And That Definition of Neurosis...

Trade Pact Approved By House
GOP Struggles to Eke Out 217-215 Victory on CAFTA

By Paul Blustein and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 28, 2005; Page A01

The House narrowly approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement this morning, delivering a hard-fought victory to President Bush while underscoring the nation's deep divisions over trade.

The 217 to 215 vote came just after midnight, in a dramatic finish that highlighted the intensity brought by both sides to the battle. When the usual 15-minute voting period expired at 11:17 p.m., the no votes outnumbered the yes votes by 180 to 175, with dozens of members undeclared. House Republican leaders kept the voting open for another 47 minutes, furiously rounding up holdouts in their own party until they had secured just enough to ensure approval.

The House vote was effectively the last hurdle -- and by far the steepest -- facing CAFTA, which will tear down barriers to trade and investment between the United States, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

"This win sends a powerful signal to the region and the world that the United States will continue to lead in opening markets and leveling the playing field," said Rob Portman, the U.S. trade representative, in a statement issued immediately after the vote.

Although the deal was approved by the Senate last month, it was overwhelmingly opposed by House Democrats who contend that it is wrong to strike a free-trade pact with poor countries lacking strong protection for worker rights. Only 15 of the 202 House Democrats backed the accord, while 27 out of 232 Republicans voted against.

During last night's debate, which lasted 2 1/2 hours, the bitterness of the Democrats' opposition shone through in condemnations such as that by Ohio's Dennis J. Kucinich, who thundered: "CAFTA is for multinational companies who want to make a profit by shutting plants in the United States and moving to places with cheap labor."

To win, the White House and GOP congressional leaders had to overcome resistance from dozens of Republican members who were also loath to vote for the accord because of issues ranging from the perceived threat to the U.S. sugar industry to more general worries about the impact of global trade on U.S. jobs.

NAFTA AT SEVEN
Its impact on workers in all three nations

* NAFTA's Hidden Costs: Trade agreement results in job losses, growing inequality, and wage suppression for the United States
* The impact of NAFTA on wages and incomes in Mexico
* False Promise: Canada in the Free Trade Era
* Online supplement to the U.S. report: NAFTA's impact on the states

Introduction

Each year since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on January 1, 1994, officials in Canada, Mexico, and the United States have regularly declared the agreement to be an unqualified success. It has been promoted as an economic free lunch-a "win-win-win" for all three countries that should now be extended to the rest of the hemisphere in a Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement.

For some people, NAFTA clearly has been a success. This should not be a surprise inasmuch as it was designed to bring extraordinary government protections to a specific set of interests-investors and financiers in all three countries who search for cheaper labor and production costs. From that perspective, increased gross volumes of trade and financial flows in themselves testify to NAFTA's achievements.

But most citizens of North America do not support themselves on their investments. They work for a living. The overwhelming majority has less than a college education, has little leverage in bargaining with employers, and requires a certain degree of job security in order to achieve a minimal, decent level of living. NAFTA, while extending protections for investors, explicitly excluded any protections for working people in the form of labor standards, worker rights, and the maintenance of social investments. This imbalance inevitably undercut the hard-won social contract in all three nations.

As the three reports in this paper indicate, from the point of view of North American working people, NAFTA has thus far largely failed.

These reports, based in part on more comprehensive labor market surveys in all three countries,1 show that the impact on workers in each nation has been different according to their circumstances. For example, given their respective sizes, the impact of economic integration has been inevitably greater in Canada and Mexico than in the United States. But despite this, there are striking similarities in the pattern of that impact.

In the United States, as economist Robert Scott details, NAFTA has eliminated some 766,000 job opportunities-primarily for non-college-educated workers in manufacturing. Contrary to what the American promoters of NAFTA promised U.S. workers, the agreement did not result in an increased trade surplus with Mexico, but the reverse. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, workers were downscaled to lower-paying, less-secure services jobs. Within manufacturing, the threat of employers to move production to Mexico proved a powerful weapon for undercutting workers' bargaining power.

Was U.S. workers' loss Mexican workers' gain? While production jobs did move to Mexico, they primarily moved to maquiladora areas just across the border. As Carlos Salas of La Red de Investigadores y Sindicalistas Para Estudios Laborales (RISEL) reports, these export platforms-in which wages, benefits, and workers' rights are deliberately suppressed-are isolated from the rest of the Mexican economy. They do not contribute much to the development of Mexican industry or its internal markets, which was the premise upon which NAFTA was sold to the Mexican people. It is therefore no surprise that compensation and working conditions for most Mexican workers have deteriorated. The share of stable, full-time jobs has shrunk, while the vast majority of new entrants to the labor market must survive in the insecure, poor-paying world of Mexico's "informal" sector.

As Bruce Campbell of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reports, Canada's increased market integration with the United States began in 1989 with the bilateral Free Trade Agreement, the precursor to NAFTA. While trade and investment flows increased dramatically, per capita income actually declined for the first seven years after the agreement. Moreover, as in Mexico and the United States, Canadians saw an upward redistribution of income to the richest 20% of Canadians, a decline in stable full-time employment, and the tearing of Canada's social safety net.

That worked out so well that we should go and do more of it? I don't think so.

Posted by Melanie at 09:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Fatal Error

Via Susie:

Brazilian did not wear bulky jacket

Relatives say Met admits that, contrary to reports, electrician did not leap tube station barrier

Mark Honigsbaum
Thursday July 28, 2005
The Guardian

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with the Metropolitan police, Vivien Figueiredo, 22, said that the first reports of how her 27-year-old cousin had come to be killed in mistake for a suicide bomber on Friday at Stockwell tube station were wrong.

"He used a travel card," she said. "He had no bulky jacket, he was wearing a jeans jacket. But even if he was wearing a bulky jacket that wouldn't be an excuse to kill him."

Flanked by the de Menezes family's solicitor, Gareth Peirce, and by Bianca Jagger, the anti-Iraq war campaigner, she condemned the shoot-to-kill policy which had led to her cousin's death and vowed that what she called the "crime" would not go unpunished.

"My cousin was an honest and hard working person," said Ms Figueiredo who shared a flat with him in Tulse Hill, south London. "Although we are living in circumstances similar to a war, we should not be exterminating people unjustly."

Another cousin, Patricia da Silva Armani, 21, said he was in Britain legally to work and study, giving him no reason to fear the police. "An innocent man has been killed as though he was a terrorist," she said. "An incredibly grave error was committed by the British police."

Mr de Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at 10am last Friday after being followed from Tulse Hill. Scotland Yard initially claimed he wore a bulky jacket and jumped the barrier when police identified themselves and ordered him to stop. The same day the Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said the shooting was "directly linked" to the unprecedented anti-terror operation on London's streets.

There are fuck-ups and then there are fuck-ups. When they cost a life, there ought to be someone to pay.

Fairy Tales

Juan Cole goes narrative this morning.

War on Terror Over

The Bush administration is giving up the phrase "global war on terror."

I take it this is because they have finally realized that if they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys in a gymn in Leeds. It isn't going to take very long for people to realize that a) you don't actually need to pay the Pentagon $400 billion a year if that is the problem and b) whoever is in charge of such a war isn't actually doing a very good job at stopping the bombs from going off.

The Scotsman reports on the spectacular arrest of the Somalian suspect in the July 21 failed bombing attempts, saying, "The ethnicity of the eight London bombers, ranging from Somalis, to British-born sons of Pakistani parents and an Anglo-Jamaican Muslim convert, have surprised detectives investigating the attacks."

They should not be surprised. You have to think about terrorists as units of hardware, on which software has been installed. The software is a world-view, a set of premises about the world, which then make sense of the terrorist's actions. How does the software get installed? The potential terrorist meets the installer socially and falls under his spell.

The terrorists don't have a social background in common. They aren't lumpen proletariat or working class or middle class or bourgeois. Or rather, they have in their ranks persons from all these backgrounds.

The terrorists don't have an ethnicity in common. Richard Reid and Lindsey Germaine were Caribbean. Others are Arabs. Some have been Somali or Eritrean or Tanzanian. Others have been South Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh). Still others have been African-American or white Americans. They don't even have to start out Muslim. Ayman al-Zawahiri was particularly proud of an al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan who had been an American Jew in a previous life. Ziad Jarrah, one of the September 11 hijackers, appears to have been a relatively secular young man right to the end. It isn't about religion, except insofar as religion is a basis on which the recruiter can approach his victim. Islam as a religion forbids terrorism. But then so does Christianity, and that doesn't stop there being Christian terrorists. They are a fringe in both religions.

If you try to "profile" the terrorist using such social markers as class or ethnicity, maybe even religious background, you will go badly astray.

What then do they have in common? They got the software installed in their minds. Why? Because they met the installer, and were susceptible to his worldview. That's all they have in common.

So the young man goes to the Finsbury Mosque in the old days and hangs out with Imam. And he points out that the Israelis had fired a huge missile into a residential apartment building to get at a Hamas leader, and had killed 16 civilians, including a little baby. And nobody said "boo" to the Israelis. The US actually gave them more money after that. Tony Blair deplored it, but did nothing practical. Then, the Imam will tell him, the Americans destroyed Fallujah and killed hundreds of innocents. He might even have the photograph that circulated last December, of the dead baby at Fallujah. And nobody can say "boo" to the Americans, and they go on killing Muslims. In fact, the Imam intimates, pulling the young man close, almost whispering, tears in his eyes, the West is destroying Islam. Almost nothing is left of Islam, he will say. It will be completely devastated in our lifetimes. Nobody is lifting a finger to stop it.

So the young man says, what could anyone do? And the Imam says, there is something. But it isn't for ordinary people. It isn't for mere show-offs. And the young man says, sticking out his chest, I'm not showing off! I really want to help, to do something that would make a difference. The Imam says, a person who was really committed could change everything. He could save the Muslim Ummma from destruction. But, no, you are not ready. You don't have the training, the commitment. You are useless. And the young man protests, until he is put in touch with the trainer and given the mission. His new friends all agree on this view of the world. He hangs out with them, at the mosque, at the gym, even socially. They reinforce each other. They tell each other the stories of the harm done to Muslims. They get angry. They swear. They are determined not to be like the rest, who just let it happen. The young man gains in determination. The mission inflates his ego. Maybe he had low self-esteem, maybe not. But he is about to save the world, he is told.

The software is of course a hugely distorted view of the universe. It lets the young man see Israeli atrocities, but not those of Hamas or the Aqsa Brigades. It lets him see American atrocities but not those of Saddam Hussein, Izzedin al-Duri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The software is fatally one-sided. It also exaggerates. The Muslim world is not in danger of being destroyed, least of all by the United States, a warm friend of most Muslim countries. But the software configures a dire crisis, almost apocalyptic, which can only be averted by an ethical hero who is willing to sacrifice himself. The software hides from the convert that he is to become a monster and kill innocents. It tells him he is a noble soldier, and his victims are wicked enemy soldiers, that there are no innocent civilians.

So how do you fight this form of terror? You disrupt the installation of the software in more and more minds. You adopt policies that make the story the software tells implausible. And you reach out to make sure people hear the implausibility.

