PolitixWatch.com

2010-12-22T15:01:00.000-08:00

Wikirebels--The documentary (re: Wikileaks)

http://svtplay.se/v/2264028/wikirebels_the_documentary

2010-01-14T10:09:00.000-08:00

MEET HAROLD FORD JR.: PRO-GUNS, ANTI-GAY, ANTI-IMMIGRANT, ANTI-CHOICE

by BraveNewFilms.com

New Yorkers are starting to get acquainted with their new neighbor, former Tennessee Congressman and bank executive Harold Ford, Jr.

So who is the REAL Harold Ford, Jr.?

Well, for starters, he’s a staunch opponent of abortion rights. He also disapproves of marriage equality for gay couples, opposes public safety laws to keep guns off the streets, and blames immigrants for America’s problems. Doesn’t sound like much of a New Yorker, does he?

Of course, now that he’s living in Manhattan instead of south of the Mason-Dixon line, Ford is remaking himself as a pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-gun control progressive. But unfortunately for Harold, this is the age of the internet, and you can’t just walk away from your past statements. That’s why we compiled this video of the REAL Harold Ford, Jr., to introduce New Yorkers to their latest carpetbagger.

2009-12-02T04:55:00.000-08:00

90-Point List of Obama's Accomplishments in Office (To Date)
by Robert Watson, PhD
American Studies
Lynn University
12/02/09

I am always being asked to grade Obama's presidency. In place of offering him a grade, I put together a list of his accomplishments thus far. I think you would agree that it is very impressive. His first six months have been even more active than FDRs or LBJs the two standards for such assessments. Yet, there is little media attention given to much of what he has done. Of late, the media is focusing almost exclusively on Obama's critics, without holding them responsible for the uncivil, unconstructive tone of their disagreements or without holding the previous administration responsible for getting us in such a deep hole. The misinformation and venom that now passes for political reporting and civic debate is beyond description.

As such, there is a need to set the record straight. What most impresses me is the fact that Obama has accomplished so much not from a heavy-handed or top-down approach but from a style that has institutionalized efforts to reach across the aisle, encourage vigorous debate, and utilize town halls and panels of experts in the policy-making process. Beyond the accomplishments, the process is good for democracy and our democratic processes have been battered and bruised in recent years.

Let me know if I missed anything in the list (surely I did).
Robert

1. Ordered all federal agencies to undertake a study and make recommendations for ways to cut spending

2. Ordered a review of all federal operations to identify and cut wasteful spending and practices

3. Instituted enforcement for equal pay for women

4. Beginning the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq

5. Families of fallen soldiers have expenses covered to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover AFB

6. Ended media blackout on war casualties; reporting full information

7. Ended media blackout on covering the return of fallen soldiers to Dover AFB; the media is now permitted to do so pending adherence to respectful rules and approval of fallen soldier's family

8. The White House and federal government are respecting the Freedom of Information Act

9. Instructed all federal agencies to promote openness and transparency as much as possible

10. Limits on lobbyist's access to the White House

11. Limits on White House aides working for lobbyists after their tenure in the administration

12. Ended the previous stop-loss policy that kept soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan longer than their enlistment date

13. Phasing out the expensive F-22 war plane and other outdated weapons systems, which weren't even used or needed in Iraq/Afghanistan

14. Removed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research

15. Federal support for stem-cell and new biomedical research

16. New federal funding for science and research labs

17. States are permitted to enact federal fuel efficiency standards above federal standards

18. Increased infrastructure spending (roads, bridges, power plants) after years of neglect

19. Funds for high-speed, broadband Internet access to K-12 schools

20. New funds for school construction

21. The prison at Guantanamo Bay is being phased out

22. US Auto industry rescue plan

23. Housing rescue plan

24. $789 billion economic stimulus plan

25. The public can meet with federal housing insurers to refinance (the new plan can be completed in one day) a mortgage if they are having trouble paying

26. US financial and banking rescue plan

27. The secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are being closed

28. Ended the previous policy; the US now has a no torture policy and is in compliance with the Geneva Convention standards

29. Better body armor is now being provided to our troops

30. The missile defense program is being cut by $1.4 billion in 2010

31. Restarted the nuclear nonproliferation talks and building back up the nuclear inspection infrastructure/protocols

32. Reengaged in the treaties/agreements to protect the Antarctic

33. Reengaged in the agreements/talks on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions

34. Visited more countries and met with more world leaders than any president in his first six months in office

35. Successful release of US captain held by Somali pirates; authorized the SEALS to do their job

36. US Navy increasing patrols off Somali coast

37. Attractive tax write-offs for those who buy hybrid automobiles

38. Cash for clunkers program offers vouchers to trade in fuel inefficient, polluting old cars for new cars; stimulated auto sales

39. Announced plans to purchase fuel efficient American-made fleet for the federal government

40. Expanded the SCHIP program to cover health care for 4 million more children

41. Signed national service legislation; expanded national youth service program

42. Instituted a new policy on Cuba, allowing Cuban families to return home to visit loved ones

43. Ended the previous policy of not regulating and labeling carbon dioxide emissions

44. Expanding vaccination programs

45. Immediate and efficient response to the floods in North Dakota and other natural disasters

46. Closed offshore tax safe havens

47. Negotiated deal with Swiss banks to permit US government to gain access to records of tax evaders and criminals

48. Ended the previous policy of offering tax benefits to corporations who outsource American jobs; the new policy is to promote in-sourcing to bring jobs back

49. Ended the previous practice of protecting credit card companies; in place of it are new consumer protections from credit card industry's predatory practices

50. Energy producing plants must begin preparing to produce 15% of their energy from renewable sources

51. Lower drug costs for seniors

52. Ended the previous practice of forbidding Medicare from negotiating with drug manufacturers for cheaper drugs; the federal government is now realizing hundreds of millions in savings

53. Increasing pay and benefits for military personnel

54. Improved housing for military personnel

55. Initiating a new policy to promote federal hiring of military spouses

56. Improved conditions at Walter Reed Military Hospital and other military hospitals

57. Increasing student loans

58. Increasing opportunities in AmeriCorps program

59. Sent envoys to Middle East and other parts of the world that had been neglected for years; reengaging in multilateral and bilateral talks and diplomacy

60. Established a new cyber security office

61. Beginning the process of reforming and restructuring the military 20 years after the Cold War to a more modern fighting force; this includes new procurement policies, increasing size of military, new technology and cyber units and operations, etc.

62. Ended previous policy of awarding no-bid defense contracts

63. Ordered a review of hurricane and natural disaster preparedness

64. Established a National Performance Officer charged with saving the federal government money and making federal operations more efficient

65. Students struggling to make college loan payments can have their loans refinanced

66. Improving benefits for veterans

67. Many more press conferences and town halls and much more media access than previous administration

68. Instituted a new focus on mortgage fraud

69. The FDA is now regulating tobacco

70. Ended previous policy of cutting the FDA and circumventing FDA rules

71. Ended previous practice of having White House aides rewrite scientific and environmental rules, regulations, and reports

72. Authorized discussions with North Korea and private mission by Pres. Bill Clinton to secure the release of two Americans held in prisons

73. Authorized discussions with Myanmar and mission by Sen. Jim Web to secure the release of an American held captive

74. Making more loans available to small businesses

75. Established independent commission to make recommendations on slowing the costs of Medicare

76. Appointment of first Latina to the Supreme Court

77. Authorized construction/opening of additional health centers to care for veterans

78. Limited salaries of senior White House aides; cut to $100,000

79. Renewed loan guarantees for Israel

80. Changed the failing/status quo military command in Afghanistan

81. Deployed additional troops to Afghanistan

82. New Afghan War policy that limits aerial bombing and prioritizes aid, development of infrastructure, diplomacy, and good government practices by Afghans

83. Announced the long-term development of a national energy grid with renewable sources and cleaner, efficient energy production

84. Returned money authorized for refurbishment of White House offices and private living quarters

85. Paid for redecoration of White House living quarters out of his own pocket

86. Held first Seder in White House

87. Attempting to reform the nation's healthcare system which is the most expensive in the world yet leaves almost 50 million without health insurance and millions more under insured

88. Has put the ball in play for comprehensive immigration reform

89. Has announced his intention to push for energy reform

90. Has announced his intention to push for education reform

Oh, and he built a swing set for the girls outside the Oval Office!

Robert P. Watson, Ph.D.,
Coordinator of American Studies
Lynn University

2009-02-06T17:30:00.001-08:00

Please Don't Divorce Us
06 Feb 2009

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

2008-12-04T18:28:00.000-08:00

New star-studded Web video protests Proposition 8

By JAKE COYLE
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 4, 2008; 2:56 PM

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

-- Since Proposition 8 passed in California, much of Hollywood has been up in arms. Now, they are singing and dancing, too, in a new Web video called "Prop 8: The Musical."

The video was posted Wednesday on FunnyOrDie.com, the video site co-founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. The site has found a niche in getting professional talent to quickly create topical comedy videos.

"Prop 8: The Musical" may be a 3-minute Internet video, but it has a blockbuster cast _ including Jack Black (who plays Jesus), Neil Patrick Harris, John C. Reilly, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, Margaret Cho, Rashida Jones and others.

Though Jesus doesn't bring the two sides together, Harris has better luck. He argues gay marriage could save the economy: "Every time a gay or lesbian finds love at the parade, there's money to be made."

The video was conceived and written by Marc Shaiman, the Tony-winning composer of "Hairspray" and "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut." McKay, who had previously collaborated with Shaiman on the song-and-dance routine Ferrell, Black and Reilly did at the Oscars earlier this year, sent him an e-mail floating the idea of a video.

As of Thursday, the clip had clearly ascended to viral status, with more than 1.1 million views on FunnyOrDie.com. Given the sensitivity of the issue, comments also have been flying, with well over a thousand posted.

Shaiman had been involved in a more serious debate over Proposition 8.

After voters approved Proposition 8, which changed the state's constitution to ban same-sex marriage, it was revealed that Scott Eckern, artistic director of the California Musical Theater in Sacramento (the state's largest nonprofit musical theater company) had donated $1,000 to the "Yes on 8" campaign.

Shaiman's "Hairspray" had played at the theater and he said he would never allow anything he wrote to play there because of Eckern's donation. Others protested and Eckern resigned in November.

In an interview Wednesday, Shaiman regretted that it came to Eckern losing his job and said: "It's a tragedy for everyone involved. You'll certainly see that no one called for him to resign."

The video for Funny or Die was a lighter-hearted protest.

Shaiman wrote the piece in a day, recorded it the next and shot it in a single day last week.

"It was like, `Eureka! That's right, that's what I do!" said Shaiman of the mini-musical. "If I'm going to stand on the soap box, at least let me sing and dance."

2008-11-17T16:15:00.000-08:00

Melissa Etheridge: You can Forget My Taxes (on Prop 8)

Nov. 17, 2008
Blogs & Stories
The Daily Beast

Singer Melissa Etheridge rails against the passage of the gay-marriage ban in California—and she won't be paying the state a dime.

Okay. So Prop 8 passed. Alright, I get it. 51% of you think that I am a second class citizen. Alright then. So my wife, uh I mean, roommate? Girlfriend? Special lady friend? You are gonna have to help me here because I am not sure what to call her now. Anyways, she and I are not allowed the same right under the state constitution as any other citizen. Okay, so I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen. I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books.

Okay, cool I don't mean to get too personal here but there is a lot I can do with the extra half a million dollars that I will be keeping instead of handing it over to the state of California. Oh, and I am sure Ellen will be a little excited to keep her bazillion bucks that she pays in taxes too. Wow, come to think of it, there are quite a few of us fortunate gay folks that will be having some extra cash this year. What recession? We're gay! I am sure there will be a little box on the tax forms now single, married, divorced, gay, check here if you are gay, yeah, that's not so bad. Of course all of the waiters and hairdressers and UPS workers and gym teachers and such, they won't have to pay their taxes either.

Gay people are born everyday. You will never legislate that away.

Oh and too bad California, I know you were looking forward to the revenue from all of those extra marriages. I guess you will have to find some other way to get out of the budget trouble you are in.

…Really?

When did it become okay to legislate morality? I try to envision someone reading that legislation "eliminates the right" and then clicking yes. What goes through their mind? Was it the frightening commercial where the little girl comes home and says, "Hi mom, we learned about gays in class today" and then the mother gets that awful worried look and the scary music plays? Do they not know anyone who is gay? If they do, can they look them in the face and say "I believe you do not deserve the same rights as me"? Do they think that their children will never encounter a gay person? Do they think they will never have to explain the 20% of us who are gay and living and working side by side with all the citizens of California?

I got news for them, someday your child is going to come home and ask you what a gay person is. Gay people are born everyday. You will never legislate that away.

I know when I grew up gay was a bad word. Homo, lezzie, faggot, dyke. Ignorance and fear ruled the day. There were so many "thems" back then. The blacks, the poor ... you know, "them". Then there was the immigrants. "Them.” Now the them is me.

I tell myself to take a breath, okay take another one, one of the thems made it to the top. Obama has been elected president. This crazy fearful insanity will end soon. This great state and this great country of ours will finally come to the understanding that there is no "them". We are one. We are united. What you do to someone else you do to yourself. That "judge not, lest ye yourself be judged" are truthful words and not Christian rhetoric.

Today the gay citizenry of this state will pick themselves up and dust themselves off and do what we have been doing for years. We will get back into it. We love this state, we love this country and we are not going to leave it. Even though we could be married in Mass. or Conn, Canada, Holland, Spain and a handful of other countries, this is our home. This is where we work and play and raise our families. We will not rest until we have the full rights of any other citizen. It is that simple, no fearful vote will ever stop us, that is not the American way.

Come to think of it, I should get a federal tax break too...

Melissa Etheridge is an Academy Award-winning and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter.

Melissa Etheridge: Keep Your Laws Off My Family

Oct. 29, 2008
Blogs & Stories
The Daily Beast

As Proposition 8 in California threatens same sex marriage rights, musician Melissa Etheridge looks back on her own struggle to adopt her children with her now wife Tammy.

When my official sample ballot for the November 4th general election arrived I was in the kitchen, where my eldest son was practicing tricks on his yo-yo. As I thumbed through the pamphlet I turned to page 5, state measures. There it was, right between prop 7: The Renewable Energy Generation Initiative Statute, and prop 9:The Criminal Justice System Victims’ Rights Parole Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute:

Proposition 8: Eliminates Right of Same-Sex couples To Marry.

I know my preference of life mate freaks some people out. Maybe it is just their fear of sex or intimacy. Fine, let me stand before my creator and take any consequences there might be to living my life in truth and balance with my spirit.

I called my son over. I said “Read this, tell me what you think”. He, being 9 years old and very proud of his reading skills, read “Changes California Constitution to eliminate right of same sex couples to marry.” He looked at me, very matter-of-factly and said, “Wow, that’s lame.”

A rush of memories came over me. What a long strange trip it has been.

I remembered being a new mom in 1997. I followed the long trail of red tape to find a way to adopt my children so they could be covered by health insurance, or so I could see them in the hospital in case of some emergency, along with dozens of other reasons. I was fortunate enough to have the financial resources to find a lawyer that would help me through the heart breaking adoption system. The social worker would come to my house, numerous times, evaluate me, have me fill out all of the forms and then regretfully deny me my right to adopt my children because California law prohibited social workers from adoption approval of same sex couples. Then my lawyer would take my case to a judge that would read the social worker’s words “regretfully deny” and then the judge would say, “overruled, “allowing me to adopt my children within the legal system. I give thanks to these great people who truly believe in equal rights and risked so much for so many families.

There were the dark times, when proposition 22 was put on the ballot in 2000. It was a strange act, more like a true or false question: ”Marriage in the state of California is defined as being between a man and a woman.” Okay…? It passed.

Then I remembered my own wedding in 2003. I had found my true love, Tammy. It was a magical ceremony that started with my children walking with me down the aisle to meet my bride as the two aisles merged into one. I wanted to stand in front of my community of family and friends and declare my promise to be committed to my partner, now my wife, through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, something that would be tested with my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment later that next year. The day before the wedding Grey Davis gave same sex couples domestic partnership rights, one of his last moments as governor and we proudly hung our certificates on our wall. They were limited rights, but doggone it, it was a beginning.

I will never forget the day earlier this year when the news came down the wire that the Supreme Court of CA. had declared same sex marriage legal. We told our children about it and all danced around the room in family glee. I have four children now, my 11-year-old daughter, my 9-year-old son and boy and girl twins, aged two. We knew the only way our rights could be taken away was through a ballot measure and a constitutional amendment revoking the rights of same sex couples.

And now here it is.

Prop 8 is a blatantly hateful, and fearful proposition that I believe the great citizens of California can see through. The proponents of it have run the most fearful of television ads telling the people that if this doesn’t pass they will have to teach about homos to small grade school children. I can’t seem to recall any relationships ever being taught in school and I can’t find anything about that in this proposition. Now, I know my preference of life mate freaks some people out. Maybe it is just their fear of sex or intimacy. I know that they hold up the bible and say that it’s wrong. Fine, let me stand before my creator and take any consequences there might be to living my life in truth and balance with my spirit.

