Hagel/Murtha 2008

Chuck Hagel said today about Israel that, "The Madness must stop."

Thank you, Senator Hagel.

Frank Rich 7/30/06

The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq
By FRANK RICH

AS America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle's gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war - now branded as Crisis in the Middle East - but you won't catch anyone saying it's Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks' evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a "shame on you" e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift - a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC's "World News." The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki's short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war's progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike "Law & Order" episodes, don't hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn't happenstance. It's a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. "It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror," said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on July 18. "I mean, it's summertime." Americans don't like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don't know what we - or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops - are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

Certainly there has been no shortage of retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the administration's initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam's mushroom clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We've been told that the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel, while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.

But it's the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq - as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people - that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war's architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.

The Bush administration constantly congratulates itself for liberating Iraq from Saddam's genocidal regime. But regime change was never billed as a primary motivation for the war: the White House instead appealed to American fears and narcissism - we had to be saved from Saddam's W.M.D. From "Shock and Awe" on, the fate of Iraqis was an afterthought. They would greet our troops with flowers and go about their business.

Donald Rumsfeld boasted that "the care" and "the humanity" that went into our precision assaults on military targets would minimize any civilian deaths. Such casualties were merely "collateral damage," unworthy of quantification. "We don't do body counts," said Gen. Tommy Franks. President Bush at last started counting those Iraqi bodies publicly - with an estimate of 30,000 - some seven months ago. (More recently, The Los Angeles Times put the figure at, conservatively, 50,000.) By then, Americans had tuned out.

The contempt our government showed for Iraqis was not just to be found in our cavalier stance toward their casualties, or in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There was a cultural condescension toward the Iraqi people from the get-go as well, as if they were schoolchildren in a compassionate-conservatism campaign ad. This attitude was epitomized by Mr. Rumsfeld's "stuff happens" response to the looting of Baghdad at the dawn of the American occupation. In "Fiasco," his stunning new book about the American failure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, captures the meaning of that pivotal moment perfectly: "The message sent to Iraqis was far more troubling than Americans understood. It was that the U.S. government didn't care - or, even more troubling for the future security of Iraq, that it did care but was incapable of acting effectively."

As it turned out, it was the worst of both worlds: we didn't care, and we were incapable of acting effectively. Nowhere is this seen more explicitly than in the subsequent American failure to follow through on our promise to reconstruct the Iraqi infrastructure we helped to smash. "There's some little part of my brain that simply doesn't understand how the most powerful country on earth just can't get electricity back in Baghdad," said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile and prominent proponent of the war, in a recent Washington Post interview.

The simple answer is that the war planners didn't care enough to provide the number of troops needed to secure the country so that reconstruction could proceed. The coalition authority isolated in its Green Zone bubble didn't care enough to police the cronyism and corruption that squandered billions of dollars on abandoned projects. The latest monument to this humanitarian disaster was reported by James Glanz of The New York Times on Friday: a high-tech children's hospital planned for Basra, repeatedly publicized by Laura Bush and Condi Rice, is now in serious jeopardy because of cost overruns and delays.

This history can't be undone; there's neither the American money nor the manpower to fulfill the mission left unaccomplished. The Iraqi people, whose collateral damage was so successfully hidden for so long by the Rumsfeld war plan, remain a sentimental abstraction to most Americans. Whether they are seen in agony after another Baghdad bombing or waving their inked fingers after an election or being used as props to frame Mrs. Bush during the State of the Union address, they have little more specificity than movie extras. Chalabi, Allawi, Jaafari, Maliki come and go, all graced with the same indistinguishable praise from the American president, all blurring into an endless loop of instability and crisis. We feel badly ... and change the channel.

Given that the violence in Iraq has only increased in the weeks since the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist portrayed by the White House as the fount of Iraqi troubles, any Americans still paying attention to the war must now confront the reality that the administration is desperately trying to hide. "The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists," President Bush said in December when branding Zarqawi Public Enemy No. 1. But Iraq's exploding sectarian warfare cannot be pinned on Al Qaeda or Baathist dead-enders.

The most dangerous figure in Iraq, the home-grown radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is an acolyte of neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam but an ally of Iran who has sworn solidarity to both Hezbollah and Hamas. He commands more than 30 seats in Mr. Maliki's governing coalition in Parliament and 5 cabinet positions. He is also linked to death squads that have slaughtered Iraqis and Americans with impunity since the April 2004 uprising that killed, among others, Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey. Since then, Mr. Sadr's power has only grown, enabled by Iraqi "democracy."

That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad's civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?

Mucho Trabajo para no Mucho Dinero

Our friends in the House of Representatives voted to increase the minimum wage. Jeepers, why the rush? It's only been ten years since the last increase!

Now Republicans can go back to their districts and say they are working for the working class.

Whoops - just one tiny, little caveat. Included in the bill is a provision that would raise the estate tax to $5 million. For small business owners. See, here's how they justify it, since small business owners are going to have to pay more in wages they want to "offset" the cost by raising the estate tax. How many small business owners do you know that have a $5 million estate? Obviously, I'm moving in the wrong circles because I don't know anyone with a $5 million estate. Perhaps it's time to find new friends.

Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said Democrats were upset with the legislation because Republicans had found a clever way to link the two. “You have seen us outfox you on this issue tonight,” Mr. Wamp told Democrats in the floor debate.

That Zach, what a wily wabbit. It's not about helping the working poor in this country, it's about screwing Democrats and aiding the super rich while looking like you're helping the working poor.