It is not a war. It is counter-insurgency. Gen. Anthony Zinni tells the story about how he had been away from the Pentagon for a while and then was (as I remember) brought back to give a backgrounder. And a young soldier saluted and said he was there to fight the G-WOT. And Zinni said, "Come again?" The soldier looked puzzled and say, "Why, the Global War on Terror, sir."

It was always a poor metaphor. I can't figure out who they think they are fighting a war against. It sure isn't the Muslim world. Morocco as a country couldn't be more friendly and cooperative, and we have good trade relations with it. Algeria likewise. Tunisia? A topflight relationship. Even Libya is coming around. Egypt? A non-NATO ally. Palestine? We give them hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Jordan? A closer friend you couldn't find. Lebanon? Very friendly except for Hizbullah and even they haven't hit American targets any time in the past decade. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan.

It is incredible how good the relations are between the United States and almost all the countries of the Muslim world. They provide us with a NATO ally (Turkey) and 4 of our five non-NATO allies! The only sour notes are Bashar al-Asad in Syria (who hasn't done anything to us as far as I know) and Iran, with which our relationship needn't be different from that with Venezuela under Chavez (leaders of both countries badmouth the US, but don't seem actively to harm us in ways that are visible to me). It will be argued that Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon. But a) we don't know that for sure; and b) even if it were to succeed in doing so, how would it be different from the Soviet Union, which hated us much more than Iran does and which had thousands of warheads pointed at us? So far no two countries, both of which have nuclear weapons, have fought a major war with one another, and the reason is clear. This is not to say it could not happen, but it is unlikely. As for the Mad Cheney scenario whereby a state gives nuclear weapons to terrorists to use on the US, puh- lease. Even my five year old niece wouldn't believe that whopper. States don't share nuclear bombs with terrorists; and it is not as if a bomb's provenance could not easily be traced.

As for the jihadis, who do wish us harm, former CIA analyst Marc Sageman estimates the number of radical Muslims who can and would do significant harm to the US in the hundreds.

That's right. The old "war on terror" was a war of the world's sole superpower on a few hundred people. (I exclude Iraq because it is not and never was part of any 'war on terror,' though the incredible incompetence of the Bush administration has contributed to the ability of terrorists to operate there.)

On the issue of the sources of terrorism see recent articles by Howard LaFranchi at CSM and Jim Lobe, and James M. Wall of the Christian Century.

Isms

I married a feminist
By Crispin Sartwell, Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College.

Feminism has a broad agenda and a rich history. It has dedicated itself to equal pay for women, to making it possible for women to ascend to positions of power in all areas of human endeavor. It has dedicated itself to raising Third World women out of poverty and to stopping the rape, harassment, mutilation and degradation of women.

And feminism is anything but monolithic. There are anarchist feminists, communist feminists and Republican feminists. There are Christian feminists, Islamic feminists and atheist feminists. There are feminists who define pornography as rape and feminists who endorse it as a liberating practice. And although most feminists favor abortion rights, there are others who are not so sure — even the radical feminist Emma Goldman had her doubts.

Jane Roberts has for many years been a high-powered attorney, a status made possible in part by the victories of American feminism. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity or intensity of her commitment to many of the tenets of feminism. But like many people, she comes from a religious perspective (in her case, Catholicism) that condemns abortion and, perhaps, she also has independent moral misgivings.

Such misgivings are philosophically defensible. If it were perfectly clear that abortion is only a matter of a woman's control of her own body, then you could not endorse the liberation of women without endorsing abortion rights. But that is not clear. To what extent and up to what point a fetus is part of a woman's body are difficult questions that trouble even as strong an advocate of abortion rights as my wife.

Or if feminism were consistently libertarian — if it opposed on principle all legislation that limited individual autonomy — then you could make a plausible argument that feminism demanded a pro-choice stance. But because feminist theory has been extremely enthusiastic about achieving liberation through the force of law, including Title IX and sexual-harassment statutes, feminists cannot in principle be opposed to laws designed to defend the rights of children. (The only question is whether limits on abortion are in fact about children at all.)

So Ms. Roberts' anti-abortion feminism is sensible and logical. There are a hundred aspects of a feminist agenda that she can enthusiastically endorse and that may have been and may in the future be essential to her personal and professional life. This may lead to some lively conversations around the Roberts' home.

We don't know whether the Robertses — much as Marion and I — argue about feminism and abortion over breakfast. But when you marry someone like my spouse or Mr. Roberts', you'd better be willing to defend yourself.

The relation of Jane Roberts' successful career as an attorney or her pro-life activities to her husband's future as a Supreme Court justice is a matter for speculation. But it is worth pointing out that, whatever his views on this or that, the judge is a man who married a feminist.

Jane Roberts and I can both be considered "feminists." Sartwell's op-ed is knowing. The word is broad (snicker) and needs further conversation.

The Usual Suspects

Oil and Blood

By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 28, 2005

It's the oil, stupid.

What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.

Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.

The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As The Washington Post first reported, an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism.

Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration.

The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.

But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.

Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.

That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.

Do you think he's joking? Here is The Project for a New American Century. None of this is new or hidden.

The Unusual Suspects

The Reluctant Gourmet chimes in:

This is the way my wife prepares Acorn Squash and I love it. If you are interested in learning more about winter squash and its' many varities, please check my Winter Squash.

INGREDIENTS

* 1 Acorn Squash, halved
* 2 pats of butter
* 2 teaspoons of honey or maple syrup
* 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
* Salt & pepper

PREP WORK

Pre heat oven to 375 degrees.
HOW TO MAKE AT HOME

Scoop the seeds out of each half with a spoon

Add 1 pat of butter, 1 teaspoon of honey or maple syrup, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, salt and pepper to the hollow scoop of each half.

Place upright on a greased cookie sheet and roast for 20 to 30 minutes or until tender when flesh is poked with a fork.

This is a delicious, quick and easy side dish that is great anytime of the year.

Enjoy

Melanie adds a dash of allspice to each half. You won't be sorry.

You can do this on the grill by wrapping each half in foil. They'll take an hour, nestled next to the bird you are cooking. More on that this evening.

Before You Light The Grill

It's the "wrong" time of the year for this, but I've been dreaming about pot roast for a couple of weeks. This summer has been so hot and so hard that I'm already craving fall food: orangic free range beef and chickens without taint of mad cow and bird flu. I've been living on a vegan diet for weeks ( which is not a bad thing, but is not my normal habit ) and I want beef satays, aged steaks and roasted chickens, without turning on my stove. Post your microwave (great way to cook fish and veg, BTW) recipes and things for the grill below. Look at quantities for singles and doubles. I know how to knock down a recipe for 6 to a dinner for three or expand it to a pot luck. Not everyone does.

Barbara Gordon's The Microwave Gourmet is essential for small households.

Dine well. No one is forcing you to dine stupid. Hint: This is a keeper. Yum.

Country-Style Pot Roast
This pot roast is made with sour cream gravy. A delicious oven pot roast recipe.

INGREDIENTS:

* 3- to 4-pound beef pot roast
* flour
* 1/4 cup butter
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/8 teaspoon pepper
* 1 beef bouillon cube or base
* 1/2 cup hot water
* 12 to 18 small white onions, peeled
* 4 large potatoes, peeled and quartered
* 1 pound carrots, peeled and quartered

* Sour cream gravy
* 1 1/3 cups drippings
* 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
* 1/4 cup cold water
* 1 cup sour cream, room temperature

PREPARATION:
Coat both sides of pot roast with flour. In a Dutch oven or large deep baking dish, melt butter; brown meat slowly on both sides. Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon salt and the pepper. Dissolve bouillon cube in hot water; pour over meat. Cover and place in a preheated 350° oven; cook 1 1/2 hours.

Prepare sour cream gravy:
Pour drippings from pot roast into saucepan. Blend together flour and water. Heat drippings to boiling; gradually stir in flour and water mixture and cook, stirring constantly until gravy is thickened. Cook 2 minutes longer. Remove from heat and slowly stir in sour cream. Heat through, but do not boil.
Makes 6 to 8 servings.

The beef, carefully sliced and stored with its gravy, means that you can dine well in November, if you have a freezer. Store single portions in plastic containers. It only gets better with age. And you are eating well in the depths of winter.

It is damn near August. Unless you are a fanatic bread baker, don't turn the oven on and do this in the crockpot. Add a 1/2 pound of cremini mushrooms and a cup of red wine to the gravy making. Serve the whole thing over cooked egg noodles with a salad and everyone in your beach house will think you are the resident gastronome. Well, you are. Tomorrow night: the grill and how not to abuse it. And something about chicken on the grill. Tred carefully with The White Meat and it will reward you well.

Light Music

I'm not particularly tech savvy, but I've certainly learned a lot (some of it from you all) during the years I've spent in the blogosphere. I'm not afraid of my BIOS and I've taken the cover off the (still ailing) box to do some of the repairs myself, usually with pogge or my brother (scroll down to meet my brother, Leigh, and my sister in law, Anne and their menagerie, "the blondies") on the phone telling me what to do, or with a detailed email instruction from either or both of them explaining, tab by tab and menu by menu, what I have to do to acheive a fix. I know my limitations and when I need help. You can learn these things, too.

One of the things I have learned to do is read The Register. You can learn a lot by reading magazines like PC World and reading all those O'Reilly books, of course, but you won't laugh nearly as much as you will reading The Reg. This is from Wednesday's edition, you literally never know what you'll find, but even hard news is covered firmly tongue in cheek. And then there is the weekly "Bastard Operator from Hell" installment, in which a fictional serial displays exactly what your tech department thinks of you. But I digress. Here's today's news of the weird from Wednesday's Reg.

Microsoft cloaks Area 51 By Lester Haines Published Wednesday 27th July 2005 13:59 GMT

Black helicopter alert We all know that Microsoft has a tentacle in just about every pie on the planet, but what exactly is Redmond's black ops department up to in Nevada?

This chilling question arises because Microsoft's Virtual Earth has excised all satellite data of the legendary Area 51, leaving a great big grey void filled only with hundreds of hovering black helicopters:

The truth is out there...

Google, on the other hand, offers this fine view of the Top Secret desert facility, famed for its alien post-mortems, flying saucers and general extraterrestrial shenanigans:

The truth is right here

Yup, if you look closely you can just make out what appears to be a heavily-disguised Steve Ballmer wheeling an alien corpse on a gurney from the wreckage of a fission-powered interplanetary craft. Either that or it's some bloke emptying the bins. Further analysis is clearly required.

Until such time as the truth is known, we wonder what exactly MS has to gain from this cloak of invisibity. After all, the internet is chock-full of Area 51 info, maps and satellite images. Try this website, for example - a veritable cornucopia of conspiracy goodies.

And while you peruse this invaluable online resource, keep one eye fixed firmly on the skies. The next unidentified flying object you spot may not be vistors from Alpha Centauri looking for a farm hand to anally probe, but rather the MS X-X-Box, an XP/SP2-controlled stealth vehicle constructed from mysterious yet improbably strong alien alloys and now offering a raft of new and indispensible features for the Office 2003 suite, including the ability to genetically alter Word documents at a sublinear level.

This may not be the stuff to take up your time with daily, but it is worth an occasional read, particularly for BOFH and if you like a British sense of humor and you are willing to do a little Google digging to learn some new things about your 'puter.

