why is that?

It's because those same corporations have, in just one decade, driven their profits and overhead (hiring those lobbyists and buying those congressional critters and building their fleets of private jets) from 5 percent to nearly 20 percent.

In other words, the corporate bite has gone from 5 cents of every dollar paid in premiums to 20 cents of every premium dollar.

It's good old unregulated American greed of the same stripe that drove this country into its current economic meltdown. Wall Street loves these guys.

We desperately need a government-run health care program that can, by good old American competition, force private health insurers to get off their pirate ships and back in the real world. The 46 million or so uninsured Americans need somewhere to get their health needs tended. The millions more in dire danger of losing their jobs and their private insurance need some alternative immediately available.

All of us need some people in Congress who haven't been bought or rented by the pirates, liars and thieves to speak out in favor of filling those real needs.

Wonder how much Big Pharma donated to the key committee members who amended the health care legislation to prohibit any government-run health program from negotiating lower drug prices with the price-gouging drug companies of, you guessed it, Big Pharma?

What we need right now is a huge outburst of common sense and enlightened self-interest.

Those gray-haired Medicare recipients who're playing angry mob need to stop screaming and start listening and reading, separating fact from fiction and learning who’s manipulating them and why.

Follow the money trail back to the pirates and thieves and their handmaidens, the greasy liar lobbyists and those in Congress who're slurping at their troughs.

by Joseph L. Galloway

Ayn Rand, Conservatives and social darwinism

2009-09-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand and the American Right

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left. Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism. The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting
instrument. These two theories had in common a practical quality. They described a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences. But Rand, by contrast, argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution--that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous--and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

The economic right may believe religiously in their moral view of wealth, but we do not have to respect it as we might respect religious faith. For it does not transcend--perhaps no religion should transcend--empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, this conservative view, the Randian inversion of the Marxist worldview, rests upon a series of propositions that can be falsified by data.

Let us begin with the premise that wealth represents a sign of personal virtue--thrift, hard work, and the rest--and poverty the lack thereof. Many Republicans consider the link between income and the work ethic so self-evident that they use the terms "rich" and "hard-working" interchangeably, and likewise "poor" and "lazy." The conservative pundit Dick Morris accuses Obama of "rewarding failure and penalizing hard work" through his tax plan. His comrade Bill O’Reilly complains that progressive taxation benefits "folks who dropped out of school, who are too lazy to hold a job, who smoke reefers 24/7."

A related complaint against redistribution holds that the rich earn their higher pay because of their nonstop devotion to office work--a grueling marathon of meetings and emails that makes the working life of the typical nine-to-five middle-class drone a vacation by comparison. "People just don’t get it. I’m attached to my BlackBerry," complained one Wall Streeter to Sherman. "I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money.”

Now, it is certainly true that working hard can increase one’s chances of growing rich. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the rich work harder than the poor. Indeed, there are many ways in which the poor work harder than the rich. As the economist Daniel Hamermesh discovered, low-income workers are more likely to work the night shift and more prone to suffering workplace injuries than high-income workers. White-collar workers put in those longer hours because their jobs are not physically exhausting. Few titans of finance would care to trade their fifteen-hour day sitting in a mesh chair working out complex problems behind a computer for an eight-hour day on their feet behind a sales counter.

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. "No one helped me," she wrote, "nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me."

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams described as "moral luck."

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as "That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!" and "That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!" Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: "Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?"

There seems to be something almost inherent in the right-wing psychology that drives its rich adherents to dismiss the role of luck--all the circumstances that must break right for even the most inspired entrepreneur--in their own success. They would rather be vain than grateful. So seductive do they find this mythology that they omit major episodes of their own life, or furnish themselves with preposterous explanations (such as the supposed handicap of making it in American television with a British accent--are there any Brits in this country who have not been invited to appear on television?) to tailor reality to fit the requirements of the fantasy.

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

In addition to describing the rich as "hard-working," conservatives also have the regular habit of describing them as "productive." Gregory Mankiw describes Obama’s plan to make the tax code more progressive as allowing a person to "lay claim to the wealth of his more productive neighbor." In the same vein, George Will laments that progressive taxes "reduce the role of merit in the allocation of social rewards--merit as markets measure it, in terms of value added to the economy." The assumption here is that one’s income level reflects one’s productivity or contribution to the economy.

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.

Now assume that this principle were to apply not only within a profession--that a dentist earning $200,000 a year must be contributing exactly twice as much to society as a dentist earning $100,000 a year--but also between professions. Then you are left with the assertion that Donald Trump contributes more to society than a thousand teachers, nurses, or police officers. It is Wall Street, of course, that offers the ultimate rebuttal of the assumption that the market determines social value. An enormous proportion of upper-income growth over the last twenty-five years accrued to an industry that created massive negative social value--enriching itself through the creation of a massive bubble, the deflation of which has brought about worldwide suffering.

If one’s income reflects one’s contribution to society, then why has the distribution of income changed so radically over the last three decades? While we ponder that question, consider a defense of inequality from the perspective of three decades ago. In 1972, Irving Kristol wrote that

Human talents and abilities, as measured, do tend to distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve, with most people clustered around the middle, and with much smaller percentages at the lower and higher ends. . . . This explains one of the most extraordinary (and little-noticed) features of 20th-century societies: how relatively invulnerable the distribution of income is to the efforts of politicians and ideologues to manipulate it. In all the Western nations--the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany--despite the varieties of social and economic policies of their governments, the distribution of
income is strikingly similar.

So Kristol thought the bell-shaped distribution of income in the United States, and the similarly shaped distributions among our economic peers, proved that income inequality merely followed the natural inequality of human talent. As it happens, Kristol wrote that passage shortly before a boom in inequality, one that drove the income share of the highest-earning 1 percent of the population from around 8 percent (when he was writing) to 24 percent today, and which stretched the bell curve of the income distribution into a distended sloping curve with a lengthy right tail. At the same time, America has also grown vastly more unequal in comparison with the European countries cited by Kristol.

This suggests one of two possibilities. The first is that the inherent human talent of America’s economic elite has massively increased over the last generation, relative to that of the American middle class and that of the European economic elite. The second is that bargaining power, political power, and other circumstances can effect the distribution of income--which is to say, again, that one’s income level is not a good indicator of a person’s ability, let alone of a person’s social value.

Majority Of Physicians Want Public And Private Insurance Options

2009-09-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

Majority Of Physicians Want Public And Private Insurance Options

Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system. Now, a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.

When polled, "nearly three-quarters of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options," says Dr. Salomeh Keyhani. She and Dr. Alex Federman, both internists and researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, conducted a random survey, by mail and by phone, of 2,130 doctors. They surveyed them from June right up to early September.

Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That's the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they'd like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

Can right-wing conservatives count? My friend's cousin said there were 4 million people there
Yesterday on his radio program, while discussing the crowds at this weekend's 9/12 protests, Glenn Beck claimed that the LondonTelegraph "quote[d] a source from the Park Service, the National Park Service, saying that it is the largest march on Washington ever." This led to a good deal of confusion here, as the Telegraph article contains no such quote. Just another case of Beck making things up? Actually, the story behind this turns out to be much funnier than we could have anticipated.

Several conservative blogs have been quoting National Park Service spokesman "Dan Bana" as saying the 9/12 protest was "the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever." This appears to be a repurposing of this quote from David Barna (who, unlike Dan Bana, appears to be a real person):

David Barna, a Park Service spokesman, said the agency did not conduct its own count. Instead, it will use a Washington Post account that said 1.8 million people gathered on the US Capitol grounds, National Mall, and parade route.

"It is a record," Barna said. "We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."

Very impressive! Unfortunately, as Little Green Footballs pointed out, that quote was actually about the inauguration:

This is so pathetic I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Dozens - if not hundreds - of right wing blogs are running with this quote, portraying it as a statement about the tea party held last weekend: 'We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.'

The quote is from January. The National Park Service spokesman was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration.

Pam Geller quoted "Dan Bana" as saying this on Saturday. She cited Thomas Lifson at American "Thinker," who also calls him "Dan Bana." In keeping with his fellow conservatives, Lifson doesn't feel the need to provide a link for his outlandish crowd estimates:

Despite mainstream media attempts to characterize turnout as in the thousands, a spokesman for the National Park Service, Dan Bana, is quoted as saying "It is a record.... We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."

True, "Dan Bana" definitely "is quoted" as saying this. By whom? Well, Thomas Lifson.

Imaginary ABC News reports, unnamed universities, invented quotes, and for safe keeping, the journalistic equivalent of "I heard this one dude say."

From Pam Geller:

Here's the video over at CSPAN of millions on the mall. Incredible. Look at the pan of the crowd shot. The left fascists are debating the number to take the focus off what happened in Washington, D.C., this weekend. I'll go with the Parks department estimates, thankyouverymuch.

A 9-12 participant in DC claims to have overheard DC police discussing the crowd numbers. They put the numbers at over 2 million -- and those were only the people who could make it into the city. The local authorities as well as many participants claim that many many more could not even get into the city to the core of the protest.

Yes, she cited someone who "claims to have overheard DC police discussing the crowd numbers." Your conservative blogosphere, ladies and gentleman.

Blaming Obama for The Bush Legacy

2009-09-14T05:14:00.000-07:00

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

Economists would cite many reasons why presidential terms are an imperfect frame for tracking economic trends. The business cycle doesn't always follow the electoral cycle. A president's economic record is heavily influenced by factors out of his control. Timing matters and so does good fortune.

But few would argue that national economic policy is irrelevant to economic outcomes. And rightly or wrongly, voters still judge presidents and their parties largely by the economy's performance during their watch. In that assessment, few measures do more than the Census data to answer the threshold question of whether a president left the day to day economic conditions of average Americans better than he found it.
If that's the test, today's report shows that Bush flunked on every relevant dimension-and not just because of the severe downturn that began last year.

Consider first the median income. When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income-the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below-stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That's a decline of 4.2 per cent.