I believe in our democracy. I believe in our constitution. I believe we live in the greatest country in the world. I believe that we are as strong as our weakest link and if we deny any of our citizens the right to “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” then we deny it to all of us.

I will be waking up with my children on November 5th and I will be fixing them
breakfast as I usually do. I look forward to telling them that prop 8 was defeated. I am sure my son will say, “Good, that was lame.”

Yes, lame indeed.

2008-11-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

Rahm Emanuel Roasts Stephen Colbert for Charity

AlterNet.org
November 15, 2008.

Watch the video:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/107256/rahm_emanuel_roasts_stephen_colbert_for_charity/

Obama's new chief of staff takes on his pseudo-nemesis, the host of the Colbert Report.

White House chief of staff-designate Rahm Emanuel took some time off from the transition Friday night to hurl barbs at his longtime pseudo-nemesis Stephen Colbert (as well as Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Joe Lieberman, et al...)

Colbert was roasted as part of a charity event for the Spina Bifida Association, organized every year by Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt. (Click here to donate to the cause.)

We've posted some text highlights from Emanuel and Colbert below, and videographer/journalist Liz Glover was kind enough to pass along video of the event (note: the first minute or so is choppy).

Some highlights from Rahm's speech:

On Joe Biden: "Unfortunately, Joe Biden couldn't make it here tonight. Joe's the one who predicted that President-elect Obama will be tested by a crisis in the first six months of his presidency. What he didn't mention: the crisis will no doubt be over something Joe said."

On Steny Hoyer: Stephen is a guy who knows that no matter how smart or successful he is, he'll always play second fiddle to Jon Stewart. If he thinks that's humiliating, try standing behind Steny Hoyer.

On Barack Obama: Of course, Stephen and I do have our differences. Stephen believes the messiah is Jesus Christ. In my briefing books, that's Barack Obama.

On Sarah Palin, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Lieberman: "I'm scared of Stephen Colbert. I'm not alone. My colleagues in Congress, political operatives, the top minds in Washington, even some of the people in this room -- we're all scared of Stephen Colbert... We're scared of Stephen Colbert in the same way Sarah Palin is scared of a geography bee. We're scared of him the same way that John Edwards is scared of the National Enquirer. Mary Matalin is scared of Stephen, and she's seen Carville naked! ... Even Hillary Clinton is scared of Colbert, and this makes no sense to me -- she is a woman who braved sniper fire at the Battle of Bosnia's Airport. We're frightened of Colbert, but we know that deep down, underneath the Republican character you see on TV, there's still a good man, there's still hope for him. It's the same way we feel about Joe Lieberman."

On Sen. Orrin Hatch's musical talents: "Did you know that Orrin is a songwriter much the way Joe is a plumber?"

On DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton: "In Congress, Eleanor is allowed to speak, but doesn't have a real vote or a final say. So she has the same role I used to play with Nancy Pelosi."

On Mark Shields: "He's been called one of the funniest, wittiest political analysts in Washington, which is like being called the sexiest member of the Supreme Court."

* * *

And from Stephen Colbert's speech:

On Judy Woodruff: "Judy, great to see you tonight. I love Judy's work, I haven't seen you lately, where have you been? PBS? Oh that explains it. It's a great place to get away from it all -- especially all the viewers. It's essentially the witness protection program for journalists. If you testify against the mob, they send you to Newshour. Is Jim Lehrer here? Jim Lehrer, the man brave enough to be boring. ... The important thing, Judy, is you're doing good work -- you are helping millions of elderly go to sleep every night. Well, technically it's dozens, a lot of people use the Weather Channel instead."

On Alan Greenspan: "Alan Greenspan is here, and we're in the middle of a once-in-a-century financial meltdown, so of course the question everyone is asking is, How did Alan Greenspan land Andrea Mitchell? Seriously. Keep kissing him, Andrea, he's going to turn into a prince one of these days."

On Ben Bradlee: "Ben Bradlee is here -- nice to see you Ben. Congratulations on your latest children's book, 'Grandpa, What Was Print Media?'"

On Chris Matthews: "Chris Matthews is here tonight, thank you so much for coming here tonight. People are asking, how did he come here, doesn't he have a show? Well what people don't know is that many nights, Chris just puts a blond wig on a potato and nobody notices. You're a good man -- good luck in Pennsylvania on that run."

On Dana Perino: "Dana Perino is here, what an honor to be roasted by the spokesman for the president. Dana Perino, wonderful to see you. I always knew Scott McClellan would hatch into something beautiful. When you crawled out of the McClellan cocoon, did you have to devour the shell for nutrients or is he still lurking around someplace? ... I loved it when you told Helen Thomas that the 'Mission Accomplished' banner should have read, 'Mission Accomplished For These Sailors Who Are On This Ship On Their Mission.' I certainly hope you had a banner for that explanation. Do you get sore the next day after shoveling it that hard? I kid, I kid, but no, Dana, you are the one person who I don't mind slamming me on this entire podium, because I know for the last year and a half you haven't meant anything you've said."

On Bill Clinton: (Speaking to Rahm) "Can I be in your cabinet? If Hillary says no, can I be Secretary of State? I promise I'll be good, I'll just sit in the back of the room, I won't say anything! No special conditions, I'll agree with everything that you say. And I promise, unlike Bill Clinton, if I say something nice about Barack in public, I won't look like I'm trying to pass a stone."

2008-11-10T21:01:00.001-08:00

Keith Olbermann on Prop 8

2008-11-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

California Prop 8 Letter

by Lorri L. Jean
November 5, 2008

Sadly, fueled by misinformation, distortions and lies, millions of
voters went to the polls yesterday and said YES to bigotry, YES to
discrimination, YES to second-class status for same-sex couples.

As of this morning, more people had voted for Proposition 8 than
against it. The Secretary of State’s office has yet to call the race as
millions of votes remain to be counted. Thus, the No on 8 Campaign is
not calling the race.

While we do not know what the exact margin will be, we do know that
millions of people voted to eliminate the fundamental rights of their
neighbors, colleagues, families and friends.

Yesterday will be judged as a shameful chapter in the history of our
state and our nation. While hope overcame fear in the Presidential
election, fear reigned supreme for millions of California voters.

The Yes campaign engaged in the most immoral and reprehensible tactics
imaginable. They took $40 million dollars--most of it funded by Mormons
at the direction of their Church President--and subjected people in our
state to a constant barrage of lies and distortions. The Mormon Church
was not alone, however, organizations like Focus on the Family, the
Knights of Columbus, and the American Family Association also supported
this hateful initiative.

They couldn’t win with the truth so they resorted to something far more
sinister. They even stooped so low as to distribute a campaign mailer
fraudulently suggesting that President-elect Obama supported their
efforts, when they knew for a fact that he had come out in opposition
to Proposition 8.

That is clearly the only way these anti-gay extremists could advance
their agenda of discrimination and exclusion. Most fair-minded people
find such tactics and concepts absolutely repugnant and more would have
voted "no" were it not for such a deceptive campaign of scare tactics
and lies.

I am angry and enormously sad. And I’ll have more to say once the No on
8 Campaign calls this race. For now, our legal eagles have filed suit
against Proposition 8, which should never have been on the ballot in
the first place.

Amidst all the emotions I am feeling today, I am taking heart in the
fact that no matter the result of this particular battle, the war is
far from over. Of one thing I am certain, the freedom to marry will one
day be the law of the land. Our success is inevitable in time. We will
work ceaselessly to see that this day comes as soon as humanly
possible.

2008-11-05T20:28:00.000-08:00

President-Elect Barack Obama in Chicago

November 4, 2008

HISTORY!

2008-11-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

California Appears Likely to Ban Gay Marriage

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: November 5, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Measures to prohibit same-sex marriage won in two states on Tuesday, and most significantly, appeared headed for victory in California, where such unions have been legal for nearly the last five months.

Massachusetts voters, meanwhile, rejected a proposal to eliminate the state income tax as voters considered a wealth of ballot initiatives nationwide.

On Wednesday morning, with 95 percent of California precincts reporting, the anti-same sex marriage ballot initiative known as Proposition 8 had 52 percent of the vote but was still considered too close to call. Arizona and Florida voters approved similar proposals to enshrine a ban on same sex marriage in their state constitutions. Voters in 36 states weighed in on 153 ballot measures, including 59 initiated by citizens. Colorado had 14 ballot questions, more than any other state, including whether to ban race- and gender-based affirmative action. Early results showed that proposal would not pass, nor another that would define human life as beginning at fertilization, effectively giving fertilized eggs the same constitutional rights and protections as people

Only three state ballots included questions on same-sex marriage this year, compared with eight in 2006 and 11 in 2004.

But the decision in California, a trend-setter in so many arenas, was seen by opponents and advocates as an important test of the tolerance for gay marriage.

A total of $73 million was spent in the race, a record for a ballot measure on a social issue, resulting in incessant television and radio commercials from both sides. Advocates of the ban played up their belief children could be taught about gay marriage in schools and opponents likened approval of the measure to denying fundamental civil rights.

The measure came only months after the state’s highest court ruled it constitutional and spurred thousands of gay couples to marry there. In Massachusetts voters heeded heeding the pleas of public officials and employees who said it would decimate the state budget and paralyze school systems, police departments and other agencies.

With 70 percent of precincts reporting just before 11 p.m., only 30.6 percent of voters had endorsed the tax repeal while 69.4 percent had rejected it. That suggested a far stronger defeat than in 2002, when a similar proposal came close to passing.

Opponents spent more than $4.5 million fighting the measure, which would have saved the average taxpayer here about $3,600 a year. The income tax provided about 40 percent, or $12.5 billion, of the state’s budget last year, and Gov. Deval Patrick was among many who warned of staggering cuts if it passed. Proponents pointed to recent corruption scandals as evidence that the state routinely squandered tax dollars.

Connecticut voters rejected a plan for the state to hold a rare convention to make changes to its constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage had expressed hope that a convention could lead to a ballot initiative to ban the practice, which the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled legal last month.

Connecticut is the third state, after Massachusetts and California, to allow marriage between people of the same sex.

In Michigan, voters decided to allow people with illnesses like cancer and multiple sclerosis to use marijuana.

In South Dakota, voters appeared to rebuff a proposal to ban all abortions in the state except those performed because of rape or incest or to protect a woman’s health. The question was almost identical to one the state’s voters rejected in 2006.

Early results showed voters in Arkansas supporting a proposal to bar unmarried couples from adopting or acting as foster parents, which critics said was unfairly aimed at gays. Residents of Washington State were voting on whether to allow assisted suicide for the terminally ill, just as Oregon already does.

In addition to the income tax vote, Massachusetts residents embraced proposals to ban greyhound racing, a longtime tradition in the state, and to ease penalties for possession of an ounce or less of marijuana. Maine residents voted to repeal a new law that would increase taxes on beer and wine and impose new taxes on soda to finance the state’s health insurance system.

Among the more unusual measures on this year’s ballots was one in Florida that would repeal an old clause in the state constitution that allows legislators to bar Asian immigrants from owning land. The repeal would be symbolic, as equal protection laws would prevent lawmakers from applying the ban. With 78 percent of precincts reporting just before 11 p.m., the vote was close, with 52 percent voting to preserve the clause.

2008-11-05T11:58:00.000-08:00

The Promise: For Many Abroad, an Ideal Renewed

New York Times

By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: November 5, 2008

GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility.

“It allows us all to dream a little,” said Oswaldo Calvo, 58, a Venezuelan political activist in Caracas, in a comment echoed to correspondents of The New York Times on four continents in the days leading up to the election.

Tristram Hunt, a British historian, put it this way: Mr. Obama “brings the narrative that everyone wants to return to — that America is the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen.”

But wonder is almost overwhelmed by relief. Mr. Obama’s election offers most non-Americans a sense that the imperial power capable of doing such good and such harm — a country that, they complain, preached justice but tortured its captives, launched a disastrous war in Iraq, turned its back on the environment and greedily dragged the world into economic chaos — saw the errors of its ways over the past eight years and shifted course.

They say the country that weakened democratic forces abroad through a tireless but often ineffective campaign for democracy — dismissing results it found unsavory, cutting deals with dictators it needed as allies in its other battles — was now shining a transformative beacon with its own democratic exercise.

It would be hard to overstate how fervently vast stretches of the globe wanted the election to turn out as it did to repudiate the Bush administration and its policies. Poll after poll in country after country showed only a few — Israel, Georgia, the Philippines — favoring a victory for Senator John McCain.

“Since Bush came to power it’s all bam, bam, bam on the Arabs,” asserted Fathi Abdel Hamid, 40, as he sat in a Cairo coffee house.

The world’s view of an Obama presidency presents a paradox. His election embodies what many consider unique about the United States — yet America’s sense of its own specialness, of its destiny and mission, has driven it astray, they say. They want Mr. Obama, the beneficiary and exemplar of American exceptionalism, to act like everyone else, only better, to shift American policy and somehow to project both humility and leadership.

And there are others who fear that Mr. Obama will be soft in a hard-edged world where what is required is a clear line in the sand to fanatics, aggressors and bullies. Israelis worry that he will talk to Iran rather than stop it from developing nuclear weapons; Georgians worry that he will not grasp how to handle Russia.

An Obama presidency, they say, risks appeasement. It will “reassure Europeans of their defects,” lamented Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the Italian right-wing daily Il Foglio.

Such contradictory demands and expectations may reflect, in part, the unusual makeup of a man of mixed race and origin whose life and upbringing have touched several continents.

“People feel he is a part of them because he has this multiracial, multiethnic and multinational dimension,” said Philippe Sands, a British international lawyer and author who travels frequently, adding that people find some thread of their own hopes and ideals in Mr. Obama. “He represents, for people in so many different communities and cultures, a personal connection. There is an immigrant component and a minority component.”

Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian novelist and social scientist, said he saw Mr. Obama less as a black man than “as a successful negotiator of identity margins.”

His ability to inhabit so many categories mirrors the African experience. Mr. Nyamnjoh said that for America to choose as its citizen in chief such a skillful straddler of global identities could not help but transform the nation’s image, making it once again the screen upon which the hopes and ambitions of the world are projected.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at the People’s University of China, said Mr. Obama’s background, particularly his upbringing in Indonesia, made him suited to understanding the problems facing the world’s poorer nations.

He and others say they hope the next American president will see their place more firmly within the community of nations, engaging in what Jairam Ramesh, junior commerce minister in the Indian government, called “genuine multilateralism and not in muscular unilateralism.”

Assuming Mr. Obama does play by international rules more fully, as he has promised, can his government live up to all the expectations?

“We have so many hopes and wishes that he will never be able to fulfill them,” said Susanne Grieshaber, 40, an art adviser in Berlin who was one of 200,000 Germans to attend a speech by Mr. Obama there in July. She cited action to protect the environment, reducing the use of force and helping the less fortunate. In essence, she wants Mr. Obama to make his country more like hers. But she is sober. “I’m preparing myself for the fact that peace and happiness are not going to suddenly break out,” she said.

Many in less developed countries — especially in the Arab world — agree that Mr. Obama will not carry out their wishes regarding American policy toward Israel and much else, and so they shrug off the results as ultimately making little difference.

“We will be optimistic for two months but that’s it,” predicted Huda Naim, 38, a member of the Hamas parliament here who said her 15-year-old son had watched Mr. Obama’s rise with rapt attention.

But some remain darkly suspicious of the election itself. They doubted that Mr. Obama could be nominated or elected. Now they doubt that he will govern. The skeptics say they believe that American policy is deeply institutionalized and that if Mr. Obama tries to shift it, “they” — the media, the corporate robber barons, the hidden powers — will box him in or even kill him.

“I am afraid for him,” said Alberto Müller Rojas, a retired Venezuelan Army general and the vice president of President Hugo Chávez’s Unified Socialist Party. “The pressures he will face from certain sectors of society, especially from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, will be enormous.”

Part of that fear stems from genuine if distant affection.

“He has charisma, he’s good-looking, he’s very smart, he’s young and he knows how to make people like him, to the point that when he went to bow down to the Israelis, people here still made excuses for him,” said Nawara Negm, an Egyptian writer and blogger.

There is another paradox about the world’s view of the election of Mr. Obama: many who are quick to condemn the United States for its racist past and now congratulate it for a milestone fail to acknowledge the same problem in their own societies, and so do not see how this election could offer them any lessons about themselves.

In Russia, for example, where Soviet leaders used to respond to any American criticism of human rights violation with “But you hang Negroes,” analysts note that the election of Mr. Obama removes a stain. But they speak of it without reference to their own treatment of ethnic minorities.

“Definitely, this will improve America’s image in Russia,” said Sergey M. Rogov, director of the Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies in Moscow. “There was this perception before of widespread racism in America, deeply rooted racism.”

In Nigeria, a vast, populous and diverse collection of states, Reuben Abati, an influential columnist, has written, “Nigerians love good things in other lands, even if they are not making any effort to reproduce the same at home,” adding, “If Obama had been a Nigerian, his race, color and age would have been an intractable problem.”