What's Ahead

Fred Barbash, at the WaPo's Supreme Court Blog says that Arlen Spector expects the Roberts confirmation hearings to start on August 29th. Yay. I can get out of town for a vacation.

Wednesday Dinner

This is easy and fast.

Dinner in 45 Minutes

'Baked' Pasta With Zucchini,
Tomatoes and Ricotta

6 to 8 servings

This pasta isn't baked, technically, but it has the spirit and character of a baked dish.

The recipe calls for pancetta, an Italian cured -- but not smoked -- bacon that is now available pre-sliced and packaged in the deli or meat section of most supermarkets. Its sweet and salty flavor adds depth to sauces and stir-fries.

No additional salt is needed in this dish. Serve with a simple green salad.

1 pound dried penne pasta

2 ounces pancetta, diced

1 medium onion (about 4 ounces), finely chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 pound (2 small) zucchini, cut into 1/4 - to 1/2 -inch cubes

1 pound tomatoes, peeled and seeded, coarsely chopped

Freshly ground black pepper

1 cup part-skim ricotta cheese

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Lightly oil a 13-by-9-inch baking dish. Set aside.

Cook the pasta according to package directions, drain well and transfer to a large bowl.

Meanwhile, in a large pan over medium-high heat, cook the pancetta until it releases its fat and looks translucent, about 2 minutes. Add the onion, reduce the heat to medium and cook until the onion is translucent, about 2 minutes. Add the olive oil and the zucchini and cook for 4 to 6 minutes more, stirring occasionally, then add the tomatoes and pepper to taste. Cook the mixture for 2 to 3 minutes, continuing to stir, then remove from the heat and keep warm if the pasta isn't quite done.

Preheat the broiler to high.

Add the pancetta-zucchini mixture to the bowl of pasta, then add the ricotta cheese and 1/4 cup of the Parmesan cheese. Stir to combine thoroughly, and pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish and sprinkle evenly with the remaining Parmesan. Place under the broiler until the cheese melts and begins to brown, about 3 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve immediately.

More Murder

This makes me sick to my stomach.

Algerian Diplomats Are Killed in Iraq

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 27, 2005

Filed at 1:32 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility Wednesday for killing two Algerian diplomats who were kidnapped in Baghdad last week -- the second slaying of Arab envoys in Iraq this month.

Algerian state radio said Ali Belaroussi and Azzedine Belkadi had been killed, although the announcement from President Abdelaziz Bouteflika did not provide the source of the information.

Belaroussi, 62, and Belkadi, 47, were kidnapped at gunpoint July 21 in Baghdad's upscale Mansour area.

''The head of the Algerian mission Ali Belaroussi and the diplomat Azzedine Belkadi, whose government is ruling in violation of God's will, were killed,'' said a statement from al-Qaida in Iraq that appeared on an Islamic Web site.

They were slain because of the Algerian government's repression of Muslims in their north African country, the Internet statement said.

In a video made public Tuesday, the pair appeared blindfolded and in captivity, giving their names and home addresses.

Meanwhile, progress on Iraq's new constitution ran into another snag as Iraqi Kurds threaten not to back down from demands for a federal state despite problems this may create in meeting an Aug. 15 deadline that U.S. officials are pushing.

Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, also said Kurds would never dissolve their militias and repeated demands for the return of ethnic Kurds to the oil-rich Kirkuk area from which tens of thousands of them were expelled under Saddam Hussein.

Barzani's comments, broadcast by Al-Arabiya television, indicated the Kurds are standing firm on longtime demands at a time when the United States is urging all sides to compromise in order to finish the new constitution by the Aug. 15 deadline.

His remarks were broadcast as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad to urge the Iraqis not to miss the deadline for completing the draft of the constitution. The Defense Department wields considerable influence among the Kurds, who worked closely with the Americans in preparations for the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam.

Facing the Obvious

Well, duh!

Panel: Bush Was Unready for Postwar Iraq

By BARRY SCHWEID
The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 27, 2005; 9:29 AM

CWASHINGTON -- An independent panel headed by two former U.S. national security advisers said Wednesday that chaos in Iraq was due in part to inadequate postwar planning.

Planning for reconstruction should match the serious planning that goes into making war, said the panel headed by Samuel Berger and Brent Scowcroft. Berger was national security adviser to Democratic President Clinton. Scowcroft held the same post under Republican Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush but has been critical of the current president's Iraq and Mideast policies.

"A dramatic military victory has been overshadowed by chaos and bloodshed in the streets of Baghdad, difficulty in establishing security or providing essential services, and a deadly insurgency," the report said.

"The costs, human, military and economic, are high and continue to mount," said the report, which was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent foreign policy group.

Two years after a stunning three-week march on Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi military forces have been unable to secure and rebuild the country, and reconstruction has fallen victim to a lack of security, the report said.

The White House has reacted to similar criticism in the past by saying there was significant postwar planning.

In a speech last month to soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., President Bush pointed to the Iraqi elections and efforts to improve roads, schools and basic services. "Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. Our progress has been uneven, but progress is being made."

The report said the critical miscalculation of Iraq war-planning was the conclusion that reconstruction would not require more troops than the invasion itself.

CFR report here (.pdf)

Compare with:

U.S., Iraqi Officials Discuss Steps to Speed Troop Withdrawals
Statements Suggest Heightened Immediacy for Move

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 27, 2005; 10:48 AM

BAGHDAD, July 27 -- Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld met with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari and the top U.S. commander in Iraq Wednesday and discussed specific steps to speed preparations for the withdrawal of some of the 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq beginning as early as next spring.

The tone of statements by Rumsfeld and Jafari, as well as the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, suggested a heightened determination and immediacy to planning for the U.S. troop reduction, despite the continuation of lethal daily attacks by insurgents in Iraq.

"The great desire of the Iraqi people is to see the coalition forces be on their way out as they take more responsibility," Jafari said at a press conference with Rumsfeld following their noon meeting in Baghdad. "We have not limited to a certain schedule, but we confirm and we desire speed in that regard."

This will require "picking up the pace of training Iraqi forces" as well as carefully synchronizing the U.S. withdrawal as Iraqi forces take charge of different parts of the country, Jafari said.

Casey also voiced confidence before meeting with Jafari that the United States will be able to begin reducing its force levels in Iraq next spring or summer.

"If the political process continues to go positively and if the development of the security forces continues to go as it is going, I do believe we'll still be able to take some fairly substantial reductions after these elections in the spring and summer," Casey told reporters after a morning session with Rumsfeld and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Casey is making up bullshit for the benefit of his boss, who happens to be in town today. This is all utter fantasy, of course.

The Hardest Word

The American Prospect's prolific Matt Yglesias weigh's in on John Roberts:

Just Say No
Democrats don't have to filibuster John Roberts -- but they don't have to vote for him, either.

By Matthew Yglesias

Roberts’ record demonstrates that he would try to restrict Congress' ability to protect endangered species from extinction and suggests that he would imperil efforts to defend the environment in other respects. His scant jurisprudential record makes it unclear exactly how far he’d go in construing the commerce clause so as to strike down popular and effective regulatory schemes aimed at protecting the rights of workers and consumers, but it's clear that he’d do so to at least some extent. His decisions indicate that he’d seek to erect procedural barriers to victims of injustice by using the federal courts to redress injuries in cases where they might well prevail if they could get their cases heard. It indicates that he’d refuse to act as a check on efforts by the executive branch to use its national-security authority in abusing ways. And, despite efforts to muddy the waters on this topic, it makes it pretty clear that he’d try to open the door to the criminalization of abortion and, perhaps, the further restrictions on the right to privacy.

This is bad stuff. Exactly how bad it's hard to say. But there's simply no case from the liberal point of view for believing that Roberts would improve the Court in any respect, and many reasons to think he’d make it worse. Given that he'll probably be confirmed one way or another, there's no need for Democrats to engage in a complicated calculus of trying to discern exactly how bad he'll be or what the alternatives are. That someone will be a bad judge is a perfectly good reason for voting against him -- warning the public that he'll be bad, reiterating that “we told you so” when he does bad things in the future, and trying to take the case to the voters in elections to come.

Mounting a serious effort to block Roberts with a filibuster would only counterproductively focus the country on procedural issues rather than the consequences of confirmation. What's more, it wouldn’t work -- the votes just aren't there. At the same time, dozens of Democrats giving Roberts a stamp of approval would be a disaster. It would set the bar that much lower for the next time Bush gets to fill a vacancy, and render Democrats unable to make any political hay out of the matter if the Court's right-wing majority does something outrageous in the future.

Democrats who oppose Roberts will doubtless stand accused of "playing politics." It's an accusation that should be familiar from the Social Security debate, and Democrats should remember above all that playing politics worked. For a minority party coping with an increasingly parliamentarized legislative process in Washington, to play any other game would be foolish. Democrats are not co-equal partners in running the government, and they have no obligation to try to reach compromises or accommodations with the people who, at the moment, have all the power and, therefore, all the responsibility. Instead, their duty is simply to make it clear where they stand -- say what kind of justice they would like to see, explain why Roberts is not that justice, vote "no," and hope to gain some measure of political power before too many more bad things happen.

via the equally prolific Howard Bashman

Cognitive Dissonance Again

Poll: USA doubts Iraq success, but not ready to give up
By Susan Page, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Most Americans don't believe the United States will succeed in winning the war in Iraq or establishing a stable democracy there, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.

But an ambivalent public also says sending troops to Iraq wasn't a mistake, a sign that most people aren't yet ready to give up on the war.

"There's a lot of conflicting impulses here," says Andrew Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research Center. A Pew poll last week also showed crosscurrents in attitudes toward the Iraq war. "People are giving bleak assessments on the one hand, and on the other hand (they're) saying maybe it was still the right thing to do."

The bombings in London this month also have roiled public opinion, intensifying a not-yet-settled debate among Americans about whether the Iraq war has made the United States safer from terrorism.

Strong fears that a family member might become a victim of terrorism spiked in the survey, rising to their highest level since October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
....
For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — the reason Bush emphasized in making the case for invading. The administration's credibility on the issue has been steadily eroding since 2003.

By 58%-37%, a majority say the United States won't be able to establish a stable, democratic government in Iraq.

About one-third, 32%, say the United States can't win the war in Iraq. Another 21% say the United States could win the war, but they don't think it will. Just 43% predict a victory.

Still, on the question that tests fundamental attitudes toward the war — was it a mistake to send U.S. troops? — the public's view has rebounded. By 53%-46%, those surveyed say it wasn't a mistake, the strongest support for the war since just after the Iraqi elections in January.

"I think the American people understand the importance of completing the mission," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said when asked about the poll results. "Success in Iraq will help transform a dangerous region."

Can anybody explain to me how this makes sense?

Nature's Terrorist

Real virus looms

For all the talk about "homeland security" in the nearly four years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, our nation has been woefully unprepared in many areas.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of public health.

Since 9/11, the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Pentagon have spent more than $12 billion on measures to combat hypothetical threats such as smallpox and anthrax spent almost nothing to deal the most dangerous and most likely threat to the public health and safety, the flu virus H5N1 -- avian influenza, otherwise known as "bird flu."