That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The median household income increased during the two terms of Clinton (by 14 per cent, as we'll see in more detail below), Ronald Reagan (8.1 per cent), and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (3.9 per cent). As Mishel notes, although the global recession decidedly deepened the hole-the percentage decline in the median income from 2007 to 2008 is the largest single year fall on record-average families were already worse off in 2007 than they were in 2000, a remarkable result through an entire business expansion. "What is phenomenal about the years under Bush is that through the entire business cycle from 2000 through 2007, even before this recession...working families were worse off at the end of the recovery, in the best of times during that period, than they were in 2000 before he took office," Mishel says.
Bush's record on poverty is equally bleak. When Clinton left office in 2000, the Census counted almost 31.6 million Americans living in poverty. When Bush left office in 2008, the number of poor Americans had jumped to 39.8 million (the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.) Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008.

The trends were comparably daunting for children in poverty. When Clinton left office nearly 11.6 million children lived in poverty, according to the Census. When Bush left office that number had swelled to just under 14.1 million, an increase of more than 21 per cent.

The story is similar again for access to health care. When Clinton left office, the number of uninsured Americans stood at 38.4 million. By the time Bush left office that number had grown to just over 46.3 million, an increase of nearly 8 million or 20.6 per cent.

The trends look the same when examining shares of the population that are poor or uninsured, rather than the absolute numbers in those groups. When Clinton left office in 2000 13.7 per cent of Americans were uninsured; when Bush left that number stood at 15.4 per cent. (Under Bush, the share of Americans who received health insurance through their employer declined every year of his presidency-from 64.2 per cent in 2000 to 58.5 per cent in 2008.)

When Clinton left the number of Americans in poverty stood at 11.3 per cent; when Bush left that had increased to 13.2 per cent. The poverty rate for children jumped from 16.2 per cent when Clinton left office to 19 per cent when Bush stepped down.

Every one of those measurements had moved in a positive direction under Clinton. The median income increased from $46,603 when George H.W. Bush left office in 1992 to $52,500 when Clinton left in 2000-an increase of 14 per cent. The number of Americans in poverty declined from 38 million when the elder Bush left office in 1992 to 31.6 million when Clinton stepped down-a decline of 6.4 million or 16.9 per cent. Not since the go-go years of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations during the 1960s, which coincided with the launch of the Great Society, had the number of poor Americans declined as much over two presidential terms.

The number of children in poverty plummeted from 15.3 million when H.W. Bush left office in 1992 to 11.6 million when Clinton stepped down in 2000-a stunning decline of 24 per cent. (That was partly because welfare reform forced single mothers into the workforce at the precise moment they could take advantage of a growing economy. The percentage of female-headed households in poverty stunningly dropped from 39 per cent in 1992 to 28.5 per cent in 2000, still the lowest level for that group the Census has ever recorded. That number has now drifted back up to over 31 per cent.) The number of Americans without health insurance remained essentially stable during Clinton's tenure, declining from 38.6 million when the elder Bush stepped down in 1992 to 38.4 million in 2000.

Looking at the trends by shares of the population, rather than absolute numbers, reinforces the story: The overall poverty rate and the poverty rate among children both declined sharply under Clinton, and the share of Americans without health insurance fell more modestly.

So the summary page on the economic experience of average Americans under the past two presidents would look like this:
Under Clinton, the median income increased 14 per cent. Under Bush it declined 4.2 per cent.

Under Clinton the total number of Americans in poverty declined 16.9 per cent; under Bush it increased 26.1 per cent.

Under Clinton the number of children in poverty declined 24.2 per cent; under Bush it increased by 21.4 per cent.

Under Clinton, the number of Americans without health insurance, remained essentially even (down six-tenths of one per cent); under Bush it increased by 20.6 per cent.
Adding Ronald Reagan's record to the comparison fills in the picture from another angle.

Under Reagan, the median income grew, in contrast to both Bush the younger and Bush the elder. (The median income declined 3.2 per cent during the elder Bush's single term.) When Reagan was done, the median income stood at $47, 614 (again in constant 2008 dollars), 8.1 per cent higher than when Jimmy Carter left office in 1980.

But despite that income growth, both overall and childhood poverty were higher when Reagan rode off into the sunset than when he arrived. The number of poor Americans increased from 29.3 million in 1980 to 31.7 million in 1988, an increase of 8.4 per cent. The number of children in poverty trended up from 11.5 million when Carter left to 12.5 million when Reagan stepped down, a comparable increase of 7.9 per cent. The total share of Americans in poverty didn't change over Reagan's eight years (at 13 per cent), but the share of children in poverty actually increased (from 18.3 to 19.5 per cent) despite the median income gains.
The past rarely settles debates about the future.

The fact that the economy performed significantly better for average families under Clinton than under the elder or younger Bush or Ronald Reagan doesn't conclusively answer how the country should proceed now. Obama isn't replicating the Clinton economic strategy (which increased federal spending in areas like education and research much more modestly, and placed greater emphasis on deficit reduction-to the point of increasing taxes in his first term). Nor has anyone suggested that it would make sense to reprise that approach in today's conditions. But at the least, the wretched two-term record compiled by the younger Bush on income, poverty and access to health care should compel Republicans to answer a straightforward question: if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?

Joe Wilson R-SC Voted to Provide Taxpayer Money for Illegal Immigrants' Healthcare

2009-09-14T05:04:00.000-07:00

Joe Wilson R-SC Voted to Provide Taxpayer Money for Illegal Immigrants' Healthcare

On Wednesday night, Rep. Joe Wilson [R, SC-2], shouted “You lie!” at President Obama when he said that the healthcare bill would not cover illegal immigrants. “The supporters of the government takeover of healthcare and liberals who want to give healthcare to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan,” Wilson said the next day in a campaign fundraising video.

However, in 2003, Wilson voted to provide federal funds for illegal immigrants’ healthcare. The vote came on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which contained Sec. 1011 authorizing $250,000 annually between 2003 and 2008 for government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. The program has been extended through 2009 and there is currently a bipartisan bill in Congress to make it permanent.

.....To be fair, Section 1011 is just a small part of a much larger bill that contained many Republican priorities. Still, Wilson’s protest against the current healthcare reform proposal giving coverage to illegal immigrants (which is false), is in direct contradiction to his 2003 vote. Allowing illegal immigrants to purchase unsubsidized healthcare through the Exchange that would be set up under the current proposal wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent, and it would be a step towards fixing the problem that Section 1011 was designed to throw federal money at.

The Ugly Soul of Conservatism

2009-09-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

Exploiting 9/11, Glenn Beck, Extremists And Corporate-Backed Groups Plan Anti-Obama March
This Saturday, right-wing protesters will gather in Washington DC for a march to oppose health reform and President Obama. The event, scheduled intentionally on September 12 to coincide with the anniversary of the day following the September 11 terrorist attacks, was conceived largely by Fox News’ Glenn Beck. However, most of the day-to-day organizing has been orchestrated by a now familiar set of lobbyists and Republican operatives who helped plan anti-Obama “grassroots” tea party events since February. In addition, a set of far-right groups are supporting the event, bringing along their members to join in on the Obama-bashing.

In the past, Beck has said he “hates” the families of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Nonetheless, Beck hosted a special program earlier this year announcing his initiative called the “9/12 Project” — an effort to ostensibly recreate the patriotic unity after the September 11 attacks. But far from calls for common ground, Beck explained that the purpose was to demonize his political opponents, declaring that his movement would “surround them.” He has also implored listeners to attend the rally because they “may be the only thing that stands between freedom and slavery.” The 9/12 project website, owned by Beck’s media company Mercury Radio Arts, directs readers to Beck’s radio newsletter.

While Beck and his allies in right-wing media have provided a platform of constant publicity and coverage for the march, FreedomWorks, led by former corporate lobbyist and Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), has turned the gears to make the event possible. The official website for the protest, 912dc.org, is owned and operated by FreedomWorks and most of the logistical work for the march is being coordinated from its offices in DC. Starting in August, Beck began directing viewers to the FreedomWorks website at the end of his Fox News show. Billed as a “grassroots” rally, the event is actually sponsored by organizations run by partisan GOP operatives and corporate front groups:

– Gold Sponsor Tea Party Patriots is a website run by FreedomWorks staffers. When Tea Party Patriots list serv members objected to the 9/12 march symbol, they were rebuffed and told that all final decisions were made by FreedomWorks.

– Gold Sponsor Our Country Deserves Better is a Republican PAC that also operates the Tea Party Express, a bus tour arriving in DC for the 9/12 march. Our Country Deserves Better/Tea Party Express, which has ran an advertisement comparing Obama to Hitler, is managed by the GOP consulting firm Russo, Marsh & Rogers.

– Bronze Sponsors The Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute are phony think-tanks dedicated to churning out academic-appearing reports to discredit global warming. Like FreedomWorks, both organizations are funded by David and Charles Koch of the Koch Industries oil empire, one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

– Bronze Sponsor American Conservative Union is run by David Keene, a lobbyist for a firm that represents private health care companies, including the insurer HealthFirst.

– Bronze Sponsor The Senate Conservatives Fund is a Republican Party PAC run by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).

Many of these groups — each of which paid up to $10,000 to FreedomWorks to participate as sponsors — were pivotal in providing assistance (talking points, event lists, signs) to attendees of rowdy town halls in August and anti-Obama tea party protests. Encouraging anger and intimidation against lawmakers supporting health care reform was part of the strategy.

But for the 9/12 march, there appears to be a shift towards a more radical coalition. The official sponsorship list reveals a subterranean, extreme element of the American right in attendance. The National Association for Rural Landowners, a bronze sponsor, references the incidents at Waco and Ruby Ridge to call for attacks on “government entities” and liberals. In a YouTube video posted in July, the group makes the case for a secession, followed by a violent civil war. Similarly, another 9/12 cosponsor, FreeRepublic, is a forum for various radical right causes. As ThinkProgress reported, the shooter at the Holocaust museum found a welcome audience for his writings on the website.