So foreigners are watching closely, hoping that despite what they consider the hypocrisies and inconsistencies, the nation they once imagined would stand as a model for the future will, with greater sensitivity and less force, help solve the world’s problems.

There is a risk, however, to all the extraordinary international attention paid to this most international of American politicians: Mr. Obama’s focus will almost certainly be on the reeling domestic economy, housing and health care. Will he be able even to lift his head and gaze abroad to all those with such high expectations?

Reporting was contributed by Rachel Donadio from Rome; Steven Erlanger from Paris; Nazila Fathi from Tehran; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Nicholas Kulish from Berlin; Clifford J. Levy from Moscow; Sarah Lyall from Reykjavik, Iceland; Lydia Polgreen from Dakar, Senegal; Simon Romero from Caracas, Venezuela; Somini Sengupta from New Delhi; Michael Slackman from Cairo; Sabrina Tavernise from Istanbul and Kiev, Ukraine; Edward Wong from Beijing; and Robert F. Worth from Sana, Yemen.

2008-11-05T11:14:00.000-08:00

Michael Moore's Post Election Letter

November 5, 2008

Friends,

Who among us is not at a loss for words? Tears pour out. Tears of joy. Tears of relief. A stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair.

In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity: Barack Obama, a good man, a black man, said he would bring change to Washington, and the majority of the country liked that idea. The racists were present throughout the campaign and in the voting booth. But they are no longer the majority, and we will see their flame of hate fizzle out in our lifetime.

There was another important "first" last night. Never before in our history has an avowed anti-war candidate been elected president during a time of war. I hope President-elect Obama remembers that as he considers expanding the war in Afghanistan. The faith we now have will be lost if he forgets the main issue on which he beat his fellow Dems in the primaries and then a great war hero in the general election: The people of America are tired of war. Sick and tired. And their voice was loud and clear yesterday.

It's been an inexcusable 44 years since a Democrat running for president has received even just 51% of the vote. That's because most Americans haven't really liked the Democrats. They see them as rarely having the guts to get the job done or stand up for the working people they say they support. Well, here's their chance. It has been handed to them, via the voting public, in the form of a man who is not a party hack, not a set-for-life Beltway bureaucrat. Will he now become one of them, or will he force them to be more like him? We pray for the latter.

But today we celebrate this triumph of decency over personal attack, of peace over war, of intelligence over a belief that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs just 6,000 years ago. What will it be like to have a smart president? Science, banished for eight years, will return. Imagine supporting our country's greatest minds as they seek to cure illness, discover new forms of energy, and work to save the planet. I know, pinch me.

We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, "gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?" Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We've entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

An African American has been elected President of the United States! Anything is possible! We can wrestle our economy out of the hands of the reckless rich and return it to the people. Anything is possible! Every citizen can be guaranteed health care. Anything is possible! We can stop melting the polar ice caps. Anything is possible! Those who have committed war crimes will be brought to justice. Anything is possible.

We really don't have much time. There is big work to do. But this is the week for all of us to revel in this great moment. Be humble about it. Do not treat the Republicans in your life the way they have treated you the past eight years. Show them the grace and goodness that Barack Obama exuded throughout the campaign. Though called every name in the book, he refused to lower himself to the gutter and sling the mud back. Can we follow his example? I know, it will be hard.

I want to thank everyone who gave of their time and resources to make this victory happen. It's been a long road, and huge damage has been done to this great country, not to mention to many of you who have lost your jobs, gone bankrupt from medical bills, or suffered through a loved one being shipped off to Iraq. We will now work to repair this damage, and it won't be easy.

But what a way to start! Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Wow. Seriously, wow.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com

2008-11-04T11:30:00.001-08:00

Paulson's Swindle Revealed

Wednesday 29 October 2008
by: William Greider, The Nation

The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride - a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

These are dynamite facts that demand immediate action to halt the bailout deal and correct its giveaway terms. Stop payment on the Treasury checks before the bankers can cash them. Open an immediate Congressional investigation into how Paulson and his staff determined such a sweetheart deal for leading players in the financial sector and for their own former employer. Paulson's bailout staff is heavily populated with Goldman Sachs veterans and individuals from other Wall Street firms. Yet we do not know whether these financiers have fully divested their own Wall Street holdings. Were they perhaps enriching themselves as they engineered this generous distribution of public wealth to embattled private banks and their shareholders?

Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, raised these explosive questions in a stinging letter sent to Paulson this week. The union did what any private investor would do. Its finance experts vetted the terms of the bailout investment and calculated the real value of what Treasury bought with the public's money. In the case of Goldman Sachs, the analysis could conveniently rely on a comparable sale twenty days earlier. Billionaire Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs and bought the same types of securities - preferred stock and warrants to purchase common stock in the future. Only Buffett's preferred shares pay a 10 percent dividend, while the public gets only 5 percent. Dollar for dollar, Buffett "received at least seven and perhaps up to 14 times more warrants than Treasury did and his warrants have more favorable terms," Gerard pointed out.

"I am sure that someone at Treasury saw the terms of Buffett's investment," the union president wrote. "In fact, my suspicion is that you studied it pretty closely and knew exactly what you were doing. The 50-50 deal - 50 percent invested and 50 percent as a gift - is quite consistent with the Republican version of spread-the-wealth-around philosophy."

The Steelworkers' close analysis was done by Ron W. Bloom, director of the union's corporate research and a Wall Street veteran himself who worked at Larzard Freres, the investment house. Bloom applied standard valuation techniques to establish the market price Buffett paid per share compared to Treasury's price. "The analysis is based on the assumption that Warren Buffett is an intelligent third party investor who paid no more for his investment than he had to," Bloom's report explained. "It also assumes that Gold Sachs' job is to protect its existing shareholders so that it extracted from Mr. Buffett the most that it could.... Further, it is assumed that Henry Paulson is likewise an intelligent man and that if he paid any more than Mr. Buffett - if he paid $1 for something for which Mr. Buffett would have paid 50 cents - that the difference is a gift from the taxpayers of the United States to the shareholders of Goldman Sachs."

The implications are staggering. Leo Gerard told Paulson: "If the result of our analysis is applied to the deals that you made at the other eight institutions - which on average most would view as being less well positioned than Goldman and therefore requiring an even greater rate of return - you paid a$125 billion for securities for which a disinterested party would have paid $62.5 billion. That means you gifted the other $62.5 billion to the shareholders of these nine institutions."

If the same rule of thumb is applied to Paulson's grand $700 billion bailout fund, Gerard said this will constitute a gift of $350 billion from the American taxpayers "to reward the institutions that have driven our nation and it now appears the whole world into its most serious economic crisis in 75 years."

Is anyone angry? Will anyone look into these very serious accusations? Congress is off campaigning. The financiers at Treasury probably assume any public outrage will be lost in the election returns. I hope they are mistaken.

--------
William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not, Secrets of the Temple, Who Will Tell The People, The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster) and - due out in February from Rodale - Come Home, America.

2008-11-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

I now denounce you Chuck & Larry

John Stewart
The Daily Show

2008-11-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

So Little Time, So Much Damage

Nov. 3, 2008
The New York Times, Editorial

While Americans eagerly vote for the next president, here’s a sobering reminder: As of Tuesday, George W. Bush still has 77 days left in the White House — and he’s not wasting a minute.

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look — by no means comprehensive — at some of Mr. Bush’s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don’t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans’ rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject’s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends. The changes also give the F.B.I. — which has a long history of spying on civil rights groups and others — expanded latitude to use these techniques on people identified by racial, ethnic and religious background.

The administration showed further disdain for Americans’ privacy rights and for Congress’s power by making clear that it will ignore a provision in the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security. The law requires the department’s privacy officer to account annually for any activity that could affect Americans’ privacy — and clearly stipulates that the report cannot be edited by any other officials at the department or the White House.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has now released a memo asserting that the law “does not prohibit” officials from homeland security or the White House from reviewing the report. The memo then argues that since the law allows the officials to review the report, it would be unconstitutional to stop them from changing it. George Orwell couldn’t have done better.

THE ENVIRONMENT The administration has been especially busy weakening regulations that promote clean air and clean water and protect endangered species.

Mr. Bush, or more to the point, Vice President Dick Cheney, came to office determined to dismantle Bill Clinton’s environmental legacy, undo decades of environmental law and keep their friends in industry happy. They have had less success than we feared, but only because of the determined opposition of environmental groups, courageous members of Congress and protests from citizens. But the White House keeps trying.

Mr. Bush’s secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, has recently carved out significant exceptions to regulations requiring expert scientific review of any federal project that might harm endangered or threatened species (one consequence will be to relieve the agency of the need to assess the impact of global warming on at-risk species). The department also is rushing to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list — again. The wolves were re-listed after a federal judge ruled the government had not lived up to its own recovery plan.

In coming weeks, we expect the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a final rule that would weaken a program created by the Clean Air Act, which requires utilities to install modern pollution controls when they upgrade their plants to produce more power. The agency is also expected to issue a final rule that would make it easier for coal-fired power plants to locate near national parks in defiance of longstanding Congressional mandates to protect air quality in areas of special natural or recreational value.

Interior also is awaiting E.P.A.’s concurrence on a proposal that would make it easier for mining companies to dump toxic mine wastes in valleys and streams.

And while no rules changes are at issue, the interior department also has been rushing to open up millions of acres of pristine federal land to oil and gas exploration. We fear that, in coming weeks, Mr. Kempthorne will open up even more acreage to the commercial development of oil shale, a hugely expensive and environmentally risky process that even the oil companies seem in no hurry to begin. He should not.
ABORTION RIGHTS Soon after the election, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, is expected to issue new regulations aimed at further limiting women’s access to abortion, contraceptives and information about their reproductive health care options.

Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims.

•

The administration has taken other disturbing steps in recent weeks. In late September, the I.R.S. restored tax breaks for banks that take big losses on bad loans inherited through acquisitions. Now we learn that JPMorgan Chase and others are planning to use their bailout funds for mergers and acquisitions, transactions that will be greatly enhanced by the new tax subsidy.

One last-minute change Mr. Bush won’t be making: He apparently has decided not to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the most shameful symbol of his administration’s disdain for the rule of law.

Mr. Bush has said it should be closed, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, pushed for it. Proposals were prepared, including a plan for sending the real bad guys to other countries for trial. But Mr. Cheney objected, and the president has refused even to review the memos. He will hand this mess off to his successor.

We suppose there is some good news in all of this. While Mr. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009, he has only until Nov. 20 to issue “economically significant” rule changes and until Dec. 20 to issue other changes. Anything after that is merely a draft and can be easily withdrawn by the next president.

Unfortunately, the White House is well aware of those deadlines.

2008-10-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

Obama Informercial

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

2008-10-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Forge Free Speech Pact

10.28.08

PCMAG

by Chloe Albanesius

A joint effort between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo might seem like an awkward encounter waiting to happen, but the three Internet giants confirmed Tuesday that they will work together on an initiative aimed at preserving free speech on the Web.

The Global Network Initiative (GNI) is intended to provide guidance to technology companies with regard to advancing freedom of expression and privacy in countries with laws and policies that interfere with these goals.

In addition to the three tech companies, GNI will also include Human Rights First, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights in China.

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Business for Social Responsibility, facilitated the creation of GNI; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University also offered its expertise.

"This initiative is the result of two years of discussions with other leading technology companies, human rights organizations, socially responsible investors and academic institutions," Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government Affairs, wrote in a blog post. "We know that common action by these diverse groups is more likely to bring about change in government policies than the efforts of any one company or group acting alone."

"Yahoo was founded on the belief that access to information can enrich people's lives, and the principles we unveil today reflect our determination that our actions match our values around the world," Jerry Yang, Yahoo's CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. "These principles provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted."

GNI has established Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy. That document has not yet been published. The group's Web site - www.globalnetworkinitiative.org – goes live on Wednesday.

"CDT and Business for Social Responsibility co-facilitated an 18-month effort by these groups to craft the key documents underlying this effort," according to a note on the CDT Web site. "The documents provide guidance for companies, NGOs, investors, academics and others working together to resist efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards. The documents also provide specific implementation commitments and outline a framework for accountability and learning."

Earlier this year, Yahoo, Google, and Cisco appeared before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee to discuss Internet freedom. While a number of countries were mentioned for their restrictive Internet policies, much of the debate centered on China.

Congressional hearings in 2006 revealed that Yahoo provided information to Chinese officials that led to the imprisonment of online activists for several years.

Yahoo has since settled and set up a fund to help cyber dissidents obtain legal aid, and established international fellowships at Stanford and Georgetown Universities to promote the pursuits of journalists from press-restrictive countries.

But Michael Samway, vice president and deputy general counsel for Yahoo, admitted in May that the company has little control over what user information gets handed over to the Chinese government.

In 2005, Yahoo purchased a 40 percent stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com, which runs Yahoo's Chinese operations and "complies with the day-to-day requests" from government officials for customer information, Samway said.

Internet companies like Yahoo and Google have Chinese versions of their search sites, which include censored image and search returns. Both companies expressed concern about the lack of Internet freedom in China, but explained that any Web presence in the country at this point is better than nothing.

2008-10-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Preserving California's Constitution

New York Times
Sept. 28, 2008

California voters will have a chance in November to protect the rights of gay men and women, and to preserve the state’s Constitution. They should vote against Proposition 8, which seeks to amend that Constitution to prevent people of the same sex from marrying.

The measure would overturn a firmly grounded State Supreme Court decision that said everyone has a basic right “to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one’s choice.” It said the state’s strong domestic partnership statute was inadequate, making California the second state to end the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. Massachusetts did so in 2004.

Whether this important civil rights victory endures is now up to California voters. Opponents of giving gay couples the protections, dignity and respect that come with marriage are working furiously to try to overturn the court ruling through Proposition 8. It is our fervent hope that Californians will reject this mean-spirited attempt to embed second-class treatment of one group of citizens in the State Constitution.

If passed, Proposition 8 would add language to the State Constitution stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Supporters of the amendment complain about the “activist” judges who wrote the court decision. But the majority in the 4-to-3 ruling was acting to protect a vulnerable group from unfair treatment. Enforcing the state’s guarantee of equal protection is a job assigned to judges.

It is true that in 2000 California voters approved a ballot measure recognizing only heterosexual marriages as valid. But since then, the public has grown more comfortable with idea of marriage equality. The California Legislature passed a measure to let gay couples marry in 2005, and another in 2007. Both were vetoed by the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who took the wrong position — that the change had to come either from the courts or through a ballot initiative.

To his credit, Mr. Schwarzenegger is now among those opposing Proposition 8. To his discredit, John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, is in favor of restoring marriage discrimination. Barack Obama opposes the initiative, as do California’s senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats.

The proponents of Proposition 8 make the familiar claim that legalizing same-sex marriage undercuts marriage between men and women. But thousands of gay and lesbian couples have been married in California since the May ruling and marriage remains intact.

Similar discriminatory measures are on the ballot in Arizona and Florida. They also should be rejected.

2008-10-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Block the Vote

Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST
Rolling Stone Magazine
Release date: Oct 30, 2008

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.

But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico."

There's a reason Iglesias couldn't find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration's main point person on "ballot protection" has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. "The claim of widespread voter fraud," Minnite says, "is itself a fraud."

Allegations of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who traditionally support Democrats. "The Republicans have a long history of erecting barriers to discourage Americans from voting," says Donna Brazile, chair of the Voting Rights Institute for the Democratic National Committee. "Now they're trying to spook Americans with the ghost of voter fraud. It's very effective — but it's ironic that the only way they maintain power is by using fear to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote." The recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters include:

1. Obstructing Voter-Registration Drives

Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms. Facing potentially huge penalties for trivial administrative errors, the League of Women Voters abandoned its voter-registration drives in Florida. A court order eventually forced the legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to $1,000. But even so, said former League president Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines "create an unfair tax on democracy." The state has also failed to uphold a federal law requiring that low-income voters be offered an opportunity to register when they apply for food stamps or other public assistance. As a result, the annual number of such registrations has plummeted from more than 120,000 in the Clinton years to barely 10,000 today.

2. Demanding "Perfect Matches"

Under the Help America Vote Act, some states now reject first-time registrants whose data does not correspond to information in other government databases. Spurred by HAVA, almost every state must now attempt to make some kind of match — and four states, including the swing states of Iowa and Florida, require what is known as a "perfect match." Under this rigid framework, new registrants can lose the right to vote if the information on their voter-registration forms — Social Security number, street address and precisely spelled name, right down to a hyphen — fails to exactly match data listed in other government records.

There are many legitimate reasons, of course, why a voter's information might vary. Indeed, a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that as many as 20 percent of discrepancies between voter records and driver's licenses in New York City are simply typing mistakes made by government clerks when they transcribe data. But under the new rules, those mistakes are costing citizens the right to vote. In California, a Republican secretary of state blocked 43 percent of all new voters in Los Angeles from registering in early 2006 — many because of the state's failure to produce a tight match. In Florida, GOP officials created "match" rules that rejected more than 15,000 new registrants in 2006 and 2007 — nearly three-fourths of them Hispanic and black voters. Given the big registration drives this year, the number could be five times higher by November.