So conservatives finally get that Bush is a moron. Liberals knew this all along.

Okay I am fed up with all the blather about conservatives finally turning on Bush. Another book out by a Reagan man - this one detailing the fact that Bush is a free spending, reckless, childish, war mongering goof ball and that Delay was - get this - CORRUPT!!! Imagine. Those conservatives sure are smart.
Here's the truth - everyone to the Left of Ann Coulter knew Bush and his crew were mean, foolish buffoons A LONG TIME AGO - and many of us said so. Maybe, just maybe, the liberals in this country should be taken seriously. Since we are always right.
I wonder how many more conservatives will turn on W and garner headlines saying things that liberals said in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006?

Coultergiest

Last night on Hardball Ms. Coulter was featured.

Here's my question. If she believes that the New York Times building should be destroyed and that they are treasonous, why then does she proudly exclaim that her books are New York Times Best Sellers?

I don't think we need to explore why she dresses like a slut and sells sex and then doesn't want any of us to have sex. She obviously is a virgin as a good Catholic girl rocking her cross. She might be a little less strident if she were getting some.

Unexplained mysteries abound.

Kiss Off Kate

Oh, poor Katherine Harris. Things just are not going well for the drag queen.

Katherine Harris' former communications director has joined the campaign of one of her Republican opponents for the U.S. Senate, LeRoy Collins Jr.

Chris Ingram, who was one of five senior staffers to leave Harris' campaign two weeks ago, is now Collins' campaign manager, according to a news release from the Collins camp.

I haven't seen an ad for Ms. Harris recently. Perhaps because she had to take some of the money she donated to herself to use on her home?

Bob Herbert 7/27/06

Failure Upon Failure
By BOB HERBERT

Imagine a surgeon who is completely clueless, who has no idea what he or she is doing.

Imagine a pilot who is equally incompetent.

Now imagine a president.

The Middle East is in flames. Iraq has become a charnel house, a crucible of horror with no end to the agony in sight. Lebanon is in danger of going down for the count. And the crazies in Iran, empowered by the actions of their enemies, are salivating like vultures. They can't wait to feast on the remains of U.S. policies and tactics spawned by a sophomoric neoconservative fantasy - that democracy imposed at gunpoint in Iraq would spread peace and freedom, like the flowers of spring, throughout the Middle East.

If a Democratic president had pursued exactly the same policies, and achieved exactly the same tragic results as George W. Bush, that president would have been the target of a ferocious drive for impeachment by the G.O.P.

Mr. Bush spent a fair amount of time this week with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. There was plenty to talk about, nearly all of it hideous. Over the past couple of months Iraqi civilians have been getting blown away at the stunning rate of four or five an hour. Even Karl Rove had a tough time drawing a smiley face on that picture.

"Obviously the violence in Baghdad is still terrible," said Mr. Bush, "and therefore there needs to be more troops."

One did not get the sense, listening to this assessment from the commander in chief, that things would soon be well in hand. There was, instead, a disturbing sense of deja vu. A sense of the president at a complete loss, not really knowing what to do. I recalled the image of Mr. Bush sitting in a Sarasota, Fla., classroom after being informed of the Sept. 11 attacks. Instead of reacting instantly, commandingly, he just sat there for long wasted moments, with a bewildered look on his face, holding a second-grade story called "The Pet Goat."

And then there was the famous picture of Mr. Bush, on his way back from a monthlong vacation, looking out the window of Air Force One as it flew low over the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. "It's devastating," Mr. Bush was quoted as saying. "It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

I'll tell you what's devastating. The monumental and mind-numbing toll of Mr. Bush's war in Iraq, which is being documented in a series of important books, the latest being Thomas Ricks's "Fiasco." Mr. Ricks gives us more disturbing details about the administration's "flawed plan for war" and "worse approach to occupation."

Near the end of his book, he writes:

"In January 2005, the C.I.A.'s internal think tank, the National Intelligence Council, concluded that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for a new generation of jihadist terrorists. The country had become 'a magnet for international terrorist activity,' said the council's chairman, Robert Hutchings."

Saddled with one failure after another, the administration seems paralyzed, completely unable to shape the big issues facing the U.S. and the world today. Condoleezza Rice is in charge of the diplomatic effort regarding Lebanon. She's been about as effective at that as the president was in his response to Katrina.

But Dr. Rice is still quick with the scary imagery. Her comment, "I have no doubt there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and sovereign Lebanon in its crib," recalls her famous, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

It might help if she spent less time giving us provocative metaphors and more time on the very difficult nuts and bolts of trying to maintain or bring about peace.

It may be that a hamstrung Bush administration is a better bet than the same crew being free to act as it pleases. Imagine how much better off we'd have been if Congress had found the wisdom and the courage to prevent the president from invading Iraq.

In two years and a few months Americans will vote again for president. I hope the long list of tragic failures by Bush & Co. prompts people to take that election more seriously than some in the past. If you were about to be lifted onto an operating table, you'd be more interested in the competence of the surgeon than in his or her personality.

Mr. Bush's record reminds us that similarly careful consideration should be given to those who would be president.

Fly/No fly zones

It is now a sin to fly. Which is fine with me since I hate flying. On a related note levitation may save Israel.
Everything is so confusing.
now
uh
days.

Maureen Dowd 7/26/06

The Immutable President
By MAUREEN DOWD


It's too bad President Bush spurns evolution - both in his view of the universe and his view of himself.