Despite the inclusion of such anti-government extremists, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) plan to attend and speak

GOP legislator resigns after describing affair on live mic
The California Republican state legislator caught divulging lurid details on a live microphone about his affair with a lobbyist has resigned, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly, who are working hard on the very serious problems facing our state,” Michael Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) stated on his Web site. “I have come to the conclusion that it would not be fair to my family, my constituents or to my friends on both sides of the aisle to remain in office. Therefore, I have decided to resign my office, effective immediately, so that the Assembly can get back to work.”

News sources in California have recently learned that a conservative Republican member of that state’s Assembly was recorded without his knowledge earlier this summer describing lurid details of his affair with a lobbyist.

Orange County Assemblyman Michael D. Duvall apparently didn’t realize that his mic had gone live just before a committee hearing. At the time, he was telling a Republican colleague, “We had made love Wednesday — a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!”

“So, I am getting into spanking her,” Duvall continued. “Yeah, I like it. I like spanking her. She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah! Because you’re such a bad girl!’”

Duvall, a former president of the Yorba Linda Chamber of Commerce, is married with two children. According to R. Scott Moxley of OC Weekly, his paramour, with whom he has frequently been seen at restaurants and even at fund-raising events, is Heidi DeJong Barsuglia, a “hot blonde” 18 years his junior. Barsugla was hired last spring to lobby for a major energy company soon after Duvall became vice-chairman of the Utilities and Commerce Committee.

No one's ever conquered Washington politics by saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat

2009-09-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

No one's ever conquered Washington politics by saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat
The editors of the Economist magazine say America's healthcare debate has become a touch delirious, with people accusing each other of being evil-mongers, dealers in death, and un-American.

Well, that's charitable.

I would say it's more deranged than delirious, and definitely not un-American.

Those crackpots on the right praying for Obama to die and be sent to hell -- they're the warp and woof of home-grown nuttiness. So is the creature from the Second Amendment who showed up at the President's rally armed to the teeth. He's certainly one of us. Red, white and blue kooks are as American as apple pie and conspiracy theories.

Bill Maher asked me on his show last week if America is still a great nation. I should have said it's the greatest show on earth. Forget what you learned in civics about the Founding Fathers — we're the children of Barnum and Bailey, our founding con men. Their freak show was the forerunner of today's talk radio.

Speaking of which: We've posted on our Web site an essay by the media scholar Henry Giroux. He describes the growing domination of hate radio as one of the crucial elements in a "culture of cruelty" increasingly marked by overt racism, hostility and disdain for others, coupled with a simmering threat of mob violence toward any political figure who believes healthcare reform is the most vital of safety nets, especially now that the central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive.

So here we are, wallowing in our dysfunction. Governed -- if you listen to the rabble rousers -- by a black nationalist from Kenya smuggled into the United States to kill Sarah Palin's baby. And yes, I could almost buy their belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, only I think he shipped them to Washington, where they've been recycled as lobbyists and trained in the alchemy of money laundering, which turns an old-fashioned bribe into a First Amendment right.

Only in a fantasy capital like Washington could Sunday morning talk shows become the high church of conventional wisdom, with partisan shills treated as holy men whose gospel of prosperity always seems to boil down to lower taxes for the rich.

Poor Obama. He came to town preaching the religion of nice. But every time he bows politely, the harder the Republicans kick him.

No one's ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat.

Let's get on with it, Mr. President. We're up the proverbial creek with spaghetti as our paddle. This healthcare thing could have been the crossing of the Delaware, the turning point in the next American Revolution -- the moment we put the mercenaries to rout, as Gen. Washington did the Hessians at Trenton. We could have stamped our victory "Made in the USA." We could have said to the world, "Look what we did!" And we could have turned to each other and said, "Thank you."

As it is, we're about to get healthcare reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefit analysis. I mean, this is topsy-turvy -- we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity.

As we speak, Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, has been fined a record $2.3 billion as a civil and criminal -- yes, that's criminal, as in fraud -- penalty for promoting prescription drugs with the subtlety of the Russian mafia. It's the fourth time in a decade Pfizer's been called on the carpet. And these are the people into whose tender mercies Congress and the White House would deliver us?

Come on, Mr. President. Show us America is more than a circus or a market. Remind us of our greatness as a democracy. When you speak to Congress next week, just come out and say it. We thought we heard you say during the campaign last year that you want a government-run insurance plan alongside private insurance -- mostly premium-based, with subsidies for low-and-moderate income people. Open to all individuals and employees who want to join and with everyone free to choose the doctors we want. We thought you said Uncle Sam would sign on as our tough, cost-minded negotiator standing up to the cartel of drug and insurance companies and Wall Street investors whose only interest is a company's share price and profits.

Here's a suggestion, Mr. President: Ask Josh Marshall to draft your speech. Josh is the founder of the Web site TalkingPointsMemo.com. He's a journalist and historian, not a politician. He doesn't split things down the middle and call it a victory for the masses. He's offered the simplest and most accurate description yet of a public insurance plan -- one that essentially asks people: Would you like the option -- the voluntary option -- of buying into Medicare before you're 65? Check it out, Mr. President.

This healthcare thing is make or break for your leadership, but for us, it's life and death. No more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. President. We need a fighter.

-- By Bill Moyers

The far right's un-American values

2009-09-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

The far right's un-American values by Joan Walsh
I had to debate right-wing extremist Terry Jeffrey of Human Events on the controversy over President Obama's back-to-school address on "Hardball" Friday afternoon. What a big steaming pile of misunderstanding, prejudice and outright lies.

Jeffrey started out doing a fair imitation of a reasonable person, insisting, "I don't have a problem with the president of the United States talking to school children." He went on to say his issue is with the additional materials the Department of Education provided to go along with Obama's speech; we differed about how much of the materials had been withdrawn by the Department after the controversy erupted, but even I admitted that sometimes the Obama camp does play up the cult of personality a bit (the faux-presidential seal before he had the nomination? The Classical columns in Denver?). Six minutes in, it was shaping up to be a ho-hum debate -- but keep watching (text continues below):

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

But Jeffrey couldn't help himself; he simply had to unleash his inner fascist. Just as Chris Matthews seemed to be ending the debate, Reasonable Terry began to fade away, suggesting, maybe he did have a few objections to Obama speaking that went beyond the instructional handouts. Then Crazy Terry showed up and ran amok for the rest of the segment. Quoting C.S. Lewis that "An education should teach a child to love what's right and hate what's wrong," he began frothing about how "there's a "culture war going on in this country, from abortion to the question of whether two people of the same sex should be allowed to marry" -- and Obama's on the wrong side. Of course, so are the public schools, which he insisted should be teaching the values of the Christian right. Can you say tolerance or pluralism, anyone? How can these wingnuts purport to respect the Founders when they truly want to impose a state religion? How un-American is that? Terry Jeffrey hates our freedom!

I tried to remind Jeffrey that abortion is legal, and a majority of the country wants it to stay that way, and that Obama was elected with 54 percent of the vote -- the biggest first-election margin for any president since Lyndon Johnson. We are the mainstream, he is the fringe. I also reminded him that I'm a Catholic C.S. Lewis fan, with a daughter who got a great education in both Catholic and public schools (the Catholic card always surprises them). But he kept nattering on that schools "should teach people that abortion is wrong," and how Obama is guilty of "advancing the wrong value system," and I had enough, telling Jeffrey: "Yours is the fringe point of view, and I will not have it inflicted on my daughter or my community. And you're losing, my friend. He's our president, Terry. He's our president."

Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal took state helicopters to church
Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal is receiving heavy criticism after local media revealed he has been using taxpayer money to make helicopter visits to churches in the state.

According to one Louisiana newspaper, the governor’s chopper-travel habits have cost the taxpayers over $180,000.

The Advocate reported: “In May, June and July, there was rarely a Sunday when the governor didn’t board a taxpayer-funded helicopter to attend church services in far-flung parts of the state. He traveled by helicopter to churches less frequently in March and April.

“Over five months, Jindal took more than three dozen helicopter trips. Fourteen were to attend church services, according to state records.”

Republicans Hate Healthcare Reform But Love "Socialized Medicine" for Themselves

2009-09-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Republicans Hate Healthcare Reform But Love "Socialized Medicine" for Themselves

Republicans in Congress have raised the specter of a bloated, "socialized," bureaucrat-run nightmare of a health care system as a means of undermining the White House's effort at a systematic overhaul. And yet, as Democratic sources are now pointing out, when medical crisis hit close to home, many of these same officials turned to a government-run hospital for their own intensive care and difficult surgeries.

Take, for instance, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who warned that "a government takeover of health care" would "take away the care that people already have [and] are perfectly satisfied with." In its place, the senator said, would be "a system in which care and treatment will be either delayed or denied."

That was July 2009. In February 2003, McConnell actually went to one of those government-run institutions (where treatment is, apparently, "either delayed or denied") for a procedure of his own. The Kentucky Republican traveled to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to have an elective coronary artery bypass surgery after it had been revealed that he had arterial blockages.

Also known as Bethesda Naval Hospital, the National Naval Medical Center is the premier branch of the United States Navy's system of medical centers -- as in, the government runs it. It's also the place where elected officials of all ideological stripes and political branches often go get surgery performed. Indeed, members of Congress pay an annual fee for the privilege of getting treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital or, for that matter, Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It is, as longtime Democrat Martin Frost wrote for Politico, "like belonging to an HMO." Only, in these cases, the surgery is conducted at a public facility.

None of this has stopped some of the same officials who have taken advantage of this congressional perk from railing against the intrusiveness and inefficiencies of a health care system with greater government involvement.

Senator John McCain, (R-Ariz.) for instance, recently applauded the town hall protesters who were, in his words, revolting "against a government-run health system." That was August 2009. In May of 2000, McCain had surgery at the Bethesda Naval Hospital to remove a potentially lethal melanoma from his left temple.

Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.), meanwhile, has warned of the rationing of care, expensive costs, and reduced quality that would come under a government-run health care plan. In April 2003, however, he traveled to Bethesda Naval Hospital to undergo hip replacement surgery in an attempt to alleviate degenerative arthritis in his left hip.

*courtesy Sam Stein

We Need a Special Prosecutor for Blackwater and Other CIA 'Contractors'

2009-09-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

We Need a Special Prosecutor for Blackwater and Other CIA 'Contractors'
Blackwater’s web of connections includes a Who’s Who of former Bush-era CIA officials. And that’s just one company in a sea of “private contractors”

Some parts of Blackwater’s clandestine work for the CIA have begun to leak out from behind the iron curtain of secrecy. The company’s role in the secret assassination program and its continued involvement in the CIA drone attacks that occur regularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan have become front page material in the Washington Post and New York Times. There is much more to this story than has been reported publicly and details will continue to emerge, particularly about Blackwater’s aviation division(s).

Now we learn (unsurprisingly) that Blackwater offered “foreign” operatives to work on the CIA assassination program. Blackwater told the CIA that it “could put people on the ground to provide the surveillance and support — all of the things you need to conduct an operation,” a former senior CIA official familiar with the secret program told The Associated Press. If that’s true, those foreign individuals would appear to have been privy to information that vice president Cheney and other US officials deemed not appropriate for Congressional ears, not to mention oversight.

In light of all of these developments, it is important to remember how Erik Prince essentially hired George W Bush’s top people from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations to create his own private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions. He also offered Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, the former number 3 man at the CIA, a paid position on Blackwater’s board. Buzzy was the guy who got Blackwater its first known CIA contract back in 2002 in Afghanistan. Buzzy is also the one whining about the CIA’s “morale” problem, in light of the recent scandals, in the Washington Post. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he told the paper.

When you hear reports that a “private” company was hired to do clandestine work, remember that this particular “private” company, Blackwater, is, in part, being run by Agency veterans, including several of the top people running the torture and assassination programs under Bush. At the end of the day, using Blackwater and/or other companies represents taking covert, lethal operations even further away from anything vaguely resembling oversight by the Congress. By using ex-Agency people instead of “current” Agency personnel, yet another barrier is thrown up and the case for “plausible deniability” becomes stronger. When you are dealing with a billionaire like Erik Prince who apparently viewed himself as a crusader tasked with eliminating muslims and Islam globally, as has been alleged by a former Blackwater official, it is not difficult to imagine how all of this could remain—at least in part— off the books. Would it be a great shock if we learn that Prince volunteered some of his men or his company’s time to lethal missions for the CIA free of charge? “I’m not a financially driven guy,” Prince told Congress in October 2007. Take that with a grain of salt, but it is probably not flat out false. He was a believer in the crusade.

That is why it is essential that Congress dig deep into all aspects of the CIA assassination program and Blackwater’s total involvement. But it is important to remember that it is so much bigger than this one company and certainly bigger than one clandestine program.

Also, it is very important to remember this: Blackwater is hardly alone. Salon’s Tim Shorrock obtained documents in 2007 from the office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.5 billion in 2000. That means 70 percent of the US intelligence budget is going to private companies. “This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community,” former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman told me a year ago. “My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s outrageous.”

Rebuking Cheney's Torture Propaganda in 7 Easy Steps

2009-09-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

Rebuking Cheney's Torture Propaganda in 7 Easy Steps
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports

First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war).

Second, CIA interrogators themselves have said that they believed that Cheney’s torture policy put individual CIA personnel in legal jeopardy. As Greg Sargent has pointed out, on page 94 of the recently released Inspector General’s report, we learn the following:

“During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…”

This is not even to mention, in a broader sense, the risk to any US personnel that possibly ended up in “enemy” hands where captors of US prisoners could justify their own acts of torture by pointing to US tactics.

Third, Dick Cheney showed utter contempt for the CIA when he went not once, not twice, but more than a dozen times to Langley to pressure analysts to fit intelligence to his political agenda. He and his top aide Scooter Libby were “attempting to pressure analysts on the subject of weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former counterterrorism chief at the CIA. So when Cheney talks about being “offended as hell,” let’s remember how much faith Cheney had in the CIA in the lead up to the Iraq invasion. I’m sure the CIA analysts who he tried to manipulate were “offended as hell” by Cheney’s actions. “The visits were, in fact, unprecedented,” wrote Ray McGovern, who was vice president George HW Bush’s national security briefer. “During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.” Those personal visits were in addition to the ones Cheney received at home. “I enjoyed having the CIA show up on my doorstep every morning, six days a week, with the latest intelligence,” Cheney said on Fox News Sunday.

Fourth, the tactics Cheney apparently loves were a violation of US law, international law and conventions that the US has ratified—including the Convention Against Torture ratified under the militant leftist regime of Ronald Reagan. That dovish draft-dodger who wouldn’t know torture if he endured it for several years, John McCain, pointed out the lawless aspects of Cheney’s torture program on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan,” said McCain. “I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq… I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And I believe that information, according go the FBI and others, could have been gained through other members.”

Fifth, there is no evidence—none—to suggest any of this torture produced any actionable intelligence. “I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney told Sean Hannity back in April on Fox News. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Well, those documents were released last week. Cheney, clearly knowing that many “journalists” apparently wouldn’t bother reading them, was all over the media claiming the documents absolve him and that torture worked. The problem is, they showed nothing of the sort and actually—upon a close read—indicate that techniques that did not involve torture produced better results. Some portions “actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations,” as Spencer Ackerman observed in the Washington Independent.

Let’s remember: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a blowhard braggart long before he was taken prisoner by the US in March 2003, as Jane Mayer has pointed out. Al Jazeera did not need to waterboard him or put a drill to his head or threaten to rape his wife before he bragged about being the mastermind of 9/11 on the network before being captured. “[T]here’s no evidence that I see in [the declassified documents] that these things were necessary,” observed Mayer. “I spoke to someone at the CIA who was an adviser to them who conceded to me that ‘We could have gotten the same information from tea and crumpets.’”

Also, Mohammed told the International Committee of the Red Cross that he gave misinformation to US interrogators as well. “During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop,” Mohammed told the ICRC. “I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order tomake the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US.” This raises an unanswerable question: Who knows how many US lives were put at risk because of bad intelligence obtained from torture?

One of the few people that had actually seen the documents to which Cheney was referring before they were released and had the courage to speak up was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. In May, he said: “I am a member of the Intelligence Committee, and I can tell you that nothing I have seen, including the two documents to which [Cheney] has repeatedly referred, indicates that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary or that they were the best way to get information out of detainees.” Now that the public has had access to these documents, it is clear, as Feingold said months ago, that Cheney was “misleading the American people.” And, with the cooperation of a lazy and pliant media, Cheney continues to run his own televised miseducation camp. And let’s be honest: It ain’t just Fox News. The Washington Post now appears to be a private little Pravda for Cheney and his tiny group of minions formerly employed by the CIA. “The Post management, it seems, is determined to return to its past practice of acting as stenographers for the CIA’s PR machine,” McGovern, the former CIA analyst, recently wrote.

The role that the media should actually play in all of this was summed up well by Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who rightly points out that the tactics were not limited to waterboarding, but included “threats of rape, of killing children, of blowing cigar smoke into detainee’s faces until they retch, in addition to the power drills and mock executions:”

“We’ve long said that if you televise an execution that will be the end of public support for the death penalty. In a similar way, one hopes that the more the reality of torture is put before the American public, the less support there will be for it. When the issue is presented — as in the earliest leaked torture memos — as a legal abstraction, it’s easier for the public to rationalize the idea that nothing wrong is taking place.”

Sixth, at the end of the day, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the debate about whether torture actually worked is not the central point here:

The debate over whether torture extracted valuable information is, in my view, a total sideshow, both because (a) it inherently begs the question of whether legal interrogation means would have extracted the same information as efficiently if not more so (exactly the same way that claims that warrantless eavesdropping uncovered valuable intelligence begs the question of whether legal eavesdropping would have done so); and (b) torture is a felony and a war crime, and we don’t actually have a country (at least we’re not supposed to) where political leaders are free to commit serious crimes and then claim afterwards that it produced good outcomes. If we want to be a country that uses torture, then we should repeal our laws which criminalize it, withdraw from treaties which ban it, and announce to the world (not that they don’t already know) that, as a country, we believe torture is justifiable and just. Let’s at least be honest about what we are. Let’s explicitly repudiate Ronald Reagan’s affirmation that ”[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever … may be invoked as a justification of torture” and that “[e]ach State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers.”

Seventh, one last point about Dick Cheney and his little toadie Chris Wallace when they talk about how there hasn’t been another attack since 9-11. Remember toadie’s sarcastic words: “I just want to point out to the audience that it is purely coincidental that this country has not been attacked since 9/11.” How about the more than 4,300 US troops that have been killed in Iraq as a result of the Bush-Cheney lie factory? That is more American dead than perished on 9/11. Those young men and women would not have died in Iraq had it not been for the policies of Bush and Cheney.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.

Where are Mike Huckabee's Morals

2009-08-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

Huckabee: After reform, Kennedy would be told, "Take pain pills and die"
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Thursday that politicizing the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy "defies good taste." Apparently, he meant that to apply only to Democrats who are pushing for passage of healthcare reform, because he then went on to say this, as reported by Huffington Post's Sam Stein:

"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow-up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for."

Of course, what Huckabee said about the Democratic plan -- and, for that matter, about what Obama had said -- was completely untrue. What Obama actually said was quite different:

I don’t want bureaucracies making those decisions. But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they’re not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they’re being made by private insurers...

[W]hat we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that’s not making anybody’s mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know, and your mom know, that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help, maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.

Those are decisions that are being made by doctors and patients every day now, especially when it comes to terminal cancer. Unfortunately, in many cases there comes a point where the drawbacks to treatments like surgery and chemotherapy outweigh the potential benefits -- or where they're just not working well, and the decision's made to start focusing on making the patient comfortable in their final days. And, in fact, according to the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, Kennedy himself made a decision like that earlier this year. Leibovich writes, "By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority."