3. Purging Legitimate Voters From the Rolls

The Help America Vote Act doesn't just disenfranchise new registrants; it also targets veteran voters. In the past, bipartisan county election boards maintained voter records. But HAVA requires that records be centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state — partisan officials — who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible. Ironically, the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida — the same corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place. Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000 voters, most of them African-Americans, because their names resembled those of persons convicted of a crime. The state eventually acknowledged that the purges were improper — two years after the election.

Rather than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them. Maez, the elections supervisor in New Mexico, says he was the victim of faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state. Hector Balderas, the state auditor, was also purged from the voter list. The nation's youngest elected Hispanic official, Balderas hails from Mora County, one of the poorest in the state, which had the highest rate of voters forced to cast provisional ballots. "As a strategic consideration," he notes, "there are those that benefit from chaos" at the ballot box.

All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to the states on "list maintenance" methods.

4. Requiring Unnecessary Voter ID's

Even if voters run the gauntlet of the new registration laws, they can still be blocked at the polling station. In an incident last May, an election official in Indiana denied ballots to 10 nuns seeking to vote in the Democratic primary because their driver's licenses or passports had expired. Even though Indiana has never recorded a single case of voter-ID fraud, it is one of two dozen states that have enacted stringent new voter-ID statutes.

On its face, the requirement to show a government-issued ID doesn't seem unreasonable. "I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I've got to show a little bit of ID," Karl Rove told the Republican National Lawyers Association in 2006. But many Americans lack easy access to official identification. According to a recent study for the Election Law Journal, young people, senior citizens and minorities — groups that traditionally vote Democratic — often have no driver's licenses or state ID cards. According to the study, one in 10 likely white voters do not possess the necessary identification. For African-Americans, the number lacking such ID is twice as high.

5. Rejecting "Spoiled" Ballots

Even intrepid voters who manage to cast a ballot may still find their vote discounted. In 2004, election officials discarded at least 1 million votes nationwide after classifying them as "spoiled" because blank spaces, stray marks or tears made them indecipherable to voting machines. The losses hit hardest among minorities in low-income precincts, who are often forced to vote on antiquated machines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its investigation of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected, a ratio that holds nationwide.

Proponents of HAVA claimed the law would correct the spoilage problem by promoting computerized balloting. Yet touch-screen systems have proved highly unreliable — especially in minority and low-income precincts. A statistical analysis of New Mexico ballots by a voting-rights group called VotersUnite found that Hispanics who voted by computer in 2004 were nearly five times more likely to have their votes unrecorded than those who used paper ballots. In a close election, such small discrepancies can make a big difference: In 2004, the number of spoiled ballots in New Mexico — 19,000 — was three times George Bush's margin of victory.

6. Challenging "Provisional" Ballots

In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional" ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

Many voters are given provisional ballots under an insidious tactic known as "vote caging," which uses targeted mailings to disenfranchise black voters whose addresses have changed. In 2004, despite a federal consent order forbidding Republicans from engaging in the practice, the GOP sent out tens of thousands of letters to "confirm" the addresses of voters in minority precincts. If a letter was returned for any reason — because the voter was away at school or serving in the military — the GOP challenged the voter for giving a false address. One caging operation was exposed when an RNC official mistakenly sent the list to a parody site called GeorgeWBush.org — instead of to the official campaign site GeorgeWBush.com.

In the century following the Civil War, millions of black Americans in the Deep South lost their constitutional right to vote, thanks to literacy tests, poll taxes and other Jim Crow restrictions imposed by white officials. Add up all the modern-day barriers to voting erected since the 2004 election — the new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.

"Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.

Contributing editor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the nation's leading voting-rights advocates. His article "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002] sparked widespread scrutiny of vote tampering. Greg Palast, who broke the story on Florida's illegal voter purges in the 2000 election, is the author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." For more information, visit No Voter Left Behind and Steal Back Your Vote.

2008-10-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Brad Sherman

Threat of Marshall Law
2 Oct 2008

2008-09-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

Sarah Silverman "TheGreatSchlep.com" (OBAMA)

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

2008-09-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Lies of Sarah Palin

by Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone (Oct 2nd Issue)
Monday, September 22, 2008

I’m standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for Vice President. If I hadn’t quit my two pack a day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain smoking right now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

All around me, a million cops in there absurd post-9/11 space combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in paper-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joylessly out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “Unbelievable Time” they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.

The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into the sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague – They were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation – At the Xcel gates.

“She totally reminds me of my cousin!” the delegate screeched. “She’s a real woman! The real thing!”

I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – And this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party’s fortunes around faster

Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman – Reportedly his real preference – By picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-Thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

But watching Palin’s speech I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker – And immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who “Five children later” is “Still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American; the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set or drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “Difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set – Who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else’s wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review – Seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We’re used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She’s all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It’s just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn’t the most qualified candidate, that the party “went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.”

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflective prejudices of their demographic, as they would for a reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-Syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would “Have a friend and advocate in the White House.” This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.

Palin’s charge that “government is too big” and that Obama “Wants to grow it” was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical bush-era republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK’d a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that “Taxes are too high” and Obama “Wants to raise them.”

Palin hasn’t been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin’s paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn’t collect from her own; Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation. The rest of Palin’s speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin’s crack about a mayor being “like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities” testified to the Republican’s apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They’re probably right.) The incessant pausing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people – Reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever – For their failures.

Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to “forfeit” to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, it’s total disregard for reality, it’s absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.

Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won’t matter that she’s got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson (50 cent) holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don’t need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate’s bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.

One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor’s record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the “truth” about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection knows by know that Palin was originally for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she opposed it (She actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn’t actually sell the Alaska governor’s state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).

Then there are the salacious tales of Palin’s swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister’s ex-husband), Palin also fired a campaign aide who had an affair with a friends wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.

Then there’s the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush “Come from Hell” and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a “refuge state” for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was “God’s Will.” She also described the Iraq War as a “task that is from God” and part of a heavenly “Plan.” She supports teaching creationism and “Abstinence only” in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.

All of which tells you about what you’d expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She’s a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you’d think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.

The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job – But not in America. In America, it takes about 2 weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you’ve been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He’s been on TV every day for two years and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that’s a lifetime of hands-on experience.

It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin’s Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-“I love you, Obama!” ritual at the Democratic nominee’s town-hall appearances.

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much as a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we’re actually going to need in government if we’re going to get out of this huge mess we’re in.

Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and porked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: That you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for few hours around election time.

Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in awhile, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing “I’m Lovin’ It!” during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

And when it comes time to vote all you have to do is put your Country First – Just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, Baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!

2008-09-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

McCain contradiction

2008-09-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

Humor: Setting the Record Straight

Email Forward
Anonymous

A concise history and quite accurate!

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight...

--If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're
"exotic, different." Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a
quintessential American story.

-- If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

--Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.
Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well
grounded.

--If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become
the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter
registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a
Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a
district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health
and Human Services committee, spend almost 4 years in the United States Senate
representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131
bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and
Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

--If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city
council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20
months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're
qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

--If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while
raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within protestant churches, you're not a
real Christian.

--If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left
your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a
Christian.

--If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education,
including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

--If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with
no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your
unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

--If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position
in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city
community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't
represent America's.

--If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction
and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once
was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA,
your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

2008-09-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

White Privilege, White Entitlement and the 2008 Election

By Tim Wise
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

For those who still canʼt grasp the concept of white privilege, or who
are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it,
perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol
Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your
family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or
your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and
Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as
irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckinʼ redneck," like
Bristol Palinʼs boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with
you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to
"shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American
boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six
years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of,
then returned to after making up some coursework at a community
college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to
achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as
unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first
place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller
than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about
the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan,
makes you ready to potentially be president, and people donʼt all piss
on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term
state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means youʼre "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under
God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the
founding fathers, itʼs good enough for me," and not be immediately
disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was
written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasnʼt added until
the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists
their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to
teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly
idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people
immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a
husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your
state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and
no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're
black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can
be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately
think sheʼs being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and
the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women
to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child
labor--and people think youʼre being pithy and tough, but if you merely
question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with
no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--youʼre
somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who donʼt even
agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running
mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has
inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your
party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didnʼt support your
political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a
typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and
merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in
Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose
pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize
George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly
Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian
theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who
say the conflict in the Middle East is Godʼs punishment on Jews for
rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think youʼre just a good
church-going Christian, but if youʼre black and friends with a black
pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of
Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign
policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black
people, youʼre an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a
reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such
a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give
one-word answers to the queries of Bill OʼReilly means youʼre dodging
the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has
anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black
and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it, a "light"
burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow
someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90
percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are
losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly
isolated from world opinion, just because white voters arenʼt sure about
that whole "change" thing. Ya know, itʼs just too vague and ill-defined,
unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and
certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

2008-09-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

McCain’s Radical Agenda

Op-Ed Columnist
By BOB HERBERT
Published: September 15, 2008

Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?

These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

There is nothing secret about Senator McCain’s far-reaching proposals, but they haven’t gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign has mostly been about nonsense — lipstick, celebrities and “Drill, baby, drill!”

For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.

“It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.

According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”

The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”

Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.

While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That’s because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit — $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family — to be used “to help pay for your health care.”

You may think this is a good move or a bad one — but it’s a monumental change in the way health coverage would be provided to scores of millions of Americans. Why not more attention?

The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)

Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It’s the beginning of the end.

When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.

That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.

The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: “I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.”

Yet another radical element of McCain’s plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless.

In a refrain we’ve heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these “needless and costly” insurance regulations.

This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the right-wing Republicans’ ideological playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone.

You would think that with some of the most venerable houses on Wall Street crumbling like sand castles right before our eyes, we’d be a little wary about spreading this toxic formula even further into the health care system.

But we’re not even paying much attention.

2008-09-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Making America Stupid

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
Published: September 13, 2008

Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of “drill, baby, drill!”

I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — “Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!” — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that — with “drill, baby, drill” — why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent?” That is what a party committed to “change” would really be doing. As they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”

I dwell on this issue because it is symbolic of the campaign that John McCain has decided to run. It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue — including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters and no matter how much it might weaken America.

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. Now the same guy, who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.

In order to disguise the fact that the core of his campaign is to continue the same Bush policies that have led 80 percent of the country to conclude we’re on the wrong track, McCain has decided to play the culture-war card. Obama may be a bit professorial, but at least he is trying to unite the country to face the real issues rather than divide us over cultural differences.

A Washington Post editorial on Thursday put it well: “On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government’s rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Senator John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Senator Barack Obama for using the phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.”

Some McCain supporters criticize Obama for not having the steel in his belly to use force in the dangerous world we live in today. Well I know this: In order to use force, you have to have force. In order to exercise leverage, you have to have leverage.

I don’t know how much steel is in Obama’s belly, but I do know that the issues he is focusing on in this campaign — improving education and health care, dealing with the deficit and forging a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure — are the only way we can put steel back into America’s spine. McCain, alas, has abandoned those issues for the culture-war strategy.

Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?

Sorry, but there is no sustainable political/military power without economic power, and talking about one without the other is nonsense. Unless we make America the country most able to innovate, compete and win in the age of globalization, our leverage in the world will continue to slowly erode. Those are the issues this election needs to be about, because that is what the next four years need to be about.

There is no strong leader without a strong country. And posing as one, to use the current vernacular, is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.

Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.

2008-09-15T15:25:00.001-07:00

The SHIFT Movie Trailer

2008-09-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket

Op-Ed Columnist
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 13, 2008

WITH all due deference to lipstick, let’s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?

It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn’t have to name names — who are none of the above.

There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.

Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler’s words but spirit into their candidate’s speech shows where they’re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created “a whole new Republican Party,” but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.

The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.

But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.

And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do. No less revealing than Palin’s convention invocation of Pegler was the pointed omission of any mention of immigration, once the hottest Republican issue, by either her or McCain. Saying the word would have cued an eruption of immigrant-bashing ugliness, Pegler-style, before a national television audience. That wouldn’t play in the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, where Obama already has a more than 2-to-1 lead among Hispanic voters. (Bush captured roughly 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.)

Since St. Paul, Democrats have been feasting on the hypocrisy of the Palin partisans, understandably enough. The same Republicans who attack Democrats for being too P.C. about race now howl about sexism with such abandon you half-expect Phyllis Schlafly and Carly Fiorina to stage a bra-burning. The same gang that once fueled Internet rumors and media feeding frenzies over the Clintons’ private lives now express pious outrage when the same fate befalls the Palins.

But the ultimate hypocrisy is that these woebegone, frightened opponents of change, sworn enemies of race-based college-admission initiatives, are now demanding their own affirmative action program for white folks applying to the electoral college. They want the bar for admission to the White House to be placed so low that legitimate scrutiny and criticism of Palin’s qualifications, record and family values can all be placed off limits. Byron York of National Review, a rare conservative who acknowledges the double standard, captured it best: “If the Obamas had a 17-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.”

The cunning of the Palin choice as a political strategy is that a candidate who embodies fear of change can be sold as a “maverick” simply because she looks the part. Her marketers have a lot to work with. Palin is not only the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket, but she is young, vibrant and a Washington outsider with no explicit connection to Bush or the war in Iraq. That package looks like change even if what’s inside is anything but.

How do you run against that flashy flimflam? You don’t. Karl Rove for once gave the Democrats a real tip rather than a bum steer when he wrote last week that if Obama wants to win, “he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president,” not Palin for vice president. Obama should keep stepping up the blitz on McCain’s flip-flops, confusion, ignorance and blurriness on major issues (from education to an exit date from Iraq), rather than her gaffes and résumé. If he focuses voters on the 2008 McCain, the Palin question will take care of itself.

Obama’s one break last week was the McCain camp’s indication that it’s likely to minimize its candidate’s solo appearances by joining him at the hip with Palin. There’s a political price to be paid for this blatant admission that he needs her to draw crowds. McCain’s conspicuous subservience to his younger running mate’s hard-right ideology and his dependence on her electioneering energy raise the question of who has the power in this relationship and who is in charge. A strong and independent woman or the older ward who would be bobbing in a golf cart without her? The more voters see that McCain will be the figurehead for a Palin presidency, the more they are likely to demand stepped-up vetting of the rigidly scripted heir apparent.

But Obama’s most important tactic is still the one he has the most trouble executing. He must convey a roll-up-your-sleeves Bobby Kennedy passion for the economic crises that are at the heart of the fears that Palin is trying to exploit. The Republican ticket offers no answers to those anxieties. Drilling isn’t going to lower gas prices or speed energy independence. An increase in corporate tax breaks isn’t going to end income inequality, provide health care or save American jobs in a Palin presidency any more than they did in a Bush presidency.

This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it’s too late. But in framing this debate, it isn’t enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president — like Iraq — invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush’s right.

As Republicans know best, fear does work. If Obama is to convey just what’s at stake, he must slice through the campaign’s lipstick jungle and show Americans the real perils that lie around the bend.

2008-09-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

"'Alaskin Women Reject Palin' Rally is Huge"

9/14/08
http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/

I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.

After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.

The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.

So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.

So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.

2008-09-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin Commercial Aerial Shooting of Wolves

2008-09-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Gloria Steinem on Sarah Palin

September 4, 2008
Email Letter

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

2008-09-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

Blizzard of Lies

Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
Published: September 11, 2008

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

2008-09-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Incredible Sahara Forest Project to Generate Fresh Water, Solar Power and Crops in African Desert

by Leonora Oppenheim, London, UK on 09. 2.08

Can you imagine being able to produce enough water in the Sahara to grow crops there? Can you imagine harnessing sufficient quantities of solar power to supply electricity to cities in Africa and cities in Europe? Can you imagine producing a sustainable bio-fuel that doesn’t impact on world food supplies? Charlie Paton, Michael Pawlyn and Bill Watts can and what’s more they can imagine all these happening in the same place at the same time.

This week this trio of visionaries launched the Sahara Forest Project: their proposal to combine two innovative technologies, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Seawater Greenhouses, to produce renewable energy, water and food in an area of desert known to be one of the hottest places on earth.

Multitasking renewable solutions
It has often been said that there will be no one solution to solving the climate crisis and all those issues that surround it, such as energy sources, food prices and water supply. We need a portfolio of technologies to help us to combat these advancing problems. The Sahara Forest Project is one of the first projects we’ve seen that proposes not only to combine technologies to optimise performance and production, but also aims to tackle all of the serious challenges mentioned above. It is a bold and ambitious plan that, if realised, could have a powerful positive impact not only for the Sahara region, but also for Europe and the rest of the world.

Positive Collaboration
The most exciting aspect of the Sahara Forest Project is not specifically the use of these technologies. We’ve read about Seawater Greenhouses and Concentrated Solar Power and how they’re being used to great effect. It is the fact that they are being used together in the same place, to support each other and optimize their operating capacities to produce energy and water and by proxy vegetation.