Scientists see more and more evidence that human evolution not only exists but is ongoing, as people adapt to changing circumstances with shifts in everything from skin color to the protein structure of sperm.

But with W., it's more a matter of survival of the stubbornist.

If you turn on TV, you see missiles flying, bodies lying, nuclear missiles unleashed and a slaughterhouse in Iraq. But don't despair, because yesterday President Bush announced the establishment of "a joint committee to achieve Iraqi self-reliance." He called it a "new partnership," as if it were some small business.

Isn't it a little late, in July 2006, to be launching a new partnership for such an old mess? Isn't it a little late to realize that Baghdad, a city where 300 garbage collectors have been killed in the last six months, according to press reports, has spun out of control?

In a press conference at the White House with his rogue puppet, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Mr. Bush explained that "our strategy is to remain on the offense, including in Baghdad." Then why, after three and a half years, does our offense look so much like a defense?

The president sounded like a Jon Stewart imitation of himself when he assured reporters that Mr. Maliki had "a comprehensive plan" to pacify Iraq. "That's what leaders do," W. lectured, in a familiar refrain. "They see problems, they address problems, and they lay out a plan to solve the problems."

If only the plan were a little less robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul, and a little more road-to-Damascus epiphany. Taking troops out of Anbar Province, where the insurgency is thriving, to quell violence in Baghdad doesn't inspire confidence that the plan is truly "comprehensive."

And despite W.'s praise of Mr. Maliki's leadership, the plan to start from scratch, in essence, stabilizing neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad is, as The Times's Michael Gordon writes, "an implicit acknowledgment of what every Iraqi in Baghdad already knows": the prime minister's "original Baghdad security plan has failed. In the past two weeks, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than have died in Lebanon and Israel."

Mr. Bush also sent Condi Rice to lay out a plan to the Arabs and Europeans about the destruction and refugee flight in Lebanon, but the plan turns out to be a plan to do nothing until Israel has more time to kick the Hezb out of Hezbollah.

W. says he supports more diplomacy, but it's the diplomacy of sanctimony. He now grudgingly notes that "the violence in Baghdad is still terrible," but doesn't seem to grasp the tragic enormity of an occupation that is sliding into civil war and constricting his leverage to deal with all the other crises crackling around the world. The U.N. reported last week that in May and June no less than 5,818 Iraqi civilians were killed.

Although he talked about whether America could be "facile" and "nimble" enough to change with the circumstances in the Middle East, in fundamental ways, he has not changed his attitude at all.

Newsweek's Richard Wolffe says he conducted four "freewheeling" interviews with the president last week, and concluded: "Bush thinks the new war vindicates his early vision of the region's struggle: of good versus evil, civilization versus terrorism, freedom versus Islamic fascism. He still believes that when it comes to war and terror, leaders need to decide whose side they are on."

The president sees Lebanon as a test of macho mettle rather than the latest chapter in a fratricidal free-for-all that"s been going on for centuries. "I view this as the forces of instability probing weakness," he said. "I think they're testing resolve."

The more things get complicated, the more W. feels vindicated in his own simplified vision. The more people try to tell him that it's not easy, that this is a region of shifting alliances and interests, the less he seems inclined to develop an adroit policy to win people over to our side instead of trying to annihilate them.

Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change. But W. prides himself on his changelessness and regards his immutability as the surest sign of his virtue. Facing a map on fire, he sees any inkling of change as the slippery slope to failure.

That's what's so frustrating about watching him deal - or not deal - with Iraq and Lebanon. There's almost nothing to watch.

It's not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It's like watching dry paint.

Shock and Awe

My pal John told me I am no longer able to say that I can't believe ANYTHING this administration does.

So, in complete belief our fine government is seizing drugs coming from Canada as part of border enforcement. Dangerous drugs like Fozomax and Actonel for osteoporosis. Thank God they're on top of this. Even better is that they (border enforcement) don't bother to let the recipient know that they won't be receiving the drugs they paid for and I'm guessing, need.

Lou Dobbs had a poll tonight on why would our government do this.

Why do you believe the government is clamping down on prescription drug imports from Canada?

Dedication to law enforcement 0% 7 votes

Pressure from the drug lobby 99% 2958 votes

Concern of health risks 1% 21 votes
Total: 2986 votes

He also had on someone from the ABA to talk about Mr. Bush's signing statements and how they are completely illegal and could create a constitutional crisis.

If it's something so crazy that you can't believe it, believe that Mr. Bush has done it or will do it. How I wish he would just leave the presidency and go and train for the Tour de France.

Miami Rice

OK, so is this the latest in dipolomatic fashion? Sunglasses casually perched on your head during a meeting with heads of state?

Can the Bush administration do anything right?

What happened to our war?

Am I the only one who has noticed that the media is covering the Israeli war much more completely then the one America is currently fighting? Or did the Iraq thing work out while I was at the movies?

Why do I know more about what Israel army commanders feel about their families than I do about any American boy who died in Iraq this year? Why do I know exactly what apartment block was hit in Haifa but have next to no knowledge about the Taliban attack in Afghanistan on Sunday?

Are there still Americans giving their lives in Bush's phony war?

What is wrong with our media?

Frank Rich 7/23/06

The Passion of the Embryos
By FRANK RICH
HOW time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.

Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he's consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action - on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president's base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq's marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.

The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush's Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran's ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America's own religious wars. The president's politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right's former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush's presidency. If we can't beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we're at least starting to rout them here.

That the administration's stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party's far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo's condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program's canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he's read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush's side.

The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell "compromise" could make "more than 60" cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board's audit committee.