H5N1 is anything but hypothetical. It is a lethal flu strain new to the human immune system. First spotted in east Asia about a decade ago, it has jumped from chickens to migratory birds to humans with growing ease.

Officially, only about 100 people worldwide have died from bird flu, but many medical experts believe the H5N1 virus is on the verge of acquiring the genetic traits that could turn it into a fast-spreading flu pandemic in humans.

The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 50 million people worldwide could die in a H5N1 pandemic. It could be the deadliest flu outbreak since the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak that killed up to 40 million people around the world, including about 850,000 in the United States.

That's the conservative estimate. Other epidemiologists think that the 1918 pandemic killed as many as a 100 million. If that pandemic is considered as the historic hallmark for the next, adjust the other totals.

This is not a secret. Health experts in America have known for several years that the likelihood of another big flu pandemic is great. Unfortunately, almost nothing has been done to prepare for one.

Not "almost nothing." Nothing. Period

In the United States, there has been little development of new flu vaccines and anti-viral medicines, because the big drug companies are making more money selling the medications you see advertised on television. Last fall's shortages of flu vaccine was a dramatic example of how little margin for error there is if a vaccine is needed quickly.

Viagra. Your woody isn't going to be of much help to you or your partner when your lungs are filling up with fluid or blood.

The most effective anti-viral medicine against H5N1 is oseltamivar, sold by Roche under the brand name of Tamiflu. It is made in a single factory in Switzerland and Roche will not be able to meet global demand if a flu pandemic breaks out.

Without access to greater production of anti-viral medicines and vaccines and without stockpiles of Tamiflu, millions of Americans run the risk of being left unprotected.

Let's say it plainly: all 300 million Americans are unprotected. Period. "Running the risk" is a little beside the point.

It is ridiculous that the federal government has large stockpiles of smallpox and anthrax vaccines, but has virtually nothing on hand for a disease far deadlier and far more likely to happen.

Once again, individual states are going to be stuck having to pick up the slack. Last month, the Vermont Department of Health held a drill to deal with a hypothetical flu outbreak.

"We know a pandemic is coming," said state epidemiologist Cort Lohoff. "We need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario."

But Vermont can't do all it alone. The federal government needs to start making a real commitment toward protecting the nation from avian flu and other infectious diseases.

To those who say the government can't afford it, we say that the cost of not being prepared -- the potential deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans -- is far higher.

Having a national discussion about what we can or can't afford is completely beside the point when we aren't even told that avian influenza is in the risk pool.

Posted by Melanie at 08:35 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Yikes

At 8 AM EDT it is 81 and 76% humidity. I didn't think the weather could get worse than yesterday. I was wrong.

Don't Look

Operation Turd-blossom:

Operation Coverup

It's a good bet that there has already been some lying under oath. One theory about the puzzling tenacity and ferocity of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald — why he is sending journalists to jail for refusing to provide information he already has about an activity that probably wasn't even a crime by people other than the ones he is persecuting — is that he's switched his attention from the leak itself to perjury by White House officials who were asked about it earlier in the investigation.

Perjury is your classic coverup method, and still is used when other methods have failed. Advances in the science of spin since Watergate, however, have made a high-risk, Nixon-style coverup unnecessary in many situations.

President Bush says he won't publicly comment about the Plame case while the investigation continues. But the reason the investigation continues is partly his fault. He should have determined early on who leaked Plame's CIA identity to members of the press, and dealt with it.

Why didn't Bush two years ago just ask Karl Rove and a few others in the administration whether they had leaked Plame's identity to Bob Novak and the others? Why doesn't he ask Rove now? Is it because he knows the answer? Or because he doesn't want to have to fire Rove?

As a precaution against such a catastrophe, Bush now says he will fire anyone found to have broken the law by outing an undercover intelligence operative. Previously he had said he would fire anyone who outs an intelligence officer, period.

The coverup, in short, is going well.

Unfinished Business

White House To Withhold Nominee's Tax Returns
Document Release Excludes First Bush Administration

By Charles Babington and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 27, 2005; Page A06

The Bush administration will not give Senate investigators access to the federal tax returns of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr., White House and congressional officials said yesterday, a break with precedent that could exacerbate a growing conflict over document disclosure in the confirmation process.

Although nominees to the high court in recent decades were required to provide their three most recent annual tax forms, the administration will neither collect such documents from Roberts nor share them with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the officials said. Instead, the Internal Revenue Service will produce a one-page summary.

The White House yesterday began releasing the first of 75,000 pages of documents stemming from Roberts's service as a lawyer in President Ronald Reagan's administration two decades ago but refused to release papers from his time as deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993. These papers, Bush aides said, concern internal executive branch deliberations that remain privileged.

Senate Democrats and liberal interest groups immediately assailed the decision to withhold the more recent files, sharpening a dispute over the nominee's record.

"A blanket statement that entire groups of documents are off limits is both premature and ill advised," eight Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee, led by ranking minority member Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), wrote in a letter to President Bush. The senators attached a list of 35 topics they want to see documents related to, including abortion, civil rights, Bob Jones University, death-squad investigations and school prayer.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan dismissed the requests as part of a political strategy outlined in media reports even before Roberts was nominated. "I hope Senator Leahy is not trying to demand documents that the president has not even seen as part of their lines of attack against the president," McClellan said.

The mushrooming fight over documents represents the first battleground in the confirmation struggle since Bush chose Roberts, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, last week to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. With Roberts's legal credentials not disputed and his views on the most sensitive issues facing the court hard to pin down, Democrats have chosen for now to make the issue of document disclosure their focus -- hoping to find ammunition to derail the nomination or to wage a public battle over the administration's refusal to turn over files.

According to NPR's Nina Totenberg this morning, Roberts has a bigger paper trail than O'Connor did, but getting at it is going to be a bit of a show. In her words, "he was the hardest of hard line" conservatives, butting heads with other conservatives. We might want to go back and review the history of stare decisis. I'll put up a link to Nina's story as soon as NPR posts it. There are more questions than I would have suspected. Roberts has a tail. Nina traces it.

In New Bottles

I'm a medium serious wine consumer, I read Parker and the other wine press. This article seems to me like a nice digest of what the low cost consumer needs to know. I was a wine buyer for a boutique store in North Carolina who did the rounds of the vineyards in CA and NY each summer looking for import possibilities. This report seems plausible and enough of these vintages have slid down this throat to make the author credible.

None tasted expensive. Each was fairly simple, and yet the flavors of the grapes were allowed to shine through. One of the great winemaking clichés nowadays is, "Great wines are made in the vineyard," meaning that you cannot make great wine without first growing great grapes. Yet many who pay lip service to the vineyard use cellar techniques like aging wines in new oak barrels, which masks the grapes' flavors rather than enhancing them.

Of course, new oak barrels are very expensive. Wines made to sell for $10 or less are never aged in new oak barrels. Instead winemakers, to get an oaky quality, can dip tea bags of oak chips into the wine, infusing it with aroma and flavor that, to me, always seems artificial rather than honest. Or the wines can be manipulated in less obvious ways. The wines we liked did not taste as if they were posing as expensive bottles.

During the blind tasting, we speculated freely about where the wines we liked were made. Most of us assumed they were European, particularly from areas that have not achieved high status in people's minds and whose wines have not achieved brand-name recognition. "They harvest the grapes, put them in stainless steel or cement tanks, and that's it," Mr. Dexheimer said.

Mr. Grieco agreed, saying that wines from the New World, primarily from California and Australia, are often tailored to appeal to specific markets. "I will surmise that the New World wines are the most correct wines: balanced, acidity adjusted, with something from a tree," he said. "Old World wines rock and roll in this category. They don't try to be anything more than they are."

As it turned out, though, our top white was from South Africa, and two others from the top five were from South America. Only our No. 3 wine, the Domaine Duffour, fit the expected profile of coming from a little-known Old World region. It was made in Gascony, better known as Armagnac country, from the colombard grape. In California the grape is still widely planted and used in cheap white wines, rarely achieving the direct liveliness of this French version.

Our No. 5 white was an Italian pinot grigio from Bolla, hardly a little producer. Yet it had more flavor than many bland versions that cost twice as much. Mr. Grieco called it "unbelievable bang for the buck."

To me, though, the sauvignons blancs were the most interesting of the whites. Each seemed to have character and personality that other wines in the tasting lacked. We tasted four chardonnays, for example, including one each from California, Washington, Long Island and the Languedoc. They were not bad; just inoffensive, without zest. It may be that because of its piercing flavors, sauvignon blanc is more adaptable to an inexpensive approach than chardonnay, a grape that can reach greater heights when treated to costlier winemaking.

The reds conformed much more to our expectations. Our two top wines were both from the southern Rhône Valley, long a source for good cheap bottles. The No. 1 red, a 2001 Côtes-du-Rhône from J. Vidal-Fleury, was a superb value at $8: fruity, earthy and balanced without the candied or too-sweet qualities that may make for great popularity in the marketplace but will not impress discerning wine lovers. Our No. 2 wine, the Domaine Lafond from Lirac, was, like the Vidal-Fleury, a blend of several Rhône grapes, in this case grenache, syrah and mourvèdre.

Two American wines made our list of reds. One was the '03 Big House Red from Bonny Doon, a perennial leader in inexpensive wines. Bonny Doon is not above winery manipulations, but somehow its leader, Randall Grahm, manages to produce honest wines. Our No. 5 wine, a Bogle zinfandel, struck me as a little too sweet; yet zinfandel deserves to be on our list, as it was for years a foundation of inexpensive California wine before it began to get fancy.
....
Tasting Report: Why Plunk Down Good Money for Plonk?

WHITES

Steenberg South Africa Sauvignon Blanc 2004
$8
**½
Crisp, fresh, zesty and balanced, with unexpected depth. (Importer: Monsieur Touton Selections, New York)

Veramonte Casablanca Valley, Chile Sauvignon Blanc 2004
$7
**
Bone-dry and refreshing, with tart herb and mineral flavors. (Franciscan Estate Selections, Rutherford, Calif.)

Domaine Duffour Vin de Pays des Côtes de Gascogne 2003
$7.40
**
Bright, intense fruit flavors, like sauvignon blanc except it's colombard. (Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.)

Bodegas Salentein Mendoza, Argentina Sauvignon Blanc Finca el Portillo 2004
$9
**
Mild and refreshing, with citrus flavors. (San Francisco Wine Exchange)

Bolla Venezie I.G.T Pinot Grigio 2002
$10
**
Persistent melon, tropical fruit and honey flavors. (Brown-Forman Beverages Worldwide, Louisville, Ky.)

REDS

J. Vidal-Fleury Côtes-du-Rhône 2001
$8
***
Earthy and balanced, with lingering fruit flavors and a great sense of place. (W. J. Deutsch & Sons, White Plains, N.Y.)

Domaine Lafond Lirac Roc-Épine 2002
$8
**
Balanced fruit and tannins, with a pleasing bitter flavor. (Wines of France, Mountainside, N.J.)

Bonny Doon California Ca'del Solo Big House Red 2003
$10
**
Not complex, but full of spicy fruit flavors.

