On the Horizon

Bailout Feared if Airlines Shed Their Pensions
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Published: August 1, 2004

n an echo of the savings and loan industry collapse of the 1980's, the federal agency that insures company pensions is facing a possible cascade of bankruptcies and pension defaults in the airline industry that some experts fear could lead to another multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout.

``The similarities are incredible,'' said George J. Benston, a finance professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written extensively on the regulatory failures that led to the costly savings and loan bailout.

Deposits in savings institutions are, like pensions, guaranteed by a federal insurance program. The savings industry first sickened because changes in market conditions made the traditional way savings and loans operated unprofitable, but government delays and policy missteps then made the situation much worse. In the end taxpayers bailed out the industry - at a cost, according to various estimates, of $150 billion to $200 billion.

Now experts say they see similar forces gathering in the pension sector, with United Airlines perhaps the first to go down the path. Operating in bankruptcy, United is striving to attract the lenders and investors it needs to survive. It said last month that it would no longer contribute to its pension plans; United also seems intent on shedding some or all of its $13 billion in pension obligations as the only way to succeed in emerging from bankruptcy proceedings.

If United manages to cut itself loose from the costly burden of its pension plans, it might force others determined to keep their costs similarly under control to emulate its move. ``Rivals may feel they are at a competitive disadvantage and follow suit, raising the specter of a domino effect in the industry,'' said Bradley D. Belt, the executive director of the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pensions. If every airline with a traditional pension plan were ultimately to default, the government would be on the hook for an estimated $31 billion. Its insurance coverage is limited, so some employees would have their benefits reduced.

“The pension insurance program is there to protect workers’ benefits,” said Mr. Belt, who took over the agency in April. “It shouldn’t be used as a piggy bank to help companies restructure.”

Already, some airline employees are taking steps to protect themselves against future pension losses. Each month, for example, about 30 pilots normally retire from Delta Air Lines. But in June, almost 300 did.

Andrew Dean, one of the new retirees, said he and his colleagues watched in dismay as the financial debacle unfolded at United. He said that he and many of his fellow pilots decided they had better grab their pensions right away while the money was still there.

“These are very scary times right now for someone in my position,” said Mr. Dean, who at 58 walked away from his job just as he was reaching the peak earning period of his career. His pension was also reduced because he retired early.

But his decision now looks prescient. On Friday, Delta asked its pilots for a 35 percent pay cut and proposed a smaller pension plan.

Foremost on the minds of the departing pilots, Mr. Dean said, were arcane pension rules that can offer advantages to workers who quit before a pension plan fails. At Delta, for example, as long as the pension plan stays afloat, pilots are allowed to take half of their benefit in a single check when they retire. But if the plan fails, the pilots lose their chance to take a big payout.

“What I’ve managed to do is secure half of my retirement,” Mr. Dean said. He may still lose the rest if the government takes over the program and limits future payouts. “I really lose sleep over that,” he said.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is already hobbled by debt, having picked up the pieces of more than 3,200 failed pension plans in its 30-year life. The scale of the failures has risen sharply in the last three years, but the agency has few tools at its disposal to prevent the situation from becoming worse.

Now it faces a possible $5 billion default by United which would be a record and the possibility of more big airline defaults after that.

I know that this is a long excerpt, but I wanted to give you time to absorb the weight of the implications of this possibility. The economic "recovery" is slowing (in no small part under the weight of the deficit) and wouldn't need much to push it over the edge into a double dip recession. If United defaults (or, God help us, goes bankrupt) the effect on the rest of the economy is nearly incalculable. I got the chills reading this. You should, too.

UPDATE: reader palamades adds information in "Comments" from inside the airline industry (you can't pay for this stuff, people)

The problem is that there are too many airlines operating within the US, with profit margins that are very, very thin. On top of that, there is still a strong reliance on the hub-and-spoke system of moving passengers (Place A to Place B, but with a stopover at O'Hare or Atlanta or Denver), which isn't working as efficently as in the past for various reasons. Add to that the increased convenience of meetings via telecommunications and the web, and the lingering fears after 9-11, and you have an industry that's just plain in pain.

United would just hurt the most.

Trust me, United is going to hurt the most no matter what happens. God, this is awful. Jackie, you are in my prayers, since that is about all I can do.

Dems Are The Good Times

Michael Kinsleycrunches the numbers on economic performance under Republican and Democratic presidents:

It turns out that Democratic presidents have a much better record than Republicans. They win in a head-to-head comparison in almost every category. Real growth averaged 4.09% in Democratic years, 2.75% in Republican years. Unemployment was 6.44%, on average, under Republican presidents, and 5.33% under Democrats. The federal government spent more under Republicans than Democrats (20.87% of GDP, compared with 19.58%), and that remains true even if you exclude defense (13.76% for the Democrats, 14.97% for the Republicans).

What else? Inflation was lower under Democratic presidents (3.81% on average, compared with 4.85%). And annual deficits took more than twice as much of GDP under Republicans than Democrats (2.74% of GDP versus 1.21%). Republicans won by a nose on government revenue (i.e., taxes), taking 18.12% of GDP, compared with 18.39%. That, of course, is why they lost on the size of the deficit.

Personal income per capita was also a bit higher in Republican years ($16,061 in year- 2000 dollars) than in Democratic ones ($15,565). But that is because more of the Republican years came later, when the country was more prosperous already.

There will be many objections to all this, some of them valid. For example, a president can't fairly be held responsible for the economy from the day he takes office. So let's give them all a year. That is, let's allocate each year to the party that controlled the White House the year before. Guess what? The numbers change, but the bottom-line tally is exactly the same: higher growth, lower unemployment, lower government spending, lower inflation and so on under the Democrats. Lower taxes under the Republicans.

But maybe we are taking too long a view. The Republican Party considers itself born again in 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president. That's when Republicans got serious about cutting taxes, reducing the size of government and making the country prosperous. Allegedly. But doing all the same calculations for the years 1982 through 2002, and giving each president's policies a year to take effect, changes only one result: The Democrats pull ahead of the Republicans on per capita personal income.

As they say in the brokerage ads, past results are no guarantee of future performance.

Some talking points to share with friends who still need convincing. This wasn't in the data Kinsley was looking at, but the markets perform better under Ds than Rs.

Network Failure

What We Missed in Boston
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

PEOPLE, particularly network anchors, complain that conventions are too tailored to television. Actually, they are not tailored enough. If the parties really wanted the networks to give them gavel-to-gavel coverage, they would cut the event down to one night, not select a nominee in advance, and let viewers call in and, as they do on the Fox Network hit, vote for their favorite speaker - Convention Idol.

That would get Dan Rather's folksy idioms flowing.

Instead, Republicans and Democrats plod on with their creaky tradition, dragging out a foregone conclusion over four days, flattering state delegates, wining and dining donors, and letting obscure elected officials, even the nutty ones, have their say at the podium. Political analysts disparage the display as a political "infomercial," but to the credit of the organizers, they are not catering to the network audience nearly as much as they could.

So, are Americans getting the convention coverage they deserve? Or are the television networks shirking the civic responsibility that was implicit when the government gave them the airwaves and let them rake in billions off a public trust?
....
Ratings for cable news and PBS increased over the convention. If the broadcast networks had provided more coverage and given a sleeker presentation, millions more viewers might have been tempted to tune in. Conventions will never get huge ratings or make the networks money, but they only come once every four years.

NBC has proved ingenious at luring viewers who don't like sports to watch the Olympics by milking each athlete's résumé for Hallmark moments; it could stir up similar mini-dramas around elected officials. An NBC promotional spot highlighting the Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin starts this way: "A lifetime spent alone under water." The story of Dennis Kucinich could be packaged much the same way, though perhaps more succinctly: "A lifetime spent alone."

For now, Mr. Jennings says ABC's "mini-me" digital channel coverage is at least a consolation. When Mr. O'Reilly of Fox News asked him, "So you're not offended by this contrived display?" Mr. Jennings replied: "I don't see any point in being offended by it. We are here. It is an opportunity. They do what they do. We do what we do. And it'll be exactly the same for the Republican Party."

Some things for the network execs to think about: they missed one of the great speeches of the century (there aren't that many really good ones, ever) by not broadcasting Barack Obama's keynote. That young man is going places and the networks are going to have to go to C-Span or PBS for file tape (and believe me, they'll want it when that young man makes a splash in the Senate and then runs for president.) Stanley's piece also makes a powerful argument for reform of the FCC and the way that licenses are granted (but not the way that Michael Powell wants to do it.) I'd like to see the use of the public trust taken a whole lot more seriously.

The Responsibility Administration

9/11 action? Not before Nov. 2

July 30, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

It seems that there is a new rule in American politics: Nothing is done during an election year, lest it affect the outcome of the election. This law was spoken by the speaker of the House of Representatives last week when he solemnly announced that members were going to take a very close look at the report of the 9/11 commission and not rush into anything during an election year. So the representatives went on vacation, and the senators with them. After all, members of Congress work very hard and are entitled to free time. Recklessly driving up the national debt isn't easy work. Besides, because only 38 at most of the 435 seats in the House are ''in play'' this year, no one has to worry about losing their job.

When there was some public outcry, Congress replied that the relevant committees would return after a couple of weeks to begin working on legislation. Given the record of Congress in getting anything done, it is safe to bet that there will be no legislation before the election.

And no one will raise the question of why Congress failed to enact the recommendation of the Gore Commission in 1995 that the cockpit doors on airplanes be bulletproof and locked -- which would have saved 3,000 lives on Sept. 11.

The president said he would study the report very carefully. That is an interesting comment because he stonewalled the idea of the commission for a couple of years on the grounds that it would distract from the war on terror, and he was forced into it by the families of the victims. Moreover, he tried to appoint the ineffable Henry Kissinger as commission chairman. It is therefore the president's own fault that the report -- with its criticisms of his actions both before Sept. 11 and his foreign policy since -- appeared during an election year. The commission was restrained in its comments because it wanted unanimity during an election year. Republican members of the commission doubtless hoped that people will not read it too carefully.

At this writing, the president is busy trying to turn the report into a political asset. Since he does not read books, he has not read the pages following 363, which are an implicit but stinging indictment of the terrorism policies of his administration.

Then there is the Senate committee, which studied the failures of the American intelligence services before the Iraq war -- failure that in ordinary times would have humiliated a president, but not these days. Again in the name of unanimity, the committee postponed the completion of its investigation until -- guess when? -- after the election.

It is also said that the grand jury investigation into who in the White House ''outed'' a CIA officer (to punish her husband for reporting that there was no yellow cake uranium shipped from Niger to Iraq) will continue until after the election.

Heaven forefend that the issues of who messed up on Sept. 11 and in preparation for the Iraq war should affect the outcome of the election. Heaven equally forbid that these matters be debated during the campaign. Heaven protect the American people from thinking there are issues besides abortion and gay marriage, and whether people will ''warm up'' to John Kerry. Nor should anyone dare to ask why it required almost three years since the World Trade Center attack to produce a detailed report of the failures of our intelligence agencies and a blueprint to reform them. Nor should there be a debate about a foreign policy that has alienated the world, nor about why the dead in Iraq are now about a third of those who died in the 9/11 explosion. No one should ask about how much safer Americans really are today. Not during an election year.

There is a conspiracy of silence to protect the Bush administration from the voters' judgment about its mistakes. Such pretense supports the president's insistence that he has not made any mistakes, and is not responsible in any way. It is all the fault of the CIA and the FBI -- and, of course, the Bill Clinton administration.

American elections used to be about responsibility and accountability. Now it would seem those subjects are taboo. A president is neither responsible nor accountable -- not till after the election!

Something tells me Fr. Greeley isn't going to be voting R this fall. This points to multiple system failures: failure of congressional oversight of almost every aspect of executive branch operations; the complete bankruptcy of the "fourth estate, and a cynical and disengaged electorate. I think the Dems stand a decent chance of taking back the White House, but one of the things the politicians need to be doing in this campaign season is raising the voters' awareness of how the system is supposed to work.

It'll be interesting to see how the New York convention works out for the Repubs. The Chicago convention of '68 was a disaster for the Dems. If New York erupts the way Chicago did, Bush could see a fall in the polls like Humphrey did in '68.

Unserious Editorial

Iraq's Mixed Month

Saturday, July 31, 2004; Page A22

THE FIRST month of sovereign government in Iraq ended badly. A national conference that was to choose a 100-member assembly to function alongside the interim government was postponed for two weeks because key factions refused to participate. A car bombing that killed 70 people and a rash of kidnappings, meanwhile, underlined the fact that security remains a crippling problem. Those in Washington who believe that Iraq is headed for disaster will find confirmation in these events, and they may be proven right. Yet woven through the broader record of the past 30 days are signs that the formal end of the U.S. occupation may have advanced Iraq closer to the goal of stability under a representative government.

This is a deeply dishonest editorial by a pro-war ed board. This is unwarranted self justification by an ed board that isn't reading its own news pages. In the month since the "handover" we've lost more troops than in the preceeding month, we've installed a CIA employee as Prime Minister and the caucus scheduled for last week has been postponed because of rising violence. Contrary to the WaPo ed board, the situation is spinning out of control. The Post has bested the New York Times in the quality of its straight new coverage in the last couple of years, but its ed board is as unserious as the Times. Crappy thinking is crappy thinking.

Imaginary Battalions

Iraqi clerics oppose Muslim, Arab force

KUFA: Radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Sunni Muslim religious elders on Friday preached against a Saudi proposal to send an Arab or Muslim force to Iraq.

"I advise all countries that want to help Iraq, not to send forces here," said al-Sadr in a sermon at Friday prayers in the main mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad.

"If such forces come to Iraq, they will be seen as collaborators of the occupation," he said.

In Fallujah, Sheikh Ihsan al-Duri said he opposed "any Arab or Muslim force in Iraq". "Such forces could have served before (the occupation) but never now," he told worshippers at the Rawi mosque in the flash-point city.

In Baghdad, Sheikh Mehdi Sumaydai, a strict Wahhabi Muslim also denounced the idea, which was on Thursday welcomed by US Secretary of State Colin Powell after talks with his Saudi counterpart and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

"We don’t want (Arab and Muslim) forces to shield the occupier because we don’t want to see Muslims killed," he said.

Otherwise, al-Sadr devoted most of his sermon to criticising Allawi’s interim government for failing to restore basic services and safeguard security.

"The government said it wants to give al-Sadr’s movement a chance, but several of his leaders are in prison and others have been threatened with death for refusing to accept occupation," he said.

"I call on the occupation forces to release honest resistance fighters, otherwise we will unleash civil disobedience," he said.

Powell's little diplomatic feint with the Saudis to talk up a bunch of Arab battalions for Iraq is just PR. If such a force was actually deployed, there would be things blown up in Morroco, Dubai or whereever such troops came from. The carnage visited upon Riyadh in recent months is a shout out to the rest of the Arab world that cooperating with the US means death.

Paying the Price

Iraq is costing us plenty here at home
by Karen Dolan
The Pilot-Independent
Last Updated: Friday, July 30th, 2004 12:28:51 PM

The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq has just about hit 900. Add the fallen troops from the United Kindom and other countries, and that figure already topped the 1,000 mark. An estimated 16,000 additional U.S. soldiers have been wounded and sickened. Many lost at least one limb. And over 11,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war.

Most Americans realize that people are dying, even if they don't see photos or footage of the body bags. Yet they haven't heard enough about the many costs of the Iraq War. The facts are startling.
The government has spent more than $150 billion in taxpayer money thus far, and that price tag is likely to grow by at least $50 billion a year while Iraq remains occupied. Economist Doug Henwood estimates that this war, if the U.S. military stays there for three more years, will cost U.S.households an average of $3,415.

The war is also affecting U.S. communities, health care and education, as military spending pushes domestic needs to the back of the bus
.
For the money spent thus far on the war, the National Priorities Project estimates the government could have provided 23 million housing vouchers for America's growing homeless population.
Or the government could have funded or provided health care to 28 million Americans, helping reduce the roughly 18,000 unnecessary U.S. deaths every year suffered by the uninsured.

The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is growing more rapidly than in any other industrialized country. Programs for low-income children, like Head Start, can help fix this in the long run, yet more than half of all Head Start programs endured cuts in the past year, as the United States occupied Iraq with military force. If the United States hadn't spent all this war money, and instead made young children its top priority, 20 million more youngsters could have gotten a better shot at success through a Head Start.

Meanwhile, state and local governments are falling short. Federal policies like the tax cuts President George W. Bush gave the wealthy, coupled with the huge military costs, are contributing to costs and lost revenues in all states of nearly $200 billion between 2002 and 2005.

Tight state budgets have forced states to cut drug assistance to AIDS patients, to freeze or cut state assistance for college tuitions and to cut eligibility for Medicaid.

Drastic cuts in education are felt at the local level too. Last summer, Cleveland cut all summer classes. Buffalo saw 300 teachers lose their jobs and closed three schools. South Carolina laid off 2,000 teachers and greatly increased class sizes.

Reserve troops and National Guard are being called up in enormous numbers and are spending long successive tours in Iraq. Military families left behind face hardships associated with the loss of a breadwinner. Some report experiencing bankruptcy, hunger, unemployment and poor housing conditions.

Despite these sacrifices, we are actually less secure at home and abroad now than before the United States invaded Iraq.

According to a new survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, less than one quarter of surveyed cities have received any of the promised homeland security funds designed to assist state and local first responders, such as police officers and firefighters who handle emergencies.

National Guard troops make up about one-third of the U.S. troops in Iraq. Their deployment places a particularly heavy burden on homeland and community security, as many of these troops are local first responders. Almost half of all police forces across the nation have lost officers as a result of deployment to Iraq.

Finally, even the State Department admits that terrorism is rising. Last year reported the largest number of terror-related incidents deemed "significant" than any time in the history of these records. The Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that the war in Iraq has accelerated recruitment to Al Qaeda and made the world less safe. Anti-Americanism has skyrocketed dramatically around the world since the invasion of Iraq.

Taken together with the insecurity in basic human needs and quality of life at home, it seems that we have paid too high price and gained too little in return.

Karen Dolan is a Fellow at the Foreign Policy in Focus/Institute for Policy Studies and Director of the Cities for Peace and Progressive Challenge projects there.

Walker is the kind of small town that is paying a disproportionate price in blood in the sands of Iraq. These small towns staff our guard and reserve units with their city council members, sherrifs, cops and fireman. There are small towns across America which have lost nearly their entire government structure to guard and reserve call ups. But we don't hear about that. Why is that?

CYA

Bush Faces New Obstacles in Keeping Allies' Support

By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

Published: July 31, 2004

ASHINGTON, July 30 - With the demands of the presidential campaign adding new urgency to the search for a strategy to exit Iraq, American officials are facing many complications in holding together the coalition of countries they persuaded to support the war.

The kidnappings and executions of foreign workers, and the decision by some companies and several countries to leave the American-led forces, have compounded the burdens on the 140,000 American troops there and the diplomatic pressures on Bush administration officials intent on staying the course.

For the first time, administration officials are acknowledging the delicate nature of their "coalition of the willing" - the group of some 30 nations that lent their names and limited numbers of troops to the occupying force built mainly of American and British forces. The multinational force, which the administration stitched together as traditional NATO allies balked, is increasingly tattered.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged his dismay this week over the erosion of support, signaled most recently by the Philippines' decision to withdraw its troops and moves by Ukraine, with its 1,600 soldiers, to follow suit. Four other nations have withdrawn from the country - Spain, with 1,300 troops, and the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras, with nominal representations.

"Sure it worries me," Mr. Powell said in an interview with the Arabiya television network. "We've lost some members of the coalition, and there are some companies who have had to restrict their operations because of the dangers. But this seems to me to be an incentive to the rest of us to redouble our efforts to get after these insurgents," he said. "You cannot just say, 'Well, gosh, they are causing all of these troubles, so let's all pull out."

The United States received some encouragement on Friday when NATO allies reached an agreement to begin sending military trainers to Iraq, which should result in the deployment of 20 to 30 officers there by mid-September. The administration, which has long pushed for a more muscular role for NATO - several of whose members opposed the war - welcomed the action, however symbolic the initial deployment. The trainers are intended to speed the process of putting capable Iraqi forces on the streets.

20 to 30 officer/trainers. That's a real muscular role.

Powell is pathetic. "You cannot just say, 'Well, gosh, they are causing all of these troubles, so let's all pull out." Colin, "these troubles" are "our people are getting killed, kidnapped and beheaded." There is no damn support for this made-up war anywhere in the world and you know it and the other governments you bribed to send in a token force are finding the political cost at home to be too high. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

"Everything is different"

I want to linger a moment with this idea (which usually means that I am a)pissed, or b)curious about something, or sometimes both.) I heard it from the lips of both David Brooks and Mark Shields on the Newshour tonight. "Everything changed on 9-11." We've all heard it. It has become a trope. Is it true? Yes and no.

Say what you will about it, our intelligence services and military have been tracking terrorist groups for decades. I'm old enough to remember the Munich Olympics, the Achille Lauro, the IRA, the Scottish separatists and Red Brigade. The last three nearly killed me on several occasions. My own antennae have been set on high since the Scottish separatists failed to blow up my section of the grandstand at the Edinborough Tattoo in 1971. The other side of the field wasn't so lucky. I went through the trainstation in Bologna one day before the Red Brigade blew it up in 1980. I was with the British bandsmen who were blown up on parade in 1983 only the month before. Really, each of those disasters could have been any of us at any time. All of these groups are non-state actors with multi-national operatives (the IRA may plausibly have had a relationship with the government of Ireland, but I've never seen it proved.) The fact that foreign nationals hadn't blown things up in this country before the WTC in 1993 was an accident of timing. The rest of the world has been dealing with this reality for a while now. Decades.

What change on September 11, 2001? We became aware of a reality that our imperfect intel and military communities had already known about for a long time. By that point in time, I had already read the Bremmer and Hart-Rudman commission reports and had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. I was in class when the first plane went into the WTC and learned of it, the second plane and the Pentagon while on coffee break during class from radios in the school refectory and reception area. I went back to class which proceeded as normal (the otherwordly Carmelite teaching it hadn't heard the news) and ran to the student lounge after class to look at cable just as the first tower fell. The streets of Washington were impassible, so I went to my then-office to begin scanning the internet. It was a short Google search to Bin Laden, a name I already knew well.

What's different after September 11 is us, not our situation. The threat is the same as it has been for at least a decade, when Osama started dreaming big dreams. The world hasn't changed. We have, and not always in directions that are so nice. The fear 9-11 provoked gave Bush carte blanche to go into Iraq. That was dumb, and I was told by many friends that my opposition to the war, before and after our arrival in Baghdad, made me an enemy of America. Turns out I was right and Saddam had nothing to do with Osama, and Saddam's regime was just as weak as I thought it was, which I learned from open sources and Google. One doesn't need access to the PDB to learn most of what's out there. I blogged a story yesterday about the way that Muslim Americans and Arabs (there are non-Muslim Arabs, by the way) are being treated. That's another not so good thing we've become in the years after 9-11. The way that I changed, and did so very deliberately, in the months after 9-11 (once the shock wore off, I was as raw and damaged as everyone else for the first weeks) was to remember that we are fragile people whose lives are contingent on circumstances we do not control. I renewed all of my relationships because those lives around me, and mine, became even more precious to me.

Remember that, remember life and death and that we don't control those things. This is crucial, because the Bushies are planting the lie in people's minds that these things can be controlled and that, in fact, Flightsuit boy is able to control them. That's magical thinking and he probably believes it himself, but it isn't true. Bushco's "success" with the voters he attracts is based on really primal fears and dreams of a kind of control which none of us really possess. It is the part of us which still responds to superstition. Yes, luck exists, but we don't summon it. It happens or it doesn't, and your special red shirt doesn't bring it.

This is the theological essence of the Bush campaign: that because of his magnificent leadership after 9-11, he's our lucky charm against terrorism. That's the theological foundation of the "don't changes horses in the middle of a war" claim, and makes no truck with facts. If you read Chapter 8 of the 9-11 Commission report you'll discover that, in the broad strokes, Michael Moore got it right. Bush's appeal is for people who desperately want to believe that something is true which isn't. This isn't politics, it is theology, but we must be careful that we are not all contributing to the lie by spouting the familiar tropes of Brooks and Shields. The world is not different, the threat has been there for years and we knew about it for years. We are different and it is time to take stock of the ways in which we are different. Introspection is hardly an American virtue, but it is time to learn it. How are we as a people being changed? It is a question worthy of pondering.

UPDATE: Reader pollythewriter reminded me of this piece, which has been making the media rounds. It is a very superficial piece.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- President George W. Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the September 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

"We are saying this is psychologically useful," said Solomon.

Read the article. What I wrote above is in no small part a response to this meme. None of us are psychologically determined: we have choices of responses. But if we are unreflective, we will react out of base instinct (and that instinct may not have been so healthily formed.) From this study, it appears that about a third of the subjects were those unreflective people, which sounds to me like about the proportion in the general public.

I have a friend, a therapist, who likes to say that "there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who carry on conversations with themselves in their heads and the ones who don't."

SCLM and the Polls

Rove's Blunder
How Bush wrote Kerry's acceptance speech.
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, July 29, 2004, at 11:18 PM PT

In his determination to unite the right, Bush hasn't just united the left. He has lost the center. Look at last week's New York Times/CBS News poll of registered voters. "Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq or not?" Fifty-nine percent say it was not. "Which do you think is a better way to improve the national economy—cutting taxes or reducing the federal budget deficit?" Fifty-eight percent say reducing the deficit. "When it comes to regulating the environmental and safety practices of business, do you think the federal government is doing enough, should it do more, or should it do less?" Fifty-nine percent say more.

One more Bush voter on the right, balanced by one more Kerry voter on the left, plus the tilting of one more voter in the middle toward Kerry, is a net loss for the president. That's the lesson of this administration, this election, and this convention. Kerry doesn't have to write any good lines. He just has to read them.

So, why does the race still appear to be so close? Taegan Godard has at least a piece of the answer:

Why the Presidential Race Remains Close

It turns out that on four of these traits (excluding party affiliation), voter evaluation of the candidates is virtually identical. This is why, after record advertising campaigns, the election essentially remains a dead heat.

Of course, these preceptions wouldn't have anything to do with this, would it?

• Carlson attempted to downplay Republican attacks on Cleland
• Deficit deceit: Matthews falsely claimed "deficit is not being caused by tax cuts"
• FOX talking heads obsessed with Democratic "hate"
• CNN amnesia: Forgot TNR report on Bush plans when Al Qaeda suspect arrested during Dem Convention
• Cables, right-wing radio ran with debunked Drudge charges on Kerry combat films
• Savage commentary on Dem Convention: "Obergrupenführer Clinton," "Grupenführer Carter," "Brigadeführer Daschle," "dirtbag" Maya Angelou
• Limbaugh's snow job on the Dem Convention
• Mitchell and Fineman mimicked GOP talking points on Edwards's foreign policy experience
• In "World Exclusive," Drudge dredged up discredited charge that Kerry filmed reenacted combat scenes for future political career
• O'Reilly on Michael Moore's "power": "[T]his happened in Nazi Germany"
• Tucker Carlson's amnesia: "Nobody prevented anyone from voting" in Florida

The Hubbert Curve

N.Y. Crude Oil Rises to Record on Supply Disruption Concern,

July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil in New York rose to a record for the second time this week on concern that supply from the world's top exporters will be disrupted as fuel consumption surges.