Cheney's torture claims debunked will the media say so?

2009-08-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

Cheney's torture claims debunked will the media say so?
by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

The release of a 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the agency's "enhanced interrogation" techniques, along with two other previously classified memos, has thrown a harsh spotlight on former Vice President Dick Cheney's oft-repeated pro-torture arguments. But corporate media seem intent on deflecting much of that glare.

Earlier this year, Cheney spent weeks on the airwaves, explaining that these CIA memos would back up his argument that torture provided valuable intelligence that helped thwart attacks against the United States (FAIR Media Advisory, 5/29/09). But the heavily redacted documents don't appear to do that. Of the two that Cheney asserted would help his case, reporter Spencer Ackerman noted (Washington Independent, 8/24/09) they "actually suggest the opposite of Cheney's contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA's interrogations."

Some reporters managed to reach the opposite conclusion, though how they did so was unclear. On the CBS Evening News (8/25/09), reporter Bob Orr said: "The once-secret documents do support the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney that harsh interrogations at times did work. Interviews with prisoners helped the U.S. capture other terror suspects and thwart potential attacks, including Al-Qaeda plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi and fly an airplane into California's tallest building." The problem is, whatever one makes of the CIA's argument that their interrogations yielded valuable intelligence, there's nothing in the documents newly available to the public--and to CBS--that actually argues this intelligence was produced by the torture techniques like waterboarding that Cheney so publicly defended.

As Ackerman told CounterSpin (8/28/09): Cheney and his supporters' argument "depends a lot on conflating the difference between saying the documents show that valuable [intelligence] came from detainees in the program, and then saying that it came from the enhanced interrogation techniques themselves.... That's a conflation that has served the former vice president's purposes."

Many other accounts treated the release of these documents as another chance to play "he said/she said." An August 26 Los Angeles Times headline read, "CIA Interrogation Memos Provide Fodder for Both Sides." What sort of "fodder" they gave to Cheney's side wasn't evident in the story itself, which pointed out that the CIA documents "are at best inconclusive--attesting that captured terrorism suspects provided crucial intelligence on Al-Qaeda and its plans, but offering little to support the argument that harsh or abusive methods played a key role."

ABC reporter Brian Ross (8/25/09) managed to convey the lack of evidence for Cheney in the documents, but inexplicably still left things up in the air: "Nowhere in the reports, however, does the CIA ever draw a direct connection between the valuable information and the specific use of the harsh tactics. So, Charlie, there's just enough for both sides to argue about, while CIA officers in the field are left to figure out just what is expected of them."

NBC's Andrea Mitchell (8/25/09) sounded a similar note, explaining that "administration officials say there is no way to know whether the same information could have been obtained...without waterboarding" and airing a quote from an Amnesty International spokesperson pointing out that Al-Qaeda detainee Khalid Sheik Mohammed told the Red Cross that he lied "to mislead his interrogators and make them stop"--but then concluding: "An argument experts say that may never be resolved."

As FAIR noted in May, media's willingness to give Cheney a platform in the debate over torture shifted the discussion away from the central issue that torture is illegal under both U.S. and international law, and focused attention instead on torture's efficacy. The media allowed Cheney to push the discussion in this direction, in large part because Cheney assured that these secret documents would show that he was right. Now that it's clear they do not, will the media outlets that gave Cheney a platform continue to let him off the hook?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Conservatives and The Ever Changing Definition of Proof

2009-08-27T04:29:00.000-07:00

The redacted picture at top is meant as satire, not a reproduction of an actual document.

CIA Documents Provide Little Cover for Cheney Claims
Documents Fail to Exonerate 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children’s lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as “KSM” largely provide intelligence about “historical plots” pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his “rolodex” — that is, what intelligence experts call “pocket litter,” or the telling documentation found on someone’s person when captured. As well, traditional intelligence work appears to have done wonders — including a fair amount of blundering on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s part:

In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.

This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn’t have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn’t attempt to present a case that the “enhanced interrogation” program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.

The second newly released document — a June 2005 overview of information extracted from detainees — is, if anything, more caveated. In making a case that “detainee reporting” was “pivotal for the war against [al-Qaeda],” it says that “detainee reporting is often incomplete or too general to lead directly to arrests; instead, detainees provide critical pieces to the puzzle, which, when combined with other reporting, have helped direct an investigation’s focus and led to the capture of terrorists.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the prime example here.

The document also discusses unraveling the network of Indonesian al-Qaeda affiliate Hambali after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. There are repeated references to the value of “debriefings,” which the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report says are distinct from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” but can be used after they occur. For instance, “Debriefings of mid-level [al-Qaeda] operatives also have reported on specific plots against U.S. interests.” Indeed, in a section titled “Aiding Our Understanding [al-Qaeda],” a listed example is:

Abu Zubaydah’s identification early in his detention of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of 11 September and [al-Qaeda's] premier terrorist planner and of ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri as another key [al-Qaeda] operational planner corroborated information [REDACTED].

Those revelations, as former Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan has testified, came before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

Similarly, the document contains accounts of how interrogators performed the traditional interrogation labors of cross-checking detainees’ accounts with each other to determine veracity, and particularly when cross-referenced with “large volumes of documents and computer data”:

For example, lists of names found on the computer [REDACTED] — a key [al-Qaeda] financial operative and facilitator for the 11 September attacks — seized in March 2003 represented [al-Qaeda] members who were to receive funds. Debriefers questioned detainees extensively on the names to determine who they were and how important they were to the organization. The information [REDACTED] helped us to better understand al-Qa’ida’s hierarchy, revenues, and expenditures, [REDACTED] as well as funds that were available to families.

Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what’s released within them does not remotely make that case. Cheney’s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don’t.

In a statement, Tom Parker, the policy director of Amnesty International’s American branch, said, “Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Vice President Cheney’s track record, the two CIA memos released today are hardly the slam dunk we had been led to expect. There is little or no supporting evidence in either memo to give substance to the specific claims about impending attacks made by Khaled Shaik Mohammed in highly coercive circumstances.”

(report courtesy the Washington Independent. Reprint here for educational purposes.)

Bernie Goldberg thinks he's uncovered a scoop about Bush's military records -- that was reported 10 years ago
During a second interview, Bush himself raised the issue.

"Had my unit been called up, I'd have gone . . . to Vietnam," Bush said. "I was prepared to go."

But there was no chance Bush's unit would be ordered overseas. Bush says that toward the end of his training in 1970, he tried to volunteer for overseas duty, asking a commander to put his name on the list for a "Palace Alert" program, which dispatched qualified F-102 pilots in the Guard to the Europe and the Far East, occasionally to Vietnam, on three- to six-month assignments.

He was turned down on the spot. "I did [ask] – and I was told, 'You're not going,' " Bush said.

Only pilots with extensive flying time – at the outset, 1,000 hours were required – were sent overseas under the voluntary program. The Air Force, moreover, was retiring the aging F-102s and had ordered all overseas F-102 units closed down as of June 30, 1970.

In other words, if Bush actually did volunteer for Vietnam duty, he did so secure in the knowledge there was no chance he'd actually be called upon. That is, he was talking big talk, once again, knowing full well he'd never have to back it up.

This is especially so considering what followed -- namely, that Bush wound up failing to fulfill his obligations to the Texas Air National Guard, precisely because he failed to maintain even the most basic, fundamental components if his TANG pilot's status beginning in the summer of 1972.

Indeed, there is a set of facts about Bush's service that is irrefutable: Lt. Bush did refuse an order to take a required physical, and he was suspended for "failing to perform up to standards". Moreover, the sequence of events that failure set in motion eventually ensured that Bush did not fulfill the entirety of his military obligation.

(You can see the documentation of Bush's suspension from flying status in Sept. 1972 here.)

In the military-flying world, failure to take your flight exam is a big honking deal. As the Boston Globe reported at the time:

Two retired National Guard generals, in interviews yesterday, said they were surprised that Bush -- or any military pilot -- would forgo a required annual flight physical and take no apparent steps to rectify the problem and return to flying. "There is no excuse for that. Aviators just don't miss their flight physicals," said Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard, in an interview.

Brigadier General David L. McGinnis, a former top aide to the assistant secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, said in an interview that Bush's failure to remain on flying status amounts to a violation of the signed pledge by Bush that he would fly for at least five years after he completed flight school in November 1969.

"Failure to take your flight physical is like a failure to show up for duty. It is an obligation you can't blow off," McGinnis said.

What's more, Goldberg's big "scoop" was actually one of the Bush team's talking points when trying to deal with the TANG questions. On NPR's Morning Edition Feb. 23, 2004, Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot said:

"John Kerry served his country very honorably, and we salute his service. We would never, for a moment, diminish his service to the country. At the same point in time, the President served his country very honorably too. He signed up for dangerous duty, he volunteered to go to Vietnam, uh, he wasn't selected to go, but nonetheless, served his country very well."

It was a bogus claim then, and it remains a bogus claim now. Bush may have had a hankering to go to Vietnam in 1970, as he and those lieutenants who talked to Mary Mapes may have claimed.

But by 1972-73 -- which is the time frame that's relevant here -- he couldn't even be bothered to maintain his flying status or keep up with his TANG training time requirements. That is hardly indicative of someone intent on serving in combat missions. And it completely nullifies Goldberg's claim that Bush really wanted to serve in Vietnam.

Socialized Medicine? 5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

2009-08-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

Socialized Medicine? 5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

2009 The Washington Post
T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.

Media dismissed Bush terror alert skeptics as paranoid conspiracy theorists

2009-08-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

Media dismissed Bush terror alert skeptics as paranoid conspiracy theorists
In his forthcoming book, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge reportedly claims that politics may have played a role in the question of whether to raise the terror threat levels on the eve of the November 2004 presidential election -- echoing contemporaneous allegations made by several progressives. Media Matters for America presents a sampling -- by no means exhaustive -- of media personalities who at the time portrayed those progressives as suffering from "cynicism" and "paranoia" and obsessed with a "conspiracy theory," despite credible evidence that the Bush administration was using the War on Terror for political gain, particularly in the months before the 2004 election.