This time around, with the administration's credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn't fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren't required because there was "far more promise from adult stem cells," The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn't produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells "cruelly deceive patients."

No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush's veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been "adopted." As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.

If you believe, as Mr. Bush says he does, that either discarding or conducting research with I.V.F. embryos is murder, then fertility clinic doctors, like stem-cell researchers, belong on death row. But the president, so proud of drawing a firm "moral" line, will no sooner crack down on I.V.F. than he did on Kim Jong Il: The second-term Bush has been downsized to a paper tiger. His party's base won't be so shy. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who led the Senate anti-stem-cell offensive and sees himself as the religious right's presidential candidate, has praised the idea of limiting the number of eggs fertilized in vitro to "one or two at a time." A Kentucky state legislator offered a preview of coming attractions, writing a bill making the fertilization of multiple eggs in I.V.F. treatments a felony.

Tacticians in both political parties have long theorized that if a conservative Supreme Court actually struck down Roe v. Wade, it would set Republicans back at the polls for years. Mr. Bush's canonization of clumps of frozen cells over potential cancer cures may jump-start that backlash. We'll see this fall. Already one Republican senatorial candidate, Michael Steele of Maryland, has stepped in Mr. Bush's moral morass by egregiously comparing stem-cell research to Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.

Mr. Reed's primary defeat is as much a blow to religious-right political clout as the White House embrace of stem-cell fanaticism. The man who revolutionized the face of theocratic politics in the 1990's with a telegenic choirboy's star power has now changed his movement's face again, this time to mud.

The humiliating Reed defeat - by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state - is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it's what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff's clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry - older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn't some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right's most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed's smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing "the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century."

Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn't be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed's unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president's men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.

It's possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right's Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he's surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed "inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours" by the Anti-Defamation League. As Ralph Reed used to say: amen.

Model for Democracy in the Middle East

First, let's all revisit our first success in Afghanistan.

The most senior British military commander in Afghanistan today described the situation in the country as "close to anarchy" with feuding foreign agencies and unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption.

The stark warning came from Lieutenant General David Richards, head of Nato's international security force in Afghanistan, who warned that western forces there were short of equipment and were "running out of time" if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people.

If we look back to the old Soviet empire, they were not brought down by Ronald Reagan. They were brought down by Afghanistan. We helped, we funded the Mujahadin, part of which became Al Qaida and the Taliban. Once the Soviets left with their collective tails between their legs did we stay to re build the country? No. And what happened? The same thing that is happening now.

Let's move over to "Mission Accomplished". If Mr. Bush's mission was to destabilize Iraq completely that he has succeeded!

Two American soldiers were killed Saturday in Baghdad, seven Shiite construction workers were gunned down and five Sunni civilians were blown up, deepening the capital's security crisis. Shiite politicians called on the prime minister to cancel his visit to Washington to protest Israel's attacks in Lebanon.

With violence rising, the United States is moving to bolster American troop strength in the Baghdad area, putting on hold plans to draw down on the 127,000-member U.S. military mission in Iraq.

The Iraqi's are standing up. The problem is they're standing up against us and each other therefore we cannot stand down.

Finally, let's go to Israel and Lebanon. Mr. Bush is playing the role of Peter Gallagher in While You Were Sleeping and not doing much of anything because apparently this uprising is good for the democratic process in the Middle East.

I don't know how killing civilians, who unlike us, have long memories, is good for any process. Oh, wait, I understand. They're not embryos! It's ok for them to die senselessly.

Where does this all end? How much more damage can Mr. Bush do in the next two years?

What A "W"eek

The Israeli army is poised for a ground invasion. That can't be good. So after nine days of fighting Ms. Condi has decided to enter the fray and do some diplomacy since that's her job. Only a few hundred Lebanese dead and under a hundred Israelis. Super.

I think we can officially call Iraq a Civil War. Over 100 Iraqis are killed every day. Iraqis are talking about breaking up the country. Is Bush their Yoko?

Bush blocked the Justice Department from looking into the domestic spying program. That should have gotten more attention. That's big.

Bush issued his very first veto. How proud Barbara I must be. Let's just hope that no one in their family gets a disease that could benefit from stem cell research.

Speaking of Babs, did she not teach him any manners? I don't give a shit about him saying shit, however to watch your President eat like a farmhand who has never eaten in doors is somewhat dismaying. And Yo Blair? Was he trying to set up a pick up basketball game after dinner? Even on the road you gotta keep in shape.

Oil prices took a bit of a dive this week but recovered today. Even with the dip the price per barrel never went under $70.

My favorite line by Stephen Colbert this week was that Al Gore's movie was making millions but not because people believe in global warming. No, they just go to the movies to escape the record heat

Quite a week.

Fetus Farming

Ok, I try not to be judgmental, well, most of the time anyway. I can understand someone wanting to be a mother. I can even understand going to great lengths and expense like IVF to have your own. But if you have to be pregnant to be a mother and the fetus is not even yours what is wrong with that picture? Why not just adopt? That child is not "yours" either.

President Bush wants to protect these embryos. He is all about protecting the unborn. Meanwhile, civilian deaths are up to 100 per day in Iraq. Over 2,500 of our troops have died in Iraq. What is President Bush doing to end the deaths in Lebanon and Israel? He wants to wait until Israel is done destroying Hezbollah. I'm not defending Hezbollah but what about the civilians that are in the way?