Crude oil for September delivery was up $1.07, or 2.5 percent, at $43.82 a barrel at the 2:30 p.m. close of floor trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures reached $43.85 a barrel, the highest price since they began trading in New York in 1983. Oil was up 5.1 percent this week and 18 percent for the month. Prices are 43 percent higher than a year earlier.

Why 2004 Will Be Remembered as the Year World Oil Production Peaked
By Keith Miller
Jul 18, 2004, 12:47

Mr. Miller, who holds a Ph.D. in history, is a Member of the Council of Energy Advisors, auspices Gerson Lehrman Group (New York City).

Mr. Hubbert, we should have listened. In 1957 M. King Hubbert (1903-1989) predicted in a publication of the American Petroleum Institute, Drilling and Production Practice (p. 17), that the peak of world oil output would come "about the year 2000." And it has. As Richard A. Kerr stated in "The Next Oil Cirisis Looms Large--and Perhaps Close," Science 281 (21 August 1998): "the gush of oil from wells around the world will peak at 80 million barrels per day, then begin a steady, inevitable decline . . ." (p. 1128).

That prognostication, by way of a paraphrase of a report of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), was not expected to come true, however, until sometime between 2010 and 2020, but I believe that the world's oil production peak has been reached in recent weeks. Why? The answer derives from Tim Appenzeller's "The End of Cheap Oil," National Geographic 205 (June 2004): demand for oil globally is "now 80 million barrels a day, [and] continues to grow, . . ." (p. 90). And, from Bhushan Bahree's "OPEC Is Likely to Lift Ceiling of Its Oil Production by 11%," Wall Street Journal (3 June 2004) comes the following: "a world market now consuming 80 million barrels daily" (p. A2). The implication is crystal clear--if the people on planet earth are now consuming 80 million barrels per day--some 29 billion barrels per year--then we must be at the peak in world oil production, as forecast by the IEA back in the spring of 1998, information utilized by Kerr in his article. And, then too, we're back to Hubbert!

9-11 Report: The Review

Postie (and sometime spy novel author) David Ignatius offers a book review of the 9-11 Commission report. Only in Washington, I think, would a blue ribbon commission report get a book review. However, if someone had actually read the predecessor Hart-Rudman commission and Bremer (remember him?) commission reports on national security, maybe 9-11 wouldn't have happened.

The Book on Terror

Reviewed by David Ignatius
Friday, July 30, 2004; 7:30 AM

If the 9/11 report had been written as a novel, nobody would believe it. The story is too far-fetched: an attack by a group of Islamic fanatics that the CIA saw coming, had been warning about for years but could do nothing to stop; the murder of nearly 3,000 people to which investigators had the necessary clues before the event but couldn't see the pattern; a multiple airplane hijacking in which a computer system identified 10 of the 19 hijackers as potentially suspicious but prevented none from boarding; a morning of mayhem that knocked the United States so far off balance that, nearly three years later, it still hasn't recovered.

Think about it this way: Imagine that key details of al Qaeda's plot had been known beforehand -- the names of several operatives, their possible method of attack, their likely timing. Suppose one backup member of the team, Zacarias Moussaoui, had actually been arrested beforehand. How could the terrorists still have succeeded, and with such devastating consequences?

The 9/11 commission was charged with unraveling this mystery -- with making sense of an implausible, heartrending story. For months, its hearings provided a kind of national theater, in which witnesses tried to explain how the tragedy happened and why they had failed to avert it. Now, in its final report, the commission has compiled its findings in a book that is something of a literary phenomenon. In the 10 days since it was published, the report has become a runaway bestseller. And deservedly so. For in its meticulous compilation of fact, the report makes the horrors of 9/11 even more shocking. Try to read the story as a narrative, a nonfiction thriller in which the characters move inexorably toward the cataclysm of that cloudless morning. The strength of the report is precisely in its narrative power; by telling all the little stories, it reveals the big story in a different way. We see the bland evil of the plotters, the Hamlet-like indecision of government officials, the bravery amid chaos of the firefighters.
....
The report's tone is evenhanded and nonpartisan, but the facts gathered here are devastating for the Bush administration. The Clinton team may have dithered over plans to kidnap (or kill) Osama bin Laden in 1998 and '99, but they did manage to mobilize the government at every level to deal with al Qaeda's Millennium Plot. The Clinton administration gathered a small crisis group at the White House that made sure every agency worked to thwart al Qaeda's planned terrorist attack. The Bush team, in contrast, didn't get serious about bin Laden until those planes hit their targets. Indeed, it's shattering to read the report's account of the summer of 2001, well before the assault, when al Qaeda operatives couldn't stop chattering about the big, big terrorist attack they were planning -- and the Bush administration never went into full crisis mode. "Many officials told us they knew something terrible was planned, and they were desperate to stop it," the report notes. But they didn't, in part because the White House didn't take control.

Even after 9/11, some senior Bush officials didn't seem to get it. Another of those little-noticed footnotes describes a Sept. 20, 2001, memo prepared by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, apparently for his boss, Donald H. Rumsfeld. According to the commission, "the author expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options. The author suggested instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq. Since U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists." If Feith really wrote such a memo, how is it possible that he is still in his job?

That's a very good question.

Weak Fundamentals

Economic Growth Weaker Than Expected

By Martin Crutsinger
AP Economics Writer
Friday, July 30, 2004; 8:58 AM

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 3 percent in the spring, a dramatic slowdown from the rapid pace of the past year, as consumer spending fell to the weakest rate since the slowdown of 2001, the government reported Friday.

The Commerce Department said that the gross domestic product, the country's total output of goods and services, slowed sharply in the April-June quarter from a 4.5 percent growth rate in the first three months of the year.

The size of the slowdown caught economists by surprise. Many had been looking for GDP growth to come in around 3.8 percent in the second quarter. Even that would have been a sharp deceleration for an economy that had been growing at a 5.4 percent annual rate through the year ending in March.

It raised the issue of whether the economy, which Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said last week had encountered a "soft patch" in June, could be in danger of seeing growth falter even more in coming quarters.

2nd-quarter wage increases slow
Employment cost index rises 0.9%

From Tribune news services
Published July 30, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Wages and benefits for U.S. workers increased less in the second quarter than in the first, adding to evidence that this year's job gains haven't pushed wages higher.

The Labor Department said Thursday that its employment cost index rose 0.9 percent, matching economists' forecasts. In the first quarter, labor costs rose 1.1 percent.

Separately, the department said initial jobless claims increased by 4,000 last week, to 345,000, a gain that some economists say reflected the difficulty the government has in adjusting the data for seasonal automobile plant shutdowns.

"While the employment recovery will continue, there will remain much slack in the labor market," said Joshua Shapiro, an economist at MFR Inc. in New York. "This ought to result in continued modest readings from wage and salary costs."

The slowdown in wage and benefit costs reflected a significant decrease in the pace of benefit increases, which rose 1.8 percent, down from a 2.4 percent increase in the first quarter.

Since the beginning of the year, I have been telling you that the underlying fundamentals of this economy are not at all strong and I expected a slowdown beginning in Q3. This is one time when I hate it that I'm right.

Falling Through the Cracks

There are a number of stories about unaccounted for funds for Iraq, money "lost" by the DoD and 27 separate corruption investigations. Al Kamen's Inside the Loop column in the WaPo this morning has some valuable backstory. Kamen's column is inside the A section, towards the back, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and is as "insidery" as you can get in any of the dailies.

Simplifying the Pentagon Spreadsheet

By Al Kamen

Friday, July 30, 2004; Page A17

Last fall, urged by the administration to get some fast cash to Baghdad, Congress approved a quick infusion of $18.4 billion. But as reported earlier this month, only 2 percent of the money had been spent.

The data came from an unclassified weekly Pentagon report called "Iraq Status." The reports show how reconstruction efforts are going and how the money was flowing. A page for the Pentagon project and contracting office had columns listing how much money had been "apportioned," "committed," "obligated" and spent in various aid categories.

The Washington Post article noted that, as of June 22, nothing had been spent on construction, health care, sanitation or water projects, and that more money had been spent on administration costs than education, human rights and governance.

Some folks on the Hill were most unhappy with this.

Subsequent reports showed improvement, with a total of $458 million spent as of the July 20 report, though nothing had been spent on roads, bridges, construction, health care, water resources or sanitation. The Hill was still grumpy.

Finally, this silliness has stopped. Someone at the Pentagon appears to have hit on a simple yet elegant solution to the problem. The latest (July 27) report has taken care of any concerns. The column listing expenditures has disappeared.

Perfect. But a Pentagon spokesman says there are no secrets, and if you ask for the amount spent they'll be happy to tell you. It's now $668 million.

Maher on the Media

Tune In, Turn On and Decide

By Bill Maher, Bill Maher is host of HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher."

The media treat these conventions as if they're pointless interruptions of their real job, which is covering the Scott Peterson trial. No drama, no excitement.

Hey, you know what's exciting? It's exciting when politicians get drunk with power because people aren't keeping an eye on them. That's when the high jinks really begin: Who expected we'd invade Iraq because of 9/11? Unpredictable, whoo!

And by the way, it's good that these conventions are "produced." "Produced" is good. I like the produced version of the "Let It Be" album better. It's good that someone produces my show, and when I find out who it is, I'm gonna shake his hand! It's good when you produce a date: Most women like it when their boyfriends pick the restaurant and make the reservations. The postwar in Iraq is something that could have used a little more production value.

The point of "producing" political conventions is to make it easy for us to make a choice. In recent years, the parties have gone out of their way to give you their pitch in the one medium all Americans respect and can still understand, the infomercial — and yes, they produced it so as not to waste your time, or drag you away for too long from the challenges of the "Andy Dick Show."

They put on a pageant for you: "These are our faces, these are our voices, this is our vision of America's future" — like a car show, but instead of cars, they have ideas, ideas about where our country is going and about how the people who take such a huge chunk of our money are going to use it.

And you'd think, after all that's hit the fan since the last conventions, viewership would have gone up from 2000. What does John Kerry have to do to get your attention, fire Omarosa?

I'm not asking you to pore over issues and read everything that's out there; we can't even get our president to do that. But the conventions are one of the only times when the election isn't reduced to a war of sound bites and attack ads, one of your last chances to form an opinion that means something.

Americans don't get taught anything, but they get asked their opinions every day, so we get the impression that having an opinion is the same as knowing something. Which it isn't. And I've got the polls to back that up.

So instead of downgrading the conventions, let's elevate them so that campaigns are no longer reduced to just sound bites, and come November, I guarantee that voters will finally be able to make informed decisions based on speeches they TiVo'd but never got around to watching.

Amen. Television completely doesn't understand what the conventions are about. The coverage this year stank. The broadcast channels and the cable channels, even PBS turned it into "all about them," when it is all about us. The contempt television has for us was never on display more baldly.

The Whole World...

World media paying attention to U.S. election

By JIM MORRILL

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BOSTON - Although the American TV networks have cut back their coverage of the Democratic and Republican political conventions, international news organizations are paying closer attention than ever.

A record 1,700 international journalists covered this week's Democratic convention. Many said their audiences are tuned in because U.S. policies on war, terrorism and foreign relations are increasingly important to them.

"The elections are the political Olympics," said Diana Molineaux, a correspondent for Spain's Catalunya radio.

"It's one of the biggest international stories of the moment," said BBC producer Rajini Vaidyanathan. "And whether George Bush can stay in power has captured the imagination of a lot of people in Britain."

International journalists reporting on the convention and Sen. John Kerry's nomination have the added challenge of explaining America's political system. Electoral votes are a foreign notion to international audiences. Some journalists also found themselves frustrated by the scripted, four-day event, which they dismissed as Hollywood-shallow.

"There are foreign media here trying to cover the substance . ... There's no substance, what's the point?" asked Miroslav Konvalina, a correspondent for Czech radio.

International reporters examined how the outcome of the election could affect their countries and regions.

"Whether It's Bush or Kerry, Israel's Laughing," read Tuesday's headline in the Arab News, a Saudi-based English-language daily newspaper.

"For us they seem like look-alikes," said correspondent Khaled Batarfi. "Both are sons of (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon. Both are running their politics out of Tel Aviv, not Washington."

In the Arab world, "I suspect the majority would love to see change, even though a lot of Sen. Kerry's positions on the Arab-Israeli issue are not very encouraging," said Mohammed Alami, chief correspondent for Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV network that reaches 40 million viewers.

In Spain, which ousted a government that was closely allied with Bush after terrorists bombed a commuter train in Madrid in March, many people "will think pretty well of any Democrat who has a chance to unseat the president of the United States," said Molineaux, the correspondent for Spanish radio.

Gianni Riotta, a correspondent for Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper, said Italians were "mesmerized by the American presidential campaign, especially after the war."

Riotta's article on Thursday discussed "the triumph" of Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., Kerry's running mate, who spoke on Wednesday night.

Italians, he said, loved Edwards' speech about two Americas, one of the wealthy and another of people who struggle from paycheck to paycheck. "Italians don't understand how it's possible that such a rich, powerful country can't take care of its social problems," Riotta said.

The US is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma to the rest of the first world. As a nation, we are seen as large and rather clumsy adolescents who are unaware of the damage when we sweep the lamps off of the end tables. We seem stubborn in our reliance on "the invisible hand of the marketplace" to resolve our social problems, which has manifestly not worked, at least not yet. For all of our wealth and power, we score poorly in education, health, life span and a host of other social wellness scales, and that puzzles the rest of the world. We tolerate third world living conditions in our poorest communities and with our homeless. A citizen of Amsterdam or Brighton or Toronto or Auckland looks at us and shakes their head.

Iraq Friday Morning

Read Juan Cole. In fact, start every day by reading Juan Cole first. I do.

Iraqis Postpone Conference as Kidnappings Rise
By IAN FISHER and SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: July 30, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 - Iraq postponed a major national conference billed as one of its first steps toward democracy and national reconciliation on Thursday, as the epidemic of kidnappings widened sharply with insurgents announcing that they had kidnapped five more foreign hostages.

Kidnapping has grown into a major tactic in the conflict here, with roughly 20 people taken hostage since the Philippine government withdrew its troops from Iraq last week to save the life of an abducted Filipino truck driver.

The day after two Pakistani hostages were executed, a group calling itself the Death Squad of the Iraqi Resistance said Thursday that it had kidnapped four Jordanians and would take "appropriate measures" if the transport company they worked for did not shut down operations in Iraq, according to a videotape delivered to Dubai Television.

[Secretary of State Colin Powell made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Friday, flying into Iraq after visiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Reuters reported. He is the most senior American official to visit Iraq since the United States transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 28.]

Also on Thursday, a group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for killing several hostages, said it had kidnapped a Somali truck driver and threatened to behead him unless the Kuwaiti company he works for did not also cease operations here.

Meantime, a group that kidnapped seven truck drivers - three Indians, three Kenyans and one Egyptian - last week released a videotape showing a rifle pointed at the head of one terrified Indian, shown wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, as have several hostages who have been executed. A voice on the videotape threatened to kill him within 24 hours unless the captors' demands, which include the withdrawal of the hostages' Kuwait employer, were met.

Saudi Plan for Muslim Force in Iraq Gains in U.S.
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, July 29 - The Bush administration expressed interest on Thursday in a Saudi proposal to send an all-Muslim security force to Iraq, but foreign policy experts voiced skepticism that the plan would result in substantial contributions of troops.

The proposal, made to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell this week during a visit to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, aims to help stabilize Iraq and lend regional credibility to the interim government in Baghdad.

Some members of the coalition in Iraq are considering pulling out, having served through the June 28 transfer of authority to a new government. Ukraine, for example, said Thursday that it had begun talks with the United States and Poland on withdrawing its 1,600 troops.

Nations are also under pressure from terrorists in Iraq, which are increasingly using kidnapping and execution as a way to deter cooperation with the Americans and the interim government. Five American allies have withdrawn their troops, including the Philippines, which won the release of a hostage by departing ahead of schedule.

One possible contributor to a Muslim force, Pakistan, has engaged in high-level talks with Saudi officials about a role. But Pakistan was rocked by the news on Thursday that Islamist extremists had executed two Pakistani hostages in Iraq.

Mr. Powell, in an appearance on Thursday with Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, called the Saudi proposal "an interesting idea." He suggested that a Muslim force could provide security for facilities or protection for United Nations personnel.

Islamic States Discuss Muslim Force for Iraq

In Jakarta yesterday, Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said: “Our position remains that any possible Indonesian involvement, including dispatching our military personnel to Iraq, has to be within and under a UN framework.”

Yemen had offered earlier this month to help in a UN mission in Iraq, provided all coalition forces withdraw. Bahrain has said it was ready to send a naval force if asked by the new Iraqi government.

Commenting on the Muslim force proposal, Arab League envoy to Britain Ali Hamid said in London that the idea could gain international support as long as it was accompanied by a clear US commitment to withdraw from Iraq and was mandated by the United Nations Security Council.

Many Arab countries have indicated they would be willing to get more involved in Iraq if they can do so under the UN, rather than a perceived US, umbrella.

After the Lovin'

Reclaiming the Center
How Democrats Are Striking Back on 'Values'

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 30, 2004; Page A19

Since the late 1960s, the Republicans have often cast Democrats as living outside the American "mainstream," supporting exotic values popular in places such as San Francisco and, yes, here in Massachusetts, home to both Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy.

Sometimes directly and often indirectly, Republicans linked Democrats to flag burning, libertine personal values, indifference to family life and a preference for self-indulgence over hard work. In 1972 Richard Nixon's campaign came up with a snappy formula, deriding Democrats as the party of "acid, amnesty and abortion," amnesty referring to forgiveness of draft resisters. A similar line of attack helped create the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s, elected this president's father in 1988 and is being used relentlessly by the current president's campaign.

Bill Clinton had some success beating back the charges in the 1990s, largely by declaring that Democrats favored the same values as Republicans. But at this year's convention, the Democrats -- including, interestingly, Clinton himself -- scrapped the defensive approach and went on offense.

Thus emerged a major theme of this fall's campaign: that Republicans are a party of dividers who can win only by setting one group of Americans against another.

Clinton established the theme in his speech on the convention's first night. "They need a divided America," Clinton said of Republicans. "We don't." Clinton saw the country as favoring Democratic solutions on the practical issues of education, child care, job creation and tax fairness. Republicans thus need to bury such issues beneath controversies over gay rights, abortion and race.

A stout rejection of that sort of politics lay at the heart of Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama's remarkable keynote address. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America," Obama declared and then riffed on the division of the country between red, Republican states and blue, Democratic states. "We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states."

And vice presidential nominee John Edwards kept up the barrage, contrasting "the tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past" with "the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible."

Attacking divisiveness could yield multiple dividends in the fall. Having laid down their argument, Democrats can respond to Republican attacks with a breezy, Reaganesque "there they go again." The Kerry campaign expects President Bush to continue his withering assault on the Democratic candidate. By placing every Republican attack in the context of "old, hateful, negative politics," Democrats hope to raise the cost to Republicans of running the campaign that Bush's advisers will need to run if the president's popularity ratings don't improve.

But Democrats see the call for national unity as providing them an even larger benefit in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina argued that Americans felt "a sense of common purpose" after the terrorist assaults, are disappointed that the feeling of solidarity has ebbed and yearn to bring it back. Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota linked Bush directly to the loss of national cohesiveness. "Bush said he was going to be a uniter, not a divider," Conrad said, "and now it turns out that he's divided us at the very moment when we most need to be united."

It's commonly said that this convention was designed to "move the Democrats to the center." Actually, it was a convention designed to move the center toward the Democrats. Throughout the convention, the large screen above the podium showcased stories of Republicans who are now for Kerry and former Republicans who are now Democrats.

Since when has a Democratic convention featured so many retired generals? Since when have Democrats spoken so much about the needs of veterans, reservists and the nation's military personnel? Since when have Democrats argued so explicitly and vociferously that their approach to national security is both tougher and smarter than the Republican approach?

This was the convention of a party that thinks discontent with President Bush could move the political argument in a different direction and new constituencies the Democrats' way. A party so accustomed to beating back the attacks of others has made clear that this time it is taking the fight to its adversary.

I'll be pulling in "reaction" stories from papers across the country today. Here are some excerpts from the WaPo this morning, taking the temperature in Virginia, which is moving into "battleground" status for the fall.

Across State, Kerry Backers Sense a Shift
Echoing Warner's Words, Democrats Think Nominee Can Upend Decades of GOP Domination

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 30, 2004; Page A21

Democrats who gathered last night in bars and restaurants and at small house parties across Virginia to watch John F. Kerry accept their party's nomination bubbled with anticipation at the possibility that, finally, their vote for president might just matter again.

Earlier, Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) told a national audience what he and the leaders of the Massachusetts senator's campaign have been saying to pundits and reporters all week in Boston: that Virginia, which has not gone for a Democratic presidential candidate in four decades, is in play.

"Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years," Warner said in his convention speech. "Virginia has been wandering in the Republican desert for 40 years. But let me tell you: This Bush can't lead us to the promised land. This year, our wandering is over."

At Uncle Louie's in Norfolk, home to the world's largest naval base, Kerry supporters crowded around televisions to see the first Vietnam War veteran to become a major party nominee. It is at places such as Louie's -- a bar in a strip mall frequented by uniformed officers -- that Democrats are launching their drive to upend conventional wisdom.

The crowd there erupted when Kerry started with a salute.

"Yes, yes," they shouted moments later.

"He's slicing them up," said Wanda Byrd, whose husband is a retired naval officer. "Man, he is on fire, isn't he?" she asked her friends as the bar's crowd of about 120 rose out of their seats, waved flags and shouted approval.

Census figures show that more than one-third of the residents in some counties around Norfolk, which President Bush narrowly carried in 2000, are veterans. Many more are active-duty military men and women.

Audrey Weston, 47, the wife of a naval petty officer who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq, predicted that Kerry would carry Virginia because so many military families, like hers, are disillusioned with Bush.

"It's almost like they've been in a tunnel and they've just been awakened," she said.

Starting in 1968, the Democrat presidential nominee has always lost to the Republican in Virginia and neither major party has bothered to buy television ads, mail glossy fliers, stage rallies or hold news conferences. And as the candidates traveled across America, they usually skipped right over the commonwealth.

This year, though, Kerry strategists and leading Democrats in Virginia are convinced they have a shot at the state's 13 electoral votes because of dissatisfaction among veterans, lost jobs in rural areas and the changing demographics of Northern Virginia.

Virginia is rapidly becoming part of the New South. Northern Virginia, the Virginia suburbs of DC, are younger, tech-savvy and among the fastest growing areas in the nation. There is a thriving tech sector, rapidly growing defense contractors and "homeland security" firms (lean Repub) along with the predictable retail suburban and exurban mix. Virginia is home to the largest Naval base in the world at Hampton Roads, and the military presence is felt in the Pentagon population in Northern Virginia, as well. In short, this is a complex demographic, given the military's reaction to Bush this year, the left to libertarian leanings of the tech crowd and the historic conservatism of Southy Virginia which is dealing with serious unemployment. Virginia elected a techy Democratic millionaire governor two years ago. Mark Warner is popular in the state and brought it back from the brink of budget death.

I'd call my state leaning Bush but in play in November.

I Want Better Media

Triumph of the Trivial
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: July 30, 2004

Under the headline "Voters Want Specifics From Kerry," The Washington Post recently quoted a voter demanding that John Kerry and John Edwards talk about "what they plan on doing about health care for middle-income or lower-income people. I have to face the fact that I will never be able to have health insurance, the way things are now. And these millionaires don't seem to address that."

Mr. Kerry proposes spending $650 billion extending health insurance to lower- and middle-income families. Whether you approve or not, you can't say he hasn't addressed the issue. Why hasn't this voter heard about it?
....
Somewhere along the line, TV news stopped reporting on candidates' policies, and turned instead to trivia that supposedly reveal their personalities. We hear about Mr. Kerry's haircuts, not his health care proposals. We hear about George Bush's brush-cutting, not his environmental policies.

Even on its own terms, such reporting often gets it wrong, because journalists aren't especially good at judging character. ("He is, above all, a moralist," wrote George Will about Jack Ryan, the Illinois Senate candidate who dropped out after embarrassing sex-club questions.) And the character issues that dominate today's reporting have historically had no bearing on leadership qualities. While planning D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower had a close, though possibly platonic, relationship with his female driver. Should that have barred him from the White House?

And since campaign coverage as celebrity profiling has no rules, it offers ample scope for biased reporting.

Notice the voter's reference to "these millionaires." A Columbia Journalism Review Web site called campaigndesk.org, says its analysis "reveals a press prone to needlessly introduce Senators Kerry and Edwards and Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, as millionaires or billionaires, without similar labels for President Bush or Vice President Cheney."

As the site points out, the Bush campaign has been "hammering away with talking points casting Kerry as out of the mainstream because of his wealth, hoping to influence press coverage." The campaign isn't claiming that Mr. Kerry's policies favor the rich - they manifestly don't, while Mr. Bush's manifestly do. Instead, we're supposed to dislike Mr. Kerry simply because he's wealthy (and not notice that his opponent is, too). Republicans, of all people, are practicing the politics of envy, and the media obediently go along.

In short, the triumph of the trivial is not a trivial matter. The failure of TV news to inform the public about the policy proposals of this year's presidential candidates is, in its own way, as serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq.

P.S.: Another story you may not see on TV: Jeb Bush insists that electronic voting machines are perfectly reliable, but The St. Petersburg Times says the Republican Party of Florida has sent out a flier urging supporters to use absentee ballots because the machines lack a paper trail and cannot "verify your vote."

P.P.S.: Three weeks ago, The New Republic reported that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to announce a major terrorist capture during the Democratic convention. Hours before Mr. Kerry's acceptance speech, Pakistan announced, several days after the fact, that it had apprehended an important Al Qaeda operative.

Florida Republicans Tell Some Voters to Skip Touchscreens, Vote Absentee

By Brent Kallestad Associated Press Writer
Published: Jul 29, 2004

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Republican Gov. Jeb Bush has tried for months to persuade Florida voters touchscreen voting machines are reliable. His own party apparently hasn't gotten the message.

The state GOP paid for a flier critical of the new technology and sent it to some south Florida voters where a primary election is scheduled next month.

"The new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount," the message states. "Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today."

That's what Democrats and a coalition of civil rights groups have been saying in legal challenges, trying to force the state to provide a paper trail in case the touchscreen machines malfunction.

"It is insulting that the leadership's own party would believe that the system is broke," said Sharon Lettman Pacheco, spokeswoman for People for the American Way.

The machines are being used in 15 of the state's largest counties.

The governor, unaware of the mailing beforehand, wasn't happy.

Pakistan Holds Top Al Qaeda Suspect
Key Figure in 1998 Embassy Bombings Arrested After 10-Hour Shootout

By Kamran Khan
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, July 30, 2004; Page A10

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 30 -- Pakistan has captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is sought by the United States as a suspect in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, officials said Friday.

Ghailani, a Tanzanian citizen said to be in his early thirties, was seized early Sunday, along with his wife and five other African or Pakistani al Qaeda suspects, following a joint Pakistani-U.S. intelligence operation, senior Pakistani police and intelligence officials said. The capture followed a 10-hour shootout in the industrial city of Gujrat, 125 miles south of Islamabad.

"This is a big success," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said in an unusual late-night announcement on Pakistan's Geo television network. "More importantly, we are certain of gathering some latest intelligence on al Qaeda from him," Hayat said in an interview later.