How Conservatives Got The Facts Wrong On Their Latest Obsession: The "Death Book" For Veterans

The latest conservative obsession - dutifully spread via Sarah Palin's Facebook page - is marked by the same alarmism and factual inaccuracy as the hysteria over "death panels."

According to this tale, America's veterans are being steered into ending their lives via a "death book" distributed by the government.

It all started with Jim Towey, the former president of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives under George W. Bush, who penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal describing how the Department of Veterans Affairs was using an end-of-life planning document that was aimed at steering veterans toward choosing death.

Towey stated that the message of the veterans' health-care system to its patients was "hurry-up-and-die" and he contrasted the "death book" with "Five Wishes," his own advance care planning document.

In dramatic language, he wrote:

"One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran's health-care system that seems intent on his surrender."

Soon enough, Palin linked to the piece, stating that "the Veterans Administration encourages veterans to forego care as they make end-of-life decisions." And Fox News' Sean Hannity and RNC chair Michael Steele were calling it the equivalent of "death panels" for military veterans.

They failed to mention that the so-called "death book" contains the same advance-care planning required of all health care organizations under federal law, has been in use since 1997 and was developed with the input of interfaith ministers.

In addition, Towey seems to have his own axe to grind. He has repeatedly tried to get the government to spend millions to purchase his "Five Wishes" book, which is published by Aging With Dignity, a non-profit group he founded, to distribute to veterans across the country, according to sources within the VA. Towey used his influence with the White House to get a meeting with VA officials, including then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson. At one meeting, Towey was informed that the VA could not act on such an unsolicited proposal without violating federal procurement regulations, according to VA sources.
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The VA's policy is in accordance with the 1990 Patient Self Determination Act, which requires all institutions receiving Medicare funds to provide information to patients regarding end of life, living will and other advance directives. During the Bush administration, the VA changed its regulation to extend the act to cover all VA facilities.

In 2007, after Towey complained that the so-called "death book," "Your Life, Your Choices - Planning for Future Medical Decisions," was biased against the right-to-life viewpoint, the VA convened an outside panel of experts to assess and update the booklet.

In his op-ed, Towey stated that this panel did not include any representatives of faith groups or disability rights advocates. In fact, according to the VA, the panel included a priest, a rabbi, a renowned disability rights advocate, and the president of the organization that produces "Five Wishes," the alternative advance care planning document that Towey is promoting and selling.

The panel supported the use of the "Your Life, Your Choices" booklet but included some suggestions for revising its content. The plans to update and release the booklet were developed under the Bush administration and it is due for release in 2010.

Towey, along with Assistant Secretary Of Veterans Affairs Tammy Duckworth are scheduled to discuss the issue on "Fox News Sunday" tomorrow.

Dr. Ellen Fox, the Chief Officer for Ethics in Health Care at the Veterans Health Administration, defended the use of the booklet:

Your Life, Your Choices is an educational workbook that was designed specifically for Veterans. The authors went to great lengths to ensure it would be meaningful and helpful to all Veterans, regardless of their religious and cultural backgrounds. I am impressed by the development process they used, which included extensive input and testing by different Veterans groups, religious leaders from 10 different faiths, elderly and disabled individuals, and experienced doctors and nurses. They even made sure to incorporate everyday language that Veterans commonly use to describe medical conditions, while at the same time providing accurate information from the physician's perspective. Over the past 10 years it has been tested through scientific research, endorsed by many respected professional organizations, and widely used throughout the U.S. health care system. It is one of many educational resources we provide to help Veterans and their families. As a Federal agency we have an obligation to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars by maximizing the services we provide our Veterans. Providing an educational resource like Your Life, Your Choices at no cost to Veterans is one of the many ways we fulfill this mission. The whole purpose of this workbook is to encourage more conversations between patients, families, and health care teams. Anyone who is seriously interested in ensuring that Veterans receive the best care possible should recognize this.

Towey did not return calls placed to St. Vincent College, where he is the president.

Bush Used False Terror Alerts To Win by Fear

2009-08-21T03:44:00.000-07:00

Tom Ridge: I Was Pressured To Raise Terror Alert To Help Bush Win
In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report's Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Dave Weigel, writing for the Washington Independent, notes that in the past, Ridge has denied manipulating security information for political reasons. In 2004, for example, he said, "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security."

"What Tom Ridge disclosed confirms our worst suspicions," said Sen. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who criticized the color-coded system back in 2003. "Just like they did in Iraq, the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to cause fear in the public to further its political goals."

The "death panels" are already here
Sorry, Sarah Palin -- rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results

Opponents of reform often seem to skip right past any problems with the current system -- but it's rife with them. A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year (though the AMA noted that not all the denials were improper). There is no national database of insurance claim denials, though, because private insurance companies aren't required to disclose such stats. Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce Committee report in June found that just three insurance companies kicked at least 20,000 people off their rolls between 2003 and 2007 for such reasons as typos on their application paperwork, a preexisting condition or a family member's medical history. People who buy insurance under individual policies, about 6 percent of adults, may be especially vulnerable, but the 63 percent of adults covered by employer-provided insurance aren't immune to difficulty.

- -- In October 2008, Michael Napientak, a doorman from Clarendon Hills, Ill., went to the hospital for surgery to relieve agonizing back pain. His wife's employer's insurance provider, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare, had issued a pre-authorization for the operation. The operation went well. But in April, the insurer started sending notices that it wouldn't pay for the surgery, after all; the family, not the insurance provider, would be on the hook for the $148,000 the hospital charged for the procedure. Pre-authorization, the insurance company explained, didn't necessarily guarantee payment on a claim would be forthcoming. The company offered shifting explanations for why it wouldn't pay -- first, demanding proof that Napientak had tried less expensive measures to relieve his pain, and then, when he provided it, insisting that it lacked documentation for why the surgery was medically necessary. Napientak's wife, Sandie, asked her boss to help out, but with no luck. Fortunately for the Napientaks, they were able to attract the attention of a Chicago Tribune columnist before they had to figure out how to pay the six-figure bill -- once the newspaper started asking questions, the insurer suddenly decided, "based on additional information submitted," to cover the tab, after all.

-- David Denney was less than a year old when he was diagnosed in 1995 with glutaric acidemia Type 1, a rare blood disorder that left him severely brain damaged and unable to eat, walk or speak without assistance. For more than a decade, Blue Cross of California -- his parents' insurance company -- paid the $1,200 weekly cost to have a nurse care for him, giving him exercise and administering anti-seizure medication.

Fearing Government Involvement in Health Care

2009-08-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

Fearing Government Involvement in Health Care

One of the mantras of the opposition to meaningful health reform has been a fear of a government takeover of the health care sector. This fear is expressed virtually nonstop on talk radio, the right wing blogosphere, Fox News and at town hall meetings across the country. As we know, for better or for worse, the Obama administration is not proposing a government takeover of the entire health care system, but overstatement and exaggeration is unavoidable in these kinds of debates.

The image of government takeover of health care is meant to strike fear into good market oriented Americans who believe the government can do nothing right, particularly in an area as difficult, personal and important as health care. The fear of government involvement in any aspect of our life is a deeply held American value which allows us to continue to believe in the myth of small government. It is any easy fear to exploit even when speaking to people who have good jobs because they studied at public universities, know their parents have enough to eat because of social security, drive to work on federally funded highways and generally live in the 21st century industrialized world.

Nonetheless, opponents of health care reform believe fear of government involvement in health care to be something shared by all Americans. Before we collectively start quaking in fear of a government takeover of health care it might make sense to slow down and consider that a fair amount of our health care system already has strong government involvement.

Old people, some poor people and veterans already have government supported health care through Medicare, Medicaid and various veterans benefits. These programs are, of course, far from perfect, but they are pretty good. While many seniors would like to see Medicare reformed, it is rare to see senior citizens, or organizations of senior citizens call for abolishing Medicare. Similarly, many veterans, some who served decades ago rely on veteran's hospitals for an important part of their health care. My father is a veteran who voices more than the occasional criticism of the US government, but I have never heard him say that he wishes veterans didn't get any health care or that the government should close the veterans hospitals.

Senior citizens and veterans are both well organized and powerful interest groups, representing tens of millions of Americans, but government involvement in the health care sector has hardly caused any pubic outrage among these two key constituent groups. On the contrary, both usually push very hard for the expansion of Medicare and veterans benefits. If the American people really wanted government out of the health care industry, or if the government was unable to play a useful and positive role in the delivery of health care, it is pretty likely that these groups would have made a lot of noise about this issue years ago, but they have not.

Medicaid recipients are not as well organized as either veterans or senior citizens, but recipients of Medicaid very rarely argue for weaker Medicaid programs or less involvement by the government in providing health care services. Again, the opposite is true. Recipients of Medicaid have often shown a preference for bigger programs with more government involvement.

Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' benefits have become an indispensible part of our health care system providing valuable services and benefits to people, many of whom would have very few health care options were it not for these government programs. This is something which should be kept in mind when scare tactics about government takeover of health care are used. These programs also demonstrate the inaccuracy, or perhaps nuttiness, of some of the more outlandish claims about Obama's proposed programs. For example, if the government were really going to ration health care or set up "death panels" as part of government health care programs, wouldn't the government have started by doing these things to the poor, the elderly or disabled veterans-precisely the people who rely on the government for health care today.

The Obama administration, of course, is not proposing a full government takeover of the health care system, but they are proposing increased government involvement in health care. An incremental change of this kind, while likely to make a tremendous difference in the lives of some, although unfortunately probably not all, of those currently uninsured, is simply not a radical measure. It does not represent a new way of paying for health care services in the US, but a readjustment to the relative balance of the public and private sectors in health care and a way to leave fewer people with no health care at all, which is what most Americans really fear.

by Lincoln Mitchell, Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics, Columbia University

Iraq War's Winners and Losers

2009-08-18T04:57:00.000-07:00

Iraq War's Winners and Losers
by Sherwood Ross

"On my last day in Iraq," veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9, "as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn't see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. ... I couldn't understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed."