This sense of collaboration is echoed in the team of people behind the proposal: an inventor - Charlie Paton, creator of the Seawater Greenhouse; an architect - Michael Pawlyn of Exploration Architecture, previously of Grimshaw and the lead architect on the iconic Eden Project; an engineer - Bill Watts of Max Fordham & Partners, an engineering firm that focuses on energy efficient systems for the built environment. These three men have brought their considerable expertise together to create a truly innovative proposal.

What does a Seawater Greenhouse do?
The Seawater Greenhouse was designed to address the problem of irrigating crops in arid coastal regions by evaporating seawater and condensing it into fresh water. This helps to reverse the trend of desertification created by normal industrial greenhouses, which can use up to five times more water to irrigate crops than the respective region's average annual rainfall. The system works by mimicking the natural hydrological cycle where seawater heated by the sun, evaporates, cools down to form clouds and returns to the earth as rain, fog or dew.

What does Concentrated Solar Power do?
CSP is currently seen as one of the most exciting and powerful ways of harnessing the sun’s energy to create power. Like the Seawater Greenhouse, CSP works well in hot arid areas where the sun is at its most powerful. The sun’s rays, collected through reflecting mirrors, are used to heat water which then produces steam to power turbines. Examples currently working are Nevada Solar 1 near Las Vegas, and the solar tower in Barstow California. It has been proposed that the energy created by CSP in the Sahara could be transported to Europe with minimal loss via high voltage DC power lines.

How will the Sahara Forest Project work?
These CSP / Seawater Greenhouse technologies will work together at a location some distance from the north coast of Africa, hopefully at a point below sea level which will reduce or potentially eliminate the costs of pumping seawater. The scheme has been designed as a ‘hedge’ of greenhouses providing a windbreak and shelter for the outdoor planting. CSP arrays will be placed at intervals along the greenhouse 'hedge'. The greenhouses produce five time more fresh water than needed for the plants inside. This surplus will be used to irrigate the planted orchards and the Jatrophra crop, which can be turned into bio-fuel for transportation and other needs.

Commercial Synergies
The Sahara Forest Project team tell us that the innovative interaction between the two technologies helps each to function more efficiently:

1.CSP systems need water for cleaning the mirrors and for the generation of steam to drive the turbines which the greenhouses can provide.

2.The Greenhouse evaporators make very efficient dust traps (as do plants that are growing outside) which benefits the CSP since the mirrors stay cleaner and therefore operate more
efficiently.

3. In solar thermal power plants, only about 25% of the collected solar energy is converted into electricity. If combined with sea water another 50% of the collected energy, normally released as heat, can be used for desalination. This way, up to 85% of the collected solar energy can be used.

In conclusion the Sahara Forest Project works on many levels. By combining the benefits of Concentrated Solar Power and Seawater Greenhouses the design team has vastly scaled up the positive outputs of renewable energy, food production and fresh water supply. Furthermore they tell us that “the scheme would also have the restorative effect of returning areas of desert to forested land and sequestering substantial quantities of atmospheric carbon in new plant growth and reactivated soils.” Surely this is a perfect example of the potential power of human and technological collaboration.

Saharan sun to power European supergrid

by Alok Jha, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 22 2008 16:50 BST

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.

The idea is gaining growing political support in Europe with both Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy recently giving backing to the north African solar plan.

Speaking today at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts to provide all of Europe's energy needs.

In addition, because the sunlight in this area is more intense, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

Jaeger-Walden explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each containing power plants generating around 50-200MW of power, could be fed thousands of miles across European countries by using high-voltage direct current transmission lines instead of the traditional alternating current lines. Energy losses on DC lines are far lower than AC ones where transmission of energy over long distances is uneconomic.

"If you look at solar radiation, then the Mediterranean region is a very favourable one," said Jaeger-Walden.

He said that the proposed grid was a way to balance out the intermittencies of renewable energy: "If you can connect the grid to hydro power, you've got that as a backup battery, and in addition there's wind. It's not a single source that's providing the energy but a combination of the different renewable energies."

Conveniently the potential to generate solar energy, either from photovoltaic cells, or by using it to heat water, is at its highest exactly when there is peak demand. "Between 11am and 1pm – there are a lot of cooking activities going on, people are going home, air conditioners are used," he said.

The idea of developing solar farms in the Mediterranean region and north Africa was given a boost recently by French president Nicholas Sarkozy earlier this month when he highlighted solar farms in north Africa as a key part of the work of his newly-formed Mediterranean Union.

Depending on the size of the grid, building the necessary high voltage lines across Europe could cost up to €1bn a year every year till 2050 but Jaeger-Walden pointed out that the figure was small when compared to a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that the world needs to invest more than $45tr (£22.5tr) in energy systems over the next 30 years.

Much of the cost would come in developing the public grid networks of connecting countries in the southern Mediterranean, which do not currently have the spare capacity to carry the electricity that the north African solar farms could generate.

"Even if high voltage cables between North Africa and Italy would be built or the existing cable between Morocco and Spain would be used, the infrastructure of the transfer countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey also needs a major restructuring," said Jaeger-Walden.

Scientists working on the project admit that it would take many years and huge investment to generate enough solar energy from north Africa to power Europe but envisage that by 2050 it could produce 100 GW, more than the the combined electricity output from all sources in the UK, with an investment of around €450bn.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the proposals. "Assuming it's cost-effective, a large scale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change. Europe needs to become a zero-carbon society as soon as possible, and that will only happen with bold new ideas like this one. Tinkering with 20th-century technologies like coal and nuclear simply isn't going to get us there."

Jaeger-Walden also believes that scaling up solar PV by having large solar farms could help bring its cost down for consumers. "The biggest PV system at the moment is installed in Leipzig and the price of the installation is €3.25 per watt. If we could realise that in the Mediterranean, for example in southern Italy, this would correspond to electricity prices in the range of 15 cents per KWh, something below what the average consumer is paying."

The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short to medium term future.

"It recognises something extraordinary – if we don't put together resources and findings across Europe and we let go the several sectors of energy, we will never reach these targets. We need a coordination of research applied to different fields," said Giovanni de Santi, director of the JRC, also speaking in Barcelona.

The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second-generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. De Santi said it was designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020 while reducing CO2 emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.
High-voltage transmission lines

First developed in the 1930s, High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines are seen as the most efficient way to move electricity over long without incurring the losses experienced in normal AC power lines. HVDC cables can carry more power for the same thickness of cable compared with AC lines but are only suited to long-distance transmission because they require expensive devices called static inverters to convert the electricity, usually generated as AC, into DC. Modern HVDC cables can keep energy losses down to around 3% per 1,000km.

Another advantage of HVDC is that it can be used as a link to transfer electricity between different countries that might use AC systems at differing frequencies. Alternatively, the HVDC cables could be used to synchronise the AC currents produced by renewable energy sources such as wind turbine farms.

2008-08-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

Brad Pitt's Green Wash

by Terri MacLeod on 08.20.08
Culture & Celebrity
Huffington Post

Ever fantasize about a hot, steamy shower with Brad Pitt? Well, now is your chance (sort of). The green-hearted celeb is hooking up with Kiehl's to support their new Aloe Vera body cleanser. ...In return for the power endorsement, all of the product's net profit will go to a foundation created by Kiehl's and the actor to support global environmental intiatives with regards to housing design. ....As you probably know, architecture is the actor's passion and put it to good use re-building eco-friendly homes in New Orleans. ...So, makes the sense the first big chunk of cash will go to Brad's Make It Right NOLA foundation.

2008-08-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

Miley's Got A Green Message

August 21, 2008
Huffington Post

..Whether you like her music or not, you gotta love Miley's "go-green" message. The teen icon is poised to be her generation's eco-voice. . ....She recently released a snappy eco-anthem "Wake Up America" and got young teens thinking and singing a "greener" beat. Now Miley and good her friend Mandy have shot a go-green YouTube video. ...Set in Miley's bedroom, the two shout-out a number of eco-suggestions. ...Things like unplug your cell phone, make sure to recycle books and magazines, and not to use aerosol cans. ...Simple stuff, but still important for young kids to hear. Check out Miley's YouTube video:

2008-08-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

One.org Matt Damon Ad to make Poverty History

August 21, 2008

2008-08-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

Rachel Maddow to Replace Dan Abrams on MSNBC

By Bill Carter
August 19, 2008, 5:02 pm

ust in time for the closing rush of the presidential election, MSNBC is shaking up its prime-time programming lineup, removing the long-time host –- and one-time general manager of the network — Dan Abrams from his 9 p.m. program and replacing him with Rachel Maddow, who has emerged as a favored political commentator for the all-news cable channel.

The moves, which were confirmed by MSNBC executives Tuesday, are expected to be finalized by Wednesday, with Mr. Abrams’s last program on Thursday. After MSNBC’s extensive coverage of the two political conventions during the next two weeks, Ms. Maddow will begin her program on Sept. 8.

MSNBC is highlighting the date, 9/8/08, connecting it to the start of the Olympics on 8/8/08, as a way to signal what the network’s president, Phil Griffin, said “will be the final leg of the political race this year.” He added, “We making that Rachel’s debut.”

* Update: Maddow comments on new role

Mr. Abrams, who is well liked at MSNBC, is expected to remain at both that network and at NBC News, where he is the chief legal correspondent. He will also serve as an anchor during some of MSNBC’s daytime coverage, as well as a substitute host on NBC’s “Today” show, Mr. Griffin said.

The addition of Ms. Maddow as prime-time host had been expected for some time. Only a month ago, Mr. Griffin said she was at the top of the list to get a show at the network, and would likely get one soon.

MSNBC has put heavy emphasis this year on presidential election coverage (it has given itself the tag line, “The Place for Politics”) and has turned to Ms. Maddow frequently both as a guest and as a substitute for the network’s most popular host, Keith Olbermann. Mr. Olbermann’s emergence as the signature personality on the network has led to an unofficial rebranding of MSNBC as the liberal alternative to Fox News, which is dominated by conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

MSNBC has been known to be seeking a way to capitalize to a greater degree on Mr. Olbermann’s popularity. A program hosted by Ms. Maddow will almost certainly be a closer ideological fit with Mr. Olbermann’s.

Mr. Abrams was not as overt a partisan. His program, “Verdict,” was based more in legal than political issues. He enjoyed some success, especially of late. With NBC’s Olympic coverage helping, Mr. Abrams beat Larry King’s show on CNN twice last week among the viewers preferred by news advertisers, people between the ages of 25 and 54.

Contacted by phone Tuesday, Mr. Abrams said “Putting my general manager’s hat back on, considering where the network is right now, it is actually the right call.”

Mr. Griffin said of the selection of Ms. Maddow, “This just completes our prime-time lineup. Our lineup makes sense now.”

2008-08-02T00:08:00.000-07:00

Black Sites

By ALAN BRINKLEY
New York Times
Published: August 3, 2008

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.

In fairness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, who could not have imagined the worst and contemplated extraordinary efforts to prevent it? But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.

Occasional lurid revelations of abuse — most prominent among them the appalling photographs of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, made public in 2004 — have been widely denounced throughout the world. The president has expressed outrage and has insisted that the degradation was the work of a few bad apples who would be appropriately punished. But it was only the pictures that made Abu Ghraib an aberration. The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world. The detainees in these scattered sites — many of them innocent — have been held for months and years without charges, without lawyers, without notification to their families and often without respite from torture for weeks and months at a time. The Bush administration’s response to the Abu Ghraib scandal was not to stop the behavior, but to try to hide it more effectively.

No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.

This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information. But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions. Among the many cases Mayer and other journalists have chronicled — including the case of the most notable Al Qaeda operative yet captured, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the information gleaned from tortured detainees has produced unreliable and often entirely unusable information. That many of the interrogations were conducted by American servicemen and -women with scant training made the likelihood of success even lower. (Some of the interrogators had no qualms about what they were doing and welcomed being unconstrained by any laws or rules. “It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” one officer later told a journalist. “We didn’t have to mess with others and it was fun.” Others were traumatized by what they had done and seen, and suffered psychologically as a result.)

The architects of this network of secret prisons and secret torture were a small but powerful group within the Bush administration. Dick Cheney stood at the center of the effort but delegated many of its operations to others. The vice president’s counsel (and later chief of staff), David Addington, was a ruthless, bullying enforcer of the strategy, effectively derailing all challenges by claiming that everything had been mandated by the president and by dismissing all legal and moral challenges as naïve and weak. John Yoo, a law professor from the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted an infamous memo giving legal cover to torture by simply redefining what torture was — virtually anything short of deliberate killing. George Tenet, the eager-to-please C.I.A. director; William Haynes, the militant general counsel to the Pentagon; Alberto Gonzales, the weak and pliable White House counsel who later became attorney general: all played vital roles in the creation and protection of these covert strategies. At the urging of Cheney — or his surrogate Addington — President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions and, without publicly stating it, suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects, thus removing two important impediments to torture. Others worked to undermine the 1984 international Convention Against Torture, which, under American leadership, had provided the first explicit definition of what torture was.

Mayer provides a particularly ghoulish description of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist, who introduced the C.I.A. to a secret military program that had been designed in the 1950s to teach high-risk personnel to withstand torture. Known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), it rested on the belief that inflicting a controlled level of pain and humiliation on those who might face it in combat would help them survive the real thing if they were captured. For the C.I.A. after 2001, SERE became not a tool for resisting torture, but a template for inflicting it — a template soon adopted by interrogators in the far-flung “black sites” where detainees were imprisoned. Mitchell dismissed the arguments of F.B.I. agents that his tactics were ineffective and that he had no experience with the Middle East or Islamic terrorism. “Science is science,” he said. At one point, the F.B.I. agents collaborating with the C.I.A. on interrogation plans were so alarmed by what they were hearing that they urged their superiors to arrest Mitchell. Soon after that, they withdrew from the program altogether. “We don’t do that,” one of the F.B.I. agents said. “It’s what our enemies do!”

From the very beginning, there was strong resistance to the regime of torture. Those who challenged it included journalists like The New York Times’s James Risen and Scott Shane, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Ron Suskind (the author of “The One Percent Doctrine”), The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and Mayer herself (who scrupulously credits the work of her many colleagues). Other opponents were officials in the State Department, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., members of Congress of both parties and many career military officers, including former chiefs of staff. But as Mayer notes, few of them “had the temerity to confront Cheney, who clearly was the true source of these policies.” Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration — conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted “an abomination.” All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.

By the end of 2005, those defending the regime of torture were no longer seeking primarily to protect the search for valuable intelligence. They were fighting for its survival, in the face of considerable evidence of the failure of SERE and other programs, because they feared being prosecuted should the program be halted and exposed. Even releasing detainees whom they knew to be entirely innocent was dangerous, since once released they could talk. “People will ask where they’ve been and ‘What have you been doing with them?’” Cheney said in a White House meeting. “They’ll all get lawyers.”

There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.

The Bush administration is not, of course, the first or only regime to violate civil liberties. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all authorized or tolerated terrible violations of civil and human rights, all of them in response to great national and global crises. In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.

2008-07-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama's Berlin Speech

PieReportNews
July 24, 2008

Berlin Speech - Part I

Berlin Speech - Part II

2008-07-27T10:35:00.001-07:00

Press Favors Obama Commentary

by John Stewart
Comedy Central

2008-07-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

Berlin Speech Commentary

by John Stewart
Comedy Central

2008-07-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

Gadgets blamed as lightning strikes dozens

From CNN's Alina Selyukh
July 18, 2008

MOSCOW, Russia -- Lightning has killed and injured more than a dozen people in Russia in the past two weeks, officials say, blaming widespread use of electronic gadgets such as cell phones for an increase in deadly strikes.

In one incident Wednesday, a lightning bolt killed three sunbathers in the town of Neftekamsk 800 miles east of Moscow.

One victim, Marina Sadykova, 26, was among a few people on a beach along the Kama River when a storm moved in. Witnesses said they saw a sharp blinding ray of light that raised7.6 meters (25 feet) of sand.

The woman -- mother of a 5-month-old son -- was talking on a cell phone when she was killed, and the phone was found melted in her hand, according to police.

Russian media have reported similar instances across central Russia -- including the death of a 10-year-old boy on a bike, a young man talking on a cell phone, and an elderly farmer tending her potato plants.

Leonid Tarkov, of the weather observation center FOBOS, told CNN that he believes the surge in lightning strikes may be connected to the increased use of portable electronic technology, such as cellular phones or music players.

"These things are electro-magnetic field carriers," he said. "That makes them, in essence, conductors. Thunderbolts are frequently attracted to such things, and hits are often connected with a lethal outcome."

The idea that lightning can follow the weak electro-magnetic fields of such devices is rejected by virtually all scientists, although there is evidence that a lightning strike is more likely to be fatal for a person carrying any object with metal in it.

And Tarkov himself pointed out another explanation for the surge in lightning strikes in Russia this summer -- the country has been hit by an unusually high number of storms.

He said Moscow is already 139 percent above normal for rainfall this month, including 51 millimeters (2 inches) from a fierce thunderstorm Wednesday -- the equivalent of five buckets of water on each square meter.