The operation to capture Ghailani, who is on the list of the FBI's 22 most wanted terrorists, was supervised by agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and coordinated with CIA and FBI officials, according to an official in Punjab state who was present. The official said 240 Punjab policemen conducted the raid on a rented house in a middle-class neighborhood of Gujrat.

No U.S. official was visible on the scene, the official said.

In Washington, a senior FBI official said the capture "looks like the right guy." The FBI did not play a role in the raid, said the official, who declined to be identified because of FBI policies.

Reminder

Over on the right, there is a new button which takes you directly to the nomination form for the washingtonpost.com blog contest, one nomination per category to a customer. It's right next to the Paypal button (cough.) Below the "Search" box are links, including a new one to my resume, if you or your organization (in the DC Metro area) are in search of a writer/editor, fundraiser, Web content provider or chief cook and bottle washer. There's a link to my Amazon wishlist, too, which some thoughtful reader hit earlier this week, I think, as UPS brought me a rather nice package yesterday morning.

Speeches Open Thread

And whatever else is on your mind. Discuss, pontificate, bloviate, whatever.

UPDATE: First blush review: I thought he hit it out of the park, I may not feel that in the morning. I've never seen Kerry like this before. He's still awkward with his body, but he's doing things with his voice I've never heard before. If this is going to be our man on the stump, I love the smell of hope in the morning.

And the set up was brilliant: having his daughters frame him was FABULOUS. They did the humanizing thing in a way that Teresa simply couldn't, she's as much a policy wonk as he is. The girls were talking about Dad, and the little Spielberg video was the real into. It was pretty seamless.

As I said, this is first blush, and I was very emotional through the whole thing, I'll see how I feel in the morning after I've slept on it. And hassled my way through the DMV in the morning (yah, yah, I put it off and tomorrow is the drop dead day for my license so light posting.) We'll see. I'll leave some open threads for your reactions. I thought tonight was red meat, while sending out some pretty fine signals to the pursuadables.

See you in the morning.

--Melanie

Quiet Boston

Activists appear to save anger for NYC

By Marcella Bombardieri and Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | July 29, 2004

To prepare for the protesters expected to swarm Boston during the Democratic National Convention, security planners amassed a force of 5,000 law enforcement officers. The city built a razor-wired protest zone that attracted comparisons to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Suffolk County officials cleared enough jail cells and courtrooms to handle 2,500 arrests.

Total number of protest-related arrests so far this week: One.

As the convention culminates today, protesters are planning a bike ride, a flashlight peace vigil near the FleetCenter, and unpredictable "decentralized actions" throughout the city. But signs suggest that there simply aren't enough activists here to create the kind of chaos that hit Miami, Seattle, or even the major party conventions in Los Angeles and Philadelphia in 2000. Now the question on the minds of activists, police, and local residents is: Where are the protesters?

"Clearly, what this represents is that folks on the left have decided it would be counterproductive to protest the DNC," said Jason Pramas, a labor organizer from Cambridge who helped create the Boston Social Forum, which attracted 5,000 people last weekend for several days of lectures, discussions, and performances.

"At this moment you could call it a truce" with the Democrats, he added.

This attitude is a sharp change from 2000, when many in the booming antiglobalization movement saw both parties as equally distasteful. One group's name lampooned the candidates' interchangeability: "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)."

But this time, with an administration that many on the left blame for getting the country into a needless war, many progressives, radicals, and Greens are saving their protests for the Republican National Convention in New York. "We are confident the New York demonstrations will be quite massive," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of antiwar groups.

The biggest demonstration of DNC week was Sunday's antiwar rally; organizers said 3,000 people attended, but police now estimate the number at 700. By contrast, some of the antiwar rallies held across the country in the past year-and-a-half have drawn tens of thousands of people. At the previous Democratic National Convention, in Los Angeles, almost 200 protesters were taken into custody. About 390 were arrested at the last Republican convention, in Philadelphia.

In Boston, many activists say heavy police presence and the fortified "free speech zone" discouraged protesters from turning out. Some suggested police predictions were deliberately overblown.

"The real question for me is why Boston was manipulated into believing that hordes of protesters would descend on the city," Tom Hayden, who led protests at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, wrote in an e-mail to the Globe. "It plays into the politics of fear, suppresses civil liberties, and becomes a blank check for police overtime and the procurement of bone-crushing gadgets."

But authorities needed to be prepared, said Boston Police spokeswoman Beverly Ford. "We have studied demonstrations at the G8 [conference in Georgia], in Seattle, everyplace, and they're a good indicator of what we should expect here," she said.

Activists themselves seem to have overestimated possible turnout. Despite predictions of hundreds, even thousands, by some group members, a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the "free speech zone" attracted about 150 people. A "Close Down Guantanamo" rally in Copley Square yesterday brought out about 300.

Suffolk Lawyers for Justice sent home more than half of the attorneys it had available to handle arraignments of arrested protesters.

"We all would have liked to have seen more people out on the streets," Cagan said. "One way to hold on to your right to protest is to actually keep doing it."

Cagan's group, however, brought only a few activists to Boston. In New York it is sponsoring an antiwar rally for which it received a permit for 250,000 people.

Get a clue, BoGlo: while the left isn't particularly happy with John Kerry's stance on the war, this year he's our guy. The other side, however, has sent 140,000 of our troops into harm's way, and that is going to fuel some protests in New York. Oh, yes.

Sibel Edmonds Redux

Whistle-Blowing Said to Be Factor in an F.B.I. Firing
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: July 29, 2004

WASHINGTON, July 28 - A classified Justice Department investigation has concluded that a former F.B.I. translator at the center of a growing controversy was dismissed in part because she accused the bureau of ineptitude, and it found that the F.B.I. did not aggressively investigate her claims of espionage against a co-worker.

The Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the allegations by the translator, Sibel Edmonds, "were at least a contributing factor in why the F.B.I. terminated her services," and the F.B.I. is considering disciplinary action against some employees as a result, Robert S. Mueller III, director of the bureau, said in a letter last week to lawmakers. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

Ms. Edmonds worked as a contract linguist for the F.B.I. for about six months, translating material in Turkish, Persian and Azerbaijani. She was dismissed in 2002 after she complained repeatedly that bureau linguists had produced slipshod and incomplete translations of important terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11 attacks. She also accused a fellow Turkish linguist in the bureau's Washington field office of blocking the translation of material involving acquaintances who had come under F.B.I. suspicion and said the bureau had allowed diplomatic sensitivities with other nations to impede the translation of important terrorism intelligence.

Look at that last sentence carefully. There was, apparently, an active espionage program going on in the middle of the translation operation. This whole shop looks like a disaster. I hope the FBI has gotten in cleaned up because we kinda need translations in those languages.

Impolite Fiction

Saudis Propose Islamic Force in Iraq
Idea Pushed as Way to Expedite Pullout of U.S.-Led Military Coalition

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 29, 2004; Page A16

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia, July 28 -- Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, in talks Wednesday with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, proposed the creation of an Islamic force to help stabilize Iraq and potentially quicken the withdrawal of the U.S.-led military coalition, according to senior Arab and U.S. diplomats.

Saudi Arabia has spent about three weeks exploring the possibility of an Islamic force with Arab and Muslim countries and the United Nations. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud Faisal, discussed specifics of the idea with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan last week in Vienna, according to a senior Saudi diplomat.

Saudi officials said they launched the initiative to address mounting concerns in the Islamic world about the ongoing deployment of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq as well as Saudi Arabia's own security concerns.

"We're taking this initiative because a) we want to help the Iraqi people get back on their feet and reclaim their sovereignty as quickly as possible, b) because there is a tremendous desire in the Arab and Muslim world to help Iraq and help the Iraqi people get back on their feet and c) we're doing this because instability in Iraq has a negative impact on Saudi Arabia and stability in Iraq has a very positive impact on Saudi Arabia. We want to stabilize the situation in Iraq," said Adel Jubeir, chief foreign policy adviser to Abdullah.

A senior Saudi official said that no countries had signed on but that Pakistan, Malaysia, Algeria, Bangladesh and Morocco were among strong possibilities. Countries that border Iraq, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, would not be included, he said.

The State Department, which has been in charge of Iraq policy since the June 28 handover of political power to an interim government, reacted positively to the concept.

"We discussed some ideas with the Saudis that they have been discussing with others about how to facilitate the deployment of troops from Muslim countries not bordering on Iraq," the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, told reporters traveling with Powell. "The goal they have is to help Iraqis establish security. It's a goal we support. And we'll keep talking to them about it."

A senior State Department official traveling with Powell said the United States was interested in exploring specifics of the plan. He initially described the Islamic force as "supplemental" but later retracted that and said the force could help "lower the demand" for coalition forces. The coalition has no Arab members.

Ain't gonna happen, not a chance. This is pure image-buffing before the RNC.

AP Spouts RNC Talking Points

Stephen Crockett of DemocraticTalkRadio sends along this article:

AP Story Giving Bush Electoral Lead Is Faulty

Recently, the Associated Press ran a story that was widely published in newspapers and on the Internet titled, “Bush Leads Kerry In Electoral Votes” that could have been written by the Bush campaign. The assignment of states to candidates, the headline and the conclusions were all simply wrong. The Associated Press should print a retraction and work to see that it is widely published.

Using their numbers, the solid Bush states (even including the faulty assignment of Tennessee) have only 144 electoral votes. The solid Kerry states (even without adding Pennsylvania) give Kerry 168 electoral votes.

The AP ran this story last Saturday and it was picked up everywhere--Google reveals 120K hits--so this extremely misleading perception has been disseminated everywhere. But now you know the truth.

Bigotry Remains

Arab Americans Report Abuse
U.-Mich. Study Finds Nearly 60 Percent Fear for Families

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 29, 2004; Page A05

Fifteen percent of Arab Americans in the Detroit area said they have experienced harassment or intimidation since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and a significant number wish other Americans understood them better, according to a University of Michigan report to be released today.

Derogatory comments -- "Go back where you came from!" or "Ooh, are you a member of al Qaeda?" -- were the most common form of abuse. Others alleged job discrimination and a small number reported physical assaults, researchers said.

Forty-two percent of Muslim Arabs interviewed for the survey in Detroit -- an area with one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the nation -- feel their religion is not respected by mainstream society. Nearly 60 percent said they worry more about their families' future than before the attacks.

The report comes as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, among other groups, relays a steady stream of allegations of poor treatment of Muslims in this country. Many Muslims have complained that harassment and unfair law enforcement tactics are byproducts of the Bush administration's battle against terrorism.

Wayne Baker, the Institute for Social Research professor who led the Michigan study, said Arabs and Chaldeans -- mostly Iraqi Christians -- suffered from misinformation and stereotypes that flowed into a void after the terrorist attacks.

"After 9/11, it was very clear that most Americans knew very little about Arab Americans," Baker said. The report also found that 50 percent of respondents believe U.S. news coverage is biased against Muslims.

Researcher Sally Howell said violent incidents were few, with 3 percent reporting a "serious" negative experience. One said a relative had been beaten. Another said a neighbor had held a gun on his family.

Some of the 1,016 Arab American respondents reported harassment at shopping malls or job supervisors turning cold. They included complaints such as one from a store worker who said a customer often greeted him with the crack "How's Osama doing?"

Howell said the news was not all bad. Thirty-three percent of respondents said a non-Arab had offered a helping hand or a positive comment since the Sept. 11 attacks.

This is a discouraging article which goes on to survey non-Arab American attitudes toward Arab Americans and finds a great deal more prejudice than I would have hoped for.

Making Nice

Meant Well, Messed Up
By THEODORE C. SORENSEN

Published: July 29, 2004

Only 96 days remain to take back our country from the most secretive, hypocritical and dangerous band of ideologues in our governmental history. Let no doubt remain; this is the most important election of our time. Either we take the road forward to national unity and international cooperation, or we fall further into despair, division and dangerous isolation.

Our nation cannot go on like this - squandering brave young lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary war, losing old friends and creating new enemies, abandoning the middle class while making the rich richer and saddling our children with unsustainable debt and pollution.

The Kerry-Edwards administration, unlike the Cheney-Bush agenda, will invest in jobs, health care and education, not Halliburton and other corporate cronies. We will practice transparency, not evasion. When trouble comes, we will find solutions, not scapegoats. We will protect our borders without bending our Constitution.

I am proud to have led Americans under fire, proud to have fought hard in the Senate for hard-working families; proud to have protected the environment without sacrificing jobs; proud to have prosecuted corporate predators; proud to have devoted my life to public service and the search for peace, and proud that I am the only presidential nominee this year who can make any of those statements.

Mr. Bush, you meant well and tried your best. But by weakening our alliances, our economy, our national unity and global respect for our values, you have weakened our security. Too many American lives have been lost already and too many more are at increased risk. We can and must do better. We can restore our security, our economy and our global standing. I beseech thee, in the name of all we hold dear, go home before you do any more harm.

Ted's making nice. I have no evidence, anywhere, that Bushco was ever well meaning but simply misguided. To the contrary, the evidence is that this is the most ruthless group of blackguards to ever enter politics. They have an agenda and they started working it before the inauguration.

Working for Less

I.R.S. Says Americans' Income Shrank for 2 Consecutive Years
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Published: July 29, 2004

The overall income Americans reported to the government shrank for two consecutive years after the Internet stock market bubble burst in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II, newly disclosed information from the Internal Revenue Service shows.

The total adjusted gross income on tax returns fell 5.1 percent, to just over $6 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average incomes declined even more, by 5.7 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, the income of all Americans fell 9.2 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the new I.R.S. data.

While the recession that hit the economy in 2001 in the wake of the market plunge was considered relatively mild, the new information shows that its effect on Americans' incomes, particularly those at the upper end of the spectrum, was much more severe. Earlier government economic statistics provided general evidence that incomes suffered in the first years of the decade, but the full impact of the blow and what groups it fell hardest on were not known until the I.R.S. made available on its Web site the detailed information from tax returns.

The unprecedented back-to-back declines in reported incomes was caused primarily by the combination of the big fall in the stock market and the erosion of jobs and wages in well-paying industries in the early years of the decade.

In the past, overall personal income rose from one year to the next with relentless monotony, the growth rate changing in response to fluctuations in economic activity but almost never falling.

But now, with many more ordinary employees joining high-level executives in having part of their compensation dependent on stock options and bonus plans, a volatile and relatively unpredictable new element has been introduced to the incomes of millions of workers.

"Risks used to be confined largely to executives and business owners with large incomes,'' said Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University who studies wealth and income.

"But now for many people with more modest incomes their earnings are more volatile,'' Mr. Wolff added, leaving them more vulnerable to losing pay they count on to meet regular expenses like mortgage payments, car loans and day-to-day living costs.

The new data also helps explain why personal income taxes, the government's most important source of revenue, are subject to much greater fluctuations than in the past. It may help analysts do a better job in predicting changes in government receipts and provide businesses with clues to help anticipate bigger ups-and-downs in spending for their goods and services.

Before the recent drop, the last time reported incomes fell for even one year was in 1953. The only other time since World War II that the I.R.S. reported an interruption in income gains was from 1947 to 1949, but that was because of changes in the tax law at the time that affected how income was reported rather than an actual fall.

From 2000 to 2002, individual income taxes fell 18.8 percent, more than three times the decline in adjusted gross incomes, the I.R.S.'s latest statistical reports show. (Adjusted gross income is the broadest category of income taxpayers report to the government, excluding only a small portion of income in other forms, notably interest on tax-free bonds.)

This is shocking. That vague sense of unease that most of us have felt for several years has a statistical underpinning: we really are getting poorer. The Bandit Prince and his Merry Band of Thieves have accelerated the pace at which this is happening, but the privileging of wealth over work as tax policy started with Reagan.

Still the Economy

Oil Price Hits Record Over Yukos Troubles

By Justin Blum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 29, 2004; Page A01

Crude oil prices jumped to record levels yesterday as already jittery international oil markets reacted to turmoil at Russian's largest petroleum producer.

Tight supplies and fears of global terrorism have kept the cost of crude and gasoline hovering near all-time highs for months, and some analysts said prices at the pump may soon rise further because of yesterday's spike.

The price of benchmark crude oil for September delivery rose $1.06, to $42.90 a barrel, the highest recorded level on the New York Mercantile Exchange since the exchange began offering the contracts in 1983.

Traders were acting on reports that Yukos Oil Co. might have to shut down production within several days as part of the Russian government's effort to seize company assets. A top Yukos official said that while the company's production subsidiaries had received a notice forbidding the sale of company property, he did not believe it would affect crude oil sales. [See story, Page A18.]

Yukos produces about 1.7 million barrels oil a day, or about 2 percent of the world's crude oil.

Oil traders said that prices were also pressured yesterday by new Department of Energy statistics showing that domestic gasoline and heating oil inventories were lower than had been hoped. "There was nothing pointing downward in price and almost everything pointing upward," said Eric Bolling, an independent energy trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

This volitility isn't good for W and it has implications for job growth, which has been soft since June. Financial analyst Barry Ritholtz says:

"Ned Davis Research did a recent study on post-World War II presidential campaigns and determined that while "job growth does not guarantee a victory, sluggish job growth historically has hurt the incumbent party." According to the study's data, the party in power lost the presidency whenever the change in nonfarm payrolls during the president's term was below 5%. This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, but rather an incumbent vs. a challenger issue.

In light of these data, ask yourself: Are politics roiling the market, or are the economy and the market ailing the politicians? . . . While it may not always be "the economy, stupid," incumbents who ignore economic data do so at their own peril."

Back in the Saddle

Former NPR Host Bob Edwards To Be XM's New Morning Star

By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 29, 2004; Page A01

Radio host Bob Edwards, who drew millions of listeners to National Public Radio for three decades but was demoted earlier this year, is taking his signature voice to a competing radio universe, according to Edwards and executives of Washington-based XM Satellite Radio.

Starting Oct. 4, Edwards will host his own morning show on a new channel being launched by XM, as the growing subscription radio service makes its move into public-radio programming.

Edwards, who was unceremoniously dumped as anchor of NPR's "Morning Edition" in March, prompting widespread public protests, will bring the blend of news, talk and interviews he was famous for at NPR to the new "Bob Edwards Show," airing 8 to 9 a.m. daily -- opposite "Morning Edition." The show will repeat immediately afterward.

"They want to give me a program, so I can continue to host and be heard every day instead of occasionally, as I would have been at NPR," Edwards said Tuesday while driving around Maine as part of a three-month book tour/public radio fundraising effort that ends this weekend.

"It's also new. It's like being at NPR when I joined NPR in 1974. It was less than three years old -- as old as XM is now. I get to be a pioneer again. How often does someone get that opportunity twice?"

Edwards, 57, had agreed to remain at NPR as a correspondent -- he was expected to return to work shortly -- but had hinted recently that he might be moving on. What NPR didn't know, however, was that Edwards had been won over by the largest satellite radio network in the country. After developing its own music programming in its first three years, XM is pursuing its ambition to distribute public-radio programming and its own original shows in the public radio vein.

With that in mind, XM President and CEO Hugh Panero, who has been developing the new channel (XM Channel 133, premiering Sept. 1), heavily wooed Edwards in hopes his presence would expand XM's subscriber base (By the end of his 25 years as anchor, Edwards drew 13 million early-morning listeners to NPR's "Morning Edition" every week). XM, which offers more than 100 channels, currently has 2.1 million subscribers, who pay $9.99 per month for the nationwide service. An XM receiver that can be switched from home to car to boombox costs $99.

XM Satellite Radio has yet to officially announce the Edwards deal. But Panero, reached on vacation with his family yesterday, could not hide his excitement.

"Bob Edwards is a guy I respect, a guy who has done nothing but contribute his entire life to public radio, and continues to offer great value to his listeners," Panero said. "I could not be more thrilled to be able to offer him a place to continue to do what he does extremely well."

NPR management, which has acknowledged that the Edwards move was mishandled, issued a statement after news of the deal leaked yesterday: "We understand that Bob has decided to end his distinguished tenure at NPR. We wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor and thank him for the contributions he has made to public radio."

Edwards -- who will be working with former NPR producer Mark Schramm -- is still in the early stages of developing the show's format.

"It'll be loose," he said. "It'll be long interviews, short interviews, and then maybe departments. . . . You've got to have the news . . . it's not going to be all features, yet it's not going to be the Financial Times, either."

Panero hopes the show will anchor a still-developing lineup of programming, some of it created by XM and some coming from public-radio providers, including Public Radio International, American Public Media (an arm of Minnesota Public Radio) and WBUR in Boston. NPR has an exclusive distribution agreement with Sirius, the other major satellite radio network, whose subscription base is a fraction of XM's.

The people at XM "get radio," Edwards said. "They're excited about it. They remember how it was and they want to go off in new directions and be part of radio's future. With all those channels, you can do both, of course, and that's exciting."

Can NPR's screwup become XM's big success? We'll see. I'm going to have to buy one of these radios to find out if my favorite morning voice for 30 years can craft his way in a new medium. We're all doing it.

Reminder

Over on the right, there is a new button which takes you directly to the nomination form for the washingtonpost.com blog contest, one nomination per category to a customer. It's right next to the Paypal button (cough.) Below the "Search" box are links, including a new one to my resume, if you or your organization (in the DC Metro area) are in search of a writer/editor, fundraiser, Web content provider or chief cook and bottle washer. There's a link to my Amazon wishlist, too, which some thoughtful reader hit earlier this week, I think, as UPS brought me a rather nice package this morning.

From Auckland: Throw the Bums Out

A reader in New Zealand sent me this, telling me that this columnist is the most conservative at the New Zealand Herald. I don't feel that much commentary from me is necessary. The whole world really is watching.

Garth George: The best place for George W. Bush is back at the ranch

29.07.2004
COMMENT

Back in 2000 I hailed the election to the presidency of George W. Bush, mainly because he was a Christian. I should have known better.

I must have forgotten that religion and politics don't ever mix; and that too many Christians equate conservative moral values with conservative - indeed, extreme hard-right-wing - economic policies.

Bush has been no exception and the effect of his Administration, not just on the international scene but on America domestically, has been nothing short of disastrous.

While I have no problem with the idea that thugs like Saddam Hussein ought to be dealt with, I nowadays seriously question Bush's motives in starting that pre-emptive war.

In light of new evidence - particularly the investigations into the political and bureaucratic omissions and cock-ups before September 11, 2001 - I have concluded that he did so simply because he had become obsessed with proving himself to his Daddy by finishing off what Daddy had started.

I can see no end to the fiasco in Iraq, which is sad not just for the long-suffering Iraqis but for Americans as well. Not that they don't have enough to worry about at home. And the things that are troubling Americans are the same sorts of things that are worrying many New Zealanders.

All of which persuades me that Bush is a mediocre, common, inarticulate and visionless President, the puppet of a powerful cabal of neo and crytpo-fascists.

He is, according to an American friend of mine, "a suit puffed up by the likes of [Vice-President] Cheney, [Defence Secretary] Rumsfeld, [Deputy Defence Secretary] Wolfowitz et al. His USA Patriot Act is his crowning glory - the worst invasion of individual rights and privacy since the Americans interned the innocent Japanese during World War II. If you speak out against it, you are branded a traitor".

The agenda of this powerful group which cocoons a rather dull-witted President, my mate says, is simple. Among other things it includes: pre-emptive warfare; despoiling the environment to plunder resources; transferring wealth to an elite, untaxed, hereditary upper-class; moving the goals of corporations (especially the multinational conglomerates) ahead of the common good; and getting into bed with the likes of the Saudis.

But it is the effect of Administration policies on ordinary Americans - people like you and me - that really strikes a chord.

Says my friend: "The shift of money away from the middle-class to the upper-classes is something you have to see to believe. Ever since Reagan the middle-class has been on the ropes, having lost its purchasing power - which really means loss of independence, health care, education, travel, security in old age, new cars every three years, upward mobility, and all those things that characterised the American way of life in earlier years."

He says a brief populism emerged under President Clinton "but that was quickly snuffed out by soaring corporate profits, dwindling security for the middle-class, of whom I am one, and a real cascade of money uphill to the rich, super rich, and seriously rich like Bill Gates - a return, really, of the gilded Victorian age".

All over America, he says, the middle-class has descended, and continues to descend, to the status of the "working poor". He admits he is blessed that he and his wife own their own home - something that has become harder and harder for middle-class folk to do - and have jobs with health insurance, "which has become a fleeting commodity for the American working-class".

Education, he says, went out the window with Ronald Reagan, and now all the middle-class can do is get "loans" instead of scholarship money, "so when their children graduate from college to nab that $25,000 job they already owe over $100,000 in education loans which they may not be able to fully pay off in their lifetimes".

In spite of being well up on the middle-class salary scale, he says that if he had to send his two daughters to university today, he couldn't afford to do it.

"Something is wrong here," he says. "Medical insurance is a scandal throughout the country, which is the only significant industrial nation in the world with no national healthcare plan. Yet our home is now worth 700 per cent more today than we paid for it." Sound familiar? Of course it does.

Substitute Roger (Douglas) for Ronald (Reagan) and my mate might as well be recording the tale of the New Zealand middle-class over the past 20 years - and the cabal that surrounded Douglas had the cheek to celebrate the fact with a big party a few weeks ago.

There is no doubt that Bush has to go, not just for the good of Americans but for the safety of the world at large.

What? No WMD?

A tip from reader rw:

The real reasons Bush went to war

WMD was the rationale for invading Iraq. But what was really driving the US were fears over oil and the future of the dollar

John Chapman
Wednesday July 28, 2004
The Guardian

There were only two credible reasons for invading Iraq: control over oil and preservation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Yet the government has kept silent on these factors, instead treating us to the intriguing distractions of the Hutton and Butler reports.
....
Over the past 15 years, the overall US deficit with the rest of the world has risen to $2,700bn - an abuse of its privileged currency position. Although about 80% of foreign exchange and half of world trade is in dollars, the euro provides a realistic alternative. Euro countries also have a bigger share of world trade, and of trade with Opec countries, than the US.

In 1999, Iran mooted pricing its oil in euros, and in late 2000 Saddam made the switch for Iraqi oil. In early 2002 Bush placed Iran and Iraq in the axis of evil. If the other Opec countries had followed Saddam's move to euros, the consequences for Bush could have been huge. Worldwide switches out of the dollar, on top of the already huge deficit, would have led to a plummeting dollar, a runaway from US markets and dramatic upheavals in the US.

Bush had many reasons to invade Iraq, but why did Blair join him? He might have squared his conscience by looking at UK oil prospects. In 1968, when North Sea oil was in its infancy, as private secretary to the minister of power I wrote a report on oil policy, advocating changes like the setting up of a British national oil company (as was done). My proposals found little favour with the BP/Shell-supporting officials, but Richard Marsh, the then minister, pressed them and the petroleum division was expanded into an operations division and a planning division.

Sadly, when I was promoted out of private office the free-trading petroleum officials conspired to block my posting to the planning division, where I would surely have advocated a prudent exploitation of North Sea resources to reduce our dependence on the likes of Iraq. UK North Sea oil output peaked in 1999, and has since fallen by one-sixth. Exports now barely cover imports, and we shall shortly be a net oil importer. Supporting Bush might have been justified on geo-strategic grounds.

Oil and the dollar were the real reasons for the attack on Iraq, with WMD as the public reason now exposed as woefully inadequate. Should we now look at Bush and Blair as brilliant strategists whose actions will improve the security of our oil supplies, or as international conmen? Should we support them if they sweep into Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia, or should there be a regime change in the UK and US instead?

If the latter, we should follow that up by adopting the pious aims of UN oversight of world oil exploitation within a world energy plan, and the replacement of the dollar with a new reserve currency based on a basket of national currencies.