Sumarroca Penedès Tempranillo Barrel-Aged 2002
$10
*½
Herbal flavors, decent tannins. (Frontier Wine Imports, Dover, N.J.)

Bogle California Old Vine Zinfandel 2003
$9
*½
Juicy and fruity, but a little too sweet.

Until I get the nerve to put out my own wine letter, this will have to do. I know all of these wines and recommend this report. Yes, I have drunk a $400 bottle of legacy French wine and know the difference, bought it cheap at a charity auction.

Those of you with a Trader Joe's within driving distance might have a slightly different report. I can't think of wine unless it is paired with food.

If you can get Bonny Doon wines in your state, you are in for a world of fun.

...A Fight Breaks Out

Looks like the honeymoon is over.

Democrats Ask for More Memos Related to Roberts Nomination

By DAVID STOUT
Published: July 26, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 26 - Republican and Democratic senators clashed today on whether the administration was cooperating enough in releasing thousands of pages of documents from earlier in the career of Judge John G. Roberts, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court.

"I think the president has made the right decision, and I'm very pleased that he is going to be open," Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, said of the impending release of paperwork from Judge Roberts's tenure in the White House counsel's office in the mid-1980's and from his earlier post working for the attorney general.

As for Democrats' complaints that they are not getting enough information, Senator Hutchison said, "I think that's a pretty small fig leaf, frankly."

Taking the opposite view was Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings on the Roberts nomination.

Mr. Leahy said he welcomed a "dialogue" with the White House about the documents but that if the administration intended to block further discussions "it is a regrettable beginning."

"It is for the Senate and not the White House to decide what documents the Senate will need to fulfill its responsibilities in the confirmation process," Mr. Leahy said.

The dispute has to do with documents related to Judge Roberts's work in the solicitor general's office from 1989 to 1993, under the first President George Bush. Democrats say they need the documents because they could shed light on the nominee's thinking about issues that may come before the Supreme Court.

The White House and its Republican allies say Democrats are not entitled to those papers because they are covered under the attorney-client privilege. The solicitor general acts as the lawyer for the federal government.

President Bush's chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today, "The decision that we have made to provide them with all of that appropriate information, I think, goes above and beyond what the Senate needs to do their job. It's more than what they need."

Mr. McClellan said previous solicitors general have expressed concerns that the confidentiality of their office might be breached. "They rely on open, candid and thorough assessments or advice from their attorneys during the decision-making process, and you cannot have that if attorneys in the Office of the Solicitor General fear that that information might be disclosed," he said.

Senator John Cornyn, Texas's other Republican senator, appeared with Senator Hutchison today and embraced the attorney-client argument. Mr. Cornyn said it was clear that the solicitor general's paperwork was protected and that, in any event, Judge Roberts will be "the most investigated, researched and scrutinized nominee that the Supreme Court has ever had."

"I don't have any doubt that he will pass muster, and he should be readily confirmed," Mr. Cornyn said. While Mr. Cornyn is a member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Hutchison is not.

Senator Leahy's view, expressed on Sunday on the ABC News program "This Week," is that lawyers in the solicitor general's office are not covered by some blanket attorney-client privilege because "they are working for you and me, and all the American people," not the president.

Another Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, said he, too, was disappointed "that the administration has so quickly closed the door on providing Judge Roberts's documents to the Judiciary Committee."

This is a backdoor way to craft a fight, and with Congress leaving town at the end of the week, I don't know that it is going to amount to much. Nobody is going to be paying attention in August, anyway.

The Big Winners

Dan Froomkin comes up with some of the most amazing stuff using the Izzy Stone technique: close reading of public documents. Take a look:

The House Government Reform Committee's minority staff is out with new fact sheet showing that "a permanent estate tax repeal would provide an enormous windfall to the President, the Vice President, and members of their cabinet, saving them as much as $344 million dollars in taxes."

The biggest winners, based on their current estimated net worth: Not Bush, but Vice President Cheney (who might stand to save $12.6 to $60.7 million); Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ($31.8 to $101.3 million); and Treasury Secretary John Snow ($22.9 to $69.8 million.)

Bolton Watch

Writing in Salon today, Farhad Manjoo follows up on the John Bolton story:

Once the Senate adjourns for its monthlong August break on Friday, it will be unable to deliberate on many important national matters. True emergencies -- say, healthcare -- will go unsolved. But there is one emergency that may become so urgent, so pressing, that George W. Bush could argue he has to step in and solve it himself, without the Senate's help. We're referring to the seat for ambassador to the United Nations, which is currently empty. John Bolton, Bush's pick for the job, has so far been blocked by Senate Democrats -- but as soon as the Senate clocks off Friday night, Washington speculation goes, Bush may issue a recess appointment to put Bolton in place.

So far, there's no guarantee that Bush will do this -- but there are clues. Congressional aides tell Reuters to expect the nomination on Friday. When asked about the possibility on Monday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan declined to say what Bush will do. But speaking in general about presidential nominees who've been blocked, he said, "If the Senate fails to act and move forward on those nominees, then sometimes there comes a point where the president has needed to fill that in a timely manner by recessing those nominees." Reuters notes that this differs from McClellan's previous answer, which was that the White House had sought an "up or down" vote on Bolton.

But Steve Clemmons The Washington Note tells us this morning:

Efforts are underway to resolve "officially" whether John Bolton met with the Valerie Plame grand jury or its investigators. If he did before submitting his declaration statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his recess appointment will not occur. If he simply failed to amend his declaration but did meet with the Committee, there is still a chance he could squeak by during recess.

Here We Go Again

Skirmish Over a Query About Roberts's Faith

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: July 26, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 25 - Congressional Republicans warned Democrats on Monday not to make Judge John G. Roberts's Roman Catholic faith an issue in his confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court, reviving a politically potent theme from previous battles over judicial appointees. Skip to next paragraph

The subject came up after reports about a meeting on Friday at which Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, is said to have asked Judge Roberts whether he had thought about potential conflicts between the imperatives of their shared Catholic faith and of the civil law. The discussion was described by two officials who spoke anonymously because the meeting was confidential and by a Republican senator who was briefed on their conversation.
....
Whatever the conversation in the senator's office on Friday, Mr. Durbin's question hit the fault line between liberal anxiety about theocratic intolerance and conservative fears about hostility to religion.

Here is another one of those framing issues that the Repubs win because reporters are ignorant about religion. Because Kirkpatrick is ignorant about the existence of liberal faith, he allows all liberal objections to be characterized as "hostility to religion." This pisses me off, but our side needs to do a better push-back, too.

Plain Sense

As you know, you won't find me quoting a National Review author very often, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Ramesh Ponnuru has a better connection to reality than most of the rest of their staff.

Ask Not
Our crazy rules for judicial nominees.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the August 8, 2005, issue of National Review.

The Senate faces a momentous decision in deciding whether to confirm John Roberts as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s successor on the Supreme Court. Roberts would have great power to determine whether the death penalty will be curtailed or expanded, how the war on terrorism will be fought, which regulations of abortion will be allowed, whether same-sex marriage will be the law of the land, and what types of affirmative action governments may practice. He may not be able to set local traffic laws or to wage wars. But he will do more to determine how Americans are governed than any senator, or any five senators. Yet it would apparently be wrong for senators to ask him how he would exercise this vast power. In our current political order, elections for the Senate may turn on the candidates’ positions on abortion even though senators do not set abortion policy. But the people who do set abortion policy are not to be asked how they will rule. It is permissible to interview a candidate for the job of Supreme Court justice. But the hirers are not to ask for the answers they most want to know.

That position, however absurd it may sound, has been embraced by the Republican party. Even before Bush named a nominee, most Republicans in Washington were saying that questions about how the nominee would rule on specific issues are off limits. They say that questions about professional qualifications are proper. Questions about “judicial philosophy” may also be proper, some Republicans will allow. But even they draw the line at asking the nominee about the implications of his judicial philosophy.

Republicans have adopted this principle for reasons of both high principle and low politics. The high principle is that if nominees must answer specific questions, it will compromise their independence. The political calculation is that it will compromise their confirmability.

If the goal is to get Roberts, or any future Bush nominee, confirmed, then a rule that allows only extremely general questions is obviously useful.

Missing the Point

Bob Scheer's thinking and writing is nearly always messy, but he is taking on a messy subject today: our tortured relationship with the Chinese as they become an economic power.

Robert Scheer:
On China at least, Nixon was right
"China will never make it economically."

That's what I was told four decades ago, during my days as a graduate fellow at UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies. That widely shared pessimistic view was based on the notion that the Chinese economy, plagued by scarce resources and massive overpopulation, would never take off, no matter what ideology dominated.

Everyone knows those experts were wrong. China, despite having almost a billion more mouths to feed now and being far more dependent on foreign resources, is frightening not because of the prospect of its economic failure, but because of its success. You could smell panic over China's offer to buy Unocal.

Sadly, the prospect of hundreds of millions of people being lifted from abject poverty seems to alarm even leading Democrats in Congress, who claim to be driven by a standard of social justice. And many Republicans, who tend to trumpet the virtues of free trade when it involves the domination of world markets by U.S. businesses, are also raising the protectionist flag against the prospect of Chinese ownership of a single mid-size American-based oil company.

The signals we send to China have always been bizarrely mixed: Play in the capitalist ballpark but not so well that you become one of the big stars. It is a message that, as with the Japan-bashing of the 1980s, is at best paranoid and at worst racist. We in the West can be trusted with enormous economic power, but not the children of a lesser god.

The contradictions in U.S. policy were on full display last week when China untied its currency from the dollar, a move long demanded by American China-bashers. The upward valuation of the yuan was welcomed by those concerned about the U.S.-China trade imbalance; it also caused shivers of fear that China might not continue to lavishly invest in U.S. Treasury securities.

Of course, if you believe the protectionists, the trade imbalance with China is a reflection not of the hard work of the Chinese people but rather trickery on the part of China's leaders. Such irrationality is finding broad bipartisan congressional support. The House voted, 398 to 15, to condemn a sale of Unocal to the Chinese, alleging it would "threaten to impair the national security of the United States."

"Trade should be mutually beneficial, and it is certainly not with China," Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) said.

Tell that to the American consumers storming Costco and Wal-Mart to buy affordable Chinese-made goods, or the millions who have benefited from low-interest mortgages made possible by the Chinese subsidization of our huge budget deficits under President Bush.

And why isn't it a good thing that China is seeking access to Unocal's cleaner-burning natural gas as a substitute for coal, thereby lessening the danger of global warming?

The fear-mongering must be confusing to Asians, who've been hectored by the West for two centuries about the ineffable beauty of free trade. Americans, for instance, don't think that Asians should feel in the least bit threatened because of Unocal's ownership of natural gas fields on their continent. That's just the market in action.

Upon examination, the national security argument against Chinese ownership is absurd. Access to oil is determined by the international market, and the only nation with the military power to implement or prevent a worldwide blockade of this or any other vital resource is the United States.

And consider the hypocrisy: The Senate that authorized the "preemptive" conquering of the nation with the second-largest oil reserves on the planet is now challenging China's right to use dollars it earned exporting legal products to buy a U.S.-based multinational company.