"The absolute July maximum was observed in July 1965, when 184 millimeters (7.24 inches of precipitation fell on Moscow," he said. "If such weather continues, it's not unlikely for the absolute maximum to be topped."

Storms left dozens of houses around Central Russia without electricity or water, and lightning ignited fires that burned a number of them, according to media reports.

More than a hundred trees were reported felled by winds in Moscow Thursday night and traffic was regularly stalled by flows of water during the past week. Thursday's storm also cut power to the rails used by public transportation, halting movement for more than an hour. Dozens of frustrated passengers who missed their airplane flights are still in Moscow.

Russia's stormy weather is likely to last at least another week, Tarkov said. He cited contrasting weather in the central region as the cause: A vast anticyclone that has settled over the area first carries cool humid North Atlantic winds and, hours later, subtropical heat, he explained.

"This only happens once in five to seven years," Tarkov said. "We haven't had such intensive storm activity in a while."

2008-07-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

VA Crisis: 20 medical stories that reveal how the gov’t REALLY feels about its soldiers

Topic: Healthcare
ONDD.org

For the past four years, over 30,000 U.S. soldiers have returned home from fighting in Iraq wounded. Promised state-of-the-art medical care and assistance transitioning back to their previous lives, many soldiers are finding that the government isn’t holding up on its end of the bargain. The ill-managed Veterans Administration system has some soldiers tied up for months in a deep web of red tape and unaccountability that prevents many from receiving the benefits they’re owed. These are just a few stories that indicate the government’s true ability and willingness to take care of our veterans returning from Iraq.

1.Sending the wounded back to war: Several wounded troops from a military medical facility in Ft. Benning, Ga., were sent back into combat despite still showing symptoms of their conditions, raising questions about much recovery time the military is allowing soldiers while under pressure to keep soldier population in Iraq high. One female was redeployed despite having significant spinal damage and being unable to carry gear.

2.Withholding pay from the wounded: Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson was walking down a road in Iraq when a car bomb exploded just feet away. Shrapnel ripped through his back and into his spine, paralyzing him. He returned home for treatment and while he was in the hospital his wife called to tell him she had no money to pay the bills. For four months, and without warning, the Army’s messy bureaucracy withheld pay from Simpson, saying he owed them money from a combat duty bonus they neglected to cancel. He was not even aware he was receiving it.

Purple Heart
The overwhelming evidence of sub-standard care provided wounded Veterans is a better indicator than rhetoric of the government’s respect for its soldiers.

3.False Diagnoses: In the past six years, the military has released more than 22,000 wounded soldiers from service for having a “personality disorder”, according to reporter Joshua Kors. This diagnosis is often inaccurate, but is used frequently because the government doesn’t have to cover medical costs for individuals with personality disorders. Kors’ research found that money saved on these veterans will save the government $12 billion over the course of their lifetimes.

4. Medical Benefits Denied: A soldier profiled by Kors in The Nation, Town was injured when a rocket slammed into a wall inches above his head, shooting shrapnel into his neck. The shrapnel was removed, but he is now partially deaf and has significant memory loss. The military told him his wounds were caused by a personality disorder, not the rocket. His medical benefits were denied, and he is now fighting the government for coverage.

5.Government Accountability Office: In 2006, the GAO issued this report that concluded that the government has failed the test of taking care of the wounded when they return from war. It estimates that nearly 900 critically wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan have gone into government debt through no fault of their own.

6. Ryan Kelly: One of the more highly publicized veterans, Ryan Kelly lost his leg in Iraq in 2003. While still in recovery, he was receiving letters from the military threatening to ruin his credit. Unbeknownst to him, he was overpaid $2,200, and the government cut his pay and benefits until he paid it back.

7. Overloading the system: Mark Benjamin, the investigations editor at UPI, reports that the military is discharging wounded soldiers at an increased rate, transferring their continued medical care to the Veterans Administration. This phenomenon is overloading the V.A. system, making it less able to deliver quality care and deliver adequate treatment.

8.Medical Hold: Many wounded soldiers are encountering long waits – sometimes months – for doctors’ appointments. The soldiers, described by the government to be on “medical hold,” are often made to wait out this period in run-down military barracks; some are redeployed before they can see a doctor.

9.Immediate Treatment Denied: Jonathan Schulze, an Iraq veteran from Minnesota, fought depression, violent outbursts, and a desire to die after he returned wounded from Iraq. When he went to the closest V.A. hospital in his home state, he was denied immediate admission and listed 26th on a wait list for an opening in a 12-bed facility. Four days later, he killed himself. He is not the only veteran to commit suicide due to untreated mental illnesses resulting from injuries.

10.Depression, Anger, and Insomnia: In one Boston Globe poll, 58 percent of veterans reported having nightmares and insomnia since their return; 59 percent reported uncontrollable anger; 58 percent reported depression; and 62 percent reported have some level of mental health problems.

11. No Rural Access for Treatment: Many veterans from rural areas are having significant problems accessing care nearby their residences, and then discovering long waits after driving hours to reach a V.A. Hospital. One couple from North Carolina even relocated to Massachusetts, quitting their jobs and leaving their home, just to be close to a treatment facility that specializes in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

12. Conditions requiring special treatment: Many veterans and their families say the government system is not able to adequately treat certain mental illnesses and are seeking more expert care. Some, like veteran Vincent Mannion, who, like 3,000 other veterans, has been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, are fighting to get coverage extended to include treatment at private facilities.

13.Suicide: A CBS investigation found that the suicide rate for veterans of the Iraq war is more than twice that for Americans who didn’t serve in the war. Some have even called it an epidemic, saying that many soldiers are returning home to find they can’t win the battles waging in their psyches. Diana Henderson’s son, Derek, served three tours of combat duty in Iraq, only to return home and later commit suicide by jumping off a bridge.

14. Ineffective enforcement of laws to protect veterans: It is predicted that government health costs for Iraq veterans will total $650 billion in the long run. Especially troubling for the V.A. is the fact that many veterans and reservists are returning home to find their jobs cut, their health insurance curtailed, and their pensions gone, despite a federal law and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Act, which were enacted to keep this from happening. The laws have failed largely because there is no single government entity overseeing or enforcing them.

15. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome: PTSD is thought to affect at least one out of every three Iraq War veterans. However, the Government Accountability Office has predicted many crises for the V.A. in treating this disorder. One GAO report questioned whether the V.A. was adequately screening veterans for the disorder and whether veterans were receiving medical referrals after diagnosis. It also questioned the V.A.’s ability to plan for and handle the continued increase of PTSD patients.

16.Complicated wounds: Many physicians have attested to the fact that the wounds sustained by soldiers in the Iraq war are usually much more complicated than traditional war wounds and require long, difficult surgeries and treatments, due to the high risk for direct injury by car bombs, chemicals, and other new forms of warfare.

17.Psychological damage: The Pentagon reports that 35 percent of Iraq veterans seek mental health care, and it’s estimated that even more have psychological disorders and aren’t seeking treatment. Veteran advocates want to see increased government spending dedicated to mental health treatments and are doubtful that the V.A. can handle the issue at its current funding level.

18. Lawsuits: This summer, Iraq veterans sued VA Secretary Jim Nicholson for denying them health coverage, treatment, and disability pay.

19.Inability to care for other veterans: As the Iraq War continues to take its toll on soldiers, veterans of previous wars face insecurities about their own benefits. When veterans turn 65, they are entitled to free health benefits. But as costs for the VA increase, these benefits will likely be in jeopardy.

20.Jon Walter Reed Hospital: Hailed as the premiere military hospital in the country, Walter Reed Hospital, located five miles from the White House, is in a state of disarray, according to this Washington Post report and has been the subject of much media scrutiny in recent months. According to the article, the hospital is run-down and overcrowded and navigating the disorganized administration is proving to be almost as big of a battle as what some veterans faced overseas.

The V.A.’s ability to adequately treat and assist wounded veterans is beyond highly questionable. Most of the evidence points to one conclusion: Soldiers wounded in battle are sure to keep fighting for their lives once they return home.

2008-07-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

Preparing the Battlefield

The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
29 June 2008 (Release: 07 July 2008)
(Also see video interview below w/Candy Crowley)

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)

The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.

“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”

“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.

The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.

The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.

Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”

Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”

None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)

A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”

One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”

Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”

Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”

Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.

Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.

Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”

The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.

In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency—“are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.

A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions—a beheading, in one case—were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.

It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”

The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags—basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations—judicial, strategic, and political—are different in Iran.”

He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”

A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.

The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”

Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.

The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians—if they have good will.”

The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”

There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”

Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.

It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table. ♦

2008-07-01T12:19:00.001-07:00

Seymour Hersh - Preparing the Battlefield

Interviewed by Candy Crowley
CNN
29 June 2008

2008-06-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects

By DAN FROSCH
Published: June 27, 2008
The New York Times

DENVER — Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

Much of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land in the West is ideal for solar energy, particularly in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, where sunlight drenches vast, flat desert tracts.

Galvanized by the national demand for clean energy development, solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management since 2005. They center on the companies’ desires to lease public land to build solar plants and then sell the energy to utilities.

According to the bureau, the applications, which cover more than one million acres, are for projects that have the potential to power more than 20 million homes.

All involve two types of solar plants, concentrating and photovoltaic. Concentrating solar plants use mirrors to direct sunlight toward a synthetic fluid, which powers a steam turbine that produces electricity. Photovoltaic plants use solar panels to convert sunlight into electric energy.

Much progress has been made in the development of both types of solar technology in the last few years. Photovoltaic solar projects grew by 48 percent in 2007 compared with 2006. Eleven concentrating solar plants are operational in the United States, and 20 are in various stages of planning or permitting, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The manager of the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental impact study, Linda Resseguie, said that many factors must be considered when deciding whether to allow solar projects on the scale being proposed, among them the impact of construction and transmission lines on native vegetation and wildlife. In California, for example, solar developers often hire environmental experts to assess the effects of construction on the desert tortoise and Mojave ground squirrel.

Water use can be a factor as well, especially in the parched areas where virtually all of the proposed plants would be built. Concentrating solar plants may require water to condense the steam used to power the turbine.

“Reclamation is another big issue,” Ms. Resseguie said. “These plants potentially have a 20- to 30-year life span. How to restore that land is a big question for us.”

Another benefit of the study will be a single set of environmental criteria to weigh future solar proposals, which will ultimately speed the application process, said the assistant Interior Department secretary for land and minerals management, C. Stephen Allred. The land agency’s manager of energy policy, Ray Brady, said the moratorium on new applications was necessary to “ensure that we are doing an adequate level of analysis of the impacts.”

In the meantime, bureau officials emphasized, they will continue processing the more than 130 applications received before May 29, measuring each one’s environmental impact.

While proponents of solar energy agree on the need for a sweeping environmental study, many believe that the freeze is unwarranted. Some, like Ms. Gordon, whose company has two pending proposals for solar plants on public land, say small solar energy businesses could suffer if they are forced to turn to more expensive private land for development.

The industry is already concerned over the fate of federal solar investment tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress renews them. The moratorium, combined with an end to tax credits, would deal a double blow to an industry that, solar advocates say, has experienced significant growth without major environmental problems.

“The problem is that this is a very young industry, and the majority of us that are involved are young, struggling, hungry companies,” said Lee Wallach of Solel, a solar power company based in California that has filed numerous applications to build on public land and was considering filing more in the next two years. “This is a setback.”

At a public hearing in Golden, Colo., on Monday, one of a series by the Bureau of Land Management across the West, reaction to the moratorium was mixed.

Alex Daue, an outreach coordinator for the Wilderness Society, an environmental conservation group, praised the government for assessing the implications of large-scale solar development.

Others warned the bureau against becoming mired in its own bureaucratic processes on solar energy, while parts of the West are already humming with new oil and gas development.

Craig Cox, the executive director of the Interwest Energy Alliance, a renewable energy trade group, said he worried that the freeze would “throw a monkey wrench” into the solar energy industry at precisely the wrong time.

“I think it’s good to have a plan,” Mr. Cox said, “but I don’t think we need to stop development in its tracks.”

2008-06-27T13:46:00.001-07:00

Obama, Clinton Campaigning Together In New Hampshire
27 Jun 08
AP

UNITY, N.H. — Rivals turned allies, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton made a display of unity Friday in a hamlet named for it, their first joint public appearance since the divisive Democratic primary race ended.

"To anyone who voted for me and is now considering not voting or voting for Senator (John) McCain, I strongly urge you to reconsider," said Clinton, the loser in a marathon Democratic nomination fight, as she implored her supporters to join with Obama's "to create an unstoppable force for change we can all believe in."

In turn, Obama praised both Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, as allies and pillars of the Democratic Party. "We need them. We need them badly," Obama said. "Not just my campaign, but the American people need their service and their vision and their wisdom in the months and years to come because that's how we're going to bring about unity in the Democratic Party. And that's how we're going to bring about unity in America."

Moments earlier, the two snaked their way through some 6,000 people who gathered in a wide-open field and overflowed some bleacher seats in this town of 1,700.

This was a carefully chosen venue in a key general election battleground state: Unity awarded exactly 107 votes to each candidate in New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary in January. Obama clinched the nomination June 3 and Clinton suspended her campaign four days later.

Friday's joint appearance capped a turbulent Democratic primary season and tense post-race transition as the two went from foes to friends _ at least publicly. This was the most visible event in a series of gestures the two senators have made over the past week to heal the hard feelings _ between themselves as well as among their backers. Both were mindful of the need for the entire Democratic Party to swing behind Obama as he faces McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, in the general election.

At a private appearance with Obama in Washington on Thursday, Clinton encouraged her top fundraisers to help Obama. She went one step further on Friday: Both Clintons, Hillary and Bill, made the maximum $2,300 donation to Obama's campaign Friday in an online transaction, aides said.

In New Hampshire, Clinton and Obama took the stage together.

"Unity is not only a beautiful place as we can see, it's a wonderful feeling, isn't it? And I know when we start here in this field in Unity, we'll end on the steps of the Capitol when Barack Obama takes the oath of office as our next president," Clinton said from a podium as Obama sat next to her on a stool, coatless with his white shirt sleeves rolled up. She wore a powder blue pantsuit; he wore a light blue tie.

Wasting little time pressing Obama's case, Clinton noted that McCain and the GOP probably hoped she wouldn't join forces with Obama.

"But I've got news for them: We are one party; we are one America, and we are not going to rest until we take back our country and put it once again on the path to peace, prosperity and progress in the 21st century," Clinton said to cheers.

Echoing Obama's pitch, Clinton said McCain offered nothing more than a continuation of President Bush's policies.

"In the end, Senator McCain and President Bush are like two sides of the same coin, and it doesn't amount to a whole lot of change," Clinton said. "If you think we need a new course, a new agenda, then vote for Barack Obama and you will get the change that you need and deserve."

Obama heaped praise on Clinton when it was his turn to speak.

"For 16 months, Sen. Clinton and I have shared the stage as rivals for the nomination, but today I could not be happier and more honored and more moved that we're sharing this stage as allies to bring about the fundamental changes that this country so desperately needs," Obama said. "Hillary and I may have started with separate goals in this campaign, but we made history together."

Obama is seeking to become the country's first black president; Clinton had sought to become the first woman to win the White House.

"I've admired her as a leader, I've learned from her as a candidate. She rocks. She rocks. That's the point I'm trying to make," Obama added, responding to cheers from the crowd. "I know firsthand how good she is, how tough she is, how passionate she is, how committed she is the causes that brought all of us here today."

Each needs the other now.

Obama needed the former first lady to give her voters and donors a clear signal that she doesn't consider it a betrayal for them to shift their loyalty his way; she did that this week. Clinton won convincingly among several voter groups during the primaries, including working class voters and older women _ groups that McCain has actively courted since she left the race.

Clinton, for her part, needs the Illinois senator's help in paying down $10 million of her campaign debt, and Obama has asked his supporters to help retire her debt. And she certainly doesn't want Obama to lose and have some of his supporters blame her.

She also wants assurance she will be treated respectfully as a top surrogate on the campaign trail and at the Democratic convention later this summer. Some of Clinton's supporters want her name placed in nomination for a roll call vote at the Denver convention, an effort she hasn't formally discouraged.

Campaigning in Youngstown, Ohio, McCain told reporters he understood the Democrats' effort to unite, but he also believes he is making inroads in attracting disgruntled Democrats. He noted a woman at a town-hall style meeting Thursday in Cincinnati who wore a "Hillary" hat as she asked him a question.

"Obviously, I have to get Republican votes, independent votes and the old and new Reagan Democrats," McCain said Friday after touring a General Motors car factory in Lordstown, Ohio.

___

Associated Press Writer Beth Fouhy contributed to this story.

2008-06-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

Gas $7 Per Gallon in Four Years
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.25.08
Science & Technology (alternative energy)

Time to buy a bike: Gasoline prices in North America will soar over the next four years to $7.00, causing a massive jolt to the continent's manufacturing base not seen since the oil shocks of the 1970s, a leading economist is warning. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets was laughed at three years ago when he predicted $ 100 per barrel oil, and now thinks it will climb to $225 in four years. (Houston Chronicle quotes him as saying gas will cost $10 per gallon) From the National Post:

"Stripping out natural gas liquids, oil production has not grown for over two years, which certainly goes a long way to explaining why oil prices have doubled over that period," Rubin said. "It is increasingly clear that the outlook for oil supply signals a period of unprecedented scarcity."