The 9-11 Commission Tour

Force of 9/11 Panel Is Felt
Kerry wants to extend the bipartisan group's charter until 2006. Bush aides say the White House has accelerated a review of its findings.

By Josh Meyer And Matea Gold, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The juggernaut known as the Sept. 11 commission gathered momentum and influence Tuesday as Sen. John F. Kerry called for extending its charter until 2006 and a Senate oversight committee moved up its first hearing on reforming U.S. counterterrorism agencies to later this week.

Campaigning in Norfolk, Va., Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, proposed keeping the independent panel of congressionally appointed commissioners together for at least another 18 months so they can forcefully advocate for their 41 recommendations and issue regular progress reports.

In response, Bush administration officials reiterated that they are accelerating a review of the commission's 567-page report, which was released Thursday. Several Bush aides said the president and his staff are working to adopt at least some of the commission's recommendations in August.

Some commission officials questioned whether Kerry's suggestion was practical. Though panel members plan to tour the country pushing their proposals, the commission's charter expires Aug. 26, and it wasn't clear where the money would come from to keep the group intact for so long or whether its members and staff would agree to do so.

But the mere suggestion that a blue-ribbon panel become a semi-permanent part of the landscape demonstrated the surprising political effect the commission has managed to wield since it published its final report last week.

Kerry had immediately embraced the group's recommendations. After President Bush's initial lukewarm response, congressional Republicans pushed him to get out in front of a groundswell of public support for the commission's ideas.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, for instance, showed that more than six in 10 Americans approve of the congressionally established commission's work.

Great. I want those commissioners out there talking about what went wrong. They can go ahead a talk about what Clinton did wrong--he isn't running for president--as long as they keep Bushco's indifference to terrorism in front of everybody's eyes and ears all the way to November.

Abu Ghraib

U.S. General Witnessed Abuses, Iraqi Says

Associated Press
Wednesday, July 28, 2004; Page A02

The American general who headed the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib personally witnessed abuses there, an Iraqi man alleged in a federal lawsuit protesting his treatment.

In a videotaped deposition from Iraq played yesterday, Saddam "Sam" Saleh Aboud said he endured beatings at the prison. During one session, he said, his hood was removed and he saw Army Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski.

Aboud identified Karpinski in a news magazine photograph that his lawyer, Michael Hourigan, showed him.

"He was adamant that there was an occasion when he was being tortured, in Tier 1A, when she was present and watching and laughing as he was being tortured," Hourigan said. He said Aboud did not know Karpinski's identity until he told him.

"He knew she was a supervisor, because she had a star on her hat and she was in an American uniform," Hourigan said. "He said the other soldiers would defer to her."

Neither Karpinski nor her lawyer returned several telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking comment.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Joseph Yoswa, said it would be inappropriate for him to comment on the pending litigation.

It won't go away. WaPo is running it inside, but on A2, not buried. I can't believe how foolish the DoD is being with letting this fester: we know Sy Hersh has more stuff and he controls the timing. If I were Rumsfeld, I would have dumped this completely early in the spring and counted on the lousy memory of the American voter.

Boiled Down

Dumbing Him Down
The networks condense John Kerry's foreign-policy speech to 45 words (or less), and the public doesn't know what he stands for. Imagine that.

By Todd Gitlin

Is it a huge surprise that American multitudes say they don’t know what John Kerry and the Democrats stand for? How would they know? And who bears responsibility?
....
Meanwhile -- third point about what the candidate and his supporters say and when they say it -- it’s not as though Kerry has been exactly quiet. The pundits may roll their eyes at Kerry’s prolixity, but the networks aren’t exactly giving Americans more than a nibble. Take the gigantic question of foreign policy. George W. Bush’s White House, Kerry said in Seattle on May 27, has “looked to force before exhausting diplomacy; they bullied when they should have persuaded. They've gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole team. They have hoped for the best when they should have prepared for the worst. They've made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous world. In short, they have undermined the legacy of generations of American leadership, and that is what we must restore, and that is what I will restore.

Kerry went on in this vein for 3,500 words. And the night of this speech, how many did America’s still dominant news channels convey? ABC: 28 words. NBC: 42 words. CBS: 43 words.

And what's the big news on CNN this afternoon? Those new headsets that Blitzer et al are wearing on the floor of the Convention.

File this under Brad de Long's "why oh why can't we get a better news media."

Reminder

Over on the right, there is a new button which takes you directly to the nomination form for the washingtonpost.com blog contest, one nomination per category to a customer. It's right next to the Paypal button (cough.) Below the "Search" box are links, including a new one to my resume, if you or your organization (in the DC Metro area) are in search of a writer/editor, fundraiser, Web content provider or chief cook and bottle washer. There's a link to my Amazon wishlist, too, which some thoughtful reader hit earlier this week, I think, as UPS brought me a rather nice package this morning.

President 2012

Obama ROCKED last night. Here is the transcript.

Liberation

In Iraqi Homes, A Constant Battle Just to Stay Cool
Energy Rationing Prompts Rudimentary Alternatives

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 28, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, July 27 -- In the oppressive swelter of the Iraqi summer, where temperatures reach 110 degrees by morning rush hour, life in thousands of run-down apartments and shops in this once-modern capital revolves around a primitive routine for heat survival.

This is the second summer since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and people here widely expected power to be restored by now. Instead, the city's electricity shuts off four or five times a day under a government energy-rationing scheme while officials struggle to revive a power system ravaged by war, vandalism and years of neglect.

When the lights die and the air stops moving, Thakaa Abrar, 45, picks up a newspaper and begins fanning her husband, a customs worker bedridden by a stroke. Her refrigerator is almost empty, a precaution against spoilage, and she will buy only enough food to cook for supper.

Her daughter Duniya, 21, fills dozens of soft drink bottles with water, ready to pour into an ancient cooler that pushes air through a filter of wet wood shavings. Even at night, someone must get up every 15 minutes to empty another bottle into the contraption.

"This is no way for a family to live. We are tired. Everyone is tired, because it is impossible to sleep," said Abrar, offering visitors a tray of warm soft drinks in her cramped apartment. "We could never afford to buy a generator. When the pipes break, I have to beg for water in the shops. And with all this terrorism, I can't even let my daughters go out for ice cream."

Even in a place accustomed to stultifying summers, the heat seems especially rankling to Baghdad residents this season. In the streets, where traffic is perpetually jammed and many cars are without air conditioning, tempers and radiators frequently boil over in the long lines at checkpoints set up by U.S. Army patrols and Iraqi police.

In the shops, merchants depend on daily supplies of ice blocks, produced round-the-clock in local factories and delivered early in the morning on dripping flatbed trucks or wooden handcarts. The price of ice, once about 25 cents a block, has shot up since most factories had to purchase large generators last year to keep up production; now a single block can cost $2 retail on delivery.

Calling it "energy rationing" is a misnomer. There is less electricity, much less, than before the war. The quality of life for the ordinary Iraqi is a whole lot worse than before "liberation." It's worth spending a couple of minutes to think about the word liberty, and what it is worth when you don't have safe water, employment, safe streets or the ability to sleep at night.

Bloody Day

68 Dead in Blast Near Iraqi Market, Police Station
In a Separate Incident, 35 Insurgents Killed in Firefight Near Suwayrah

By Pamela Constable and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 28, 2004; 7:58 AM

BAGHDAD, July 28 -- An apparent suicide bomber plowed a vehicle into a crowd outside a police station Wednesday morning killing and injuring scores of people in the city of Baqubah, according to initial reports provided by Iraqi officials.

The Iraqi Ministry of Health put the number of dead at 68 and said the number of injured was at least 40 and perhaps 70.

The casualties included men who were lined up seeking jobs with the police, passengers in a bus that was passing nearby and many bystanders on the street, according to early reports. The bomber, witnesses told wire services, was driving a minivan or a small bus.

While the estimates of dead and injured tend to vary in the hours after attacks, the current number would make it the worst attack since the interim government of Iraq took office on June 28.

Today's attack follows a pattern established by insurgents of targeting police stations and other government installations in an attempt to discourage Iraqis from going to work for the American-backed government.

In recent weeks, insurgents have also killed half a dozen senior Iraqi officials in targeted assassinations.

Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, was the site of numerous attacks against U.S. forces in the months prior to the handover of political authority.

Reuters television showed pictures of at least a dozen dead bodies scattered across a street, some of them still on fire. A severely wounded man, his clothes burnt and torn and his body covered in blood, sat amongst smoldering ruins with several dead, some of whom looked like children, lying near him.

Also Wednesday, Reuters reported that a rocket hit a busy Baghdad street, wounding several people, witnesses and hospital officials said.

Politics have blown Iraq off the TV. Bad things continue to happen. This was a particularly awful day. This was another attack against the indigenous police, and anybody else who happened to be on the street.

August in New York

Of Grass Roots and Protests

With the Republican convention about one month away, the city has so far kept protesters off the Great Lawn in Central Park. Organizers of a large protest planned for Aug. 29 were denied its use. Park officials said the 250,000 people organizers expect would do too much damage to the grass and surrounding foliage. Then the National Organization for Women wanted the 13-acre lawn for a rally of 50,000 - far fewer than the 85,000 people who went to the Dave Matthews concert last year. Again, the city said no. It made us wonder why the city was so intent on keeping free speech off the grass.

City officials seem to have two sets of rules- one for approved music lovers, who attend warm-weather events by the tens of thousands - and another for political activity. The latter, of course, is protected by the Constitution. Yet city officials lack compelling reasons for denying protesters' requests to use parts of the park, especially the Great Lawn.

Granted, millions were spent to bring back the lawn from its scraggly days. But much of that money was spent to ensure exceptional durability. Resilient Kentucky bluegrass sod was planted in a soil mix with coarse sand mined in eastern Long Island - a proven base for sturdy golf courses. It also drains quickly, which makes officials' complaints that the protests lack rain dates seem curious.

The largest of the planned protests will be allowed to march past Madison Square Garden the day before the convention opens there. The marchers will then stretch along the West Side Highway at the city's edge. The site lacks an open area to see and hear speakers but is certainly better than the awfully named "free speech zone" at the Democratic convention in Boston - a dirt field under a highway overpass surrounded by barbed wire and chain-link fencing.

NOW will be able to use the East Meadow, on the northeast edge of Central Park. According to Rita Haley, president of NOW's New York chapter, the organization agreed to the East Meadow after park officials committed to repairing holes and gaps on its grounds. There's no such hazard on the Great Lawn, but the chief concern of city officials seems to be aesthetics, not ankles.

It is understandable that those who labored - and those who gave large contributions - to make the park more beautiful would feel a sense of ownership. But the park, no matter how elegant the private residences that line it, is a public space, not a gated community's playground.

The protesters have a right to have their say in a proper venue. In a recent poll, three-quarters of New Yorkers believed that venue to be Central Park. The 50,000 or so Republicans and others attending the G.O.P.'s own political demonstration next month don't have such worries. City officials are worrying about their every need, even concierge and spa services. They'll also be treated to a concert, in Central Park.

Judging from what I hear, Central Park isn't going to be an issue next month. The protests will be in the streets and I wouldn't be wanting to get to work anywhere on the west side. If you aren't going to be in town for the convention or the protests, this would be an excellent time to learn about Vermont or Atlantic Canada. Lac Bras D'or in Nova Scotia is lovely this time of year.

Try Anything Once

A Novel Tactic on Warming

Published: July 28, 2004

Moving aggrively to compensate for Washington's unwillingness to tackle the threat of global warming, New York, seven other states and New York City filed suit last week against five of the country's largest power companies. Though the suit's legal prospects are unclear, its political implications are not. Once again, the states are asserting their right to remedy environmental problems that the Bush administration and Congress have ignored.

The lawsuit is the first by local governments aimed at forcing companies outside their jurisdictions to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be largely responsible for the warming trend. The list of defendants reads like a who's who of the industry: the American Electric Power Company, the Southern Company, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and the Cinergy Corporation. Together, they own or operate 174 power plants in 20 states that emit almost a quarter of the utility industry's carbon dioxide emissions and about 10 percent of the nation's total emissions.

The companies do not dispute the notion that carbon dioxide is a big contributor to climate warming. They complain instead that they are being unfairly singled out and, further, that the states are usurping Congress's power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. But since neither Congress nor the administration has shown much interest in pushing comprehensive legislation to regulate these gases, the states can hardly be blamed for using the levers at hand.

The attorneys general, including Eliot Spitzer of New York, are to some extent in uncharted legal waters. The novel basis for their action is the common law of public nuisance, and the states will have to persuade a judge that global warming is a "public nuisance'' that harms, or might harm, the residents of the states bringing the action.

They could well prevail. Few mainstream scientists doubt that the threat of warming is real and that carbon dioxide is a major cause. Moreover, this particular group of attorneys general, mostly Northeasterners, have already demonstrated an ability to use the courts to force action on problems that Washington ignores - most recently lawsuits pressuring utilities to reduce emissions of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide. Their hope now is to do the same with a gas that could ultimately prove far more dangerous.

I have dreams at night about Elliot Spitzer.

Fleeing

Medecins Sans Frontiers Group Will Leave Afghanistan, AP Says

July 28 (Bloomberg) -- Medecins Sans Frontiers, a Brussels- based aid agency, said it is withdrawing from Afghanistan because of the lack of security and attempts by the U.S.-led coalition to make aid a political issue, the Associated Press reported.

The Nobel Peace prize-winning agency, in a statement from the capital, Kabul, criticized an Afghan government investigation into the killing in June of five of its workers in northeastern Afghanistan, AP said. It also said there are concerns about more attacks on aid workers, the news agency reported.

U.S.-led forces are trying to use the delivery of aid for ``military and political motives,'' AP cited the group as saying.

The fatalities last month were the first ever suffered by Medicins Sans Frontiers, which was set up in 1971. Coalition forces have distributed leaflets in southern Afghanistan saying information must be given on suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters so that humanitarian aid will continue to be delivered in the region, the group said in May on its Web site.

When Doctors Without Borders decides to leave, you have trouble on your hands. They are the first in/last out agency, and will go where no one else will go. If they are leaving Afghanistan, the message is that we've lost. If you've been hanging out here, you already knew that.

News

I've got to take care of a bunch of business in the morning away from the glowing screen. I'll get back as fast as I can, start as early as I can. Notice the washpo blog link over on the right, up top. A little further down on the right is my resume, if you have a job on offer. I'm for bed now.

I offered a friend a kidney today. I'll be tested for compatibility in three weeks. If I'm the match, I'm going through with it. You couldn't have a better friend than Br. Ben. If I'm the one who can clean his blood, he's got a kidney. Now, I'm exhausted and I'll be back with you in the morning. Don't forget to leave comments.

Watch the convention and leave your remarks. I've had enough for one day.

cheers.

Just Change the Last Letter

Caution on Iran

July 27, 2004

THE SHAPING of US policy toward Iran will be a crucial task for the next president. The soundest approach will avoid the extremes of forceful regime change or abject appeasement. The president will need to find pragmatic yet principled ways of dealing with a clerical regime that is despised by most Iranians but is nevertheless capable of causing enormous grief before it goes the way of other aggressive dictatorships.

The Bush administration's stance toward Tehran has fluctuated, with periods of dialogue and incipient cooperation interrupted by confrontation over Iran's nuclear program, its involvement in terrorism, and its flagrant meddling in postwar Iraq. This drift cannot go on. The stakes are too high not only for Washington and Tehran but also for the Gulf region, central Asia, and the larger Middle East.

The difficulty of dealing with the regime in Tehran is illustrated by the recent disclosure that eight of the Sept. 11 hijackers were allowed to enter Iran from Afghanistan without having an Iranian entry stamp recorded in their passports. the acting CIA director, John McLaughlin, said, "We have no evidence that there is some sort of official sanction by the government of Iran for this activity." Though it is unlikely Iranian officials knew what the Al Qaeda operatives were going to do, US intelligence suspects that Tehran colluded with Al Qaeda in the 1996 Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia and has sheltered Al Qaeda figures.

One answer to the question of how to deal with Iran comes from a report by an independent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations. Since the ruling mullahs are "solidly entrenched and the country is not on the brink of a revolutionary upheaval," the report argues, Washington should explore a "limited or selective engagement" with Tehran.

The report draws upon unofficial talks between task force members and diverse Iranian interlocutors. It reflects the judgment of Iran specialists, retired diplomats, former CIA director Robert Gates, and former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Some of these notables have long favored rapprochement with Tehran. They propose eschewing any "grand bargain," seeking instead a "compartmentalized" dialogue that could lead to cooperation in Afghanistan and Iraq. They also would give Iran access to fuel for peaceful nuclear energy if the regime ceases its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

This issue alone is worth the replacement of W. The Iranians threw the IAEA out and restarted it's nuclear program.

International Man of Mystery

Probably the biggest news in the lefty blogosphere around the convention is the outing of Atrios. He did it himself a day or so ago rather unobtrusively on his own blog. Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left has a photo. He is Duncan Black, an economist who taught most recently at Bryn Mawr.

The Kindness of Strangers

Thanks to the generous efforts of Reid Stott, Web designer and photographer extraordinaire, some improvements have been made to the site today, and there are more to come if I can find time to update the blogroll. The links above take you to Reid's blog and photography and Web design portfolios. He does superb work.

Look over on the right sidebar. At the top of the column you'll see a button which allows you to make direct nominations to the washingtonpost.com blogging contest. You're one click away.

Underneath the "Search" box on the right is a link to my resume. If you or your organization are looking for a writer/editor, professional fundraiser, web content provider or....I'm open to suggestions...please take a look and follow the contact information. I'd prefer to stay in the Washington, DC, area but I'm willing to move for the right situation.

No Excuses

Robert Scheer:
An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report

Bush was not the first U.S. president to play footsie with Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, nor was the Clinton administration without fault in its fitful and ineffective response to the Al Qaeda threat. But there was simply no excuse for the near-total indifference of the new president and his top Cabinet officials to strenuous warnings from the outgoing Clinton administration and the government's counter-terrorism experts that something terrible was coming, fast and hard, from Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's gang, they said repeatedly, was planning "near-term attacks," which Al Qaeda operatives expected "to have dramatic consequences of catastrophic proportions."

As early as May 2001, the FBI was receiving tips that Bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the U.S., possibly including the hijacking of planes. On May 29, White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote national security advisor Condoleezza Rice that "when these attacks [on Israeli or U.S. facilities] occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them." At the end of June, the commission wrote, "the intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level." In early July, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was told "that preparations for multiple attacks [by Al Qaeda] were in late stages or already complete and that little additional warning could be expected." By month's end, "the system was blinking red" and could not "get any worse," then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11 commission.

It was at this point, of course, that George W. Bush began the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. On the very first day of his visit to his Texas ranch, Aug. 6, Bush received the now-infamous two-page intelligence alert titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States." Yet instead of returning to the capital to mobilize an energetic defensive posture, he spent an additional 27 days away as the government languished in summer mode, in deep denial.

"In sum," said the 9/11 commission report, "the domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have the direction, and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts. The public was not warned."

All together now: MISERABLE FAILURE!

Blogging the Bloggers

This is the obligatory "straight press notices the bloggers" blogpost. Just to get it out of the way.

The Blogger Circus

By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; 9:54 AM

National Public Radio correspondent Robert Smith covered the bloggers in a report that aired Tuesday morning. He noted that their "sometimes quirky, often shrewd novelty made them media stars." Smith took note of the special breakfast where convention chief executive Rod O'Connor greeted the famous 35 personally. NPR followed up with some more analysis of what it means to be a blogger -- and the "definite coolness factor attached to it" -- citing New York University journalism department head Jay Rosen (himself a blogger) as saying that "their impact may be exaggerated" but they provide a nice change from "jaded journalists."
• National Public Radio: Bloggers Offer Intimate View of Convention

The Journal also included some other noteworthy blogger thoughts: "Several bloggers were disinvited because too many people had been accepted, says Mike Liddell, the convention's online communications director. One of them, Adele Stan, decided to come to Boston anyway. 'The great thing about blogging is you don't need no stinking badges,' she writes. 'Whatever happens to you, wherever you wind up, whoever you meet, that's what you write about.' Mr. Liddell expects bloggers to give readers an unvarnished look at what goes on at the convention. But the topic on many minds inside the media pavilion is the creeping impact that blogs are having on the mainstream press. In a recent dispatch on his site truthlaidbear.com, N.Z. Bear wrote: 'They may not know it yet, but the bloggers aren't there to cover the convention. They're there to cover the journalists.'"

Conventional Wisdom

Here's the link to the DNC blog aggregator. Click only if you have nothing to do today.

Community of Nations

John Kerry's America
The Democratic convention and the challenge to Bush

by Gianni Riotta
www.corriere. it/riotta

Nothing unites European public opinion so much as the undisguised or barely concealed hope that Mr. Kerry will win, not just so that Mr. Bush is sent back to his torrid ranch in Texas. There is a conviction that with the Democrats in the White House, the storms that have plagued the Atlantic since 2002 will at last abate. That analysis is flawed. Of course, Mr. Kerry would silence the more raucous unilateralist tones and the neocon propaganda, but US-European Union understanding on Iraq, Afghanistan, trade, NATO and relationships with Russia and China still needs to be patiently sewn back together, stitch by stitch.

If he is elected, Mr. Kerry will offer a climate of collaboration, but will ask for diplomatic and military commitment. Mr. Bush's adversaries, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, will no longer be able to restrict themselves to saying no. If the dialogue is going to bear fruit, they will have to discuss proposals, negotiate, and cooperate. All through his life, from peace marches to the Senate, Mr. Kerry has built up a personality that is more suited to maturing with events than forcibly imposing itself on reality. In tandem with John Edwards as vice president, he may reopen the debate, but to make any progress on the difficult agenda of the present, he will need a new, united Europe that can maneuver on everything from tariff agreements to peacekeeping in Sudan.

That is what a President John Kerry will be asking for, and it is already written in the ponderous party platform that will be elected at Boston. We shall see how many of Mr. Kerry's current fans will actually give him a hand. The "struggle of ideas" to root democracy and rights, and to defeat terrorism, cannot be fought and won by the United States alone. Mr. Kerry will probably listen more than Mr. Bush, but the Europeans will have to do their bit. If they offer Mr. Kerry elegant chit-chat, we will no longer find agreement on anything - war or peace - and the storm over the Atlantic will be set to lash the entire planet.

The whole world is watching. It really is.

Here We Go Again

Bush's 9/11 Farce

By Richard Cohen

The spirit of Mrs. Hobby lives on in George W. Bush. Almost three years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- the biggest intelligence failure in U.S. history -- and after his own administration went to war for reasons that did not exist, the president has ordered his crack staff to see which of the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations can be implemented fast and without congressional approval. Bush, you will recall, opposed the creation of the commission in the first place.

"We will move on all fronts very aggressively in the coming days and weeks," a presidential aide told reporters down at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex. "We're going to focus on all the recommendations and determine which ones can be done through executive branch action. The president said he wants this on a fast track."

This is Hobbyism at its most egregious. She, too, was a wealthy Texan, and maybe there is a kind of softheadedness that afflicts that state's more affluent citizens. But it takes a New York kind of chutzpah for Bush to suddenly announce he will do what he has put off doing for lo these past three years. In that time the president steadfastly stood by his team of jolly incompetents who, rather than explain what had gone wrong, merely slapped Bush on the back and bonded with him in a manly fashion. George Tenet stayed at the head of the CIA even after he had assured Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction.

Why the sudden alacrity? It's because the chairman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton, have been all over the airwaves warning that another terrorist attack could be imminent and that the nation's intelligence apparatus, so obviously broken, has yet to be fixed. They recommended a host of measures, some of which -- improved border and port security, an integrated "watch list," etc. -- you would have thought would have been implemented on Sept. 12, 2001. Insistently, the commissioners recommended speed. To paraphrase: Lives are in danger and little is being done.

So dire is the situation that even Congress is threatening action. It will actually hold hearings in August and then, if the past is prologue, do nothing more. Very often this is the very best thing Congress can do for a grateful nation, but not in this case. Some serious work needs to be done -- more serious than campaigning or taking a vacation or, as is happening here, downing the canapes so kindly supplied by lobbyists. In fact, there is something a bit wacky about the Democratic Party taking a week to mount a meaningless Mardi Gras when the terrorism clock supposedly ticks closer to midnight.

Still, it is the president who runs the government. Now he suddenly discovers he is expected to do something about national security. He cannot be serious -- and rest assured he is not. The many months of inactivity in this area offer eloquent testimony to Bush's firm belief that little needs to be fixed. In the same way he could not answer earlier this year what mistakes he had made as president, he cannot even say what mistakes his government made that might have led to Sept. 11 and the debacle in Iraq.

Now we are engaged in a great farce. Outside my hotel room, a good piece of the nation's political talent is engaged in a purposeless convention to nominate a man who has already been nominated. And down in Crawford, the White House staff is dutifully feeding the press accounts of Bush's newfound concern about what ails the intelligence community and even -- imagine! -- that Bush took the Sept. 11 commission's report with him. From somewhere, Oveta Culp Hobby smiles. She is finally off the hook.

Let's see: the 9/11 commission and John Ashcroft tell us that another attack is imminent and W goes on vacation. Where have we seen that before?

Where DID I put that duct tape?

Opening Night

Bill Clinton's speech

For those of us who missed it--it was too late for me--click to go below the fold.

UPDATE: This is one hell of a speech.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here with you.

I am honored to share this podium with my senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And I want to thank the people of New York for giving the best public servant in my family a chance to continue serving the public. Thank you. I am also — I'm going to say that again, in case you didn't hear it.

I'm honored to be here tonight. And I want to thank the people of New York for giving Hillary the chance to continue to serve in public life.

I am very proud of her. And we are both very grateful to all of you, especially my good friends from Arkansas, for giving me the chance to serve in the White House for eight years.

I am honored to share this night with President Carter, for whom I worked in 1976 and who has inspired the world with his work for peace, democracy and human rights.

I am honored to share it with Al Gore, my friend and my partner for eight years, who played such a large role in building the prosperity and peace that we left America in 2000.

And Al Gore, as he showed again tonight, demonstrated incredible patriotism and grace under pressure. He is the living embodiment of the principle that every vote counts.

And this year, we're going to make sure they're all counted in every state in America. My friends, after three conventions as a candidate or a president, tonight I come to you as a citizen, returning to the role that I have played for most of my life, as a foot soldier in our fight for the future, as we nominate in Boston a true New England Patriot for president.

Now this state, who gave us in other times of challenge John Adams and John Kennedy, has given us John Kerry, a good man, a great senator, a visionary leader. And we are all here to do what we can to make him the next president of the United States.

My friends, we are constantly being told that America is deeply divided. But all Americans value freedom and faith and family. We all honor the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world.

We all want good jobs, good schools, health care, safe streets, a clean environment. We all want our children to grow up in a secure America leading the world toward a peaceful and prosperous future.

Our differences are in how we can best achieve these things in a time of unprecedented change. Therefore, we Democrats will bring to the American people this year a positive campaign, arguing not who is a good or a bad person, but what is the best way to build a safe and prosperous world our children deserve.

The 21st century is marked by serious security threats, serious economic challenges and serious problems, from AIDS to global warming to the continuing turmoil in the Middle East.

But it is also full of amazing opportunities to create millions of new jobs and clean energy and biotechnology, to restore our manufacturing base and reap the benefits of the global economy, through our diversity and our commitment to decent labor and environmental standards for people all across the world and to create a world where we can celebrate our religious, our racial, our ethnic, our tribal differences because our common humanity matters most of all.