Why are unborn children worth protecting but children in Iraq are not? Why are embryos that would otherwise be discarded worth more than your grandmother getting treatment for Parkinson's Disease?

Here's a win win. Let the people who want to adopt an embryo adopt an Iraqi child who's parents have been killed because of the civil war. Then use the embryo to research how to help one of our soldiers who has been paralyzed fighting in Iraq.

That, my friends, is the circle of life.

It's all about oil my friends

LaGuardia Airport is having a power outage right at this moment. Con-Ed in NYC had it's biggest day ever yesterday. Global Warming obviously increases the demand for energy because it's hot out there. Look for more power outages across our fine country.

Meanwhile, inflation went up today. China's GDP grew, are you ready, 11.3%. You think they're going to demand more oil? I'm thinking yes. Oil is back up over $76 per barrel.

So, Global Warming coupled with increased demands for oil lead to higher and higher prices. Tensions (don't you love that euphemism?) in the Middle East increase prices. At what point do we change our driving habits? $4.00 per gallon? $5.00?

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

Paul Krugman Breaks it Down.

March of Folly
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Since those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it - and since the cast of characters making pronouncements on the crisis in the Middle East is very much the same as it was three or four years ago - it seems like a good idea to travel down memory lane. Here's what they said and when they said it:

"The greatest thing to come out of [invading Iraq] for the world economy ... would be $20 a barrel for oil." Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), February 2003

"Oil Touches Record $78 on Mideast Conflict." Headline on www.foxnews.com, July 14, 2006

"The administration's top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion," saying that "earlier estimates of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush's former chief economic adviser, were too high." The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2002

"According to C.B.O.'s estimates, from the time U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, $290 billion has been allocated for activities in Iraq. ... Additional costs over the 2007-2016 period would total an estimated $202 billion under the first [optimistic] scenario, and $406 billion under the second one." Congressional Budget Office, July 13, 2006

"Peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There's been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia." Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and now president of the World Bank, Feb. 27, 2003

"West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of 'ethnic cleansing.' Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighborhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets." The Times of London, July 14, 2006

"Earlier this week, I traveled to Baghdad to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq." President Bush, June 17, 2006

"People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse. ... These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things." Ayad Allawi, Mr. Bush's choice as Iraq's first post-Saddam prime minister, November 2005

"Iraq's new government has another able leader in Speaker Mashhadani. ... He rejects the use of violence for political ends. And by agreeing to serve in a prominent role in this new unity government, he's demonstrating leadership and courage." President Bush, May 22, 2006

"Some people say 'we saw you beheading, kidnappings and killing. In the end we even started kidnapping women who are our honor.' These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew." Mahmoud Mashhadani, speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, July 13, 2006

"My fellow citizens, not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq." President Bush, Dec. 18, 2005

"I think I would answer that by telling you I don't think we're losing." Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, when asked whether we're winning in Iraq, July 14, 2006

"Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits for the region. ...Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced." Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002

"Bush - The world is coming unglued before his eyes. His naive dreams are a Wilsonian disaster." Newsweek Conventional Wisdom Watch, July 24, 2006 edition

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril." Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, Dec. 6, 2005

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now." Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, on the campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, April 28, 1999

Sunday drivers. 2 links about oil and our "way of life".

Oil depletion means the End of Suburbia. Trailer for that film here.
"America took all of its post war wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future."

And from today's LA Times:
Stopping for gas on a recent evening commute, Joseph Godino paused to make a call before feeding his credit card into the pump's built-in reader.He listened as a recorded voice delivered welcome news: His card still had $88 of credit available. "I had to phone up to find out if I had enough credit on there to fill up," said Godino, 58, whose workday round-trip commute is a whopping 200 miles.

Unsustainable.

The drone from Iran

Are ya spooked yet? If not - you should be. Yesterday's "drone" became the Iranian Revolutionary Guard earlier today. Will Israel be doing the American neo-cons Iranian dirty work? Does anyone remember Dick Cheney saying that maybe Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. needed to?

Hmmm. Gives one pause.

Power to the People

Mr. Bush has said repeatedly he doesn't pay attention to the polls.

But I can't help but wonder why is he appearing to be so conciliatory? Why is he giving prisoners of the "War on Terror" legal rights? Why is he willing to let the FISA court determine if the NSA domestic spying program is constitutional? Has he stacked the court? Or is it that the polls are pointing to a Democratic 2008 and unlimited presidential powers are only good for Republicans.

You know that Bush & Cheney wouldn't want Hillary or Al to have the same unrestricted authority that they now enjoy. That would freak them out.

I could be way off base here I'll admit. But I've seen Mr. Bush at press conferences. He gets that smirk working when someone asks him a question that he doesn't like. No one should be able to question him! He's the King, whoops, I mean President!

Silly Rabbit, laws are for Democrats.

It's Getting Hot in Here

If you click your heels together and keep repeating, "There's no Global Warming, there's no Global Warming" it will make it so.

Except that the first six months of this year are the hottest on record.

The average temperatures of the first half of 2006 were the highest ever recorded for the continental United States, scientists announced today.

Temperatures for January through June were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average.

Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri experienced record warmth for the period, while no state experienced cooler-than-average temperatures, reported scientists from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

It's not just heating up in the Middle East.

But perhaps market forces will help us stop or at least slow down global warming. Oil hit a new record yesterday. Will $5 gas be the tipping point for killing Hummers?

Republicans hate real Americans.

Read the Krugman piece below that Lynne shoved over the firewall. And read this article about President whatshisname's impending veto of a stem cell funding bill. These 2 articles are perfect examples of how the GOP hates and disregards the concerns of real Americans. The GOP elite must be shown the door in November. This can be done even with the pro-GOP media bias.