Rubin predicts hybrids will go "from marketing and PR fluff to the core of car production." People will move closer to where they work. "I think there will be fewer people on the road in North America in five years than there is right now." ::Houston Chronicle and ::National Post

2008-06-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

Jeff Rubin Predicts "Mass Exodus" From Cars in US
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06.26.08
Cars & Transportation (cars)

We previously reported on Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Market's prediction of gas costing $7 to $10 per gallon in four years; Now Rubin makes his prediction of its impact.

Over the next four years, we are likely to witness the greatest mass exodus of vehicles off America’s highways in history. By 2012, there should be some 10 million fewer vehicles on American roadways than there are today—a decline that dwarfs all previous adjustments including those during the two OPEC oil shocks.

Rubin notes that over 57 million Americans have access to public transit, and that more and more of them will use it, starting to "act more like Europeans", starting with lower income people.

Our analysis suggests that about half of the number of cars coming off the road in the next four years will be from low income households who have access to public transit. At their current driving habits, filling up the tank will have risen from about 7% of their income to 20%, an increase that will see many start taking the bus.

The Wall Street Journal writes:

Gas prices already appear to be reshaping suburbia. But what Mr. Rubin is predicting is a far bigger shock to the American system. Europe has had decades to develop a society based on expensive energy. What will happen if Americans suddenly are forced to shoulder European-style energy prices — but without the European-style society to cope with them?

2008-06-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

Where the hell is Matt? (2008)
by Matthew Harding
21 June 2008

PolitixWatch.com: What a GREAT WAY to unite the world! lol Thanks Matt!

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

2008-06-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

Angelina Jolie Debuts PSA For World Refugee Day (VIDEO)
Huffington Post | June 18, 2008 08:56 AM

Angelina Jolie, currently in France awaiting the birth of twins, has filmed a public service announcement for World Refugee Day, which is Friday June 20. Jolie is a Goodwill Ambassador to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and has been involved with refugee causes for over seven years. In addition to the below message, she is penning an article for a "major" US paper, also out Friday.

2008-06-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

Honey Bee Collapse Now Worse on West Coast
© 2008 by Linda Moulton Howe

“It's worse than last year, and last year was worse
than the year before. So, it's bad. And there are a lot of good,
big beekeepers that are having a lot of problems. I think we're coming
in for a big train wreck.” - Gilly Sherman, Beekeeper

Western honey bee, or European honey bee (Apis mellifera),
gathering pollen from purple aster. 34% of American honey bees in
commercial hives have disappeared this spring of 2008, in a
persistent mystery known as “colony collapse disorder.”

April 10, 2008 Gainesville, Florida - On April 5, 2008, England's BBC News carried a report entitled, “U. S. Fears Over Honey Bee Collapse.” A California beekeeper, Gilly Sherman, was interviewed and he said sobering words: “It's worse than last year, and last year was worse than the year before. So, it's bad. And there are a lot of good, big beekeepers that are having a lot of problems. I think we're coming in for a big train wreck.”

I took that quote to Jerry Hayes, Chief, Apiary Section, Florida Department of Agriculture, and President of the Apiary Inspectors of America in Gainesville, Florida and asked for his comment.

Interview:

Jerry Hayes, Chief, Apiary Section, Florida Department of Agriculture, and President of the Apiary Inspectors of America in Gainesville, Florida: “Certainly West Coast beekeepers were more dramatically affected this year than perhaps East Coast beekeepers. Last year, East Coast beekeepers had the first and dramatic events happening to their bee colonies. Sometimes, the West Coast beekeepers said, ‘Well, it’s not happening to us. You must just be bad beekeepers.’ So, now the shoe is on the other foot and they are suffering as badly as anybody has been. Everybody is on an even playing field right now.

Bees are not healthy. Bees have not been healthy for a few years and they are becoming more unhealthy. The beekeepers, the industry that uses them as a tool, is in a precarious situation.

SO WOULD YOU AGREE WITH THE BEEKEEPER QUOTED BY THE BBC NEWS, ‘I THINK WE’RE COMING IN FOR A BIG TRAIN WRECK’?

We’ll never know these things until after the train wreck. It certainly does not look good. I’ve been reading some reports about whole populations of bats dying and disappearing in the Northeast. The quail population in the southeast has virtually disappeared. I don’t know if any of these things have parallels and links, but it certainly is interesting that something in the environment is impacting these other animals.

WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATE OF COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA?

34% Bee Loss in U. S. by Spring 2008

The Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA), of which I am a part – we just completed a survey of 327 beekeepers and we came up with about a 34% loss rate over this past 2007 to 2008 winter season.

THAT’S EVEN MORE THAN LAST YEAR?

Yes, a little bit. [ 2007 estimated American loss was 25%.]

GOING INTO THIS SPRING OF 2008, WHAT ARE YOUR GREATEST WORRIES?

Beekeepers cannot continue to take these kinds of losses and rebound in any kind of way.

Cause of Colony Collapse Disorder?

“Unfortunately, we still don’t have a clear picture of why this is happening.”

THE LAST TIME WE TALKED, IT WAS THE ISRAELI VIRUS UNDER SUSPICION OF COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES THROUGH AUSTRALIAN BEES THAT HAD BEEN BROUGHT IN BECAUSE THE NORTH AMERICAN BEE POPULATION HAD BEEN WEAKENED. IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT THE ISRAELI ACUTE PARALYSIS VIRUS IS STILL CAUSING THE MORTALITY? OR IS THERE STILL SOMETHING TO BE FOUND? WHAT IS CAUSING ONE-THIRD OF ALL THE BEES IN THE UNITED STATES TO DISAPPEAR IN THE WINTER OF 2007 TO SPRING OF 2008?

[ Editor’s Note: See 090707 Earthfiles: Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) September 2007 journal, Science.]

Boy, if I knew that, I’d probably have a statue some place, Linda. Obviously it’s all the issues that are still on the table right now. Viruses – whether it’s the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, or other viruses that are known and impact honey bees? There again, pesticides, poor nutrition, stress whatever that is from moving bees back and forth, a shallow genetic pool in our managed bee colonies. Somehow, all these things are interacting. Basically, we need more funds in order to hire smart people and expensive equipment to figure what is going on. Research is never quick.

DID YOU EXPECT AN INCREASE IN THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES IN NORTH AMERICA?

I was personally interested to find out if it was going to continue and to find out what was going to happen to our West Coast beekeepers that seemed to have dodged a bit of the bullet last year. I was hoping that it would not, but I knew that something like this just generally does not go away on its own.

BUT ARE YOU SURPRISED THAT THE WEST COAST BEEKEEPERS ARE BEING HIT HARD NOW IN 2008?

No, not really. You know how things spread – if this is a pathogen or something in which all populations are not hit equally. So, it was unfortunately their turn.

HAS THE ISRAELI ACUTE PARALYSIS VIRUS BEEN FOUND IN THE WEST COAST HONEY BEES?

Yes, it’s there, but not at any dramatic levels. In fact, there’s kind of an East Coast variant and a West Coast variant of the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. There’s also the Kashmir bee virus that has shown up in quite large numbers. Then you add in all the other things we talked about that could cause the immune system collapse. All those things are interacting.

SO, IN APRIL 2008, YOU CAN’T SAY EVEN NOW THAT IT IS THE ISRAELI VIRUS THAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MOST OF COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER?

No, because in the CCD, the Israeli acute paralysis virus was found in most of the samples and at the moment is considered just a marker. It was not present in tremendously high numbers. And we can’t say it’s the varroa mite because in CCD, varroa and trachea mites are in very low levels. The Nosema protozoan was found in less than 50% of the colonies. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a clear picture of why this is happening.

Future Almond and Other American
Crop Pollinations in Jeopardy?

WITH A 33% DISAPPEARANCE RATE SO FAR IN 2008, WHAT HAPPENS TO ALMOND POLLINATION AND CROPS BECAUSE THEY WERE STRETCHED LAST YEAR TRYING TO IMPORT ENOUGH BEES FROM THE EAST COAST AND AUSTRALIA TO GET THE ALMOND GROVES POLLINATED. WHAT HAPPENS NOW WITH EVEN MORE BEES DISAPPEARING?

Well, almond pollination is over right now. And most of the bees fell apart during or towards the end of almond pollination. I think the almond guys got by in good shape, so they don’t care as long as they get pollination for next year because this year is over with. To them, honey bees are an input, just like fertilizer, pesticides and fungicides. So, until next year, the almond growers probably don’t care.

WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL THE OTHER CROPS THAT ARE DEPENDENT UPON HONEY BEES, IF THEY HAVE FALLEN APART IN SUCH GREAT NUMBERS TRYING TO POLLINATE THE ALMOND CROP?

That’s a great question. The bees are coming back to Florida now and we’re talking about watermelon pollination. And then the bees will be moving north for blueberries and apples and cranberries. But yours is a good question and I don’t have an answer for it at this moment in time.

U. S. Headed for Reliance On
International Food Imports

”The USDA projects that something like 40% of our vegetables
are going to be coming from China in 2012 or some date like that and the
U. S. is going to be a net food importer in fifty years.”

I’d like to see people at the federal level and others realize how important honey bees are! But if people don’t care where food comes from, if people are happy that food is at the grocery store and they don’t care how it gets to the grocery store, then maybe all this concern is a moot point. People have to care about this. The USDA projects that something like 40% of our vegetables are going to be coming from China in 2012 or some date like that and the U. S. is going to be a net food importer in fifty years.

We already have someone who has us by the nose for energy production, oil (Middle East). And so now, we’re going to turn our food production over to someone else? This all has larger strategic implications than just honey bees. This is talking about the food supply and how secure our food supply is in the United States?

So, I just hope that people realize how important honey bees are and somehow give support. We support sugar people. We have been throwing money at the corn people for years and everything else. Why not honey bees, if they are important?

Implications for Increasing Decline
of American Honey Bees?

“If the almond people come up short, my guess is that probably the Mexicans will petition to bring their Africanized bee colonies across the border to fill that gap. And that will probably destroy the U.S. commercial beekeeping industry.”

YOU AND I HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SO MANY HONEY BEES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA NOW FOR A YEAR. I THINK I THOUGHT, AS A REPORTER, THAT BY THE SPRING OF 2008 THAT WE WOULD BE SEEING A RESTORATION OF BETTER HEALTH TO THE BEES AND THAT EVERYTHING MIGHT BE GETTING BETTER. THE FACT THAT IT’S GONE DOWN HILL EVEN MORE, THE FACT THAT EVEN MORE BEES HAVE DISAPPEARED THROUGH THE WINTER OF 2007 TO 2008, THE FACT THAT AFTER THE ALMOND POLLINATION THAT, TO USE YOUR WORDS, ‘THE BEES ARE FALLING APART IN THE UNITED STATES.’ WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYTHING IS GOING DOWN HILL IN APRIL?

There might be crops that are potentially impacted and as the almond acreage grows, the almond growers will try to use every honey bee colony in the United States. If the almond people come up short, my guess is that probably the Mexicans will petition to bring their Africanized bee colonies across the border to fill that gap. And that will probably destroy the U.S. commercial beekeeping industry.

BUT WOULD YOU AND OTHERS IN AGRICULTURE ALLOW THAT TO OCCUR?

I’m just a mid-level civil servant. The almond people and value of the almond crop – money talks in our capitalistic society and the almond people will not be denied.

BUT DO YOU SERIOUSLY MEAN THERE COULD BE A DECISION THAT WOULD BE ONLY POLITICAL AND ECONOMICAL FOR THE ALMOND INDUSTRY THAT COULD END UP BRINGING IN AFRICANIZED BEES THAT WOULD DESTROY THE REST OF THE NORTH AMERICAN HONEY BEE?

It’s very possible.

THAT IS ACTUALLY BEING DISCUSSED NOW AS AN OPTION?

I didn’t make that up! (laughs)

I’M VERY DISTRESSED TO HEAR THIS.

Me, too.

A Year from Now in 2009?

“(Richard Adee, largest beekeeper in U. S.) is truthfully shell shocked and numb and doesn’t know what to do. You can’t replace 60,000 colonies overnight.”

GIVEN THE FACT THAT THE PERCENTAGE IN THE NUMBER OF BEES DISAPPEARING IN 2008 IS EVEN HIGHER THAN IT WAS IN 2007, AND THAT THE BEE HEALTH IS NOT GOOD, WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT TO BE THE STATUS A YEAR FROM NOW IN 2009?

I don’t know. I don’t know if this is Darwin in action and that this might go away as the weak are culled out and the strong survive – because if this continues on for another year or two, there won’t be many commercial beekeepers left. There will be some small beekeepers left, but not of the size that can load up colonies on semi-trucks and take them over the United States.

The largest beekeeper in the United States [ Richard Adee Honey Farms, Brookings, South Dakota], I think lost 60,000 colonies out of his 80,000 colonies this past late winter and spring. He had something like 100 loads of empty equipment that he had to bring back from California. You just can’t replace those kinds of numbers very quickly.

WHEN YOU TALK TO THAT LARGE HONEY BEE KEEPER, WHAT IS HIS ASSESSMENT, TALKING TO YOU, ABOUT THE NEXT FEW MONTHS INTO NEXT YEAR?

He is truthfully shell shocked and numb and doesn’t know what to do. You can’t replace 60,000 colonies overnight.

WOULDN’T THIS RISE TO A NATIONAL SECURITY LEVEL? WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE LOSS OF POLLINATORS THAT AFFECT SO MUCH OF OUR FOOD SUPPLY?

You would think so. Obviously, Senator Boxer is meeting tomorrow. So, certainly at high levels of the government, there is interest. And of course, we’re at war and spending a lot of money on the war, and money can be authorized, but is it appropriated? So, the whole political scene has to play out its course here in the way we handle things here in the United States.

ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC OR PESSIMISTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE OF HONEY BEES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA?

I’m pessimistic. We have a tendency to wait until a crisis happens in western civilization. We might lose control of our food supply at some point.

IF ONE-THIRD OF THE HONEY BEE POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES DISAPPEARED IN THE 2007 TO 2008 WINTER-SPRING, AND IF NEXT YEAR, THE PERCENTAGE CLIMBS TO ABOUT A 50% LOSS, HAS THERE EVER BEEN A TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY IN WHICH HALF OF THE HONEY BEE POPULATION DISAPPEARED AND WAS ABLE TO COME BACK?

Boy, not that I’m aware. We are in a precarious situation strategically for maintaining food supplies for our population. We need to have somebody at some level decide that honey bees are important. It’s like a lot of other agricultural industries in the U. S. – the Chinese have basically wiped out the American apple industry; the Brazilians have virtually wiped out the citrus juice industry; and these trends continue. Maybe this is the natural order of things.

DOESN’T IT SEEM THAT THIS WOULD BE ABSOLUTELY THE OPPOSITE OF THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS?

Yes, I would agree with you, but I’m a pragmatist and the low-cost producer gets the orders. It doesn’t make any difference where it’s produced or how it’s produced. Look at the Chinese goods that have come in over the last year and there are other scary things coming in, not only from them but other countries that don’t have quite the regulations and pesticides and chemical oversight that we do.

Genetically Modified Crops Could
Also Be Killing Honey Bees

IS THERE ANY MORE HARDER DATA LINKING THE GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS TO THE WEAKENING AND DISAPPEARANCE OF THE HONEY BEES?

Yes, that’s certainly being looked at. In fact, I read an article the other day talking about some genetically modified crops that had the BT toxin in it (genetically modified crops with built-in pesticide) and they found that with the BT toxin, there are a couple of different toxins involved, and one toxin they found was actually opening up the cell walls of insects and animals to allow this second toxin in to affect it. So, we don’t understand what we do - and places such as Monsanto.

So, we’re going down a precarious path and we don’t know everything. Unfortunately, we will make mistakes as human beings, but the repercussions as things grow and become more global and widespread is that the repercussions will be more severe and more dramatic.

SO, WHILE WE ARE PROMOTING A GM FOOD INTO THE FUTURE ON THE ONE HAND IN GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS, WE COULD BE KILLING THE VERY INSECT THAT KEEPS PLANTS ALIVE.

Yes, but there again, if the seed companies can develop plants that don’t need insect pollinators, and keep selling seed to the farmers, maybe that’s the goal.

WHAT I’M HEARING IN YOUR VOICE AND YOUR WORDS IS THAT YOU ARE FEELING AND SENSING THAT THIS IS A VERY DEPRESSING SITUATION WITH VERY LITTLE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.

Boy, is that coming through my voice? I’m sorry, but yeah, it is. I’m sure there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but I can’t tell if it is an answer, or a train coming down the track.

WHICH COMES BACK FULL CIRCLE TO THE BEEKEEPER WHO SAID TO THE BBC THIS WEEK, ‘I THINK WE’RE COMING IN FOR A BIG TRAIN WRECK.’