To build that kind of world, we must make the right choices. And we must have a president who will lead the way. Democrats and Republicans have very different and deeply felt ideas about what choices we should make. They're rooted in fundamentally different views of how we should meet our common challenges at home, and how we should play our role in the world.

We Democrats want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. We want a world with more global cooperation where we act alone only when we absolutely have to.

We think the role of government should be to give people the tools to create the conditions to make the most of their own lives. And we think everybody should have that chance.

On the other hand, the Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people — their people — in a world in which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to.

They believe the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their economic, political and social views, leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves on important matters like health care and retirement security.

Now, since most Americans aren't that far to the right, our friends have to portray us Democrats as simply unacceptable, lacking in strength and values. In other words, they need a divided America.

But we don't.

Americans long to be united. After 9/11, we all just wanted to be one nation. Not a single American on September the 12th, 2001, cared who won the next presidential election.

All we wanted to do was to be one country, strong in the fight against terror, helping to heal those who were wounded and the families of those who lost their loved ones, reaching out to the rest of the world so we could meet these new challenges and go on with our democratic way of life.

The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the country together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the world in the struggle against terror.

Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice. They chose to use that moment of unity to try to push the country too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work, but in withdrawing American support for the climate change treaty and for the international court on war criminals and for the anti-ballistic missile treaty and from the nuclear test ban treaty.

Now, now at a time when we're trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first.

At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in.

For the first time when America was in a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us.

Now, I'm in that group for the first time in my life.

And you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were kind of mean to me.

But as soon as I got out and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. It was amazing. I never thought I'd be so well cared for by the president and the Republicans in Congress. I almost sent them a thank you note for my tax cuts until I realized that the rest of you were paying the bill for it. And then I thought better of it.

Now look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs while withholding promised funding to the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving 2.1 million children behind.

They chose to protect my tax cut, while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of their job training programs, 100,000 working families out of their child care assistance, and worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of their after-school programs when we know it keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school, learning, going to college and having a good life.

They chose — they chose to protect my tax cuts while dramatically raising the out-of-pocket costs of health care to our veterans and while weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the protection of our forests.

Now, in this time, everyone in America had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans. And most of us, almost all of us, from Republicans to independents and Democrats, we wanted to be asked to do our part, too. But all they asked us to do was to expend the energy necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. Now, if you like these choices and you agree with them, you should vote to return them to the White House and the Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats. We've got a different economic policy.

In this year's budget, the White House this year wants to cut off all the federal funding for 88,000 uniformed police officers under the COPS program we've had for 10 years. Among those 88,000 police are more than 700 members of the New York Police Department who put their lives on the line on 9/11.

With gang violence rising, and with all of us looking for terrorists in our midst and hoping they're not too well armed or too dangerous, the president and the Congress are about to allow the 10- year-old ban on deadly assault weapons to lapse.

Now, they believe it's the right thing to do. But our policy was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street. And it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence. Their policy is the reverse. They're taking police off the streets while they put assault weapons back on the street.

Now, if you agree with that choice, by all means, vote to keep them in office. But if you don't, join John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats in making America safer, smarter and stronger again.

On homeland security, Democrats tried to double the number of containers at ports and airports checked for weapons of mass destruction. It cost $1 billion. It would have been paid for under our bill by asking the 200,000 millionaires in America to cut their tax cut by $5,000. Almost all 200,000 of us would like to have done that, to spend $5,000 to make all 300 million Americans safer.

The measure failed. Why? Because the White House and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives opposed it. They thought our $5,000 was more important than doubling the container checks at our ports and airports.

If you agree with that, by all means, re-elect them. If not, John Kerry and John Edwards are your team for the future.

These policies have turned a projected $5.8 trillion surplus that we left, enough to pay for the baby boomer retirement, into a projected debt of almost $5 trillion, with over $400 billion in deficit this year and for years to come.

Now, how do they pay for that deficit? First, by taking the Social Security surplus that comes in every month and endorsing the checks of working people over to me to pay for the tax cuts. But it's not enough.

So then they have to go borrow money. Most of it they borrow from the Chinese and the Japanese government.

Sure, these countries are competing with us for good jobs, but how can we enforce our trade laws against our bankers? I mean, come on.

So if you think — if you believe it is good policy — if you believe it is good policy to pay for my tax cuts with the Social Security checks of working men and women and borrowed money from China and Japan, you should vote for them. If not, John Kerry's your man.

We Americans must choose for president...

... we've got to choose for president between two strong men who both love their countries, but who have very different world views: our nominee, John Kerry, who favors shared responsibility, shared opportunity and more global cooperation; and their president and their party in Congress who favor concentrated wealth and power, leaving people to fend for themselves and more unilateral action.

I think we're right for two reasons.

First of all, America just works better when more people have a chance to live their dreams.

And, secondly, we live in an interdependent world in which we cannot possibly kill, jail or occupy all of our potential adversaries. So we have to both fight terror and build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.

Now, we tried it their way for 12 years. We tried it their way for 12 years. We tried it our way for eight years. Then we tried it their way for four more. But the only test that matters is whether people were better off when we finished than when we started. Our way works better.

It produced over 22 million good jobs, rising incomes for the middle class, over 100 times as many people moved from poverty into the middle class, more health care, the largest increase in college aid in 50 years, record home ownership, a cleaner environment, three surpluses in a row, a modernized defense force, strong efforts against terror and a respected America in the world. More importantly, more importantly we have great new champions in John Kerry and John Edwards, two good men, with wonderful wives: Teresa, a generous and wise woman, who understands the world we're trying to shape; and Elizabeth, a lawyer and mother, who understands the lives we're trying to live.

Now, let me tell you know what I know about John Kerry. I've been seeing all of the Republican ads about him. Let me tell you what I know about him.

During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current president, the vice president and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going too, but instead, he said: Send me.

When they sent those swiftboats up the river in Vietnam and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag and bate the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.

And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam and to demand an accounting of the POWs and MIAs we lost there, John Kerry said: Send me.

Then when we needed someone to push the cause of inner-city children struggling to avoid a life of crime or to bring the benefits of high technology to ordinary Americans or to clean the environment in a way that created new jobs, or to give small businesses a better chance to make it, John Kerry said: Send me.

So tonight, my friends, I ask you to join me for the next 100 days in telling John Kerry's story and promoting his ideas. Let every person in this hall and like-minded people all across our land say to him what he has always said to America: Send me.

The bravery that men who fought by his side in battle, that bravery they saw in battle, I have seen in politics. When I was president, John Kerry showed courage and conviction on crime, on welfare reform, on balancing the budget, at a time when those priorities were not exactly the way to win a popularity contest in our party.

John Kerry took tough positions on tough problems. He knows who he is and where he's going. He has the experience, the character, the ideas, the values to be a great president.

And in a time of change, he has two other very important qualities: an insatiable curiosity to understand the world around him, and a willingness to hear other views, even those who disagree with him. Therefore...

Therefore, John Kerry will make choices that reflect both conviction and common sense. He proved that when he picked John Edwards to be his partner.

Now, everybody talks about John Edwards' energy and intellect and charisma. You know, I kind of resent him.

But the important thing is not what talents he has, but how he has used them. He chose — he chose to use his talents to improve the lives of people like him who had to work for everything they've got and to help people too often left out and left behind. And that's what he'll do as our vice president.

Now their opponents will tell you...

Their opponents will tell you we should be afraid of John Kerry and John Edwards, because they won't stand up to the terrorists. Don't you believe it. Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.

They go hand in hand.

They go hand in hand, and John Kerry has both. His first priority will be to keep America safe.

Remember the scripture: Be not afraid.

John Kerry and John Edwards are good people with good ideas, ideas to make the economy work again for middle-class Americans, to restore fiscal responsibility, to save Social Security, to make health care more affordable, college more available, to free us from dependence on foreign oil and create new jobs with clean energy and a cleaner environment...

... to rally the world to our side in the war against terror and to make a world with more friends and less terror.

My friends, at every turning point in our history, we, the people, have chosen unity over division, heeding our founders' call to America's eternal mission to form a more perfect union, to widen the circle of opportunity deep in the reach of freedom and strengthen the bonds of our community. It happened every time, because we made the right choices.

In the early days of the republic, America was divided and at a crossroads, much as it is today, deeply divided over whether or not to build a real nation with a national economy and a national legal system. We chose to build a more perfect union.

In the Civil War, America was at another crossroads, deeply divided over whether to save the union and end slavery. We chose a more perfect union.

In the 1960s, when I was a young man, we were divided again over civil rights and women's rights. And again we chose to form a more perfect union.

As I said in 1992, I say again tonight, we are all in this together. We have an obligation, both to work hard and to help our fellow citizens, an obligation both to fight terror and to build a world with more cooperation and less terror.

Now, again, it is time to choose. Since we're all in the same boat, we should choose a captain of our ship who is a brave good man, who knows how to steer a vessel through troubled waters, to the calm seas and the clear sides of our more perfect union. That is our mission.

So let us go in tonight and say to America in a loud, clear voice: Send John Kerry.

God bless you.

L'Etat, C'est Moi

Krugman.

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."

Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.

Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-Americans, these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House.

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.

Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his handpicked election officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a high-stakes national election?

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election would do to America's sense of itself, and its role in the world. In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted - but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.

"He will allow." I guess that is the divine right of kings.

Dr. Krugman, we get to demand such things. That is our right as mere citizens.

The Virus Lottery

Virus Overwhelms Google, 3 Other Search Engines
Automated Queries Clog Sites for Hours

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; Page E01

BLOCKQUOTE>Many computer users were unable to reach the Google, Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista search engines yesterday after a new computer virus surfaced that apparently overwhelmed the Internet services with automated queries.

Access to Google was blocked for as long as five hours, some users reported. Visitors attempting to reach the Web site instead received an error message: "The service you requested is not available at this time."

For Internet users, search engines are an indispensable tool for finding information and news scattered across seemingly innumerable Web pages.

"It was like going without power and having to use a candle," said Andy Beal, vice president of marketing at WebSourced Inc., a Web site promotion firm based in Morrisville, N.C. "Google has become so much a part of everyday life that I was lost without it."

Beal said he forgot the site was down and instinctively typed "Google and attack" into his browser's Google search box in an attempt to find news about the problem. When the Google site didn't work, he turned to Yahoo's search engine, which also didn't work on his computer.

Several search engine companies and computer security experts blamed the problem on MyDoom.m, the newest version of a virus that first appeared in January. The variant appeared in the morning and quickly infected thousands of computers, judging from Internet traffic monitored by computer security experts yesterday.

The virus circulates the Web disguised as an e-mail with various subject lines, such as "Mail System Error," or "Undeliverable Mail."

Many messages purported to come from the user's corporate e-mail or Internet service provider: "Your e-mail account was used to send a large amount of junk mail messages during this week," read one message bearing the malicious software. "We suspect that your computer was compromised and now contains a trojan proxy server."

The e-mail then urges the user to click on an attachment embedded in the missive. Users who do so unwittingly activate the worm, which often gives hackers remote access to the computer and also sends copies of the infected e-mail to everyone in the user's e-mail address book.

Unlike its predecessors, the newest variant apparently also was programmed to enter a portion of the addresses it found, the domain name after the "@" sign, into various search engines in an effort to collect further e-mail addresses.
....
Craig Schmugar, the virus research manager at McAfee who named the "MyDoom" virus when it first appeared in January, agreed.

Schmugar said that the MyDoom source code has been widely available on underground Web sites since at least February and that the latest version is only different in that it uses search services to help spread itself.

MyDoom was credited by some computer security firms as being the fastest-spreading e-mail virus ever, though its sequels have generally had less impact than the first one. Schmugar said that it would not require a gifted programmer to figure out how to craft the latest modification of the bug.

"If you already had the source code, it wouldn't take a really sophisticated programmer to make the changes," he said.

There was some Internet speculation yesterday that the attack was a targeted effort at Google on the day it announced its IPO price range, computer security experts generally dismissed such speculation.

"If it were a targeted attack against Google, it was not done in an effective manner," said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager with Symantec Corp., a Cupertino, Calif., software security firm.

Update your virus blockers. This one is particularly nasty. Do you think this was an accident on the day Google went public?

Blogging Biz

The Washington Post is having a contest:

Right wing. Left wing. Indifferent. Irreverent. There's a blog for every taste, opinion and attitude. washingtonpost.com's 2004 Best Blogs - Politics and Elections Readers' Choice Awards is your chance to speak out and vote for your favorite politics and election blogs.

Nominate your favorite blogs*

(Cough.) (Cough.)
.

Invocations

The quintessential politics and religion story, via Philocrites:

O'Malley won't offer blessing; Paulist priest to deliver invocation

By Michael Paulson and Patrick Healy, Globe Staff | July 26, 2004

In a break from past practice, the Democratic Party is not inviting the archbishop of Boston to offer a blessing at the Democratic National Convention, but instead is inviting a Paulist priest who has taken Senator John F. Kerry's side in a national debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights should receive Communion.

The Kerry campaign said last night it is seeking to have the Rev. John B. Ardis, director of the Paulist Center, deliver an invocation at the convention. The Paulist Center is on Beacon Hill, where Kerry lives, and the senator and his wife have often worshiped at the chapel there.

The Kerry campaign said it has not invited Sean P. O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston. O'Malley's spokesman, the Rev. Christopher J. Coyne, said recently that O'Malley planned to be out of town this week.

''We never reached out to Archbishop O'Malley to deliver the invocation," said a Kerry spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter. ''We are seeking to arrange having [the priest] from the Paulist Center to deliver the invocation, since that is John Kerry's home church."

Ardis is a member of the Paulist Fathers, an order of Catholic priests dedicated to the evangelization of America. The Paulist Center, which he heads, is particularly popular among liberal Catholics, many of them disaffected from neighborhood parishes.
....
The Democratic National Convention Committee has declined requests to identify clergy speaking this week. Convention organizers have named only the Rev. James A. Forbes, Jr., senior minister of the Riverside Church, a New York City congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ.

The Rev. Stephen T. Ayres, vicar of Old North Church, an Episcopal parish in Boston's North End, said he has been invited to give an invocation at this afternoon's session.

The Paulist fathers are the first indigenous American male religious order. They have a reputation for theological liberalism, as well as excellent credentials in ecumenical and interfaith work. One of my best friends is a Paulist. I don't think I can remember ever seeing him in a collar.

The Rise of Corporatism

I first read this early this morning but declined to use it because the language seemed a little over the top. The more I thought about it, however, the more it seemed to be an accurate representation of our political situation. It's extracted from a much longer article, but I think these paragraphs lay out the central argument pretty well.

Groupthink and the slide into fascism
By Ritt Goldstein

In discussing questions of contemporary fascism with Asia Times Online, Dr Parenti said, "When fascism came to power [in the 1930s], what it did was cut back on the public sector, privatize a lot of state-owned industries, abolish inheritance taxes and other taxes on the rich, abolish corporate taxes, cut wages, destroy labor unions, and destroy or undermine opposition parties." He described fascism as simply a tool employed by ruthless power-elites in achieving their ambitions. He added: "There's a concern that we're [the US] heading towards fascism, or that we're replicating fascism today."

Notably, with the Nuremberg Tribunals, society long ago determined that those who may commit criminal acts while influenced by groupthink are nevertheless criminals, and should be judged accordingly.

World Opinion

The Guardian articulates a theme we surfaced over the weekend:

Kerry's chance to shine

Leader
Monday July 26, 2004
The Guardian

The world will not be watching out of any expectation of witnessing the kind of gritty political dramas which occasionally still marked nominating conventions in those earlier times. Like British party conferences, but on a far more extravagant scale, US conventions long ago became entirely presentational events aimed at television viewers back home rather than at party enthusiasts in the hall. Yet the whole world will be watching Boston this week none the less. It will be doing so because there has never been a US presidential election in which the interests and sympathies of the peoples of the world are more at stake than this one. George Bush has been the most divisive and dangerous president to occupy the Oval Office. It is not just a narrow majority of American voters who, according to current polls, want Mr Bush to be defeated in November. It is an overwhelming majority of the citizens of other lands, those of this country very much included.

Senator John Kerry comes back to his political base in Boston as overwhelmingly his party's preferred choice to topple the incumbent president. But he also arrives leading by a nose in the match-up with Mr Bush. Since he added Senator John Edwards to his ticket as vice-presidential running-mate, Mr Kerry has led in over a dozen reputable nationwide polls. Mr Kerry may not have excited the media or the Michael Moore militants very much these past few months. But do not be misled. This is not a volatile campaign and Mr Kerry is steadily building a strong position in the polls, especially in crucial swing states - places like Florida, Ohio, Missouri and New Hampshire - that will again decide the outcome, while also harbouring his big campaign war chest for when the going gets tougher. The longer the campaign has gone on - this contest effectively lasts for nine months - the better shape Mr Kerry seems to be in, and the shrewder his decision to play the long game.

Nevertheless, the hard pounding of the 2004 campaign is about to begin, and it will get much harder and much dirtier once the summer is done. Mr Kerry still has heavy lifting to do before he takes his support across the gap between the 47% or so of the electorate who seem determined to vote for him anyway and the around 53% of voters who say it is time for a change - and who are thus making themselves available to support him if he can complete the sale. The Boston convention - which Mr Kerry addresses on Thursday in his acceptance speech - represents the key opportunity for the Democratic challenger to move his campaign across this gap. It is a chance to present a programme, a man and, above all, a better way of governing America. In the end, US voters have got to want Mr Kerry in as well as wanting Mr Bush out. That is why the senator's task this week is to move from being Mr Not-Bush to being a positive candidate in his own right. The question posed at Boston is: "Why Mr Kerry?" Here is the senator's moment to answer, not only for Americans, but also for a world that is watching and willing him to rise to the occasion.

This is the week for Kerry to begin "closing the sale" with the undecideds. All 150 or so of them. Depending on who you read, I'm seeing a range of 4-7% of the electorate. That is historically small for this point in the election cycle.

Fixing the Medical Puzzle

The Pocketbook Issue

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, July 26, 2004; Page A11

GOP pollster Bill McInturff recently lectured the Republican Governors Association that bland assertions of economic recovery won't win over the voters. Americans want candidates who actually have policies.

If so, what should the Democrats talk about? Kerry and his party could start by devoting a lot more attention to the issue that, measured in dollars, is already the candidate's biggest proposal: health care. Opinion surveys suggest that a majority of Americans feel so strongly about this subject that they'd be willing to roll back all the Bush tax cuts to insure every American, and that two out of five have trouble paying their own health bills. Addressing this anxiety should be a political no-brainer.

Moreover, health is a Bush weak spot. Nearly 44 million Americans lack health insurance, and the rest have suffered steeply rising costs. President Bush's attempt to inoculate himself by signing the Medicare prescription drug law has failed: Fairly or not, the measure is not popular. Meanwhile, Kerry can boast that, according to the leading independent analysis of the candidates' health proposals, by Emory University's Kenneth Thorpe, his underdiscussed plan would reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 27 million, whereas Bush's proposals would reduce the number by just over 2 million, albeit at one-seventh of the cost.

But health ought to appeal to the Democrats for bigger reasons. Like Bush's tax plan in 2000, Kerry's health plan is at once a populist pocketbook issue and a way of talking about national competitiveness. Indeed, if you compare America to its leading rivals, it's easier to argue that future prosperity is threatened by the nation's dysfunctional health system than by excessive taxes.

The United States manages to spend nearly 15 percent of GDP on health, way more than the average in advanced economies, which stands around 9 percent. America's extra spending does not buy better health: In the global life expectancy tables, the United States ranks 48th. That poor performance partly reflects factors outside the health system's control (a higher poverty rate, obesity and so on). But the hard truth is that much of the premium Americans pay for their health care -- 6 percent of GDP, or a bit over $600 billion a year -- appears to be wasted.

If that waste is shocking now, imagine the future. Technology is forever creating new drugs and medical procedures. In principle, these could save money: A high-tech operation might reduce recovery time spent in expensive hospitals, for example. But the American medical system, in which doctors decide which new treatments are necessary while also profiting from them, makes it overwhelmingly likely that technology will drive costs up. As a result, health economists contemplate a future in which 30 percent of GDP may be consumed by health care -- a doubling that might also double the amount wasted to 12 percent of the economy.

Dysfunction on this scale ought to alarm Americans. Any who doubt that the perversity of a single sector can paralyze an economy should recall Japan, where wasteful banks (coupled with a lack of political will to fix them) derailed an industrial express train. Whether that happens in America will depend partly on the share of the soaring health bill that's paid by firms, whose costs could be driven so high that competitiveness would suffer. Already Ford Motor Co. spends $3.2 billion a year on health premiums, and General Motors Corp. spends more on health than on steel. But even if rising health costs are passed on to individuals, via co-pays and taxes, the future is bleak. The middle-class squeeze lamented by Kerry will grow far worse than now imagined.

People are not aware of the systemic problem with our health delivery system--they are aware of their own pocketbook issues, but not the fact that the system as currently consituted, the entire system, is on the verge of complete breakdown. My insurance went up 27% last year, 16% the year before. Those kinds of percentages are not sustainable. This is a public health issue: having ever greater numbers of uninsured people walking around with communicable diseases that they cannot afford to treat is a hazard. Untreated sick or injured people are also a threat to productivity, which is one of the engines of American economic growth. I've been arguing for single payer since I was in high school oratory. As it stands, we are getting at best mediocre median care in this country and I don't know why anyone is willing to put up with that.

Bush's Environmental Rollbacks

Bush's Dark Pages in Conservation History

By Stewart L. Udall, Stewart L. Udall has written, edited or contributed to dozens of books, most recently "The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West" (Shearwater Books, 2002).

The word "conservation" — and the concept of science-based management of resources — did not exist until Teddy Roosevelt became president. He initiated the reforms and raised the banner, halting raids on the public's resources and creating millions of acres of national forests, parks and wildlife refuges.

Even during the Great Depression, the second President Roosevelt enlarged his cousin's legacy. FDR put people to work replanting forests, bringing electricity to rural areas and enlarging the nation's national parks.

A third wave of conservation got underway in 1961 when Kennedy called for the establishment of wilderness reserves and the addition of seashores to the park system, inspiring conservationists to revive ideas that had been shelved after Pearl Harbor.

My office sorted through the results: Should I urge the New Jersey governor to oppose the powerful New York Port Authority's plan for a super jetport in order to preserve the Great Swamp? Should I travel to Maine to help Sen. Edmund Muskie stop a dam that would flood the storied Allagash River? Could I persuade the budget people to spend $30 million more to prevent development inside the new Point Reyes National Seashore in California? We did all that, and more.

In those days, partisan lines were never drawn where conservation issues were concerned. Kennedy's Wilderness bill passed the Senate by a vote of 78 to 12, with only six members of each party voting no. Republicans overwhelmingly voted for the bill largely because of the leadership of a farsighted Californian, Thomas Kuchel.

From 1961 to 1981, every president — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter — gave his unwavering support to environmental reforms. Richard Nixon set a high goal by declaring that the 1970s should be the "environmental decade." He created the Environmental Protection Agency and approved laws to protect endangered species.

As the country moved rightward with Reagan, the rhetoric may have been negative, but in the end no effort was made to repeal important environmental laws. George H.W. Bush had a positive record, and although Bill Clinton was stymied by a hostile Congress, he used his executive powers to achieve positive results.

Overall, it's a record that bolsters my thesis that this administration is rowing against the tide of American history. Otero Mesa symbolizes its narrow focus. Bush and company have not put forward a single positive new conservation concept. They have systematically lowered pollution regulations to please favored industries. They have allowed park and forest maintenance to be neglected and under-funded. I view these events and developments with dismay. This is a time for straight talk, for those who love the land to make their voices heard before more damage is done to the resources we all own.

This is a powerful reminder of what is at stake in this election. From God-only-knows what kind of judicial wingnuttery and Supreme Court appointments to despoilation of the environment, Bushco has been a complete disaster.

Spook Goes Mission

Failures of the Sept. 11 Commission

By William Raspberry
Monday, July 26, 2004; Page A11

For all its somber-faced seriousness, the report of the Sept. 11 commission turns out to be a childlike explanation of what went so tragically wrong nearly three years ago.

It acknowledges the obvious, but it manages to avoid any semblance of individual responsibility. "The lamp broke," a child might say. Or, as the report would have it, the "system" failed.

Which surprises Ray McGovern not a whit.

"The whole name of the game is to exculpate anyone in the establishment," says McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and a member of a group of former agents called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. " 'Mistakes were made,' but no one is to blame. Why is it that after all this evidence and months and months of testimony, the commission found itself unable even to say if the attacks could have been prevented?"

McGovern has no doubt they could have been. He cites the FBI report of "all those Arab fellows training on aircraft but with no interest in learning how to land them." The report was rejected, unread, he says, by an FBI official, Spike Owen, who nonetheless "received a $20,000 cash award from the administration for his duties in safeguarding the American people."

McGovern cites as well the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" as evidence that President Bush and his top advisers had information on which they might have acted to prevent the attacks. Instead, he said in an interview Thursday, "the president went off to chop wood in Texas."

The combination of neglecting credible information and acting precipitously on highly questionable intelligence is something he'd not previously encountered in his government service, says McGovern, whose wife's cousin died in one of the World Trade Center towers. He is speaking out now "simply to spread a little truth around," he says.

And the truth as he sees it is that the commission has made two errors in judgment -- first, the refusal to place responsibility for intelligence shortcomings on particular individuals and, second, the attempt to repair the damage by proposing creation of a super spy chief, perhaps with Cabinet rank.

Both errors stem from the same impulse to politicize things that ought to be outside politics, according to McGovern, who has a chapter in a forthcoming book from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation: "Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense: Restoring America's Promise at Home and Abroad."

Take the legal memorandum prepared by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales saying, in effect, that the president wasn't bound by the Geneva Convention in his treatment of certain war prisoners.

"Not a lawyer in the country believes that opinion holds water," McGovern said. "It was essentially a political document, one that told the president what he wanted to hear."

Much the same thing happened with the intelligence services, which strained to give the president what he clearly wanted to hear -- only to watch the administration stretch that already strained intelligence into a pretext for war.

Putting the top intelligence officer in the Cabinet would only exacerbate that problem, says McGovern. "Being in the Cabinet automatically politicizes the post. The director of central intelligence need not be above the battle, but he should certainly be apart from it."

I agree with McGovern. Intel needs to be out of the partisan fray. But part of what is interesting to me about this OpEd is McGovern himself. When he retired from the CIA under Bush Sr., he went into social justice work in the inner city. A Russia specialist in the Agency, he went on to serve on the board of Bread for the City in DC. Currently, he is co-director of the Servent Leader School, a training program for lay leadership constructed by the District's Church of the Savior, the founding organization for a group of non-denominational, lay-led mission groups. The model has now spread across the country and is part of the Emerging Church movement.

Being Seen

Officers Question Visibility of Army in Iraq
Some in Military Urge Lower Troop Profile

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 26, 2004; Page A01

Some top U.S. military officers are questioning whether the practice of keeping U.S. troops highly visible in Iraq is doing more harm than good, challenging a key tenet of the Army's approach to occupying the country.

Advocates of the new approach say U.S. troops would be more effective if they were kept out of view of the Iraqi public, and even removed to remote desert bases, appearing only when needed to conduct operations beyond the capacity of Iraqi security forces.