Paul Krugman 7/14/06

Left Behind Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I'd like to say that there's a real dialogue taking place about the state of the U.S. economy, but the discussion leaves a lot to be desired. In general, the conversation sounds like this:

Bush supporter: "Why doesn't President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias."

Informed economist: "But it's not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well."

Bush supporter: "Why doesn't President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias."

To a large extent, this dialogue of the deaf reflects Upton Sinclair's principle: it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But there's also an element of genuine incredulity. Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income in the hands of the few, find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth.

Yet newly available data show that that's exactly what happened in 2004.

Why talk about 2004, rather than more recent experience? Unfortunately, data on the distribution of income arrive with a substantial lag; the full story of what happened in 2004 has only just become available, and we won't be able to tell the full story of what's happening right now until the last year of the Bush administration. But it's reasonably clear that what's happening now is the same as what happened then: growth in the economy as a whole is mainly benefiting a small elite, while bypassing most families.

Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income - the purchasing power of the typical family - actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn't just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution - that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans - gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better - like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers - that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Can anything be done to spread the benefits of a growing economy more widely? Of course. A good start would be to increase the minimum wage, which in real terms is at its lowest level in half a century.

But don't expect this administration or this Congress to do anything to limit the growing concentration of income. Sometimes I even feel sorry for these people and their apologists, who are prevented from acknowledging that inequality is a problem by both their political philosophy and their dependence on financial support from the wealthy. That leaves them no choice but to keep insisting that ordinary Americans - who have, in fact, been bypassed by economic growth - just don't understand how well they're doing.

Get your Girl On?

Have you seen the new ads for Hummer? A woman and her child on the playground and another woman puts her child in front on the slide. So clearly, the only response is to go buy a Hummer. To Get Your Girl On. Sure. Then there's the man at the grocery store buying tofu intimidated by the guy behind him buying lots of red meat. He simply has to buy a Hummer to "Restore His Masculinity."

What they are saying is, Hey, all you insecure people, why not let your car do the talking because you are a wimp!


Who knew I was the most confident person in the world since this is my dream car. 61 miles per gallon and unlimited cuteness. Coming soon (well in a couple of years) to a dealer here in America. The Smart Car.

Adorable. Goes great with $100 per barrel gas!

Speaking of Oil

The price per barrel reached yet another all time high today. At this moment it's $76.30 per barrel.

Watching CNBC they are blaming the price on Iran, Nigeria and Iraq. "Keep your eye on where the oil is."

Meanwhile, the Dow is down 94 points. The housing market is going south and it looks like a hard landing - not a soft landing.

Didn't the President just give us the good economic news?

The Iraq war is/was/and will forever be about oil

I have been repeating for 3 years that the only logical reason for Bush's Iraq war is oil. It is the only way to truly understand - and therefore be able to respond to - the Bush/Blair war. Again- I urge the small audience of this blog to understand the overriding importance of cheap imported oil to every aspect of life in the U.S. - from the price at the pump to the value of the dollar.
This aspect of Bush's failure is delineated perfectly by a conservative here.

The Bush/Blair war is only now beginning to truly affect us. We will be dealing with their deceit and failure for years.

Check out the wing nut mail bag.

I know, I know as a liberal on one of the coasts I try not to condescend to the wing nuts - uh, I mean right wingers - but sometimes it is impossible. So many of them really are just plain stupid.

Surprise, Surprise!

John and I saw REM in 1984 at an unannounced gig at the Rat in Boston. It was fab and we ended up in a photo that appeared in Rolling Stone and REM's coffee table book.

Do you think that REM didn't announce the show because they were afraid of getting shot? Me either.

With the Bush administration touting "progress" in Iraq one has to wonder why all of their shows in Baghdad are unannounced. Surely they would sell more tickets if people knew they were coming. You would think that Mr. Bush would have let the Prime Minister know, hey, coming over to see you. Instead, Mr. Al Malaki was just told he was meeting with a senior American official and, surprise! Bush jumps out of the cake.

According to The New York Times Mr. Rumsfeld just made an unannounced visit to Iraq.

Rumsfeld emphasized he was not planning to discuss plans for reducing U.S. troop levels during this visit...

Which makes sense. If you are afraid to let people know you are coming to their country because you could die you want as many troops around you as possible.

Update. I am watching the Situation Room and according to them Mr. Rumsfeld flew the 35 miles from the Air Base to Baghdad because it was just too dangerous for him to drive the road to Baghdad. It's booby trapped. I don't know how he can look the troops in the face when one asked him why they have better equipment in NYC than the troops do in Iraq. And they HAVE to drive that road.

Shop Our Store!

You can get this fabulous design (created by my very talented brother) on hats, t-shirts, magnets and the ever popular coffee mug at our online store. Buy for yourself and your friends!

Let everyone know how you feel about Mr. Bush & Cheney. Meet new friends with this conversation starter. Have fun!

More on the OJ

There's an interesting development in the illegal immigration debate.

LAKELAND -- A proposed U.S. Department of Homeland Security regulation could effectively prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants and greatly affect Florida agriculture.

The regulation would make it easier to bring civil and criminal penalties against employers for hiring workers without a valid Social Security number. Those workers, in turn, would lose their jobs.

So, Bush is for a Guest Worker Program but his Department of Homeland Security is going around Congress and him. Mas interesante!

How do Florida citrus growers feel about this?