Shorter Bob Scheer: American exceptionalism is delusional.

Remodeling Labor's House

Ambitions Are Fueling a Division of Labor

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: July 26, 2005

CHICAGO, July 25 - The huge split in organized labor has been fueled by stagnant living standards for many workers, by the ascendancy of the service sector and by labor's lack of success in politics and unionizing workers. But as much as anything, the schism reflects the conflicting ambitions of two titans of labor, John J. Sweeney, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and his onetime protégé, Andrew L. Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, until now the largest union in the labor federation.

The split was sealed on Monday when Mr. Stern and James P. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, announced that they were pulling their two unions out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., just as the federation was beginning its 50th anniversary convention here.

Mr. Stern, 54, who is known for his eloquence, drive and impatience, had for months been pushing his membership, and the leaders and members of other unions, to break away, in a move he insists is needed to reinvigorate labor.

Deepening the rift, two other major unions, the United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite Here, which represents apparel, hotel and restaurant employees, are boycotting the convention and have indicated that they would also leave.

"We are in the midst of the most significant and profound transformative moment in economic history, and workers are suffering," Mr. Stern said at a news conference. "Our goal is not to divide the labor movement, but to rebuild it so working people can once again achieve the American dream."

Mr. Sweeney and Mr. Stern both say their overarching goal is to lift American workers, but they have different visions on how to get there. Mr. Sweeney, 71, has led the federation for a decade and prefers to work by consensus, nudging the federation's unions to do more organizing. But many have dragged their feet, and Mr. Sweeney says federation rules bar him from punishing them. For him, cooperation and solidarity are paramount.

Mr. Stern, on the other hand, wants far more aggressive recruitment efforts and the ability to crack down on labor leaders who fall short of organizing goals. Mr. Stern and his allies have called for rebating half the federation's budget to individual unions to spur organizing, but Mr. Sweeney protests that such a move would cripple the federation's efforts in political campaigns, job safety and other areas.

While Mr. Stern and his allies say their walkout is based on fundamental principles about what is the best course to help American workers and unions, their move has generated huge resentment and anger among other labor leaders. While Mr. Stern says he is charting a much-needed, more aggressive course for labor, other union leaders accuse him of a power grab and fault him for repeatedly rejecting Mr. Sweeney's offers of compromise.

"It is a grievous insult to all the unions that helped us," Mr. Sweeney said in his keynote speech to the convention. "But most of all, it is a tragedy for working people. Because at a time when our corporate and conservative adversaries have created the most powerful antiworker political machine in the history of our country, a divided movement hurts the hopes of working families for a better life."

Then, in a statement that won rousing applause and that many union leaders said was directed at Mr. Stern in particular, Mr. Sweeney said: "And that makes me very angry. The labor movement belongs to all of us, every worker, and our future should not be dictated by the demands of any groups or the ambitions of any individual."

The pullout by the two giant unions is a major blow to the federation, which until Monday had 56 unions and 13 million members. The departure of the Service Employees International Union, with 1.8 million members, and the Teamsters, with 1.4 million, takes away about one-fourth of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. membership. Those members paid about $20 million a year in dues, representing one-sixth of the federation's budget.

Standing alongside Mr. Stern at a news conference, Mr. Hoffa seemed to share his impatience. "What was done at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. was not working," he said. "We're going to do something new. That is our message."

I want to respect both sides in this struggle, but the simple truth is that the political approach that Sweeney and the historic AFL-CIO hasn't borne any fruit. I think Stern is right, and labor needs to tend its own garden and its roots or risk becoming completely irrelevant. Full disclosure: 30 year member of the American Federation of Musicians and former organizer for same.

Hot Docs

The WaPo's Campaign for the Supreme Court blog has the survey of the morning papers. All three of the national dailies have some permutation of this morning's hot story. Here are the salient paragraphs from the WaPo. It appears that this one broke late last night.

White House to Release Early Roberts Papers

By Peter Baker and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 26, 2005; Page A02

The agreement to release some Roberts documents came as the White House quietly presses Senate Republicans to start hearings on his nomination before Labor Day, in part to shorten the amount of time that liberals have to research and attack him, Republican sources said yesterday. Specter has said he wants to hold a week-long hearing just after Labor Day following the Senate's August recess. The negotiations on timing and other matters have lasted for days and may not be resolved until mid-week, Senate aides said.

The issue of how much of Roberts's record in government to release has emerged as a key point of contention between Republicans and Democrats since President Bush nominated him last week. Rather than launch a frontal attack on Roberts, Democrats have focused on pressuring the administration for documents, expecting to use any refusal against him as they have with other Bush nominees.

Senior administration officials outlining their response last night said the partial release should be sufficient. "This is an effort by the administration to give all the documents that are appropriate to the Congress to help make sure they have the information they need to move through the nomination process," one official said.

But the White House clearly does not expect Democrats to agree. The officials disclosed the new policy under ground rules requiring anonymity and an embargo until midnight, too late for Democratic reaction. Democrats have pushed for papers from throughout Roberts's government career, including the solicitor general's office.

"I urged the representatives of the White House to be as cooperative as they possibly could," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) said earlier yesterday after meeting with Roberts. Asked whether Democrats might filibuster the nomination if the administration withholds documents, Lieberman said, "I hope we don't reach that point."

Under the White House policy disclosed last night, all documents related to Roberts stored at the National Archives will be released immediately and sent to the Judiciary Committee. Reporters will be able to review them in a reading room. These documents fill six boxes and stem from Roberts's service as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith from 1981 to 1982, officials said.

Documents related to Roberts's work in the White House counsel's office from 1982 to 1986 that are at the Ronald Reagan library will be released after review, officials said. The administration will ask the library to expedite its review of the documents and then will review them itself before release. Officials said they might withhold papers at the library with "national security implications, personal privacy concerns and other concerns," but not many. "It is the intent of the administration to disclose all of them," one official said.

But documents stemming from Roberts's work as deputy to Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr during the first Bush presidency will remain secret except for any that were sent to the National Archives by the Clinton administration in 1998. Such internal memos are key to the solicitor general's deliberations over legal strategy, and releasing them would damage traditional privilege, officials said.

On the question of when to open hearings, senior Republicans said White House officials worry that idle time allows Democrats to seize on relatively minor incidents to cast doubt on Roberts. They cited a Washington Post report that his name appeared in the Federalist Society's 1997 leadership directory even though he has said he did not join the conservative organization.

"They don't want to have any extra time for the Democrats to savage the guy," Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said in an interview. "Their left-wing groups haven't gotten all geared up yet." A later hearing date, he said, "would give them more time to get geared up."

My read: a distracted White House hasn't really thought this through yet.

The NYT story is anonymously sourced:

The administration officials said the White House would work with the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to expedite processing of roughly 50,000 pages of documents from 1982 to 1986, when Judge Roberts was an assistant counsel in the Reagan White House. About 4,000 pages of documents from that period have already been made public, but those have not included papers pertaining to Judge Roberts's work on a broad array of topics including the Iran-contra scandal, school prayer and civil rights issues.

The officials said the administration had decided to waive any claim to attorney-client privilege from those documents because the papers are covered by the Presidential Records Act, the law that governs the disposition of presidential papers. The administration's position, one of the officials said, is that there is a "presumption of disclosure" when it comes to documents covered by the act. Under the law, the current White House has final say over what presidential documents are made public.

One of the officials, both of whom sought anonymity to speak candidly about a decision that had not yet been made public, said the White House had reviewed some of the papers from Judge Roberts's work in the counsel's office and saw nothing in them that could create problems for his confirmation.

"We don't have concerns," the official said.

This one is going to unfold througout the week.

Whither Normal?

Jurors Screened in Mental Retardation Case

by SUE LINDSEY
The Associated Press
Monday, July 25, 2005

YORKTOWN, Va. -- Prospective jurors were questioned Monday for a trial that will determine whether a man whose case led to the Supreme Court ban on executing the mentally retarded falls into that category himself.

"This case is going to be unique in the annals of judicial history," York County Circuit Judge Prentis Smiley Jr. told the pool of some 70 potential jurors for the case of Daryl Atkins.

The high court three years ago sided with Atkins' lawyers in ruling that execution of the mentally retarded is unconstitutionally cruel, but did not decide whether Atkins was retarded.

Atkins, 27, has been on death row since 1998 for the robbery and murder of an Air Force enlisted man.

Smiley told the potential jurors that their only assignment would be to decide Atkins' mental capabilities.

"If he is mentally retarded, by law his sentence is commuted to life in prison," Smiley said.

While the Supreme Court ruling protected the severely mentally retarded, it set no clear standard for the far greater number of inmates, including Atkins, who are borderline. That was left to the states, which have disagreed on where to draw the line.

Virginia law sets an IQ of 70 as the cutoff, but also takes into account social skills and the ability to care for oneself.

Atkins, who did not finish high school, scored 59 on an IQ test in 1998, but had scores as high as 74 and 76 on more recent tests. Virginia law also requires that mental retardation be determined by age 18, but Atkins was not tested as a youth.

Among defense attorneys' questions to potential jurors during the daylong selection process Monday was whether they thought they could tell whether someone was mentally retarded by their appearance and by talking to them.

A prosecution question was whether the potential jurors understood that there are differences between mental retardation and other mental disabilities.

Ok. Let's make it clear here. The man's been found guilty of murder.
Personally, I'm very torn about the death penalty, but I do agree with the recent decission by the high Court to make it illegal to put someone to death who is diagnosed as mentally retarded. I really don't support the death penalty, but I do know a lawyer that has argued for it and has made a very convincing arguement for it in some circumstances.

BUT, if there was a case to really test the new standard put forth by the Court , here it is. The fact is that your mental age (IQ) changes as you get older and change. In other words, it's not static. There is a huge difference though between a 59 and a 76 in terms of what a person is capable of understanding. I would really hate to be in that jury, because I doubt they will every truely know the truth.

One thing though, when the Supreme Court outlawed the excecution of the mentally retarted, we were one of the only nations to still do that. Critics of the case claimed that inmates were lining up to get retested so they could "lower" their scores below a 70 (normal).

So what do you think the jury should do?

Signs from the Weather

I've been living in DC for 20 years, but the hot-muggies are hitting a new peak this year. It's stinky and awful just beyond the door. The rest of the country is suffering, too. Jeebus, you think a little Global Climate Change might be behind it?

I'm an amateur climatologist and have been studying this for 30 years. We are in a world of hurt that isn't going to be solved anytime soon. This year, the dust cloud from the Sahel in Africa is going to tamp down the number of hurricanes on our beaches for a while. I wouldn't be owning a timeshare in hurricane country if I were you, going forward. We are in a historically significant cycle of more hurricanes which are being exacerbated by global warming. If you live on the hurricane coast, as I do, your avian flu preparations are your hurricane preparations. Be glad of that dust cloud. It gives hurricane preparation time.

There is no dust cloud for avian flu preparations.

Henry Niman, remind me how much water I have to stockpile.

Divorce

Teamsters, SEIU Bolt AFL-CIO Federation

By RON FOURNIER
The Associated Press
Monday, July 25, 2005; 3:23 PM

CHICAGO -- The Teamsters and a major service employees union on Monday bolted from the AFL-CIO, a stunning exodus for an embattled movement already struggling to build its ranks and cope with a rapidly changing work environment.