For most of the Iraq occupation, the U.S. military has assumed -- based on lessons drawn from peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo -- that maintaining "presence" through extensive patrols, large-scale raids and other highly visible operations would increase stability. Now, however, some officers are saying that such operations are doing more to inflame anti-American feelings among Iraqis than to secure the streets, and the resulting debate may shape the military's future structure and tactics in Iraq.

"Sometimes the best way is to be less present, and to be focused in your presence and successful in what you do," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said in little-noticed comments made last week during the final moments of a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. "And by exposing more and more of your formation to this kind of [guerrilla] warfare may not be the smartest thing to do. And we're looking and working very hard to do that through the commanders over there."

The view that high-profile U.S. military operations may be counterproductive departs from the basic U.S. military approach in Iraq over the past year. As one 1st Armored Division soldier put it in summarizing his unit's operations in Baghdad for the past 14 months, "We were everywhere all the time day and night 24-7 for a year -- I mean everywhere. You could not go anywhere in Baghdad without seeing a 1st AD patrol or convoy or soldiers on some point."

The changing view on presence also presents a new challenge to critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who have called for boosting the number of U.S. troops there. In May, Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, said the administration should either increase its troop strength in Iraq or withdraw. Until now, U.S. commanders have generally agreed with the need for troops, postponing plans for cuts this summer and instead maintaining a level of about 145,000 troops.

Somewhat belatedly, the revised approach to presence also provides new ammunition for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's approach to Iraq, which, beginning with the government- toppling campaign in the spring of 2003, favored maneuverability and speed over sheer bulk and big troop numbers.

Tom Ricks is an old hand and one of the better military correspondents working today, but he doesn't seem to understand that you can't have it both ways: more boots on the ground AND less visibility makes no sense. The only point of greater force size is more visibility, not less. He may be reporting what are incoherent mouthings coming out of the DoD, which wouldn't be unheard of. If so, it is discouraging news, and further evidence that very little thought is being expended in the direction of repairing our disaster in the sands.

Boston and Other Short Subjects

Markos Moulitsos asks the question, Can the Democratic Party stay relevant? It's one of the things I'll be reflecting on as the party national convention runs this week. I'll watching it by C-Span. But there is a lot going on besides the Dem Convention, lots of other news to cover, and our eventual nominee is going to have one hell of a complex world to deal with, if elected. One of the reasons this blog exists is to mark the meta-narratives in culture, public affairs and politics behind the horse race, which is not of so much interest to me. Wonkette has the Botox beat covered, and Kos and My DD will give you the latest twitches in the polls. I'm aiming for larger themes, the backstories, the landscape against which the minutiae play themselves out. Keep in touch and let me know what you want to read about.

Plan of Attack

Iraqi Insurgents Using Abduction as Prime Weapon
By JAMES GLANZ

Published: July 26, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 25 - Two Pakistani civilians working in Iraq were reported missing on Sunday in a suspected kidnapping by insurgents, who have rapidly developed hostage-taking as their most powerful weapon in recent days and issued fresh threats against other foreign nations.

The United States military also reported that 15 insurgents had been killed by American and Iraqi forces in an hourlong battle north of Baghdad that involved small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and artillery fire. No Iraqi or American forces were reported killed.

The missing Pakistanis, a truck driver and an engineer working for Al Tamimi Group, a Kuwait company, disappeared as they were driving to Baghdad along heavily traveled supply routes. The family of one of the men made an emotional appeal for his release, speaking from their village 55 miles south of Islamabad.

"I miss my father very much," said the 21-year-old daughter of the missing man, Azad Khan, as she wept, according to Reuters. "I urge the Pakistani government and Iraqi people to help find my father."

In another display of their increasing ability to track and kidnap foreigners, hostage-takers seized an Egyptian diplomat as he left a mosque on Friday, and on Sunday appeared to flaunt their unchallenged control.

The television channel Al Arabiya reported that the kidnappers of seven employees of a Kuwaiti transport company from Kenya, India and Egypt had appointed a tribal leader, Sheik Hisham al-Dulaymi, to negotiate for their release.

Whether or not all of this is coordinated remains unknown. I've seen some sources over the weekend which suggest it is, but I'm not yet willing to publish that. I'm beginning to hear things which suggest that the entire "insurgency" is under some coordination, and the facts seem to be beginning to bear that out.

Mainstream Values Win

Loony Over Labels

By Michael Kinsley
Sunday, July 25, 2004; Page B07

You would not know from the Democrats' three decades of defensiveness about themselves and the label liberal that the Democratic candidate got more votes than the Republican one in each of the past three presidential elections. Another way of putting this is that the candidate the world labeled a liberal, whether he admitted it or not, got more votes than the candidate who proudly labeled himself a conservative.

Going back to 1976, when self-flagellation first became mandatory for liberals and Democrats, the Democratic presidential candidate got more votes in four out of seven elections. Going back to 1960, the record is six out of 11.

Even if you start counting in 1980 -- the first Reagan election, and a turning point in the history of the universe to many Republicans -- the result is a tie, 3-3.

That ungainly formulation "got more votes" is necessary, obviously, because in 2000 the candidate who got more votes didn't win. Or he did win, but was wrongfully denied the prize. Take your pick.

Republicans and most neutral commentators are very, very tired of this sore-loser stuff about how Al Gore won the election in 2000. But even if you put this entire controversy aside (and I see no reason why you should), there is no disputing the fact that the Democratic candidate in 2000 got more votes. He got more than the Republican, even though that year's third-party pest -- another recent but treasured election-year tradition -- took more votes from the Democrat.

Look for very little mention of the whole 2000 imbroglio this week in Boston. This is partly because that year's Democratic nominee, Al Gore, seems to be undergoing some kind of metamorphosis and is not a popular figure at the moment. It is also because suggesting that the Bush presidency may be illegitimate is itself considered illegitimate. Although Democrats sincerely believe that election was stolen from them, they have been cowed by the successful Republican campaign to make any reference to 2000 seem like bad form.

However, it is one thing to shut up about cheating. It is another to pretend that George W. Bush is president today because he got the most votes. And yet the Democrats-must-abandon-extremism story line is so ingrained that professional commentators and freelance scolds often give 2000 the same will-they-never-learn treatment they use to explain the Democratic losses of 1980 and 1988.

Sure, it might have made the crucial difference if Gore had been just a bit more moderate in this or that, or if voters watching the Democratic convention had heard yet another heartfelt assurance that the party had learned its lesson and had written "I will not be McGovernite" on the board a thousand more times. But the party that gets the most votes is not "out of the mainstream," whether getting the most votes is enough to win the election or not.

God bless you, Michael.

The Fun Party

The Politics of Fun

By Richard Morin
Sunday, July 25, 2004; Page B05

Nearly everybody in the greater Washington area agrees this is a fun place to live. But in a town where politics is a participatory sport, who has more fun, Democrats or Republicans?

By a narrow margin, Republicans are this area's fun bunch, according to a recent Washington Post survey.

Six in 10 Republicans said they were satisfied with the way they spent their weekends, compared with half of all Democrats. Meanwhile, a majority of Democrats said they wished they had more fun on weekends, a complaint expressed by fewer than half of all GOP partisans.

To explore this very serious issue, The Post interviewed 1,001 randomly selected adults living in the District and the Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs from June 28 to July 1. The margin of sampling error for the overall results was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Respondents were asked how they had spent their leisure time on the previous weekend or their usual days off. "The previous weekend" -- June 25-27 -- was a fairly typical Friday through Sunday in early summer. The weather was warm, with generally clear skies.

Specifically, they were asked whether they did any one of 38 leisure-time activities, such as going on a hike, shopping at a mall, dining out or entertaining friends. They were also asked about their political leanings.

So does party affiliation help separate the party animals from the party poopers? Not really. Yet a few differences emerged: Thirty-six percent of the Republicans reported that they had swum in or lounged by the pool the previous weekend compared with 23 percent of Democrats -- perhaps because more of the Republicans, who were somewhat wealthier as a group, had pools of their own to lounge by.

Republicans also were more likely to say they had puttered in the yard. Democrats were more likely to have had people over. Nearly half -- 47 percent -- said they had entertained guests during the previous weekend, compared with to 37 percent of Republicans. Democrats also were more likely to say they had gone to a movie or watched television -- about an hour more on average per weekend than the Republicans who were surveyed.

No surprise at all: we're more sociable.

Funding the Left

Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
By MATT BAI

As Democrats converge on Boston this week to hold their party convention and formally anoint Kerry as their nominee, all the talk will be of resurgence, unity and a new sense of purpose. Don't be fooled. It's true that a kind of all-consuming, blue-state animosity toward George W. Bush -- not just for the war and the tax cuts, but also for what Democrats see as his venality and secrecy, his contempt for all things coastal, the way he walks and the way he laughs, the fact that he was ever sworn in as president to begin with -- has, remarkably, brought a sense of coherence to a party that had been groping for a mission. Nearing the end of his first term, Bush has at last delivered on his promise to be ''a uniter, not a divider,'' except that the people he has united will be crammed, standing room only, into Boston's FleetCenter for the next four days, rhetorically -- if not literally -- burning him in effigy.

But whether the Democrats win or lose in November, what will happen -- to put a twist on the old Engelbert Humperdinck song -- after the hating? Four years from now, in 2008, these same Democrats will come together again, in Miami or Phoenix or Las Vegas, perhaps to renominate President Kerry or perhaps to give the stage to Hillary Rodham Clinton or John Edwards or to some now-obscure governor. Either way, Bush will be receding into history, and the party's left and center factions will again be wrestling over free trade, social programs and tax cuts for the middle class. The questions that will loom over the Democratic Party will be the same ones that have resurfaced regularly since the end of the Great Society: what, beyond a series of disconnected policy proposals, is the party's reason for being? What does it stand for in the era after big government?

Andy Rappaport isn't the only one asking these questions. The party's decline is a constant source of gallows humor among Democrats in Washington. It is true that in terms of voter identification, the country remains more or less evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and in fact, the best data show that Democrats still enjoy a slight advantage among the ever-shrinking pool of voters who do identify themselves with one party or another. But the historical arc of the parties tells a different story. Since the 1950's, when nearly half of all voters called themselves Democrats, nearly one in six Democrats has left the party, according to a University of Michigan study, while Republican membership has held close to steady.

Reflected in this trend -- although it is by no means the entirety of the problem -- is that the Democratic Party has seen an exodus of the white working-class men who were once their most reliable voters. In the suburbs, according to the Democratic pollster Mark Penn, the percentage of white men supporting the party has plummeted 16 points just since Bill Clinton left office.

For liberals, this is the single most important article the NYT has published this year (and it prominently features Bump friends Media Transparency. sponsored by the invaluable daily read cursor.org.) I disagree with yesterday's David Brooks NYT OpEd (which means that I disagree with Kevin Drum) that our conflict with radical Islam is primarily ideological--it's not, it is much more basic than that, at the level of the gut and of rage--but the political conflict in this country IS ideological and our side is bringing knives to a gunfight. The left has been intellectually incoherent for a while and it is time to get our best and brightest (we have quite a few) to sit down together and re-create the ideological underpinnings of a new progressive movement. I will tell you that I think there is considerable creative energy around this project, though it still lacks direction. I was able to spend part of a day at the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Campaign for America's Future, two of the new advocacy/think tanks that have sprung up in the last year. While it was thrilling to be around a charged up group of a couple of thousand liberals, the panel sessions were more exhortatory than substantive. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know and could have been a member of any of the panels I saw.

Read the article as a backgrounder to this week's convention. I was amused to just learn (via Blitzer on CNN) that Al Jazeera will be carrying more live coverage from Boston than any of the three broadcast networks here in the States.

T Shirts for Victory

I don't normally link to commercial sites, but I got an email this morning which rather charmed me, and I'll be wearing one of these real soon. Take a look. I'm going to do everything I can to elect John/John in November. I like the progressive values on this site.

Who Owns What?

Just As Scary As Terror
Anyone Seen Our Economic Policy?

By David J. Rothkopf
Sunday, July 25, 2004; Page B01

As American voters contemplate their choices in this presidential campaign year, the world's investors have been voting with their money. The early results are in -- and they don't look good for the United States.

Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released figures showing that last year for the first time, China supplanted the United States as the No. 1 destination for foreign direct investment worldwide -- that is, money that goes into factories, equipment, real estate or existing companies. And in a blow to fans of "freedom fries," No. 2 was France. Though other major economies also suffered a drop-off in this category , no nation fell as far in percentage terms as the United States.

While such numbers fluctuate and foreign direct investment is just one type of capital flow, this dramatic swing can be seen as further evidence that in the 21st century, America is going to have to fight hard for its piece of the global investment pie -- money that translates directly into new jobs and the industries of tomorrow. Clearly, the world economy is shifting around us and our place atop it is being challenged.

Yet the Bush administration's attention has seemingly been elsewhere -- which may be natural, given the trauma of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and their aftermath. But just as last week's 9/11 commission report revealed the terrible costs of not attending to looming terrorist threats, so do we need to recognize the danger of focusing so intently on one threat that we are distracted from the others we face.

Even as our efforts to combat terrorism continue -- as they must -- we need to regain enough perspective to put economic issues back among our list of top priorities. Just as a National Security Strategy is mandated by law, having a National Economic Strategy should be mandated by self-interest and common sense. Failure to view these twin aspects of our security as interlocking pieces of a single whole will hand our enemies around the world the kind of victories they can't achieve on their own; it will erode our strength, deplete our resources and undercut our way of life.

The OECD report included another revealing statistic: Investment flows into emerging economies grew dramatically between 2002 and 2003, with investors pumping more than six times as much into developing markets as they did in the prior year -- nearly $200 billion. OECD analysts concluded that the primary reason for this redirection of capital was not simply that countries like China offer cheap labor; rather it was the size and promise of their markets. This is a big deal, because even when low wages in these countries go up, that will mean increased buying power -- so the attractive labor markets of today will gradually become the attractive consumer markets of tomorrow.

At the same time, the image the United States is presenting to global investors is increasingly tainted by our apparent disregard for both economic and diplomatic fundamentals. The message we have conveyed in recent years is that there is no economic problem we confront today -- from gigantic deficits to huge under-funded liabilities -- that we wouldn't prefer to have our children solve tomorrow. So, it should not be surprising that other important measures of investor interest have also taken a dramatic turn for the worse in recent months.

For example, foreign purchases of Treasury bonds and other government securities are up, because the way the government finances higher budget deficits is by selling more paper. But the percentage of those foreign purchases made by private investors -- people with confidence in the U.S. economy -- is falling sharply. Instead, foreign governments, which bought only 47 percent of such securities in the first quarter of 2003, bought 86 percent in the first quarter in the same period this year. Almost all the government buyers were Asian, and the effect of their purchases was to prop up the value of the dollar and make U.S. exports less competitive with foreign products. Given their motivation and America 's growing dependence on such investors, this is an ominous turn of events.

Yet our economic leadership seems to be looking the other way. Two weeks after the OECD report came out, Treasury Secretary John Snow told a Cleveland audience, "There is no more serious threat to our economy than the threat of terrorist attacks on our soil."

What did Dick Cheney say? Deficits don't matter? Hmmm.

Amnesia

Republicans having selective amnesia about Iraq

MOLLY IVINS

AUSTIN, Texas – We cannot let pass without salute Martha Stewart’s remarks after being sentenced to five months in prison. In the long history of amazing things said by people in peculiar circumstances, you must admit, this ranks right up there. “There are many, many good people who have gone to prison,” she observed. “Look at Nelson Mandela.”

We live in a great nation.

Unfortunately, we are all likely to be driven batty if this presidential campaign gets any worse, which it is likely to do. Last week, I was on book tour doing one chat show after another and so got to experience firsthand the Republican orchestration of their talking points. And an impressive display it is. Truly, they speak with one voice, repeating the same thing over and over, never off-message – just remarkable.

For the first two days I was on this media marathon, the story du jour was the Senate Intelligence Committee report that concluded the CIA was just flat wrong on its pre-war calls on Iraq. Wrong about the weapons of mass destruction, wrong about connections to al-Qaida, wrong about Saddam Hussein having a nuclear program and so on. All of which we already knew the government had been wrong about, but this was the Official Report.

So here’s the Republican reaction: “See, the CIA was wrong, so you people owe President Bush an apology.” I’m sitting there, brilliantly riposting, “Huh?” Here’s the chain of logic. The CIA was wrong, therefore those on the left who say President Bush lied to us are wrong because he wasn’t lying, he just believed the CIA. And you people are being rude and hateful and ugly and just mean about President Bush, and we want an apology.

What I’m worried about here is the amnesia factor. Am I the only person around who distinctly remembers an entire 18 months ago? This is what happened: The CIA was wrong, but it wasn’t wrong enough for the White House, which kept pushing the spies to be much wronger. The CIA’s lack of sufficient wrongness was so troubling to the anxious Iraq hawks that they kept touting their own reliable sources, such as Ahmad Chalabi and his merry crew of fabulists. The neo-cons even set up their very own little intelligence shop in the Pentagon to push us into this folly in Iraq.

Which brings us to the second talking point last week. Iraq never happened. I swear to you, this war and its disastrous aftermath never happened is the new official line. Down the memory hole. Never happened. You dreamed the whole thing. Iraq is now like Ken Lay and Chalabi. They never heard of it. Only met it once. Besides, Iraq contributed to their opponents.

According to The New York Times, “several Republicans,” presumably speaking for the Bush campaign, noted that American casualties in Iraq are down from last month. Actually, that is quite untrue. Forty-two Americans were killed in Iraq in June, presumed to be an unusually bloody month because it was leading up to the big handover of sovereignty. As of July 21, 43 more Americans have been killed in Iraq, with 10 days still to go in the month.

Total number of Americans killed so far is 901, but the new line is: What War? We turned it over to the Iraqis, see? Presto, it disappears, just like magic. It’s their problem now. Doesn’t have anything to do with us. Bush is out campaigning by calling himself “the peace president.” Honest. “He repeated the words ‘peace’ or ‘peaceful’ many times, as he had done increasingly in his recent appearances,” reported The New York Times from Iowa this week.

Watch the media compliantly take up this line. Truly fascinating.

We’re also getting a new round of “9/11 was all Clinton’s fault anyway.” I don’t think this one will work for the Rs. It’s kind of pitiful, after four years, to still go around saying, “It’s all Clinton’s fault.”

Tell you what’s not Clinton’s fault, and that’s the shape this country is going to be in by the time we get rid of this administration.

I sit in awe at the feet of an accomplished master

Alone

Kenya Tells Citizens in Iraq to Go After 3 Are Abducted
By MARC LACEY

Published: July 23, 2004

NAIROBI, Kenya, July 22 - Trying to save three Kenyan hostages threatened with execution by Iraqi insurgents, the government of Kenya acknowledged Thursday that it was following in the footsteps of the Philippines in ordering all its citizens in Iraq to leave.

The Philippines recently pulled its troops from Iraq, over the objections of the Bush administration, to secure the release of a Filipino threatened with beheading.

"We feel, like the Philippines, we have to look out for our citizens," a government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, said in an interview. "We don't want any of our citizens to suffer."

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell criticized Kenya's response to the threat. "When you negotiate in this manner, all you do is encourage it," he said after a meeting with the Bulgarian foreign minister, Solomon Passy.

He added that the United States might work with other countries to establish a "code of conduct" for abductions in Iraq.

The Kenyans were seized over the weekend with four other men, three Indians and an Egyptian. Their captors said they would be killed one by one if their home countries did not pull their troops and citizens from Iraq.

News of the kidnappings was splashed across Kenya's front pages, and family members of the detained men came forward to say all three were Muslims who were not involved in any hostilities in the country.

"He's a Muslim brother," said Idd Khamis Mambo, the older brother of one of the three men, Ibrahim Khamis Mambo. "I am appealing to the vigilantes to release my brother. He's the father of four children. The mother is old, and since she received this news, she is unwell."

The Kenyan government said it had records of about 100 Kenyans working in various capacities in Kuwait. But officials said they had no idea how many of those, or others, might be working in Iraq. As part of its announcement today, the government called on family members of any Kenyans working in Iraq to immediately report to the authorities.

Clueless. Powell is clueless. The "insurgents" are going to pick off the "allies," none of whom want to be in Iraq, all of whom were bullied to be there, one at a time. We are alone in this misadventure and the guerrillas are going to show us. Will the American media pick up on it? No.

To the North

MONTREAL — The November elections may still be ahead of him but U.S. President George W. Bush came out a big winner yesterday — at the World Stupidity Awards.

Bush was a dominating presence at the second edition of the awards presented at the Just for Laughs comedy festival.

Host Lewis Black, whose biting satire is a highlight of TV's The Daily Show, took pride in the recognition the United States received at the awards, saying: "we are the gold standard."

Black said the awards "celebrate the pros" and "perfection in idiocy" because real stupidity is hard work.

"It's easy to fall down a manhole, it's easy to put the candles too close to the drapes, it's easy to launch a military invasion of another country based on a few blurry satellite photos," he observed.

"This year my people, we scaled the Everest of stupidity and we stand upon its peak."

Bush took the Stupidest Man of the Year Award and for the second time in the history of the two-year-old awards won the Stupidity Award for Reckless Endangerment of the Planet.

That award was presented by Justin Trudeau, son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. He got the biggest reaction of the night from females in the packed house, who hooted, whistled and yelled "yum" at him while he was on stage.

Bush didn't take the category alone, however, and tied with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The controversial Texan president shared in two other awards as the United States was noted for having the Stupidest Government of the Year.

"What was interesting about that is that the decision was made overwhelmingly by Americans who voted," said Albert Nerenberg, of the Main Organization Revealing Obvious Numbskulls which runs the awards.

Nominations and voting took place at the organization's online site, except for the lifetime achievement award which is settled by the judges.

The nominations were judged by experts in their fields — "a bunch of idiots" and overseen by the Academy for Recognizing Stupidity Everywhere.

Stupidest Statement of the Year was Bush's pronouncement that "combat operations have ended in Iraq," where fighting still rages more than a year after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Bush beat out pop princess Britney Spears, nominated for saying, "I do," at her brief Las Vegas wedding, and singer Jessica Simpson, who wondered aloud on TV: "Why does Chicken By the Sea taste like tuna? Is it chicken or tuna?"

Though he is facing war crimes charges after being captured by U.S. forces, Saddam can take solace in the Lifetime Achievement Award for Stupidity, which was bestowed on him with a musical tribute and a montage of film clips and photos, including one of him getting a fashion makeover from the cast of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy.

Iraq and the conservative right in the United States figured heavily in the awards, which declared Fox's The O'Reilly Factor the Stupidest TV Show and gave Fox News the nod for Media Outlet Which Has Made the Greatest Contribution to Furthering Ignorance Worldwide.

Canada's relationship with the US is really complicated, in no small part because Americans really don't know that Canada exists and that we HAVE a relationship with our northern neighbor. For Americans, North America and the USA are one entity, and this discomfits our large bordering country.

For fifty points: Who is the prime minister? How many provinces can you name? Each is headed by what figure of government? What are the official languages of Canada?

UPDATE: As promised, the answers.

Paul Martin became Prime Minister of Canada on December 12, 2003, suceeding Jean Chretien, his Liberal predecessor who served for 10 years. Martin survived a by-election last month and returned to his post leading a minority government. Canada has a bi-cameral, parliamentary form of federal government. The provinces of Canada, from east to west, are: Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario (in which is located the seat of national government, Ottawa,) Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories and Yukon. Consult your Rand McNally to learn the provincial capitals. Each province is headed by a premiere. Canada has two official languages, English and French, but neither are directly analagous to either American or British English or Parisian French. The local dialect of the latter might more be correctly identified as Quebecois. Scottish dialect English and Acadian French are both widely spoken in the Atlantic provinces, also known as Maritime or Atlantic Canada.

Why do I bring this up? Because I love Canada and wish more Yanks would develop some appreciation for the distinct culture across the border. I know Maritime Canada the best, have camped across it for years. I grew up on the Minnesota border with Ontario and spent as much time "over the border" as on the American side while a child. Many of my friends are Canadian to this day, and there is a lot we could learn from Canada, particularly as liberals. Canadians have crafted a genuinely liberal culture and I stand in some awe of it. They are more "European" than we are, while creating a definitely North American iteration of European culture, yet welcoming at least as much diversity as we do through their membership in the Commonwealth of Nations. Toronto is the most diverse city in North America, and that's saying something to this citizen of Greater DC.

If I weren't broke right now, I'd be camping on the beach at Anchorage Provincial Park on Grand Manan Island. Some of the best birding in North America. Period.

And a terrific (and cheap) lobster roll shack right at the door of the park. I can live on this stuff.

Pay to Play

Brain injuries lead Iraq war injuries

By Brad Amburn
United Press International
Published 7/23/2004 4:42 PM

WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- Nearly two-thirds of injured U.S. soldiers sent from Iraq to Walter Reed Army Medical Center have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries -- a percentage thought to be higher than any other past U.S. conflict, military officials told United Press International.

About 60 to 67 percent of soldiers coming through the hospital with wounds as well as injuries from blasts, severe falls and motor vehicle accidents have suffered these potentially life-altering brain injuries, said Dr. Deborah Warden, national director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed, where the majority of patients with suspected head injuries from Iraq are sent.

Warden said this trend may seem grim but the increased number of cases actually serves as proof of an improved head injury survival rate from better armor, more sophisticated diagnostic tools, and soldiers and medical staff better trained to look for and treat these kinds of injuries that would have been fatal or gone unnoticed in past wars.

An ongoing investigation into the lifelong effects of war-related head injuries is at the forefront of these advancements in knowledge and treatment.

"As a medical field, we're much more sensitized to mild, closed brain injury ... and we know that there are consequences and ramifications for milder traumatic brain injury," Warden told UPI. "So we are screening and identify soldiers who have had less severe traumatic brain injury," which was not the case in Vietnam or earlier wars.

With the development of more sophisticated body armor and helmets made of Kevlar -- a bullet resistant material -- the survival rate of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries has greatly improved, whereas in past wars similar injuries would have been fatal, Warden explained.

She said soldiers who survive head injuries often suffer from a range of cognitive and emotional problems, including difficulty with memory, attention and reasoning, as well as high rates of depression, alcohol use, post-traumatic anxieties and irritability.

During the Vietnam era, brain-scanning technology, such as magnetic resonance imaging, did not exist to detect the extent of brain injuries, said Dr. Karen Schwab, assistant director at the Walter Reed brain injury center. This likely resulted in under-detection of traumatic head injury and inadequate treatment, she added.

This led to the beginning of a long-term investigation studying the effects of penetrating brain injuries on Vietnam veterans. A penetrating brain injury is one where a bullet or piece of shrapnel has passed through the skull and pierced the brain. The study is now entering its third phase of research at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

The study was started in the 1960s at Walter Reed by Dr. William Caveness, who wanted to investigate how penetrating head injuries affected epilepsy in soldiers -- who had a high incidence rate of the disease, said Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the study's principal investigator.

Grafman and fellow investigator, Dr. Andres Salazar, wanted to expand the scope of the investigation to learn more about cognition and brain function, yielding results that improved the evaluation of patients with head injuries and identified key components to their long-term outcomes.

"If you have a brain injury and you can no longer do a specific task then it is likely that that area of the brain was very important -- perhaps stored the memories that enabled you to do that task," Grafman told UPI.

"We knew the patients' long-term outcome was going to depend a lot more on their cognitive status than it would on whether they had epilepsy or not," Grafman continued. "And we probably would learn a whole lot about how the brain works and help the military change how they handle head injuries because during Vietnam there was no real standard of care."