More aggressive enforcement would threaten the ability of farmers to find enough labor to harvest the crops."On the picking crew side, where the percentage (of illegal immigrants) is very high, we would have difficulty finding labor," said George Hamner Jr., the president of Indian River Exchange Packers, a Vero Beach packinghouse that also manages about 4,000 grove acres, including harvesting.

The percentages are very high indeed, Carlton said. He pointed to a federal Government Accounting Office study on agricultural employment that found 52 percent of harvesting workers acknowledged they were in the country illegally."If 52 percent self-identify as illegal, we know there's a lot more here illegally. Anecdotally, evidence suggests as many as 80 to 90 percent of the workers could be undocumented," he said.

So, they're not happy since 80 to 90 percent of their workforce is undocumented and it will put a squeeze on their production. (sorry!)

But here's the money quote:

According to a June 10 Washington Times article on the proposed regulation, the Clinton administration issued 443 notices of intent to fine companies for violating immigration hiring laws. That fell to 16 notices in 2003 with fines falling from $2.7 million to $212,322 in that same period.

Tell that to all the Republicans who want to paint Democrats as being soft on illegal immigration. You can throw in the fact that we are down 90% in fines because of the party who calls themselves fiscally responsible.

And You Thought Gas was High

Just you wait until you buy a gallon of OJ in the fall.

LAKELAND -- A shortage of harvesting labor aggravated by rumors about immigration reform may leave as many as 6 million boxes of oranges on trees by the end of the 2005-2006 citrus season.

"There's very little doubt we'll leave a significant amount of fruit on the tree. Whether that's 3 million boxes or 6 million boxes -- nobody can say," Mike Carlton, the director of production and labor affairs at Florida Citrus Mutual, said Friday.

Florida produces most of the OJ you drink and the illegals who normally pick those oranges are leaving the country because they have been told that if they leave they will be able to come back as guest workers. Meanwhile, most Americans won't pick oranges for $1.00 per box in June, in Florida. Hard to believe, I know. Especially when you consider you also have the opportunity to receive no benefits! The citrus industry won't pay $2.00 per box because it's not cost effective. So they'll let those oranges rot on the trees.

I hope our friend Lou Dobbs likes tomato juice. Oh wait, tomatoes are hand picked, too!

Three words: Bush has failed.

Let's boil it down and stop mincing around the inescapable. George W. Bush foreign "policy" is an abject and dangerous failure.
Iraq had a day that did not evoke Vietnam so much as Rwanda. This chaos is directly attributable to the brain dead policy of Bush's neo-cons. Iraq is George W Bush's failure.

North Korea is now far more dangerous than it was when Clinton left office in 2001. And we, depending on China to finance our deficit - also created since 2001 - can do little, if anything, about it. We are locked into a dance of death with China. They must buy dollars. Or we are cooked. They will not allow North Korea to fail. We cannot allow them to succeed. China holds the cards, though. This is Bush's failure. No one else's. It is George W Bush's. Period.

Iran is now an unchecked regional power because Bush and his neo-con idiots took out the country that checked their power. Because of the stupidity of Bush's Iraq policy we can either A. No nothing about Iran's regional ascendancy. Or B. Attack and open up a regional conflict and explode oil prices, which will bring on economic calamity. These are the choices that George W Bush's foolish policy created.

And Afghanistan has erupted again.

Let us pull no punches: NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF GORE HAD BECOME PRESIDENT. NONE OF IT. The power of the United States of America has diminished markedly in 6 years. Why? Because of Bush/Cheney. Period.

Lost in the Shuffle

There are so many scandals surrounding this administration that it is "hard work" to keep up with all of them.

How about this - John Kyl, Lindsey Graham and Sam Brownback inserted a debate that they had on Guantanimo into the Congressional Record. It included interruptions and questions and answers. What's the problem with that? Well, I suppose that it never happened would be a problem. The Supreme Court didn't like it.

The transcript of the bogus discussion was submitted into the official Congressional Record after the actual debate had concluded.

Then in February, Kyl and Graham cited the unspoken conversation in a brief to the Supreme Court as an example of the legislative intent behind the act.

The Supreme Court outed Kyl and Graham last week for their not-ready-for-real-time performance by bringing it up in a footnote in its decision in the landmark case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

“Those statements appear to have been inserted in the Congressional Record after the Senate debate,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

Then there's the former American company who left our shores for a post office box in Bermuda to avoid taxes. Two years ago they were given an exemption to the Jones Act which states that only American owned ships can transport people or goods within our own port system. Their exemption is coming to an end so they want it to be permanent and our fine Congress is helping them do it. Congress is giving Nabors Industries a leg up on the competition who are actually playing by the rules.

Competitors argue that they will be slowly strangled if Nabors is allowed to vie for contracts while paying little in taxes. Nabors is a well-run company, said Ken Wells, president of the Offshore Marine Service Association, and its tax advantages allow it to underbid other offshore supply companies. The association, therefore, opposes the provision as a favor to one of its 101 members at the expense of the others, Mr. Wells said.

Nabors reported earning $428.4 million in profits in the United States last year. At the average tax rate actually paid by large American companies, Nabors would have owed about $86 million in taxes. Nabors told its shareholders that it paid less than $6 million. It paid $60.8 million in taxes to the federal government in 2001, the last year it was an American company.

I'm sure the extra $80 million is helping pay their lobbyist to get the provision through the House of Representatives. And it's not like we actually need their taxes to help fund the war or anything. Isn't $80 million just a drop in the ever rising deficit bucket?