In a decision that AFL-CIO President John Sweeney labeled a "grievous insult" to working people, the Teamsters union and the Service Employees International Union, two major federation affiliates, said they decided they had to leave.

"In our view, we must have more union members in order to change the political climate that is undermining workers' rights in this country," said Teamsters President James P. Hoffa. "The AFL-CIO has chosen the opposite approach."

The Teamsters joined the Service Employees International Union, the largest AFL-CIO affiliate with 1.8 million members, in bolting. The SEIU is a union that AFL-CIO President John Sweeney once headed. They said they were forming a competing labor coalition designed to reverse labor's long decline in union membership.

This was not an easy or happy decision, said Service Employees International leader Andrew Stern, once a Sweeney protege.

"Our world has changed, our economy has changed, employers have changed," Stern said. "But the AFL-CIO is not willing to make fundamental changes as well. By contrast, SEIU has changed."

I do not think this is a bad thing. SEIU, Teamsters and Unite-HERE understand that if labor doesn't return to its organizing roots, it is going to disappear. Going the political route netted the labor movement nothing: labor law is routinely left unenforced, restrictions on labor's actions continue to be written into the law. If lobbying was such a good deal, John Sweeney, the AFL wouldn't be losing membership by boxcarful. It's not working, John, and it never did.

Back to the Future

What Did the President Know?

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, July 25, 2005; 1:30 PM

Now that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is said to have expanded his investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's identity to encompass a possible White House cover-up, what the president and the vice president knew would appear to be much more relevant.

Fitzgerald interviewed both President Bush and Vice President Cheney more than a year ago, at what seemed at the time like the tail end of his investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

Bush and Cheney were not placed under oath -- the reasoning apparently being that they had no direct involvement in the potential criminal activity under investigation: the leak itself. We don't know much about either interview, beyond the fact that Bush had his personal attorney at his side.

But now Fitzgerald's investigation appears to have turned its focus to discrepancies in the testimony of White House senior adviser Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Fitzgerald may be trying to determine whether evidence exists to bring perjury or obstruction of justice charges.

And that raises the issue of what -- if anything -- Rove and Libby told Bush and Cheney about their roles.

So does that mean Fitzgerald might call Bush and Cheney to testify before the grand jury -- under oath? Might he even have done so already? We have no idea, of course, because the White House isn't saying anything at all about the investigation anymore.

Either way, the CIA leak story is taking on more and more of the trappings of the classic Washington political scandal -- the saving grace for Bush being that his party controls Congress, and that thus far, Republicans have closed ranks behind him.

But get ready for more and more talk about the parallels between this story and the Clinton intern scandal -- and of course, Watergate.

We're already hearing some of the prototypical questions being raised. Here's former presidential adviser David Gergen, on ABC's "This Week" yesterday: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

We are living in this wierd time where we seem to be recycling both Viet Nam and Watergate. Wow, maybe there truly is nothing new under the sun.

Deadly Disconnect

The Best Army We Can Buy

By DAVID M. KENNEDY
Published: July 25, 2005

[T]hanks to something that policymakers and academic experts grandly call the "revolution in military affairs," which has wedded the newest electronic and information technologies to the destructive purposes of the second-oldest profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is, proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.

The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve. Modern warfare lays no significant burdens on the larger body of citizens in whose name war is being waged.

This is not a healthy situation. It is, among other things, a standing invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly feared was the greatest danger of standing armies - a danger made manifest in their day by the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Jefferson described as having "transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military arm."

Some will find it offensive to call today's armed forces a "mercenary army," but our troops are emphatically not the kind of citizen-soldiers that we fielded two generations ago - drawn from all ranks of society without respect to background or privilege or education, and mobilized on such a scale that civilian society's deep and durable consent to the resort to arms was absolutely necessary.

Leaving questions of equity aside, it cannot be wise for a democracy to let such an important function grow so far removed from popular participation and accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy - like dealing out death and destruction to others, and seeking military solutions on the assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than what could be accomplished by the more vexatious business of diplomacy.

The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one option among several - would at least ensure that the civilian and military sectors do not become dangerously separate spheres. War is too important to be left either to the generals or the politicians. It must be the people's business.

Kennedy's point is well taken, but he misses the point that we have already arrived at the place he cautions us about. Half the public thinks the Iraq war was a bad idea, yet there is no hue and cry about it. We are already disconnected from it.

Equal Access

Hendrick Hertzberg cuts to the chase in the new New Yorker:

COMMENT--
ROE V. ROVE
Issue of 2005-08-01
Posted 2005-07-25

Many of the Democrats’ “powerful special interest allies,” notably in the abortion-rights movement, are raising alarms about Roe v. Wade. The core of the abortion ruling is not in immediate danger; even if O’Connor’s support becomes Roberts’s opposition, Roe will still command a majority of one. The truth, though, is that the next few years will be hard ones for reproductive freedom, especially among the red-state poor and young. Roe or no Roe, Roberts or no Roberts, a woman with money will be able to get a safe and legal abortion, even if she has to travel to another state to get one. But any Bush-appointed Justice, whatever his or her stand on Roe, is likely to endorse ever more restrictive state laws calculated to intimidate, inconvenience, or otherwise prevent young women who want or need abortions from getting them. If, after another couple of Bush appointments, the Court does strike down Roe, the result would, of course, be worse—abortion would be banned outright in a score of states—but the political energy in this seemingly endless national struggle would quickly pass from the pro-life to the pro-choice side. The more immediate dangers, from the moderate-to-liberal point of view, are in areas where O’Connor provided the fifth vote. If Roberts turns out to be as conservative as Bush’s rightmost supporters hope, then affirmative action, secularism, patients’ rights, and all manner of federal regulation from campaign-finance controls to environmental protection will be in serious trouble.

Roberts’s confirmation will be a bitter pill for Democrats, but it is a pill they have known since last November that they would have to swallow. Their bitterness is deepened by the conviction that Bush won the 2004 election in spite of his domestic policies, including his likely judicial choices; he won it because he was the post-9/11 incumbent, and he was the post-9/11 incumbent because, in 2000, the Court whose members he now appoints appointed him. All the same, there is at least a possibility, however slim, that Roberts will surprise. The nomination has been hailed as a masterstroke, but it is also a confession of weakness. Bush’s popularity is at a low ebb; his plan to privatize Social Security is failing; his war and his budget are in chaos. And by Friday the troubles of Karl Rove were back on the front page.

— Hendrik Hertzberg

Hertzberg makes a point here I haven't seen anywhere else in all the fulminating about this nomination: when it comes to reproductive choice, Roberts is likely to increase class inequality. Like so many things in our society, economic access is what you need for rights. And that's wrong.

Media Idiocy

Lord, this is offensive.

A Made-For-No-TV Story

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 25, 2005; 8:16 AM

The John Roberts nomination has revived an age-old dilemma for television news: how to cover nine secluded lawyers in black robes.

"Supreme Court arguments and decisions are fascinating to a few of us and really pretty boring to most," says MSNBC's Dan Abrams.

"The Supreme Court deals overwhelmingly with abstractions, and ideas and abstractions are not easy to convey on television," says CNN's Jeff Toobin.

"The minutiae of it, how people interpret statutes, that's not the most exciting stuff," says Fox's Greta Van Susteren.

If three of cable's best legal commentators, all lawyers, struggle with the subject, imagine how difficult it is for all the other anchors, correspondents and producers.

The amount of airtime devoted to untangling court decisions has been dwarfed by the cases involving Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, not to mention wife killer Scott Peterson, runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks and missing-in-Aruba Natalee Holloway. By contrast, major court rulings on medical marijuana, racially influenced jury selection and government seizure of private property tend to be one- or two-day stories at best.

Television reports on these high-court rulings were also eclipsed by all those speculative stories about William Rehnquist stepping down (he isn't) and whether President Bush would pick Edith Clement or some other judge besides Roberts for the Sandra Day O'Connor vacancy (he didn't).

Just as political reporters cover campaigns far more than governing, the Roberts selection provides the media with a clear story line -- whether the Senate will confirm the appeals court judge. But with no Clarence Thomas-style controversy to feast upon, the networks could quickly tire of examining the details of Roberts's record and judicial philosophy.

"He's distinguished himself in his career, but there's no novelty associated with him," Van Susteren says. "We've had white men who've gone to Harvard and been at the top of their class and are smart."

Howie, you ignorant slut. Junior High civics teachers manage to explain this material every freakin' week of the year. If a pair of overpriced blow-dries like van Susteren and Toobin can't figure it out, the problem ain't the subject, Howie. Now, which story is more likely to have a real effect on a whole bunch of people, the Holloway story or a Supreme Court appointee who is likely to curtail women's reproductive choices? Can you answer the question, Howie?

Better News

Because I need a little relief from gloom and doom (and so do you) here is a link to Animal Planet's Panda Cam at the National Zoo. The WaPo reports today that mom Mei Xiang is spending more time away from her cub, who is beginning to develop the characteristic black and white markings of the Giant Panda. It looks like (at 9:50 EDT) mom is nursing her little one. The Zoo staff pronounces Mei Xiang "a good mom," and it certainly looks like it.

Moving the Story

All of the Big Three have avian influenza stories today, but they are not all equally as good. This NYT story doesn't advance the narrative at all. The WaPo article is instructive: social panic is one of the things we are likely to see if the pandemic develops. It's worth a read. The LAT frontpager is a decent overview of the subject.

Across East Asia, an influenza virus known by the scientific designation H5N1 has killed at least 55 people and tens of millions of birds. As potential aggressors go, this one's about as insidious as they get — fast-moving, deadly and extremely unpredictable. Before it can mount an all-out offensive, this "bird flu" virus must change its genetic makeup so that it can jump easily from human to human. Once it has done so, the resulting germ could spread quickly, inflicting heavy casualties among a global population with no natural immunity against it.

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That final shift might never happen — or it could happen next week. But scientists think that roughly three times each century nature creates an influenza virus capable of global devastation, and a "pandemic" flu sweeps the world. The prospects increase when a virus long out of circulation extends its geographic range, its hold on different animal species and its contact with humans. By those measures, H5N1 is a virus on the march.

So can it be stopped? With a few more years to prepare, American public health experts say they may be able to prevail over an outbreak of pandemic flu. But its timing absolutely defies prediction. If the attack comes this year or next, experts acknowledge they can at best slow its march, and the death toll will be grievous.

Among officials and experts tracking the building force of the H5N1 virus, the anxiety is palpable. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the National Institutes of Health office that oversees preparations for pandemic flu, says the sense of urgency is intense. "I feel it every day, and my staff feels it every day."

Fauci calls pandemic flu "the mother of all emerging infections" and warns that the world is behind in building its defenses.

There is, however, a scramble to get ready. The United Nation's World Health Organization has stepped up its monitoring of H5N1 throughout East Asia. It has brokered cooperation among countries to help stem the spread of the virus — usually by killing flocks of infected birds. And it has exhorted countries to arm themselves with vaccine and antiviral medication.