Quite a few oil company CEO's and "defense" industry executives, however, do have a pretty good idea why that war is being fought. As Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Inc., said a year after the Iraq invasion boosted his security firm's profits 231 percent: "It's the Gold Rush."

What follows is a brief look at some of the outfits that cashed in, and at the multitudes that got took.

"Defense Earnings Continue to Soar," Renae Merle wrote in The Washington Post on July 30, 2007. "Several of Washington's largest defense contractors said last week that they continue to benefit from a boom in spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan..."

Merle added, "Profit reports from Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin showed particularly strong results in operations in the region." More recently, Boeing's second-quarter earnings this year rose 17 percent, Associated Pressreported, in part because of what APcalled "robust defense sales."

But war, it turns out, is not only unhealthy for human beings, it is not uniformly good for the economy. Many sectors suffer, including non-defense employment, as a war can destroy more jobs than it creates.

While the makers of warplanes may be flying high, these are "Tough Times For Commercial Aerospace," Business Week reported July 13. "The sector is contending with the deepening global recession, declining air traffic, capacity cuts by airlines, and reduced availability of financing for aircraft purchases." The general public suffers, too.

"As President Bush tried to fight the war without increasing taxes, the Iraq war has displaced private investment and/or government expenditures, including investments in infrastructure, R&D and education: they are less than they would otherwise have been," write Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Stiglitz holds a Nobel Prize in economics and Bilmes is former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce. They say government money spent in Iraq does not stimulate the economy in the way that the same amounts spent at home would.

The war has also starved countless firms for expansion bucks.

"Higher borrowing costs for business since the beginning of the Iraq war are bleeding manufacturing investment," Greg Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. And when entrepreneurs -- who hire so many -- lack growth capital, job creation takes a real hit.

We might recall too, the millions around the world who filled the streets to protest President Bush's impending attack on Iraq and who have quit buying U.S. products, further reducing sales and employment.

"American firms, especially those that have become icons, like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, may also suffer, not so much from explicit boycotts as from a broader sense of dislike of all things American," Stiglitz and Bilmes wrote.

"America's standing in the world has never been lower," the authors said, noting that in 2007, U.S. "favorable" ratings plunged to 29 percent in Indonesia and nine percent in Turkey. "Large numbers of wealthy people in the Middle East - where the oil money and inequality put individual wealth in the billions - have shifted banking from America to elsewhere," they said.

Because the Iraq war crippled that country's oil industry, output fell, supplies tightened, and, according to Palast, "World prices leaped to reflect the shortfall."

What's more, Palast pointed out, after the Iraq invasion the Saudis withheld more than a million barrels of oil a day from the market. "The one-year 121 percent post-invasion jump in the price of crude, from under $30 a barrel to over $60, sucked that $120 billion windfall to the Saudis from SUV drivers and factory owners in the West," he said.

Count the Saudis among the big winners.

The oil spike subtracted 1.2 percent from the gross domestic product, "costing the USA just over one million jobs," Palast reckoned. Stiglitz and Bilmes said the oil price spike meant "American families have had to spend about 5 percent more of their income on gasoline and heating than before."

Last year, the Iraq and Afghan wars cost each American household $138 per month in taxes, they estimated. Count the Joneses among the big losers.

Palast wrote, "It has been a very good war for Big Oil - courtesy of OPEC price hikes. The five oil giants saw profits rise from $34 billion in 2002 to $81 billion in 2004...But this tsunami of black ink was nothing compared to the wave of $120 billion in profits to come in 2006: $15.6 billion for Conoco, $17.1 billion for Chevron and the Mother of All Earnings, Exxon's $39.5 billion in 2006 on sales of $378 billion."

Palast noted that oil firms have their own reserves whose value is tied to OPEC's price targets, and "The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil oil alone by just over $666 billion...

"Chevron Oil, where Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value...I calculate that the top five oil operators saw their reserves rise in value by over $2.363 trillion."

Who's surprised when Forbes reports of the ten most profitable corporations in the world five are now oil and gas companies - Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, and Petro-China.

"Since the Iraq War began," Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive wrote, "aerospace and defense industry stocks have more than doubled. General Dynamics did even better than that. Its stock has tripled."

An Associated Pressaccount published July 23 observed: "With the military fighting two wars and Pentagon budgets on a steady upward rise, defense companies regularly posted huge gains in profits and rosier earnings forecasts during recent quarters. Even as the rest of the economy tumbled last fall, military contractors, with the federal government as their primary customer, were a relative safe haven."

Among the big winners are top Pentagon contractors, as ranked by WashingtonTechnology.com as of 2008. Halliburton spun off KBR in 2007 and their operations are covered later. Data was selected for typical years 2007-09.

1. Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Maryland, a major warplane builder, in 2007 alone earned profits of $3 billion on sales of nearly $42 billion.
2. Boeing, of Chicago, saw its 2007 net profit shoot up 84 percent to $4 billion, fed by "strong growth in defense earnings," according to an Agence France-Presse report.
3. KBR
4. Northrop Grumman, of Los Angeles, a manufacturer of bombers, warships and military electronics, had 2007 profits of $1.8 billion on sales of $32 billion.
5. General Dynamics, of Falls Church, Virginia, had profits in 2008 of about $2.5 billion on sales of $29 billion. It makes tanks, combat vehicles, and mission-critical information systems.
6. Raytheon, of Waltham, Massachusetts, reported about $23 billion in sales for 2008. It is the world's largest missile maker and Bloomberg News says it is benefiting from "higher domestic defense spending and U.S. arms exports."
7. Scientific International Applications Corp., of La Jolla, California, an engineering and technology supplier to the Pentagon, had sales of $10 billion for fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2009, and net income of $452 million.
8. L-3, of New York City, has enjoyed sales growth of about 25 percent a year recently. Its total 2008 sales of $15 billion brought it profits of nearly $900 million. Its primary customer is the Defense Department, to which it supplies high tech surveillance and reconnaissance systems.
9. EDS Corp., of Plano, Texas, purchased by Hewlett-Packard in May, 2008, had 2007 sales of nearly $20 billion. Its priority project is building the $12 billion Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, said to be the largest private network in the world.
10. Fluor Corp., of Irvine, Texas, an engineering and construction firm, had net earnings of $720 million in 2008 on sales of $22 billion.

The good times continue to roll for military contractors under President Obama, who has increased the Pentagon's budget by 4 percent to a total of about $700 billion. One reason military contractors fare so well is that no-bid contracts with built-in profit margins tumble out of the Pentagon cornucopia directly into their laps.

The element of "risk," so basic to capitalism, has been trampled by Pentagon purchasing agents even as its top brass rattle their missiles at supposedly enemy governments abroad. If this isn't enough, in 2004 the Bush administration slipped a special provision into tax legislation to cut the tax on war profits to 7 percent compared to 21 percent paid by most U.S. manufacturers.

Former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, according to author Pratap Chatterjee in his Halliburton's Army, raked in "more than $25 billion since the company won a ten-year contract in late 2001 to supply U.S. troops in combat situations around the world."

As all know, President Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney previously headed Halliburton (1995-2000) and landed in the White House the same year Halliburton got its humungous outsourcing contract. Earlier, as Defense Secretary, (1989-1993) Cheney sparked the revolutionary change to outsourcing military support services to the privateers. Today, Halliburton ranks among the biggest "defense" winners of all.

Halliburton's army "employs enough people to staff one hundred battalions, a total of more than 50,000 personnel who work for KBR, a contract that is now projected to reach $150 billion," Chatterjee wrote.

"Together with the workers who are rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and the private security divisions of companies like Blackwater, Halliburton's Army now outnumber the uniformed soldiers on the ground in Iraq."

Accompanying Pentagon outsourcing, Chatterjee wrote, "is the potential for bribery, corruption, and fraud. Dozens of Halliburton/KBR workers and their subcontractors have already been arrested and charged, and several are already serving jail terms for stealing millions of dollars, notably from Camp Arifjan in Kuwait."

There's likely no better example of how Halliburton/KBR literally burned taxpayers' dollars than its destruction of $85,000 Mercedes and Volvo trucks when they got flat tires and were abandoned.

James Warren, a convoy truck driver testified to the Government Affairs Committee in July 2004, "KBR didn't seem to care what happened to its trucks...It was common to torch trucks that we abandoned...even though we all carried chains and could have towed them to be repaired."

Bunnatine Greenhouse, once top contract official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, made headlines by demanding old-fashioned free enterprise competitive bidding. She told a Senate committee in 2005: "I can unequivocally state the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years of working on government contracts.

Greenhouse was demoted for her adherence to the law, Chatterjee said, but she became a cover girl at Fraud magazine and was honored by the Giraffe Society, a tribute to one Federal employee who stuck her neck out.

For Media, ‘Class War’ Has Wealthy Victims

2009-08-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

For Media, ‘Class War’ Has Wealthy Victims
by Radley Glasser and Steve Rendall

During an ABC Nightline interview on May 21, 2003, host Ted Koppel suggested that his guest was engaging in "class warfare" by arguing that the wealthy should pay increased taxes. While the exchange was not unusual--Koppel's use of the term "class war" to characterize bottom-up or populist economic rhetoric is the norm--what was unusual was that his guest was the second-richest man in the world, Warren Buffett. The interview is worth remembering primarily for Buffett's commonsense response: "Well, I'll tell you, if it's class warfare, my class is winning."