It’s possible. We’ll know in the future. But the take home message is: honey bees are not healthy and we, at this moment in time, have no way to make them healthier.”

On March 29, 2007, Brent Halsall, President, Ontario
Beekeeper's Assoc., Greely, Ontario, Canada, opened his hives
and found about 40% of all his bees dead - some dried up;
others fresh as if not long dead. Image © 2007 by CBC.

2008-06-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
The New York Times
James Glanz and Jad Mouawad
contributed reporting from New York
Published: June 19, 2008

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world’s dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.

While enriched by $140 per barrel oil, the oil majors are also struggling to replace their reserves as ever more of the world’s oil patch becomes off limits. Governments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil industries or seeking a larger share of the record profits for their national budgets. Russia and Kazakhstan have forced the major companies to renegotiate contracts.

The Iraqi government’s stated goal in inviting back the major companies is to increase oil production by half a million barrels per day by attracting modern technology and expertise to oil fields now desperately short of both. The revenue would be used for reconstruction, although the Iraqi government has had trouble spending the oil revenues it now has, in part because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

For the American government, increasing output in Iraq, as elsewhere, serves the foreign policy goal of increasing oil production globally to alleviate the exceptionally tight supply that is a cause of soaring prices.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry, through a spokesman, said the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.

It said the companies had been chosen because they had been advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts, and because these companies had the needed technology.

A Shell spokeswoman hinted at the kind of work the companies might be engaged in. “We can confirm that we have submitted a conceptual proposal to the Iraqi authorities to minimize current and future gas flaring in the south through gas gathering and utilization,” said the spokeswoman, Marnie Funk. “The contents of the proposal are confidential.”

While small, the deals hold great promise for the companies.

“The bigger prize everybody is waiting for is development of the giant new fields,” Leila Benali, an authority on Middle East oil at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said in a telephone interview from the firm’s Paris office. The current contracts, she said, are a “foothold” in Iraq for companies striving for these longer-term deals.

Any Western oil official who comes to Iraq would require heavy security, exposing the companies to all the same logistical nightmares that have hampered previous attempts, often undertaken at huge cost, to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

And work in the deserts and swamps that contain much of Iraq’s oil reserves would be virtually impossible unless carried out solely by Iraqi subcontractors, who would likely be threatened by insurgents for cooperating with Western companies.

Yet at today’s oil prices, there is no shortage of companies coveting a contract in Iraq. It is not only one of the few countries where oil reserves are up for grabs, but also one of the few that is viewed within the industry as having considerable potential to rapidly increase production.

David Fyfe, a Middle East analyst at the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based group that monitors oil production for the developed countries, said he believed that Iraq’s output could increase to about 3 million barrels a day from its current 2.5 million, though it would probably take longer than the six months the Oil Ministry estimated.

Mr. Fyfe’s organization estimated that repair work on existing fields could bring Iraq’s output up to roughly four million barrels per day within several years. After new fields are tapped, Iraq is expected to reach a plateau of about six million barrels per day, Mr. Fyfe said, which could suppress current world oil prices.

The contracts, the two oil company officials said, are a continuation of work the companies had been conducting here to assist the Oil Ministry under two-year-old memorandums of understanding. The companies provided free advice and training to the Iraqis. This relationship with the ministry, said company officials and an American diplomat, was a reason the contracts were not opened to competitive bidding.

A total of 46 companies, including the leading oil companies of China, India and Russia, had memorandums of understanding with the Oil Ministry, yet were not awarded contracts.

The no-bid deals are structured as service contracts. The companies will be paid for their work, rather than offered a license to the oil deposits. As such, they do not require the passage of an oil law setting out terms for competitive bidding. The legislation has been stalled by disputes among Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties over revenue sharing and other conditions.

The first oil contracts for the majors in Iraq are exceptional for the oil industry.

They include a provision that could allow the companies to reap large profits at today’s prices: the ministry and companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash.

“These are not actually service contracts,” Ms. Benali said. “They were designed to circumvent the legislative stalemate” and bring Western companies with experience managing large projects into Iraq before the passage of the oil law.

A clause in the draft contracts would allow the companies to match bids from competing companies to retain the work once it is opened to bidding, according to the Iraq country manager for a major oil company who did not consent to be cited publicly discussing the terms.

Assem Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman, said the ministry chose companies it was comfortable working with under the charitable memorandum of understanding agreements, and for their technical prowess. “Because of that, they got the priority,” he said.

In all cases but one, the same company that had provided free advice to the ministry for work on a specific field was offered the technical support contract for that field, one of the companies’ officials said.

The exception is the West Qurna field in southern Iraq, outside Basra. There, the Russian company Lukoil, which claims a Hussein-era contract for the field, had been providing free training to Iraqi engineers, but a consortium of Chevron and Total, a French company, was offered the contract. A spokesman for Lukoil declined to comment.

Charles Ries, the chief economic official in the American Embassy in Baghdad, described the no-bid contracts as a bridging mechanism to bring modern technology into the fields before the oil law was passed, and as an extension of the earlier work without charge.

To be sure, these are not the first foreign oil contracts in Iraq, and all have proved contentious.

The Kurdistan regional government, which in many respects functions as an independent entity in northern Iraq, has concluded a number of deals. Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, for example, signed a production-sharing agreement with the regional government last fall, though its legality is questioned by the central Iraqi government. The technical support agreements, however, are the first commercial work by the major oil companies in Iraq.

The impact, experts say, could be remarkable increases in Iraqi oil output.

While the current contracts are unrelated to the companies’ previous work in Iraq, in a twist of corporate history for some of the world’s largest companies, all four oil majors that had lost their concessions in Iraq are now back.

But a spokesman for Exxon said the company’s approach to Iraq was no different from its work elsewhere.

“Consistent with our longstanding, global business strategy, ExxonMobil would pursue business opportunities as they arise in Iraq, just as we would in other countries in which we are permitted to operate,” the spokesman, Len D’Eramo, said in an e-mailed statement.

But the company is clearly aware of the history. In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.”

2008-06-13T08:22:00.001-07:00

News Outlets Face Increasing Scrutiny in Campaign

By SAM SCHECHNER and REBECCA DANA
Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2008; Page A5

For the second time this week, Fox News Channel was driven to respond to criticism over on-air statements about Barack Obama, in this case for screen text that described the Democratic presidential candidate's wife as "Obama's baby mama." The term is often applied pejoratively to unwed mothers.

Television news organizations, facing unprecedented scrutiny, have often expressed contrition for poorly chosen words during this election season.

In a campaign that includes the first viable African-American presidential candidate, the lines of appropriate speech have become fuzzy. News organizations are under pressure from a broad network of self-appointed watchdogs, including organized groups like Media Matters and individuals. These watchdogs are likely to remain vigilant about gaffes, misstatements and potentially biased language through the November vote. Just this week, Gina McCauley, a well-known blogger in Austin, Texas, started michelleobamawatch.com to track the portrayal of Mrs. Obama in the news media.

In this campaign cycle, television news organizations have issued at least 10 apologies in total over on-air expressions. On Tuesday, a Fox News anchor, E.D. Hill, said she regretted suggesting that a celebratory hand gesture between Barack and Michelle Obama might be a "terrorist fist jab." On Monday, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell apologized for calling southwest Virginia "redneck country."

Fox News is owned by News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Employees at Time Warner Inc.'s CNN and General Electric Co.'s MSNBC, and a contributor to Fox News have all confused "Obama" and "Osama" in the last year in one form or another, and apologized for the mistake.

The most-recent dust-up began Wednesday afternoon during a segment on Fox News by commentator Michelle Malkin about conservative attacks on Michelle Obama. At the bottom of the screen, a headline said, "Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama's Baby Mama!"

One Fox News viewer saw the phrase on screen, and emailed a tip to the Web magazine Salon, according to Alex Koppelman, who runs a political blog for the magazine. Mr. Koppelman says he verified the viewer's claim using a Web site called Redlasso, which offers an archive of television news clips, and posted an item online.

In a statement Thursday, Fox News's senior vice president of programming, Bill Shine, said, "A producer on the program exercised poor judgment" in choosing the screen text. The Obama campaign declined to comment.

"I was a little surprised about how quickly it got picked up and turned into a really big thing," Mr. Koppelman said Thursday. "If it's not already happening more than it has in previous cycles, I'm sure it will because of technology."

The phrase baby mama or baby mother is Caribbean in origin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as "the mother of a man's child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner." It has gained wider currency in recent years through use in hip-hop lyrics and celebrity magazines. A movie called "Baby Mama," starring Tina Fey, has been in theaters since April. The movie is about a single executive who hires another woman to carry her baby.

Ms. Malkin, who is noted for trenchant criticism, said on her Web site that she had nothing to do with the on-screen headline. She pointed out that Mrs. Obama herself used the phrase "my baby's daddy" to refer to her husband in 2004. But that phrase doesn't imply unwed status, many blog commentators argued.

Among friends, "baby mama" could be construed as friendly or a joke, according to Bakari Kitwana, an artist in residence at the University of Chicago who has written about the phrase in his book "The Hip Hop Generation." But he says its use to describe the wife of a presidential candidate is disrespectful.

"Michelle Obama is not Fox News's homegirl," Mr. Kitwana said. "You're taking something out of its culture and political context."

The Obama campaign, both naturally and by design, has ushered some aspects of African-American culture into the mainstream. On one occasion, Mr. Obama brushed off his shoulder in a gesture signifying dismissal of criticism, silently reminding his audience of a song called "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" by the hip-hop artist Jay-Z. The episode generated big attention in news media.

"This campaign has shown that people are excited to use black language for the first time in presidential politics," says Sarah E. Lewis, a faculty member at Yale University School of Art, and doctoral candidate focusing on representations of African-American culture. "But as they do it, often they're putting their feet in their mouths because they don't fully understand the culture."

Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Rebecca Dana at rebecca.dana@wsj.com

2008-06-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

Supreme Court Rules Guantanamo Detainees Have Constitutional Right To Challenge Detention

MARK SHERMAN | June 12, 2008 10:26 AM EST | AP

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

The justices handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court's liberal justices in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The administration opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold enemy combatants, people suspected of ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The Guantanamo prison has been harshly criticized at home and abroad for the detentions themselves and the aggressive interrogations that were conducted there.

The court said not only that the detainees have rights under the Constitution, but that the system the administration has put in place to classify them as enemy combatants and review those decisions is inadequate.

The administration had argued first that the detainees have no rights. But it also contended that the classification and review process was a sufficient substitute for the civilian court hearings that the detainees seek.

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants."

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined Kennedy to form the majority.

The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees.

In addition to those held without charges, the U.S. has said it plans to try as many as 80 of the detainees in war crimes tribunals, which have not been held since World War II.

A military judge has postponed the first scheduled trial pending the outcome of this case. The trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's onetime driver, had been scheduled to start June 2.

Five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks appeared in a Guantanamo courtroom last week for a hearing before their war crimes trial, which prosecutors hope will start Sept. 15.

2008-06-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

Kucinich Vows to Keep Up Impeachment Fight
By Ben Pershing | June 11, 2008; 3:56 PM ET Branch vs. Branch
Washington Post

The House voted today by a comfortable margin to refer 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush to the Judiciary Committee, as the measure's chief sponsor vowed to bring the issue up again if the panel does not agree to hold hearings.

On a 251-166 vote, the chamber elected to refer Rep. Dennis Kucinich's (D-Ohio) resolution to the Judiciary panel. All 227 Democrats present voted in favor of the referral, along with 24 Republicans -- a big boost from the four GOP lawmakers who voted for referral of charges against Vice President Cheney back in November.

Democratic leaders have made clear that they want no further action on impeachment this year, but Kucinich said after the vote that doing nothing was not an option.

"Leadership wants to bury it, but this is one resolution that will be coming back from the dead," Kucinich told Capitol Briefing. "Thirty days from now, if there is no action, I will be bringing the resolution up again, and I won't be the only one reading it."

Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) has not commented on whether he plans to hold hearings, and Kucinich said he would meet with Conyers this week to present him with documentation for his charges against Bush. But if there is no further action, Kucinich said, "We'll come back and many of us will be reading this [on the House floor], and we'll come back with 60 articles, not 35."

Some Democrats agree with Kucinich that there should be hearings, but don't necessarily believe the House should actually impeach Bush.

"In my district, people have asked me many times why we haven't impeached President Bush, because they felt some of the things that he has done far outweighs what Clinton was impeached for," said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.).

Cummings said he'd like to see Judiciary hold impeachment hearings, because "there are a lot of questions out there and I think a lot of those questions need to be answered before [Bush] leaves office." But Cummings doesn't think the House should take the process all the way to the end, as it did with Clinton.

"The time we spend impeaching the president would be better spent doing productive things for the country," he said.

On the GOP side, some of the 166 lawmakers who voted against referral today did so because they wanted to simply table the resolution, while others actually wanted to have an immediate, full floor debate so they could try to paint Democrats as partisan extremists.

"In my personal opinion, we should have had a debate," said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), who called the entire impeachment movement "just political posturing."

2008-06-12T10:47:00.000-07:00

House Sends Impeachment to John Conyers
June 11, 2008
Democrats.com

By a bipartisan vote of 251-166, the full House of Representatives sent Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment to the Judiciary Committee.

That means Chairman John Conyers now has the power to decide whether to hold impeachment hearings - or not.

Incredibly, 24 Republicans voted with 227 Democrats; the 166 no votes came exclusively from Republicans.

So what will Conyers do? After the Downing Street Memo was published on May 1, 2005, Democrats.com worked closely with Conyers to hold the famous basement hearings featuring Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern, and John Bonifaz. In August 2006, Conyers published all of the evidence of Bush's crimes in The Constitution in Crisis. Many of us believed he would begin impeachment proceedings if Democrats won the House, which they did that November.

But in the spring of 2006, Nancy Pelosi declared impeachment "off the table." And when Democrats took control and Conyers was sworn in as Judiciary Chairman, he fell firmly into line behind the Speaker. (Conyers insists Pelosi did not threaten to deny him the Chairmanship.)

Since 2005, Conyers has received millions of impeachment petitions. Hundreds if not thousands of activists have spoken to him personally. But he remains adamantly opposed to hearings, for one simple reason: he fears it will hurt the Democratic candidate for President (now Barack Obama) in November.

Of course there isn't one scintilla of evidence to support Conyers' fear. It is based entirely on the 1998 election, when Newt Gingrich turned the Starr Report (published online on September 9) into a campaign issue but lost a small number of seats by overplaying the issue in TV ads. Despite those small losses, Republicans held the majority and voted to impeach Clinton six weeks after the election, on December 19. And two years later, despite a massively unpopular impeachment, Republican George Bush got close enough to Al Gore to steal the election. And one reason it was close was that Democrats believed impeachment made Clinton too "toxic" to campaign even in Arkansas, which would have put Gore over the top in the Electoral College even without Florida.

And there is no comparison between impeaching Clinton for consensual sex and impeaching Bush for 35 High Crimes, including a disastrous war of aggression based on lies. And the difference is reflected in polls - only 26% of Americans wanted to impeach Clinton in 1998, while 43% of Americans wanted to impeach Bush in our last poll on July 8, 2007. (The Corporate Media adamantly refuses to ask about impeachment in their own polls. You can email all the pollsters here.)

So the election fear that has paralyzed Conyers and the Democrats isn't just baseless, it's idiotic. Bush's polls are now lower than Richard Nixon's ever were. The American people are sick of Bush and can't wait to get rid of him.

Here at Democrats.com, we will continue to do everything we can to persuade Conyers and every other House Democrat to support impeachment. To be effective, we need your support - emails, calls, and especially local organizing.

Now that Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment are before the House Judiciary Committee, the battle is just beginning. And Kucinich feels exactly the same way:

"Leadership wants to bury it, but this is one resolution that will be coming back from the dead," Kucinich told Capitol Briefing. "Thirty days from now, if there is no action, I will be bringing the resolution up again, and I won't be the only one reading it."

Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) has not commented on whether he plans to hold hearings, and Kucinich said he would meet with Conyers this week to present him with documentation for his charges against Bush. But if there is no further action, Kucinich said, "We'll come back and many of us will be reading this [on the House floor], and we'll come back with 60 articles, not 35."

2008-06-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch Says Obama Will Win

Carlsbad, CA -- Tonight at the "All Things Digital" conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch -- Chairman of News Corp, new WSJ owner, and longtime torchbearer for conservative politics -- said this about Barack Obama: "He is a rock star. It's fantastic" "I love what he is saying about education." "I don't think he will win Florida.....but he will win in Ohio and the election". "I am anxious to meet him." "I want to see if he will walk the walk."

About the presumptive Republican nominee, Murdoch said, "McCain is a friend of mine. He's a patriot. But he's unpredicatble. Doesn't seem to know much about the economy. He has been in Congress a long time, and you have to make a lot of compromises. So what's he really stand for?... I think he has a lot of problems."

Here is the video of Murdoch's appearance at the All Things Digital Conference:

Posted May 29, 2008