In the early 1980s, the Department of Defense granted funding for the second phase of the study, to conduct a 15-year follow-up evaluation of 520 Vietnam veterans with head injuries who had participated in the first phase of research.

The investigation led to many neuropsychological advances that proved the importance of the prefrontal cortex in social functioning, and showed the Army that veterans with head injuries still experienced cognitive deficits -- in social behavior, reasoning, attention and planning -- that needed effective diagnosis and rehabilitation.

"We were able to see that many of these guys were not worked up or evaluated well after Vietnam, which led to new (head injury) units being established in military hospitals," Grafman said. "It also got the military, especially the Army, just extremely interested in head injuries in general and trying to figure out ways to minimize injuries when they occur medically or even prevent them by changing the helmet. So it had a powerful clinical impact."

The development of better helmets has reduced the number of penetrating head injuries in Iraq, but internal, concussive head injuries are more of a problem in this war, Warden said, particularly among paratroopers injured by rough landings.

Only Your Friends Will Tell You

Fortress America: George Bush's re-election hopes may well hang on al-Qaida's ruthless ingenuity

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday July 22, 2004
The Guardian

I have just entered the United States. Since I was on a so-called J-1 visa, this was quite an achievement. First I had to fill in a form asking my host university to send me another form. Armed with that form, I filled in three further forms, including such obviously relevant information as my brother's telephone number, and the names of two people who could verify this information. Then I had to go to Barclays bank to get a special receipt for paying the fee. Then I had to supply a passport photograph 2 inches square in which "the head (measured from the top of the hair to the bottom of the chin) should measure between 1 inch to 1 inches (25mm to 35mm) with the eye level between 1 1 18 inch to 1 inches (28mm and 35mm) from the bottom of the photo". Only a few photoshops do these and, once found, Snappy Snaps charged me £24.99 for a double set. Snappy, indeed. The first time you apply, you also have to go for an interview at the embassy.

Finally armed with this precious patent of nobility, I arrived at San Francisco airport, where I was fingerprinted and photographed. Last year, I was taken aside for further investigation, while at the next desk an official of the department of homeland security reduced a girl to a nervous wreck by intrusive questioning about what she would be up to with her American boyfriend. And she, like me, was from Britain, the United States' closest ally. Imagine what it's like if you come from Libya or Iran.

Yes, I know that the United States was attacked by terrorists on September 11 2001, and some of those terrorists had entered the US on J-1 visas. I understand, obviously, that the country has had to tighten up its security controls. But this is more than just a personal grouse. Heads of leading American universities have publicly complained that such bureaucratic and intrusive procedures are reducing the number of foreign students willing and able to come to study in the US. (I have heard it argued in London that this creates a significant opportunity for British universities.) This raises the larger question of whether the United States' "soft power", its power to attract others and to get them to do what it wants because they find it attractive, has been diminished by the way the Bush administration has reacted to the 9/11 attacks. That, in turn, raises the even larger question of who is winning this "war": al-Qaida or the US?

"God bless America," wrote WH Auden, "so large, so friendly and so rich." And American hyperpower, by contrast with the one-dimensional superpower of the Soviet Union, has always depended on having all three dimensions: military, economic and "soft". The soft power of a country is more difficult to measure than its military or economic power, but one yardstick is what I call the "Statue of Liberty test". In this test, countries are rated by the number of people outside who want to get into them, divided by the number of people inside who want to get out. Thus, during the cold war, many people wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union, while very few wanted to go and live there, whereas hundreds of millions wanted to enter America and very few to leave it. By this rough measure, America still has bags of soft power.

Yet its overall attractiveness surely has been diminished, not just by such bureaucratic procedures, but by Guantánamo, by Iraq, by a certain harsh, militarist, nationalist approach to world affairs, and by a mistaken belief that the "war on terror" can be won mainly, if not solely, by military, intelligence and police means.

f you look at the results of the worldwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre, you can see that resentment of America around the world has reached unprecedented levels in the last two years. The Bush administration has imperilled the economic dimension of American power, by running up $500bn trade and budget deficits while increasing military spending to $400bn, and it has largely neglected the third, soft dimension. Meanwhile, even the one in five Americans who possess a passport have become more reluctant to travel outside North America. To give just one small example: American customers of Avis car rentals in Europe are down 40% on 2000 levels. There's a real sense of a "Fortress America".

Could the liberal, multilateralist, French-speaking John Kerry, who launches his campaign in earnest at the Democrats' convention in Boston next week, change all this, and restore a Kennedyesque glow to America's image in the world? I find many people in Europe already answer that question with a firm no. Something deeper has changed, they say. Even if America reverts to its previous form, attitudes towards America will not.

B ut I wouldn't be so sure. Perhaps it's just the effect of sitting here in the Californian sunshine, watching this extraordinary multi-ethnic society working all around me, but I think America's underlying attractions are still all there - damaged by 9/11, diminished by economic competition from booming Asia, but still formidable. If Kerry can summon a spark of charisma, aided by his appealing running mate John Edwards, and if the monstrous ego of Ralph Nader will kindly fall under an appropriately eco-friendly bus, the Democrat has a chance of reminding us that the other America still exists. And much of the world, even the Arab and Muslim world, will respond.

Which is why, if Osama bin Laden is still in a fit state to make political calculations, he must be backing an election victory for George Bush. The object of the terrorist is often to reveal the "true" repressive character of the state against which the terror is directed, and thus win further support for the terrorists' cause. If the United States had just acted in Afghanistan, and then concentrated on hoovering-up the remains of al-Qaida, the United States might clearly be winning the war on terror today. But, as bin Laden must have hoped, the Bush administration overreacted, and thus provided, in Iraq and Guantánamo, recruiting sergeants for al-Qaida of which Osama could only dream.

I've given you what I think is the most salient section of Garton Ash's article, but I urge you to read the rest. This may be THE piece you want to print out or email to family and friends, pastors and parents who support W. This may surprise you, but this little Bump in the Beltway has readers around the world, and I hear from my readers. The rest of the world is horrified by Bush, and horrified that someplace north of 40% of the American electorate is prepared to support him in the next election. They wonder if there is something wrong with the American character, if we are as greedy, shortsighted, narcissistic and selfish as we appear with the Bushes, Cheneys, Rummys and Ashcrofts at the helm. They always thought we were arrogant, that's nothing new. But the world put up with that character flaw because they also know that we as people are essentially friendly, if not particularly curious about the rest of the world. That friendly face is gone now, replaced by Bush and Cheney's opportunistic, warmaking smirk and sneer. The charisma and extroversion and genuine piety of the Clinton years have been replaced by wealthy theocrats who think of nothing but their own wealth and that of people like them, the worst parody of Calvinist theology.

Your family and friends may say, "But it is up to us, we don't care what the rest of the world thinks." When historical friends like the Brits are saying things like this about us, you have to ask if there isn't a germ of truth in their critique would be my reply.

Preaching the Convention

via Philocrites:

Convention preacher offers US views

By Rich Barlow, Globe Staff | July 24, 2004

Politics and religion rub shoulders in the pew next week. Advocates for the poor have invited delegates to the Democratic National Convention to an interfaith service and rally from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Wednesday at Old South Church.

The featured preacher, the Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., once got an impressive nomination himself: Newsweek named him one of the dozen ''most effective preachers" in the English-speaking world. Forbes has been the senior minister at Manhattan's Riverside Church since 1989. He also will address the convention Tuesday night. Excerpts from an interview follow.
....
Regular churchgoers overwhelmingly vote Republican. What does that suggest about the two political parties?

In my sermon, I may call people to read Isaiah 58. In it, we get evidence that religion can express itself in two directions. One is personal piety, reflected in church attendance and public display of one's religious identification. Another aspect is the prophetic critique. In [Isaiah], it's almost as if God would say, forget about how often you go to church, forget about how many times you pray; what I want you to do is feed the hungry, take the homeless into your homes, care for those who are incarcerated. In Matthew 25, the issue is, when I was hungry, you didn't feed me, when I was poor and naked, you didn't clothe me.

The polls will give the impression that folks are more religious on the basis of how much they go to church. I'm a pastor; I want folks to come. But the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights are rooted in a call for justice. Otherwise, people will punch their cards -- ''See, I went [to church] 12 times." But you did not provide resources for [the needy].

Where I studied theology, I was told that religion is about love and justice, not wealth and power. In fact, I was taught that wealth and power get in the way of spiritual growth. I think they told me something like, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.

Partisan Season

Voters Are Very Settled, Intense And Partisan, and It's Only July
By ROBIN TONER

Published: July 25, 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Clif Kelley, a retired economist, stood in the leafy backyard of his suburban home one recent evening and summoned his Democratic neighbors, 62 of whom were arrayed before him, to the political barricades.

"We firmly believe that another four years of Bush in the White House will do incredible damage to this country," declared Mr. Kelley, 87, imploring his neighbors to get involved, knock on doors, make sure their precinct (which went to President Bush by six votes four years ago) goes for Senator John Kerry this time around.

"I am one of those World War II veterans who are dying off at a rapid pace, and I can't stand the thought of dying under a Bush administration."

That same intensity was palpable the following day, in Beckley, W.Va., where thousands of people like Jim Farnsworth, a 32-year-old telephone technician holding his 1-month-old son, turned out for a rally with Mr. Bush. "Voted for him last time, will vote for him again, would even vote for him a third term if he would run," Mr. Farnsworth said. "I like the convictions that he stands on. Abortion, family."

His wife, Tina, chimed in, "His belief in God." Behind them, as far as the eye could see, snaked a line of like-minded voters, patiently waiting for hours in the scorching sun to see their president.

This is not the typical July of a presidential election year.

Rarely has a presidential campaign been this intense, this polarized, this partisan, this early. The conventions historically begin the general election season, ending a lull after the primary season has wound down. But for months now, the general election battle has been fully joined.

Crowds are bigger than normal for this time of year, campaign veterans say, and money has poured in at an astonishing rate. Voters sometimes seem on the verge of tears as they reach for their candidate's hand on the rope line. They wait in the rain, they line up for hours to go through the metal detectors and the increasingly elaborate security, they cheer every biting partisan line.

The idea of a red America and a blue America, Republican and Democratic, two countries separated by a yawning cultural divide, has become a cliché, dismissed by many experts as overdrawn. The electorate, taken as a whole, is no more divided over hot-button issues like abortion than it was in years past, those experts ar

gue; a large middle ground still exists on many other issues, like the need for more affordable health care.

But the increasing partisanship of the 1980's and 1990's has left its mark on politics, culminating in the intensity of this campaign. Most voters have already chosen sides - sometimes angrily, often passionately. The swing voter and the independent, once thought to be the models of the modern voter, are harder to find this year, according to pollsters in both parties.

One telling measure: 79 percent surveyed in the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll said their minds had been made up about whom to vote for in November; 64 percent felt that way in July 2000. Similarly, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that one in five voters this summer were "persuadable," compared with one in three at this stage in past campaigns.

I would argue that there is a broad consensus in this country about a large bushel basket of "traditional liberal" values, but the infotainment that we call news seeks out conflict in order to gain interest. Take a look at the headlines in your paper some morning and circle with a pencil all of the headlines containing a set-up conflict. Headline writers are taught this stuff. Look at the he said-she said pairings on the TV or radio "new and analysis" programs. Same dynamic.

That's part of it. The extreme partisanship of the post-Gingrich congressional Republicans, their awful treatment of the Clintons and their congressional colleagues has hardened the opinions of those of us on the traditionally tolerant left. The congressional Repubs, in particular, are virtually the only party in that branch of the government, the Democrats reduced to little more than nibbling at the edges of governance by the outlandish procedural excesses of the majority.

I don't know that the electorate can maintain the fever pitch of emotion that is bubbling below the political surface of this election season and predict that by the time John Kerry is sworn in next January, a lot of the edge will be off of the public's partisanship. I don't think Kerry is going to have an easy time of it, even if we take back the Senate, as a DeLay-led House is still going to be a roadblock to substantive legislative policy changes. But if the Dems retake the Senate--a genuine possibility--at least the the Judiciary will be safe for a couple of years.

Name the Problem before you can Fix It

Honorable Commission, Toothless Report
By RICHARD A. CLARKE

Published: July 25, 2004

Americans owe the 9/11 commission a deep debt for its extensive exposition of the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Yet, because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions.

Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before 9/11, and that by invading Iraq the administration has left us less safe as a nation. (Fortunately, opinion polls show that the majority of Americans have already come to these conclusions on their own. )

What the commissioners did clearly state was that Iraq had no collaborative relationship with Al Qaeda and no hand in 9/11. They also disclosed that Iran provided support to Al Qaeda, including to some 9/11 hijackers. These two facts may cause many people to conclude that the Bush administration focused on the wrong country. They would be right to think that.

So what now? News coverage of the commission's recommendations has focused on the organizational improvements: a new cabinet-level national intelligence director and a new National Counterterrorism Center to ensure that our 15 or so intelligence agencies play well together. Both are good ideas, but they are purely incremental. Had these changes been made six years ago, they would not have significantly altered the way we dealt with Al Qaeda; they certainly would not have prevented 9/11. Putting these recommendations in place will marginally improve our ability to crush the new, decentralized Al Qaeda, but there are other changes that would help more.

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.
....
Unfortunately, because of America's low standing in the Islamic world, we are now at a great disadvantage in the battle of ideas. This is primarily because of the unnecessary and counterproductive invasion of Iraq. In pulling its bipartisan punches, the commission failed to admit the obvious: we are less capable of defeating the jihadists because of the Iraq war.

Unanimity has its value, but so do debate and dissent in a democracy facing a crisis. To fully realize the potential of the commission's report, we must see it not as the end of the discussion but as a partial blueprint for victory. The jihadist enemy has learned how to spread hate and how to kill - and it is still doing both very effectively three years after 9/11.

As I've said elsewhere, I don't think that adding an additional executive at the top of the structure is the right way to go. There are structural problems at the middle levels, where the work is actually done, that need to be fixed. Clarke's second point is bang on, however, and this is the part that the neocons are constitutionally unable to do. Regime change here for effectiveness; anything else will cost us lives.

Looking Out the Window

The Real Show
by Bill Moyers

First, a confession: I haven't seen Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." It's not that I haven't wanted to; it's just that I have not been able to tear myself away from the real show-the political theatre playing out in full sight right before our eyes. Who needs a movie when you have the news?

You think I'm kidding. But believe me; I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to. Unfortunately, I don't have to.

Fantasy Plans

NATO Short on Troops for Afghan Elections

Saturday July 24, 2004 12:31 PM

By PAUL GEITNER

Associated Press Writer

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - After months of delay, NATO has ordered hundreds more peacekeepers to Afghanistan to help provide security during presidential elections, but the deployment still appeared to fall short of 3,500 troops that were promised.

NATO ambassadors meeting late Friday approved two more battalions for Afghanistan, one each from Italy and Spain. A battalion has between 600 and 1,000 soldiers.

The alliance also cleared another 500 or so troops to beef up provincial reconstruction teams. Assuming the battalions were large, that would still make only about 2,500 troops.

``We need a little bit more to get to 3,500,'' said Lt. Col. Ludger Terbrueggen, spokesman at NATO's military headquarters in southern Belgium.

Cdr. Chris Henderson, a spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping force in the Afghan capital of Kabul, said a third battalion would be on standby as part of a reserve contingent outside the country. He said the alliance had yet to decide which countries would supply the reserve force but insisted ``NATO has not failed in meeting its commitment.''

Um, Cdr. Henderson, if you are still more than a thousand troops (a third) short of your commitment, I'd say you've "failed to meet your commitment."

This is the reason that Kerry is fantasizing when he talks about "internationalizing" the Iraq war: NATO hasn't got the warm bodies and neither does the UN. What multilateral forces there are being tied up in peace keeping/nation building actions from East Timor to Bosnia. There ain't nobody to bail us out. What we need to do is bail out.

August Hearings

Congress Plans Special Hearings on Sept. 11 Panel
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and PHILIP SHENON

Published: July 24, 2004

In Congress, which received withering criticism in the panel's report for lax oversight of the intelligence apparatus, House and Senate leaders stopped short of calling for a special session to consider the recommendations. Still, it was clear that the leaders felt enough urgency to work through the August recess, a time that in even years is traditionally devoted to campaigning.

"The threat of terrorism will be with us for a long time," the majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, said on Thursday night on the Senate floor with the minority leader, Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, by his side. "We need to fix the problems and correct the shortcomings cited by the commission so that we can make America safer."

To that end, Dr. Frist and Mr. Daschle deputized Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is chairwoman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who is the ranking Democrat on that panel, to produce bills by Oct. 1 that would carry out two of the 9/11 panel's central recommendations. Those points are creating the post of director of intelligence and a counterterrorism center.

The Senate leaders also promised to name a bipartisan group to address the other central recommendation - changing the way Congress oversees intelligence agencies. That is a politically thorny task that could result in some lawmakers' losing power and others gaining it. The group will also be charged with making recommendations by Oct. 1, the leaders said.

Changing the way Congress conducts oversight is more a matter of changes in its rules than passing measures for the president to sign.

As the Senate leaders began to act, House leaders raced to keep pace. First, they announced that they had ordered committee chairmen to work through the summer recess to examine the report and recommend changes. Later, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who on Thursday said that he was not certain that any recommendations could be adopted this year, declared that a hearing schedule would be announced next week.

I can't remember Congress EVER holding hearings in August, the leadership is obviously feeling political heat. Stepped up congressional oversight is a good thing if it doesn't devolve into partisan wingnuttery, which is all that is going on these days. I am adamantly opposed to a cabinet-level intel "czar" for the same reason. It was the politicization of the CIA (and George Tenet) that allowed Bush to pin his Iraq war on a batch of mythologized intel.

The Fertile Triangle

Health fears grow in polluted Iraq
By Caroline Hawley
BBC correspondent in Baghdad

It's not just the violence in Iraq that is keeping doctors busy. The country is facing an environmental crisis.

"Imagine yourself that somebody throws you into the sea, asking you to swim when you don't know how to swim and you don't have any equipment - what will you do? This is the situation here."
....
More than half the children now being treated at the hospital have water-borne diseases. The doctors say they can only treat the symptoms of the real problem - the state of Iraq's infrastructure.

Judy Woodruff, Media Whore

Notice how she conclusion-jumps. It's a leading question and Jamie MacIntyre doesn't answer.

WOODRUFF: So, Jamie, to clarify, this indicates that President Bush was present and putting his service while he was in the Air Guard, even though he wasn't flying, am I correct?

MCINTYRE: Well, it doesn't show that he accrued any credits during that three-month period, but again, the White House never asserted that he had during that three months. They say that he fulfilled his obligation over a 12-month period and that the records for that exist that show he accumulated the necessary points to have done what he was supposed to do. Critics charge at that point that he was away working on a senatorial campaign and was essentially AWOL for 12 months. The White House says that the documents refute that, but there was always a question about what this gap -- how this gap in the documents came by and now they say they've found that missing document.

I'm still looking around for a media outlet that says what is actually in those recovered records. Send me a link if you've found it.

Abu Ghraib Redux

This is eerie. The echo chamber hits the ed pages. Maybe the national dailies aren't willing to let this die, or maybe they are going to publish their outraged editorials just before they go into snooze mode for August and never mention it again. Hard to know. It will depend on what Warner does.

Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed

A week ago, John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was satisfied that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was keeping his promise to leave no stone unturned to investigate the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison. A newly released report by the Army's inspector general shows that Mr. Rumsfeld's team may be turning over stones, but it's not looking under them.

The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training.

Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. It does grudgingly concede that "in some cases, abuse was accompanied by leadership failure at the tactical level," but the report absolves anyone of rank, in keeping with the investigation's spirit. The inspector general's staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them. It based its findings on the comical observation that "commanders, leaders and soldiers treated detainees humanely" while investigators from the Pentagon were watching. And it made no attempt to find out who had authorized threatening prisoners with dogs and sexually humiliating hooded men, to name two American practices the Red Cross found to be common. The inspector general's see-no-evil team simply said it couldn't find those "approach techniques" in the Army field manual.

Even the report's release on Thursday was an exercise in misdirection, timed to be overshadowed by the 9/11 commission's report. Senators on the armed services panel were outraged at the report's shoddiness and timing, but should not have been surprised. The Defense Department has consistently tried to stymie Mr. Warner's investigation. It "misplaced" thousands of pages from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib, the only credible military account so far. It stalled the completion of a pivotal look at Army intelligence by two other Army generals until lawmakers went off to the political conventions and summer vacations. And it ignored Senate demands for the Red Cross reports on American military prisons for months.

The Pentagon finally brought those documents to the Senate in the last two weeks, in a way that ensured they would be of minimal use. The voluminous reports were shown briefly to senators and a few members of the Armed Services Committee staff after the senators' personal aides were ushered out. Then the reports were hauled back to the Pentagon.

Mr. Warner has admirably resisted pressure from the White House and Republican leaders in Congress to stop his investigation. But he is showing signs of losing appetite for the fight. Mr. Warner held only one hearing in the last month - on the new report - and agreed to the ground rules on the Red Cross reports. We've always been skeptical that the Defense Department can investigate itself credibly, and now it's obvious that it plans to stick to the "few bad apples" excuse. The only way to learn why innocent Iraqis were tortured by American soldiers is a formal Congressional inquiry, with subpoena power.

An Army Whitewash

Saturday, July 24, 2004; Page A20

THE ARMY'S attempt to hold itself accountable for the abuse of foreign prisoners is off to a terrible start. On Thursday, while the media and political worlds were focused on the report of the Sept. 11 commission, the Army inspector general released a 300-page summary of an investigation of "detainee operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though it identified 94 cases of confirmed or possible abuse, including 20 prisoner deaths, the probe concluded by sounding the defense offered up by the Pentagon ever since the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were published: that the crimes did not result from Army policy and were not the fault of senior commanders but were "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals."

This conclusion is contradicted by the independent investigations and reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross, by an earlier Army investigation undertaken before the scandal became public, and by testimony given to Congress. Oddly, it doesn't even square with some of the findings buried in the inspector general's own report, which confirm that commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan ordered "high-risk" interrogation procedures to be used on prisoners without adequate safeguards, training or regard for the Geneva Conventions.

No matter: The report effectively communicates the strategy of the military brass on the detainee affair, which is to focus blame on a few low-ranking personnel, shield all senior commanders from accountability, and deny or bury any facts that interfere with these aims. In that sense, the signal it sends to Congress is clear: The Pentagon cannot be counted on to reliably or thoroughly investigate the prisoner abuse affair. An independent probe by an outside authority is desperately needed.

To the credit of Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), the Senate Armed Services Committee quickly assembled for a hearing on the Army report, despite the not-so-subtle timing of its release, and some Republican as well as Democratic senators rightly voiced incredulity at the Army's findings. They pointed out that, while identifying no "systemic failures" in the military, the inspector general's team chose not to investigate such episodes as the hiding of "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross -- a Geneva Convention violation that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has publicly stated was authorized by him. Nor did the investigation explore the handling of Red Cross reports by the staff of the Iraq commander in chief, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez -- which, rather than acting to stop abuses, reportedly tried to restrict further Red Cross access. In fact, no one above the rank of brigade commander was considered culpable, the inspector general candidly told the senators. "We think it ended there," said Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek.

Really? That's hard to square with the general's own report, which says that top U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, under pressure to collect more intelligence, "published high risk [interrogation] policies that presented a significant risk of misapplication if not trained and executed carefully." Yet "not all interrogators were trained," "some inspected units were unaware of the correct command policy," and some officers "with no training in interrogation techniques began conducting their own interrogation sessions." Moreover, some of the techniques set forth by Gen. Sanchez and other senior commanders previously had been approved only for "unlawful combatants" held at Guantanamo Bay. That "appears to contradict the terms of" the Pentagon's own legal judgments, which said some interrogation methods permissible at Guantanamo could not be used in Iraq.

All this -- and yet, purportedly, there were no failures of policy, and responsibility ended at the level of a lieutenant colonel, or a reserve one-star general. The senators who rejected this whitewash were correct: It is implausible and unacceptable. If the reputation and integrity of the Army are to be restored, some other authority will need to do better.

Union Busting

Boy, has this story developed during the day. The NYT broke it earlier as United delaying a pension payment. I have a personal stake in this story, a friend is a 38 year vet of United. She's trying to figure out if she'll be able to retire before she dies.

United Airlines to Quit Paying Into Pension Plans
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH and MICHELINE MAYNARD

Published: July 24, 2004

United Airlines said yesterday that it would not contribute to its employee pension plans while it remains under bankruptcy protection. That move could save it more than a billion dollars in cash over the coming year, but pension experts said it signaled the likelihood that United would terminate some or all of the plans.

A full-blown default by United on all four of its pension plans would send tens of thousands of current and future retirees, and billions of dollars in unfunded obligations, to the government's pension insurance program, dealing the program its biggest blow since the government began insuring pensions in 1974. Such a huge default could also set off a chain reaction, prompting other airlines to reduce their own costly pension plans to stay competitive. That, in turn, would worsen the pension agency's finances.

But the rare and drastic measure would also make United much more attractive to the lenders it needs for the financing to help it emerge from bankruptcy. United filed for bankruptcy in December 2002, hit hard by the decline in travel that began even before the terror attacks of September 2001, when it lost two planes, and the struggle to compete with low-cost rivals.

Terminating a pension plan is a drastic measure that requires approval of the bankruptcy court. In a so-called distress termination, the government takes over the failed pension plan's assets and liabilities and uses the money to pay benefits to the retirees, within certain limits. When there are not enough assets in the plan to cover the obligations, the government's insurance program, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, makes up the difference. Retirees whose benefits exceed those limits would lose some of them.

The federal agency cannot reject such a termination, although it can go to court to try to get more resources from the defaulting company. The company's workers can also try to block such a termination, either in court or by striking. But success could also be failure, because they could drive the company into liquidation, leaving themselves with neither a pension plan nor jobs.

Federal law requires companies that offer pensions to contribute to their pension funds once a year, or quarterly when a fund is severely weakened, as United's funds are. It is highly unusual for a company to withhold contributions, and virtually unheard-of for a bankrupt company that has skipped contributions to revive the neglected plan later on.

There are virtually no good options here, for either the unions or the company, short of the airline economy strengthening suddenly and rendering the whole issue moot, which ain't gonna happen. United is hanging on by a thread, and so are the employees, who don't have a basketful of options. Elsewhere today I read that Delta is going back to the pilots' union with huge, really huge wage giveback demands.

I tell you, the economy is fragile and the airline industry is the canary in the mineshaft.

I went to a presentation on bankruptcy a few years ago when I was still wearing the labor organizer hat and employers were using threats of bankruptcy to avoid salary increases. The employees are last in the queue when it comes to cashing the company out. Unfortunately for the industry and the employees, these aren't negotiating ploys, these are the real deals, as the airline industry Wal-marts to cheapy, non-union carriers. That $39 dollar, cheapy fare you just picked up on Jet Blue or Southwest? Non-union employees with no salary or working condition protections is what you just paid for. If your pilot is groggy and your cabin crew snappish, don't be surprised.

Links

Here is a link to the 9-11 commission report in HTML, courtesy of Kottke.org.

UPDATE: Sorry. As David Byron notes in comments, this is only the executive summary. I still haven't found an HTML version of the entire report. Kottke.org is usually one of the first places where HTML shows up.

Plane Scandals

Investigators Probe Air Force Planes

MATT KELLEY

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Air Force has spent $2.6 billion to buy 50 planes which do not meet the military's requirements and cannot be flown in combat zones, Pentagon investigators reported Friday.