You really need a score card to keep up with these guys. Because the slime just keeps on coming.

Brother, can you spare a Benjamin for a barrel of oil?

It is interesting to see how the gestalt works. After years in the "wilderness" peak oil is going mainstream. This from CBS Marketwatch of all places:

"Crude oil, at least the cheap and easy to get to stuff, is dwindling. What's left are things like oil sands that are costly to refine, sour crude that also requires additional refining, deep-water drilling and other less than desirable and more difficult methods. Most of all these things cost more money and that cost is passed right along to you and me."

Looks like the peak oil "kooks" are about to join the global warming "kooks" and morph into prophets. As a perpetual yelper about our unconscious dive over the cliff of oil depletion I say again: I pray I am wrong. I pray everyone who is sounding the peak oil alarm is wrong.
It seems, however, they are all exactly right.

Great People

Jaap Penraat died last week. He saved 406 Jews by forging documents for them and taking some them out of Nazi occupied Europe.

Penraat's story begins in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. He saw the increased persecution of the Jews by the Nazis and, for a year and a half, helped them by providing them with forged ID cards with non-Jewish sounding names. Working as a draftsman and being the son of a printer, forgery was an easy tool for Penraat, Talbott said.

The Nazis would eventually catch wind of the Penraat's scheme and imprisoned him for six months. During that time he was tortured and kept in bad conditions.

"He came out (of jail) really sick," recounted Noëlle Penraat, his daughter. "It took him a long time to get better."

By the time Penraat was released, Nazi oppression had reached the point that simple ID cards were no longer a help.

"The Nazis kept upping the ante," Talbott said. "Jaap felt he needed to step up as well."

Six months in jail not only didn't shake Penraat's resolve, but it gave him an idea. In prison, Penraat learned of networks used to get downed fighter pilots back to the Allied forces. Penraat searched for and found a similar network to get Jews out of Amsterdam, according to Talbott.

Through a friend, Penraat obtained letterhead for a construction company and forged orders for construction workers to go to France to work on the Atlantic Wall. Penraat himself led a group of 20 Jewish boys posing as construction workers to go Lille, France. From there someone else would take the boys to England, where many joined the British army and fought against the Germans.

Penraat made the trip 20 times and saved 406 lives in all. However, those who knew him say he thought no more of that feat than it was the right thing to do.

It's just good to know that we have had people like Mr. Penraat in the world.

Global warming and wildfires

Staying on the topic of environment and the beautiful North American West that Lynne writes about having just visited below - this link explains the link between global warming and western wildfires.

North To Alaska

I just got back from Alaska and it was an amazing trip. Not one person I spoke with who lives there wants drilling in Anwar. The Anchorage paper had an unflattering article on Ted Stevens that he is losing his power in the senate.


The pictures here are of Hubbard Glacier which is one of the seven glaciers in the world that is advancing. That does not mean it's growing. On the cruise we had a lecture on glaciers and how the professor described what is happening to Hubbard is like holding and icicle in your hands and pushing to towards an oven. We did see it calf many times while we were in the bay.

The other picture in Denali from a helicopter. We spent a couple of days at Denali State Park and it was gorgeous. They serve fair trade coffee at the coffee shop on the Park. They recyle everything.

We went to the Natural Hertigage Park which depicts the lives on the five indigenous tribes. One of the lectures was that they use everything. They don't waste or throw anything away.

I got the impression that most Alaskans are the same way. Very concerned about the environment, the animals they share their land with and global warming.

If you are in a position to spend the summer in Alaska there are college kids from all over who go for the summer and get jobs at restaurants, bars, hotels and for tours. Do it.

Bush's neo -con neglect.

Everywhere we look now Bush's "neo-con neglect" is coming home to roost. Do you like the phrase "neo-con neglect"? Just thought of it. It fits.

I want to see the body.

I know I risk some really bad karma here - but I am gonna say it - a healthy 64 year old millionaire facing 20 years in federal prison - just DIES. Sorry, too easy.
I want to see the body. Not just hear about it from the coroner.
And I ask for forgiveness for this post, too "coulteresque" I know - but I can't get it out of my head.

Why we are not dealing with Global warming

If flag burning caused global warming the GOP - and the rest of us - might do something.... Good article here.

So there is plenty of nice stuff all over the web today about the good ole U.S.A. and I happen to agree with most of it. But a few months back in one of Kunstler's "eyesore's of the month" he riffed a bit about America's true religion. It is worth remembering today that there are many Americas in America.

Jesus is a liberal

In your heart you know it is true: Jesus is a liberal.
Happy Independence Day!

News flash: Coulter is a thieving bitch.

This should surprise no one.

Conservatives hate democracy and America

The "conservatives" and their freaky ilk are after democracy in a big way - they hate freedom, love the idea of endless war, and will not stop until all dissent and opposition is silenced. Believe it. People with the right wing mental disorder are the same everywhere. We have been blessed with only mild cases of it popping up in America. However, they mean business now - and will diminish democracy and freedom continually until they are stopped by normal people. Right wingers are getting sicker and more dangerous in this country. Believe it.

Oil makes us weak.

Oil is inching back to $75.00 a barrel. So? For all the Bush/Cheney bluster about America's strength - actually we have become much weaker in real terms in the last 5 years. Even greater dependence on foreign oil. An obscene national debt. And obscener trade deficit. An over stretched military.
Read this. THe only thing not correct in this piece is when it says "US oil production is flat." In fact, US oil production peaked in 1970 and has been declining ever since.