The brief comment serves as one of the very few prominent admissions that the class war can go both ways: top-down as well as bottom-up. And the current degree of economic inequality in the United States backs up Buffett's claim. In his 2007 book Categorically Unequal, Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey showed that of all advanced industrial nations, the U.S. ranks highest in inequality of both income and wealth distribution. Massey explained (Media Matters, 8/27/07):

Since the mid-1970s, mechanisms in the American political economy that were enacted in the 1930s to limit stratification and promote equality have been dismantled and replaced with new mechanisms that institutionalize exploitation....The rules of the American political economy were rewritten to favor the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Unions were weakened, entry- level wages reduced, access to social protections curtailed, anti-poverty spending cut back, and taxes on lower-income families were raised while those on upper-income families were reduced, yielding a sharp reduction in the size of the welfare state.

These actions--along with many other policies that favor the wealthy--clearly pit the well-being of one economic class against another, and yet the media rarely refer to them as "class warfare." Instead, a new FAIR survey shows that within top national media outlets, "class warfare" terminology is almost exclusively employed to characterize as belligerent actions taken on behalf of the non-rich. The result is a biased national discourse that portrays "class war" as an ongoing persecution of the wealthy at the hands of the poor and working class and their populist leaders.

FAIR's study examined every use of the terms "class war," "class warfare" and "class warrior" by the New York Times, Washington Times, Fox News and CNN over a nine-month period (9/1/08-5/31/09). In 71 percent of the instances where the term was used, there was a clear indication as to what types of actions "class war" was meant to describe. In the remaining 29 percent, the phrase was used more ambiguously, with no reference to specific instances or policies.

When there was a clear direction implied, the study shows a striking bias in the use of the "class warfare" label: In all outlets combined, the phrase was almost 18 times more likely to describe bottom-up action--rhetoric or policy decisions perceived as benefiting the poor or lower classes--than it was to describe top-down action (90 percent vs. 5 percent of occurrences).

One might expect any conflict termed a "war" to be covered as a two-way street, but the outlets only did so in 5 percent of the cases where the term was employed. Going by media coverage, it is not so much a class war as it is a class massacre, with a revolutionary rabble siphoning wealth downward (never mind how the wealth got up there in the first place).

The bias held across the outlets, but fell into two distinct groups: significantly unbalanced and completely unbalanced. At the New York Times, descriptions of "class warfare" as bottom-up outnumbered top-down descriptions 6-to-1, while at CNN the imbalance was 8-to-1.

The right-wing outlets in our sample, Fox and the Washington Times, never presented "class warfare" as anything other than action taken on behalf of the poor or against the wealthy. Fox was far more vehement in its lopsidedness, however, managing to present this version 40 times, while the Washington Times employed it in 14 articles.

Fox's unbalanced numbers were dramatically bolstered by commentators Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, whose heavily promoted shows were by far the frontrunners regarding quantity of "class warfare" rhetoric. Together, the two shows accounted for half of Fox's total bottom-up references.

All outlets surveyed were most likely to feature accusations of bottom-up "class warfare" in quotes from sources (54 percent of such references) or in commentators' opinion (35 percent), with just 11 percent of such references being made in a news reporter's own voice.

Bottom-up "class warfare" references suggest that lower economic classes are openly hostile and irrational, seeking the destruction of the rich even to the ruin of the nation. The upper class is at such great risk, it seems, that they are reminded in a New York Times op-ed (3/25/09): "The system works badly if the poor, always a majority, feel the rich are getting a good deal unfairly. But if the rich show moderation, class warfare is less of a threat to economic development." In other words, the rich must hide their wealth not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the nation's overall economy, which can be jeopardized by an acquisitive majority.

The Washington Times (10/9/08) went so far as to suggest that the economic system itself is unfairly biased against the rich, and that average Americans need to correct the injustice; after all,

U.S. corporations are taxed at one of the highest rates of the world's industrialized nations, second only to Japan. This issue still resonates with Americans if it is explained clearly and powerfully, but it must be tied to Mr. Obama's inexperience and his irrational class warfare hostility toward corporations and wealth.

Fox News host Glenn Beck (3/3/09) issued the American lower class a similarly stern warning: "You don't want to go on class warfare because...when you go global, the poorest person in America is still some of the wealthiest 2 percent in the world. We are the rich. We're the ones that the rest of the world is going to come and take our wealth." (Actually, the richest 10 percent of individuals in the world have incomes greater than $25,000 a year-which is obviously much more than the "poorest person in America" makes, given that a minimum wage job pays $15,000 a year.)

Beck seemed to fear that the U.S. poor would get a taste of the persecution that comes with being a millionaire; as Beck's colleague Sean Hannity reminded us (Fox, 3/12/09), "It may not mean a lot to people that like class warfare, but there's 27 percent fewer millionaires now in America than there was last year."

News coverage during this time period was not devoid of critical references to top-down action and policies. On the contrary, there was substantial discussion of the bank bailouts as a policy which unfairly aided the rich at the expense of the rest. However, such coverage rarely employed "class warfare" rhetoric. Only three articles could be found in the study period that referred to bank bailouts as top-down "class warfare."

Top-down action and sentiment also increased recently as a response to the proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), legislation aimed at easing the process of workplace unionization. Anti-labor sentiments are often boldly class-conscious, such as those of Lee Scott, the former CEO of Wal-Mart, who declared that "we like driving the car, and we're not going to give the steering wheel to anybody," or Bernard Marcus, former CEO of Home Depot, who said of the anti-unionization movement, "If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this... he should be shot" (Wall Street Journal, 11/19/08). However, few such comments are characterized as "class warfare" by the media in the manner progressive comments often are.

It's a long-standing trend: In a study of nine top media outlets from January 1995 through July 2000, Extra! (1-2/01) found that references to "class war" were seven times more likely to describe bottom-up than top-down actions. When Diane Sawyer, in a PrimeTime Live interview with a group of teenage mothers, referred to beneficiaries of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program as "public enemy No. 1" (ABC, 2/16/95; Extra!, 5-6/95), or when then-House Majority Whip Tom Delay said, "Organized labor is part of the extremist, left-wing clique that is destroying this country" (Newsday, 8/18/00), little suggestion was made in the media that either was waging "class war," despite their robust rhetoric and top-down policy advocacy.

Using "class warfare" rhetoric to describe actions in favor of the poor and lower class, while using less pejorative language to describe top-down actions, raises more than a question of balance; that the "class war" is reported as waged nearly exclusively from the bottom up is an indication of corporate media's own place in the economic struggle.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--Radley Glasser. Steve Rendall is FAIR's senior analyst. He is co-host of CounterSpin, FAIR's national radio show. His work has received awards from Project Censored, and has won the praise of noted journalists such as Les Payne, Molly Ivins and Garry Wills. He is co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error (The New Press, 1995, New York City).

Conservatives are the Real Joker

2009-08-13T03:07:00.000-07:00

Conservatives are the Real Joker
SOCIALISM is the tag line of a bizarre new campaign against President Obama. The word "Socialism" appears across an image portraying President Obama as Heath Ledger's Joker in last year's The Dark Knight. The Obama/Joker mash-ups have appeared on posters in Los Angeles, have gone viral on the Internet, and are available as t-shirts, mugs, and other political swag.

It seems that some elements of America's fringe Right have become embarrassingly Freudian. This is a clear cut case of projection. The Right is the Joker, not President Obama.

Heath Ledger's edgy, dark portrayal of the Joker was remarkable and disturbing precisely because it was rooted in irresistible chaos, not in tight control. If Obama's critics are trying to claim he is a big-government loving, bureaucracy building, state-control planning mastermind then they could not have chosen a worse image than Ledger's Joker.

Joker's evil is banal, random, gleeful and almost effortless. "Do I really look like a guy with a plan?" he asks.

If the current political moment were mapped onto The Dark Knight script, it would be the right wing fringe of the GOP cast as the chaos-inducing Joker.

Conservative tactics of social divisiveness feel distinctly Joker-like. Elected Republicans and conservative talk show personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck used the Sotomayor hearings and President Obama's response to the Dr. Henry Louis Gates' arrest to claim reverse racism, stoke racial anxiety, and suggest that some citizens are more worthy than others.

In the film Joker rigs two ferries with bombs. One carrying ordinary citizens, the other carrying convicted criminals. Joker offers a terrible choice,

"Each of you has a remote... to blow up the other boat. At midnight, I blow you all up. If, however, one of you presses the button, I'll let that boat live. So, who's it going to be: Harvey Dent's most wanted scumbag collection, or the sweet and innocent civilians? You choose... oh, and you might want to decide quickly, because the people on the other boat might not be so noble."

By encouraging Americans to nurture fears of racial and ethnic competition, the Right similarly asks us to blow up one another. They ask citizens to see themselves as more worthy than their neighbor and to destroy others for the sake of self-preservation.

The Birther movement of the right wing is distinctly Joker-like in its sheer madness. By repeating their baseless claims, the Birther movement has managed to convince a sizeable portion of Southern, white Americans that President Obama may not have been born in the United States. As the bizarre strategy makes inroads into Americans' consciousness one can almost see some Birther leaders clapping their hands with the child-like mania of Ledger's Joker.

Nothing has been more reminiscent of Ledger's Joker than the current strategy of massive disruption at health care reform town hall meetings. The Joker blew up a hospital. The GOP is hoping to explode the effort for health care reform.

Our nation faces a crisis in health care. The massive economic downturn and rising unemployment make the limitations of employer provided health insurance clearer than ever. There is legitimate and reasonable disagreement on how we should address this problem. As legislators return home for the August break, town hall meetings are one forum for airing these disagreements and discussing alternatives.

Rather than organize Republican citizens to engage in thoughtful debate about an important political issue, GOP elected officials are supporting tactics of disruption and disturbance promoted by the insurance lobby. Their goal is to shut down conversation, confuse voters, and rattle members of Congress. To quote the Joker, "Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos."

Fascist America Are We There Yet? Republicans Turn Far Far Right

2009-08-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

Fascist America Are We There Yet?
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.

What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:

"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Elsewhere, he refines this further as

"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

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Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.

From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.

In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.

Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.

As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.

Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.

The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.

Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:

1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.

The Road Ahead
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.

What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.

Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)

It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.