The Air Force has continued to order more C-130J planes despite the fact that contractor Lockheed Martin hasn't delivered one that met requirements in the eight years since the program began, the report said.

Problems with the propeller-driven cargo planes include faulty computer and diagnostic systems and inadequate defense measures, the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General concluded. So far, none of the planes has been cleared for some of their primary missions: Dropping troops and cargo into war zones and flying in conditions requiring the crew to wear night-vision goggles.

The inspector general's report concluded that Air Force and Defense Department officials mismanaged the program, requiring millions of dollars in upgrades and thousands of hours of work to make the planes capable of performing as well as the aging models they're supposed to replace.

The Air Force strongly denied the report's conclusions.

Marvin Sambur, the Air Force's top acquisition official, wrote to the investigators that the program is within its cost, schedule and contract guidelines. Lockheed Martin has started delivering planes which meet Air Force specifications and the necessary upgrades have either been completed or scheduled, Sambur wrote.

"While some of the facts presented in the DOD/IG report are accurate, the findings and conclusions ascribed to these facts cannot be supported," Sambur wrote in response to the inspector general's office. "The Air Force fully endorses the C-130J program."

Lockheed Martin spokesman Jeff Rhodes said Friday the company agrees with the Air Force.

"The Air Force, ultimately the end user who is flying the aircraft, also says that the C-130J program is meeting cost, schedule, contract and regulatory commitments," Rhodes said in an email statement.

Two Air Force squadrons haven't been able to perform their missions for more than four years because they only have C-130Js, the report said. The 815th Air Squadron at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi and the 135th Airlift Squadron of the Maryland Air National Guard are supposed to drop troops and supplies into hostile areas.

Five other Air Force and Marine units have the C-130J planes but use older C-130s to perform their missions, the report said.

Air Force testers found so many problems with the planes they stopped evaluations in 2000 so the problems they already found could be fixed, the report said.

Then there is the Boeing scandal:

It's simply not true that the Bush administration is hostile to congressional oversight. Why just a couple of weeks ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld answered an eight-month-old request by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for Defense Department e-mails and other records pertaining to Air Force decision-making about a controversial $23.5 billion tanker leasing deal with Boeing Co.

Okay. It took eight months. But Rumsfeld fully agreed to allow Congress to see the documents. Just a couple of teensy restrictions. The Pentagon, not Congress, will decide which documents the lawmakers can see.

Isolating the Hyperpower

Egyptian Diplomat Is Seized by Gunmen in Iraq
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: July 23, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 23 — An Egyptian diplomat was seized by gunmen in Iraq today, and the American military conducted a strike in Falluja on a group of Iraqis it said were known allies of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has claimed credit for some of the deadliest attacks and kidnappings in Iraq.

The kidnapping of the diplomat, reported by the Arabic television station Al Jazeera, was the latest by insurgents who have seized and held foreigners to demand countries withdraw troops or stop doing business in Iraq.

The Egyptian embassy confirmed one of its diplomats was seized by a group of gunmen, calling itself the Lions of God Brigades, according to a statement on Al Jazeera. The station broadcast a video of the man, who was identified as Mohammad Qutb, seated in front of six masked and armed kidnappers, according to The Associated Press.

The group said it abducted him because the Egyptian government had said it was prepared to deploy security experts to help Iraq's interim government, the A.P. said.

The American military said in a statement today that the "precision strike" in Falluja on 10 to 12 "terrorists with known ties" to Mr. Zarqawi's network was coordinated with the Iraqi government. It gave no details about casualties or the type of weapon used in the strike, which hit the courtyard of a house.

The insurgents are turning up the heat. They want to isolate the US and they are beginning to have some success, because we don't have much more than a cosmetic multinational presence.

Scary Skies

FAA Faces Exodus Of Traffic Controllers
Union Calls for Increase in Hiring

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 22, 2004; Page A03

Federal officials said yesterday that they are preparing to deal with a nationwide wave of retirements by air traffic controllers over the next decade and that passenger safety will not be jeopardized.

Regional officials with the Federal Aviation Administration are gauging how a potential exodus of nearly half the nation's air traffic controllers will affect individual airports, including Reagan National, Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International, said Doug Simons, manager at National's control tower.

"Neither the FAA nor its controllers will permit the system to operate in ways that are unsafe or with staffing that is inadequate to the task," Simons told reporters yesterday. "We will be there, with the numbers of people we need, everywhere, at all times."

The FAA estimates that nearly half of the nation's 15,000 air traffic controllers will be eligible for retirement before 2013. Many of the potential retirees were hired in 1982 after President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization the year before.

In the Washington region, nearly 700 air traffic controllers direct more than 3,000 daily flights from six towers and radar centers. Ten percent of those controllers will be eligible to retire in 2006, said FAA spokesman Greg Martin.

This is serious. The skies are much busier now than they were in 1982. Most civilian air traffic controllers got their training in the military, which is smaller now than it was in 1982. This system is already stretched to the max. I'm already a white knuckle flier, this isn't going to make me feel any easier.

The Inescapable Conclusion

William Pfaff: Reclaiming the U.S. Army

The United States now is in its second year of fighting two wars, neither of them victorious, both promising to go on for years to come. The reservists and National Guard members who originally contracted for duty one weekend a month, and two weeks in summer, find themselves locked into active duty that in many cases is already in its second year. Regular soldiers have had their terms of service extended.
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The marriages these people left behind, their businesses or professional practices, are under enormous strain or have collapsed. Yet army planners are relying on the National Guard alone to supply 43 percent of the American troops needed in Iraq next year.
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Once again there is a widening sense of exploitation and broken moral contracts for a war of still-obscure motivations, interests, and purposes. Resentments and cracks in solidarity and discipline reappear.
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Critics of the liberal movie-maker Michael Moore accuse him of "class warfare" because his "Fahrenheit 9/11" says that an American elite is exploiting patriotic volunteer soldiers, usually recruited from the poorest groups in American society, who signed up to learn skills, earn money for education and escape long-term unemployment in dying towns.
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These soldiers are disproportionately black (in roughly twice the proportion of African-Americans in the general population). To say this is not class warfare. It is to tell a truth the government neglects to its peril.
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Vietnam was a war where those who were selected had to go. Iraq is an affair that now depends on people who originally volunteered but now are being forced to serve multiple 12-month duty tours, in what amounts to their de facto conscription.
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As a result, army re-enlistments are dropping; new enlistments in fiscal year 2005 (beginning in October) are expected to fall 10 percent short of the total needed. If the United States means to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq for the next five years, there will be no alternative to reinstating conscription after the presidential inauguration in January.
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With that, the American people - however many times they are warned of impending "totalitarianism and anarchy" - may again end the political paralysis and simply say no. They may reclaim the American Army - their army - from its abuse by what they have concluded is a bankrupt political leadership.

Emphasis mine. Contrary to what we've heard out of Rummy, this simply has to happen and protestations to the contrary are disingenuous.

Torture and the Army

Guantanamo techniques improperly used elsewhere, report finds

By Elise Ackerman

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Military interrogators working in Iraq and Afghanistan improperly embraced harsh techniques that had been approved only for use on detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a 321-page report released Thursday by the Army Inspector General.

The report, written by Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, said commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan incorporated the harsher techniques into their interrogation policies based in part on memos they had read about the Guantanamo interrogations.

But the report said the commanders failed "take into account that different standards applied" to Guantanamo, where suspected members of al-Qaida were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Geneva Conventions largely applied.

Mikolashek's report, the result of a five-month investigation into how Army policies might have contributed to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, found no evidence of a "systemic failure."

But his report is certain to bolster criticism by human rights advocates that Bush administration policy toward prisoners at Guantanamo created an atmosphere that led to prisoner abuse elsewhere. Democrats in Congress were quick to criticize the report.

"Interrogation techniques witnessed by the International Committee of the Red Cross during visits to Abu Ghraib appear consistent with techniques that we now know were approved and later rescinded by high-level Defense Department officials or by commanders in the theater in Iraq," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said at a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing where the report was unveiled. "In light of the frequently changing `rules of engagement,' as they were called, for interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, it is difficult to believe that there were not systemic problems with our detention and interrogation operations."

Mikolashek, however, told the committee that his investigation of individual abuse cases found "they were not the result of any widespread systemic failure, but ... the result of an individual's failure to adhere to known standards of discipline, training or Army values."

I blogged a little of this yesterday without much commentary, but after a chance to do some more reading and listening to a report on NPR last night, it is clear that this is a very flawed report and the Democrats on the SASC criticized it heavily since we know from other reports that the abuses and torture WERE systemic.

Mikolashek virtually contradicts himself:

During the fall of 2002, officers in charge of supervising interrogations at Guantanamo sought approval for more aggressive measures. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld eventually approved the use of 26 specific "counter-resistance techniques" but required the use of seven safeguards, including approval from commanders.

However, when the techniques were imported to Afghanistan and Iraq, not all the safeguards were communicated to interrogators, Mikolashek found. Not all interrogators were trained on the use of the techniques, he said, and some interrogators were not even aware which policy was in place.

"These are very high-risk measures that require an awful lot of oversight, supervision and insurance," Mikolashek said. "And they were not always disseminated thoroughly, properly and well understood, nor were there all the safeguards in place ... to ensure the techniques were properly applied."

If Guantanamo techniques were imported into Iraq and Afghanistan, that implies a pretty high level up the chain of command.

The NYT report on the hearing indicates that the issue has become highly politicized with partisan splits on the committee with the Democrats sharply questioning witnesses and the Repubs defending the Army. It seems to me that a search for the truth is in the best interests of everyone, but Repub obfuscation is the order of the day.

The Sunshine Rule

A Lesson From 9/11: Openness

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

And that is why the second stage of the debate is about accountability, which cannot be dismissed as blame-mongering. Simply put, our government has a lot to answer for. Kean and the commission carefully avoided singling out individuals, but Kean's words yesterday were unequivocal: "This was a failure of policy, management, capability and above all a failure of imagination. . . . What we can say with a good deal of confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the United States government before 9/11 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot."

The report has critical things to say about both the Bush and Clinton administrations. But the attack happened on this president's watch, and Chapter 8, (titled after former CIA director George Tenet's evocative phrase) "The System Was Blinking Red," makes clear that the Bush administration had a lot of warning about the general threat, if not its particular locus. "There were more than 40 intelligence articles in the PDBs [President's Daily Brief] from January 20 to September 10, 2001, that related to Bin Ladin," the report says.

As for that famous Aug. 6 brief, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the report offers what little it learned from Bush as to what he did with the information. "He did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether [national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice had done so," the report says. "He said that if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That never happened."

The report said at another point: "No CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States. . . . We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of the threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States."

There may be perfectly good explanations for this. The public should know what they are. A president asking for reelection on the basis of his handling of terrorism needs to explain far more clearly what he did with what he learned that summer. And, yes, Bill Clinton should do exactly the same thing concerning his decisions when he was president.

So let's be bipartisan: Clinton and Bush owe the nation back-to-back news conferences to react to the criticisms contained in the report. The news conferences should be open-ended. No plausible question should be left behind or evaded. If we want to move forward, we have to put the recrimination behind us. As the Sept. 11 commission has shown, openness and honesty are the best means to that end.

Nah. Ashcroft will just reclassify all the documents. This most secretive administration of modern times is unlikely to change its spots at this point in time.

Blue Ribbon Tour

Panel Isn't Going Away -- It's Going on the Offensive

By Doyle McManus and Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — Blue-ribbon committees usually produce long reports that assign blame, and then go quietly out of business.

But Thursday, the commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 boldly defied those rules: It refused to assign blame — and, more importantly, it refused to go out of business.

So far, at least, the effect appears to have put President Bush on the defensive — and to have handed his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), an opportunity to question the president's record.

The commission's decision to avoid assigning blame for the 2001 terrorist attacks was a boon to Bush, who had been in office for eight months at the time. But its decision to press for sweeping organizational changes in the government's intelligence agencies put the onus for action on the president, who has resisted such proposals.

The president received Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, at the White House on Thursday morning and praised the commission for "making very solid, sound recommendations."

"I assured them that where government needs to act, we will," Bush said.

But Bush and his aides appeared to resist the commission's plea for quick action.

This is a wildcard thrown into the campaign season. I have no idea how this is going to play. What it will mean is that more people will pay attention to the commission's report--more than the six policy wonks, like me, who normally read these things--and it will enter into the political process. I'll need to read more of it to get a clue about how.

Hair on Fire

Juan Cole on the 9-11 Commission Report:

The question is, "Should he have known it was coming?"

Clinton tried, and tried hard. The gods weren't with us on that one.

We already know a fair amount about who knew what and when they knew it. By August 6, 2001, the spooks were checking their watches and waiting for it to happen, while Bush decided to do nothing and watch from Crawford. And he is doing nothing now: port security hasn't been improved, nor has airline freight. Chemical and nuclear plants have not been hardened and first responders remain underfunded. All of this is going to cost money, money currently flowing into Halliburton and tax cuts. Bush lives in a fantasy world, not the one we live in.

UPDATE: At The Left Coaster, CA Poll Junkie has a terrific review of Chapter 8 and concludes:

There is a line which separates competence from incompetence and delegation from indifference. Bush went way over it.

Checks and Checkbooks

Accounting and Accountability
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last month we learned that the United States, while it has spent vast sums on the war in Iraq, has so far provided almost no aid. Of $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds approved by Congress, only $400 million has been disbursed.

Almost all of the money spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq until late June, came from Iraqi sources, mainly oil revenues. This revelation helps explain one puzzle: the sluggish pace of reconstruction, which has yet to restore many essential services to prewar levels.

But it creates another puzzle: given that the authority was spending Iraq's money, why wasn't it more careful in its accounting?

When a foreign power takes control of an oil-rich nation's resources, it inevitably faces suspicion about its motives. Fairly or not, the locals are all too ready to believe that the invaders came to steal their oil.

The way to deal with such suspicion is to let in as much sunlight as possible by appointing financial officials with strong reputations for independence, keeping meticulous books, and welcoming and cooperating with international audits.

What actually happened was just the opposite. Every important official with responsibility for Iraqi finances was a Bush administration loyalist. The occupying authority dragged its feet on an international audit, which didn't even begin until April 2004.

When KPMG auditors hired by an international advisory board finally got to work, they found that no effort had been made to keep an accurate record of oil sales, and that accounting for the $20 billion Development Fund for Iraq consisted of "spreadsheets and pivot tables maintained by a single accountant."

The auditors also faced a lack of cooperation. They were denied access to Iraqi ministries, which were reputed to be the locus of epic corruption on the part of Iraqis with connections to the occupiers. They were also denied access to reports concerning what they delicately describe as "sole-source contracts."

Translation: they were stonewalled when they tried to find out what Halliburton did with $1.4 billion.

By obstructing international auditors, by the way, the U.S. wasn't just fueling suspicion about the misappropriation of Iraqi oil money - it was also breaking its word. After Saddam's fall, the U.N. gave the U.S. the right to disburse Iraqi oil-for-food revenues, but only on the condition that this be accompanied by international auditing and oversight.

A digression: yes, oil-for-food is the U.N.-administered program from which Saddam undoubtedly siphoned off billions. But we expect America to be held to a higher standard.

There are also allegations that Saddam's revenue diversion was aided by corrupt U.N. officials. I think we should wait and see what Paul Volcker, the genuinely independent head of the U.N. inquiry - the sort of person the U.S. occupation should have employed - has to say. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that these accusations are entirely based on documents that are purported to be in the possession of none other than Ahmad Chalabi, who has himself been accused of corruption.

And there are a few curious side stories. On the day the U.S. raided Mr. Chalabi's offices, a British associate of Mr. Chalabi who had been promising to come out with a devastating report told London's Daily Telegraph that a remarkably effective hacker attack had destroyed all his computer files, including the backup copies.

After the United States's falling-out with Mr. Chalabi, the oil-for-food investigation was taken out of the hands of Mr. Chalabi's allies. But the new head of the investigation was assassinated on July 1.

Meanwhile, the war, fed by the failure of reconstruction, goes on. The transfer doesn't seem to have made any difference: more American soldiers were killed in the first three weeks of July than in all of June, even though Knight-Ridder reports that the U.S. military has stopped patrolling in much of Anbar Province, the heart of the insurgency.

And while the U.S. has yet to disburse any significant amount of aid, the Government Accountability Office says that war costs for this fiscal year alone will run $12.3 billion above Pentagon projections.

Will anyone be held accountable?

Krugman falls back from economics to basic bookkeeping. Billions of dollars arefloating around the DoD unaccounted for. Graft and fraud are fully funded while there is no electricity in Baghdad, and we wonder why the ghost war isn't getting better.

Reading Lessons

The 567-Page Story Of a Humbled America

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2004; Page A01

After al Qaeda set out in 1999 to deliver a devastating attack on America using hijacked airplanes, only one thing worked right in the nation's defense.

According to the final report of the 9/11 commission, it wasn't the FBI, CIA, FAA or Air Force. Not the National Security Council or the Department of Defense. Not the State Department or Border Patrol. Not Congress or any president.

"The institutions charged with protecting our borders, civil aviation, and national security did not understand how grave this threat could be, and did not adjust their policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat it," the bipartisan commission unanimously declared.

Only a small band of civilians, strangers to one another -- without benefit of staff meetings, bylaws, uniforms or task forces -- communicating by cell phone with loved ones who happened to be watching TV -- managed to figure out what was going on in time to thwart a guided-missile attack on Washington.

Brave passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 forced hijackers to crash the plane into an empty field far short of its target.

The final report is a document of historic breadth and almost unprecedented detail, offering the sort of examination of a highly classified subject that customarily would not be possible for decades after the fact. From the findings of spy agencies to the tactics of fighter pilots, from the conversations of heads of state to the verbatim texts of secret presidential briefings, this is the government laid bare.

It is not a pretty picture.

Many of the specifics have been revealed in interim reports released by the commission in recent months. Here, they come together in a long and depressing narrative, by far the most comprehensive account of the catastrophe available.

It begins with a view of the enemy larger than just Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda operation. "The problem is that al Qaeda represents an ideological movement, not a finite group of people. It initiates and inspires, even if it no longer directs," the commissioners found. "Killing or capturing [bin Laden], while extremely important, would not end terror."

Unforeseen -- yet lethal -- this new challenge to American security rose quickly from the ruins of the Cold War. U.S. agencies, configured to fight the Soviets, were caught flat-footed.

Even after bin Laden called on Muslims everywhere to kill Americans wherever they found them -- and then pulled off coordinated attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania -- the U.S. response was feckless, because of bureaucratic squabbling, poor communications, misdirected resources and "failures of imagination."

The signs were there. Radical Islamists associated with 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed hit the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in 1993, and two years later were discovered plotting mass hijackings of U.S. airliners. Nevertheless, bin Laden and Mohammed had no trouble, between 1999 and 2001, communicating, meeting and planning the destruction of the twin towers using hijacked planes. Indeed, the summer of 2001 was "a drumbeat" of alarming, if unspecific, reports that -- as President Bush was told in August of that year -- "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

"The 9/11 attacks were a shock," the panel concluded, "but they should not have come as a surprise."

If you've read all the documentation, what should come as a shock is W sitting in a Florida classroom, reading "My Pet Goat." His intel people were off-the-map outraged with worry. But W went on vacation. He didn't give a good Goddamn then and he doesn't now. We've been told by Ashcroft and associates that the possibility of attack is about what it was on 9-11. And I assume the Dim Son will get to read his little book again to another classroom of innocents. That's the sort of President we want.

Real Life Intrudes

Posting will be light in the morning. I've got to go take care of the DMV things, including an expired registration. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it happens, and I need a new license. I hope the new picture is better than the old one, and I get one of those by going to bed early. I look like a spaced out narco-terrorist in the last photo. I'll try to put up four posts before I hit the road to The Place Of Ultimate Pain. The VA DMV has the worst seats in the world.

It's a Whodunit

Does anyone have a link to a piece of downloadable freeware that would allow me to cut and paste from PDFs? I don't want to spring for the the crap at BestBuy. I'm running Win2K with Mozilla, if that matters.

I want to blog some of Chapter 8 of the 9-11 Commission report. God, I hate PDFs. That was a prayer, not a curse. It appears to me that this Chapter is the crux of the report. I read this stuff so you don't have to.

This is the Chapter which pretty much disproves everything the media reported about the Report today. Bush and Condi look very, very bad. Even without any snark from me.

If you want to fight your way through the PDF, here is the "executive summary," here is the full report, downloadable by chapters. I haven't read it all, but I think Bumpers will be most interested in chapters 6-8. The Big Dog wasn't perfect, but he got the urgency, which Bushco did not. Wot a surprise, since missile defense and Saddam were the tail wagging the dog in January 2001, along with "he tried to kill my daddy," I think we know which regime to change.

Mr. Greenspan has Left the Planet

Greenspan Says Workers' Lack of Skills Lowers Wages

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 22, 2004; Page A01

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, disputing election-year assertions that the U.S. economy is producing lower-quality jobs than it has in the past, said yesterday that continuing wage sluggishness reflects the fact that many workers are ill-prepared to take advantage of the opportunities that the economy offers.

Growing U.S. income inequality largely reflects differences in workers' education and job skills, not an underlying problem with the economy, Greenspan said during a House Financial Services Committee hearing, echoing many of the remarks he made before a Senate committee the day before.

The growing pay gap reflects the "skill premium" commanded by relatively higher-educated, better-trained workers, and represents "a major problem of matching skills of workers to the technological base of the economy, which I believe is an education issue and requires that we address that as quickly and broadly as we can."

Greenspan, in similar remarks earlier this year, said it is critical that the nation better prepare its workers. The alternative is a workforce increasingly divided between those able to earn and compete and those struggling to get by.

"I think that the effective increase in the concentration of incomes here, which is implicit in this, is not desirable in a democratic society," Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

I was tempted to let this pass without comment, but it has made me so angry all day that I can't. All the people I know who are long term unemployed have graduate degrees, excellent technical skills in their fields and can manipulate a computer at least as well as I can. We're all white collar knowledge worker types or people with scientific/engineering backgrounds. For the last five years or so, Greenspan has been increasingly removed from reality. He has now moved into an alternate universe.

Iraq Roundup

Fearing Big Battle, Residents Flee
U.S. Weighs Move on Samarra, Now Controlled by Factions

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 22, 2004; Page A14

BAGHDAD, July 21 -- Tens of thousands of people have fled Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, in recent weeks, expecting a showdown between U.S. troops and heavily armed groups within the city, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.

Residents of the city said guerrillas told people to leave neighborhoods in anticipation of a larger battle after a clash on Tuesday in which U.S. warplanes bombed two houses, killing at least four people, according to military authorities.

"I will not go back to Samarra," said Mohammed Mohammed, 37. He brought his extended family of more than 70 brothers, cousins and children to Baghdad this week because of the dangers. "We expect the resistance will be very strong when the Americans go in. And the Americans have no mercy."

Samarra is now controlled by a volatile mix of tribes and gangs, some split along religious lines, and supporters of ousted president Saddam Hussein, according to interviews with numerous Samarra residents who have fled to Baghdad. On July 8, some of those groups launched an attack in which a car bombing was followed by a fierce volley of mortar fire. Five U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi National Guardsman were killed and 40 people were injured.

Even before that, U.S. military authorities had been planning how to retake control of the city without a bloodbath. Officers said they were determined not to let Samarra follow what they call the Fallujah model. U.S. forces made an agreement to stay outside Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad, in order to end fierce clashes there during April. The city is now under the control of insurgents.

25 Rebels Are Killed in Daylong Firefight in Iraq, U.S. Says
By IAN FISHER

Published: July 22, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 22 — American troops killed 25 insurgents in a daylong firefight on Wednesday in the hardline Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military said today. Meanwhile, insurgents said they were holding a seventh foreign truck driver, a day after announcing they had kidnapped six hostages and would behead one every three days unless their demands were met.

The seventh hostage was from Kenya, one of three from that country now held by the kidnappers. Kenya said today that it was ordering all its citizens out of Iraq, and urged the captors to release the Kenyans.

"We just feel like the Philippines," said the government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, in an interview with The New York Times. "We have to look after our citizens. We don't want any of our citizens to suffer."

No, things are neither more peaceful nor more free. We are still losing a couple of soldiers or Marines a day, and Iraqi deaths are in groups.

More troops killed in July than June in Iraq, says military

By Tom Lasseter

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - More U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq during the first three weeks of July than in the entire month of June, dashing hopes that the handover of sovereignty at the end of last month would ease U.S. losses or bring Iraqis a respite from violence.

During June, 26 American soldiers died in hostile fire in Iraq. As of Thursday, 30 had been killed so far in July, according to numbers from U.S. Central Command.

In Anbar province, change of course rankles many U.S. soldiers

By Tom Lasseter

Knight Ridder Newspapers

RAMADI, Iraq - Scaling back the military and political goals in Iraq's Anbar province has hurt the morale of many U.S. soldiers stationed there, and some have begun to question openly not only their mission, but also the leaders who sent them to Iraq in the first place.

It's not just buck privates. Several sergeants - the backbone of the enlisted military - said they felt the same way.

Instead of neighborhood patrols, most of the convoys that leave the bases in Ramadi these days are on their way to guard main roads and the government building downtown. There are also observations posts throughout the city, where soldiers sit and watch, waiting for something to happen.

To carry food from one base to the next in Ramadi, a matter of a few blocks, takes four vehicles - armored Humvees and trucks - all with .50-caliber machine guns mounted on top.

"I'm tired of every time we go out the gate, someone tries to kill me," said Staff Sgt. Sheldon Rivers.

Asked whether most Americans have an idea of how bad the security situation is in Ramadi, Sgt. Maj. John Jones said recently that he was annoyed every time he heard analysis about Iraq from politicians and journalists on TV.

"When people come over here, where do they stay? In the Green Zone. I call it the Safe Zone," he said, referring to the secure area in Baghdad where the government is housed. "They miss the full picture."

What is the full picture?

"It's just like the West," Jones said, "when we were trying to settle it with the Indians."

He wouldn't elaborate.

Emerging Pieces

Army Finds 94 Cases of Abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan

By Matt Kelley
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 22, 2004; 10:46 AM

The U.S. military has found a total of 94 cases of confirmed or alleged abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan since the fall of 2001, the Army's inspector general said Thursday in a long-awaited report made public at a hastily called Senate hearing.

The Pentagon had refused until now to give a total number of abuse allegations since the prisoner abuse scandal broke this spring. The 94 number is significantly higher than all other previous estimates given by Pentagon officials.

The inspector general investigation, ordered Feb. 10 after the allegations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to the attention of top Army officials in Washington, concluded that there were no systemic problems that contributed to the abuse. In some cases, the report found, the abuse was abetted or facilitated by officers not following proper procedures.

In contrast to its own findings, however, the Army report also cites a February report from the International Committee for the Red Cross that alleged that "methods of ill treatment" were "used in a systematic way" by the U.S. military in Iraq.

Sen. John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had been pressing for the results of the inspector general report for several weeks, called a last-minute hearing Thursday before Congress leaves for the rest of the summer Friday.

Warner apologized for the late notice of the hearing, but said he had wanted to get the information to the committee members as soon as it was available.

The Army has not yet made the entire report public but released parts during the public hearing.

If I can find a link to the section of the report which has been released, I'll put it up, but an hour of Googling has so far yielded nothing. I caught a bit of the hearing on C-Span this morning. Warner is really angry.