In Washington, D.C., and across the United States, officials are racing to prepare for and counter the virus before it becomes efficient at jumping from human to human and is transported to America by a passenger aboard a plane.

They know how quickly the scenario could unfold. When a novel respiratory syndrome called SARS emerged in rural China in 2003, it spread to five countries in 24 hours; within several months, it had reached 30 countries on six continents. The East Asian countries most affected by bird flu so far — Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand — are ill-equipped to track the spread of bird flu in animals and humans. Containing it, say experts, is beyond their powers.

*

Rushing development

In the last several years, U.S. federal spending on influenza research has increased more than fivefold, to $400 million annually in 2005. Vaccines against two different strains of influenza — one of them the H5N1 strain — were rushed through development using new genetic engineering techniques, and have gone into large-scale production at the same time that clinical tests have gotten underway.

The unprecedented compression of the schedule for H5N1 vaccine is risky, Fauci says. But it is "an indication of the urgency" with which officials feel they need to have a vaccine in hand.

President Bush ordered 5.3 million doses of flu-fighting antiviral medications into the strategic stockpile, and in April signed an executive order authorizing the isolation and quarantine of foreigners suspected of arriving at the U.S. border sick with flu. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding the number and capacity of quarantine stations at major U.S. ports. And chastened by flu vaccine shortages last year caused by a production glitch, CDC officials are drawing up plans for distributing limited vaccine and antiviral medication in the event of a pandemic.

"The stakes — in dollars, resources and human lives — are enormous," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who on June 30, presided over the fifth hearing this year that Congress has called on the subject.

Officials also face the uncertainty of not being able to predict how virulent a pandemic flu virus would be. Bird flu victims in Asia have been stricken with typical influenza symptoms at first, but their respiratory distress quickly worsens as their immune systems try to fight the virus. Of those confirmed infected with the bird flu, almost half have died.

The CDC calculates that even a "medium-level" pandemic could claim between 89,000 and 207,000 lives in the United States, with between 314,000 and 734,000 hospitalizations. Some warn that those estimates could be low. The Washington, D.C.-based Trust for America's Health, using CDC methods and official reports of the bird flu virus' virulence, has projected the U.S. death toll of a moderate pandemic at more than 500,000 — including nearly 61,000 in California — with more than 2.3 million hospitalized and almost 67 million Americans sickened.

The CDC estimates that the direct economic impact of a medium-level pandemic on the United States could reach $166.5 billion. But others point to the economic reverberations of the 2003 SARS scare and conclude that pandemic flu — by triggering panic, protectionism and widespread illness and death among workers — could bring the world's intricately linked economy to a virtual standstill.

Read the whole thing and pass the link around to friends and neighbors. The Flu Wiki has a lot more information.

Misplaced Logic

What Bush Doesn't Know

By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 25, 2005

So where are we, now that the real world has intervened? The military is spinning its wheels in the tragic and expensive quagmire of Iraq and there is no end to the conflict in sight. A front-page story in The Times on Sunday said the insurgents "just keep getting stronger and stronger."

As for the fight against terror, the news runs the gamut from bad to horrible. The Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik in Egypt was traumatized by a series of early-morning terrorist blasts on Saturday. London is trembling from the terror attacks on its public transportation system that have claimed dozens of lives.

Here in New York, where the police have begun random searches of the backpacks and packages of subway riders, there is an odd feeling of resignation mixed with periodic bouts of dread, as transit riders struggle with the belief that some kind of attack is bound to happen here.

Interviews over the past few days have shown that subway riders in New York almost instinctively understand what the president does not - that the war in Iraq is not making us safer here at home.

"No, in fact I think it makes us less safe here," said Edmond Lee, a salesman who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "We went over there with no real plan. No real thinking about what we'd be able to do."

He said he was concerned that "what happened in the London Underground might happen here."

Memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center are still etched, as if with acid, in the minds of New Yorkers. Very few people are dovish when it comes to the war on terror. But Mr. Bush's war in Iraq is another matter.

"Our soldiers being over there make it worse here," said Michael Springfield, a 32-year-old engineer from Brooklyn.

One of the people encountered in the subway was Andy Dommen, a musician from Germany who was pushing a shopping cart filled with luggage. He made the fundamental distinction between Iraq and Al Qaeda and said the war in Iraq was a distraction that "was taking the public eye off" other important problems, namely the fight against terror.

"Messing up other countries," said Mr. Dommen, "doesn't make the world or America safer."

There is still no indication that the Bush administration recognizes the utter folly of its war in Iraq, which has been like a constant spray of gasoline on the fire of global terrorism. What was required in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was an intense, laserlike focus by America and its allies on Al Qaeda-type terrorism.

Instead, the Bush crowd saw its long dreamed of opportunity to impose its will on Iraq, which had nothing to do with the great tragedy of Sept. 11. Many thousands have paid a fearful price for that bit of ideological madness.

It is hard to believe that someone could be as willfully ignorant as our president, but it is hard to know what other interpretation to put on his behavior. BTW, Bob, you don't "fight against terror." Terror is a tactic, not an adversary. This is one of Bush's fundamental idiocies. Don't buy into it.

The Smarter North

Toyota, Moving Northward

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 25, 2005

There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-S.U.V.'s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a U.S. location, the company cited the quality of Ontario's work force.

What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.
....
But education is only one reason Toyota chose Ontario. Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.

You might be tempted to say that Canadian taxpayers are, in effect, subsidizing Toyota's move by paying for health coverage. But that's not right, even aside from the fact that Canada's health care system has far lower costs per person than the American system, with its huge administrative expenses. In fact, U.S. taxpayers, not Canadians, will be hurt by the northward movement of auto jobs.

In our lifetime, we'll see GM and SmithKline get the same idea, and then things will start moving in Congress.

The quality of the workforce is a separate problem. Bob Herbert addressed our embarrassing high school drop out rate last week in the NYT. Did you know that Costa Rica has the highest literacy rate in the Western Hemisphere? Maybe we should be doing something about the fact that US literacy rate continue to fall and that Canadians are lapping us in the education department, eh?

A Sound Argument

Roberts may not be a friend of the disabled

Sunday, July 24, 2005

By KATHI WOLFE
KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

Fifteen years ago, on July 26, 1990, people with disabilities cheered when President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. We applauded when Bush called for "the shameful walls of exclusion" to come tumbling down. Our civil rights had finally been given legal protection and recognition.

Today, as we celebrate how the ADA has changed America, we know that our battle for equality is far from over.

President Bush's nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court should concern people who care about disability rights. If he is confirmed, Roberts is likely to cast the swing vote against the ADA and disability rights.

In 2002, in Williams v. Toyota, Roberts helped the Supreme Court narrow the scope of the ADA by arguing the case on behalf of the car manufacturer. Partly as a result of Roberts' arguments, the Supreme Court established a strict test for disability, making it much more difficult for people with disabilities such as diabetes, epilepsy, mental illness and workplace injuries to seek redress under the ADA.

Over the past 15 years, the American landscape has been transformed by the ADA, which protects people like me against discrimination in employment, public accommodations and government services.

Prior to the act, routine things that many Americans take for granted were difficult, if not impossible, for many people with disabilities. Often there would be no curb on the streets, as well as no wheelchair ramps, accessible restrooms or Braille menus at restaurants.

Today, all of these things, including interpreters for deaf people, accessible polling places and schools that are inclusive to disabled students have becoming increasingly common in American life.

Yet, implementing this civil rights law continues to be a struggle.

Many polling places remain inaccessible. Too often, people with disabilities receive inadequate health care and education because of inaccessibility and discrimination.

Upholding the civil rights protections of the ADA has required the intervention of the Supreme Court. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that George Lane, a paraplegic, could seek legal redress against the state of Tennessee under the ADA after he was forced to crawl up the steps of a courthouse because the courthouse had no elevator.

This decision sends a powerful message to state governments that access to the courts and other services is an essential right. If you ignore this message, you're in violation of the law.

But this ruling came from a divided court. O'Connor sided in favor of Lane. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, speaking for those who dissented, wrote, "Congress utterly failed to identify any evidence that disabled persons were denied constitutionally protected access to judicial proceedings."

And based on their records, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have consistently ruled to weaken civil rights protections for people with disabilities.

To ensure that the protections of the ADA are upheld, the Senate should carefully scrutinize Roberts' record and views on disability rights as part of the confirmation process.

With 54 million Americans with disabilities, we must not let our civil rights collapse.

Do you think this isn't about you? You are one automobile accident away from being the guy who has to crawl up the stairs of the courthouse. I once had to appear in court when I was in a wheelchair after an accident. Just getting to court was a nightmare. This could be you or some one you know. You aren't as powerful as you think you are.

Niger Crisis

Niger's Food Crisis Worsens Despite Appeals

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 25, 2005

MARADI, Niger, July 24 (AP) - Nasseiba Ali is the face of hunger in Niger. The 20-month-old girl weighs just 12 pounds, and her eyes are clouded at night, one of the symptoms of chronic malnutrition.

Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding center. But aid groups despair that many other children are dying because the world has been slow to respond to the needs here.

"I thought we would not make it safely," Nasseiba's grandmother, Haoua Adamou, said in Hausa through an interpreter after walking for several hours with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding center at Maradi, some 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey.

She sat Saturday fanning flies from Nasseiba's face.

The aid agency Oxfam warned last week that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in this West African nation devastated by locusts and drought. The United Nations estimates that 800,000 children under age 5 are suffering from hunger, including 150,000 faced with severe malnutrition.

The warnings have been coming for months. The United Nations first appealed for assistance in November and got almost no response. Another appeal for $16 million in March generated about $1 million. The latest appeal, on May 25 for $30 million, has brought about $10 million.

Donations jumped significantly in the last week because of increased media attention and television images of starving children, Jan Egeland, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator, said Friday. He estimated that thousands of children were dying in Niger.

Damn Damn Damn Damn... why the %^&@ do we need pictures of starving kids to get the message?

Doctors Without Borders is there. If you use their online form, you can't specifiy for Niger but if you call the toll free number (1-888-392-0392) they will target the donation for them.

According to the Guardian, the British Red Cross has started to get involved also.

Golden Opportunity for the Daring

White House Won't Show All Roberts Papers

Sunday July 24, 2005
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL

WASHINGTON (AP) - Citing privacy and precedent, the Bush administration indicated Sunday it does not intend to release all memos and other documents written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts when he worked for two Republican presidents.

The leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will conduct hearings on Roberts' nomination, disputed the assertion that privacy was at stake and called such a position a ``red herring.''

Roberts worked in the Reagan White House counsel's office from 1982-1986. He also was principal deputy solicitor general in the administration of the first President Bush.

Fred D. Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who is guiding Roberts through the nomination process on behalf of the White House, said material that would come under attorney-client privilege would be withheld. He contended that previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have followed that principle.

``We hope we don't get into a situation where documents are asked for that folks know will not be forthcoming and we get all hung up on that,'' Thompson told NBC's ``Meet the Press.''

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared more open to considering such requests, but he also cited concerns about ``very sensitive, very deliberative information'' that could be involved.

``That would be something that we'd have to look at very, very carefully,'' he said. ``Rather than prejudge the issue, let's wait for the Judiciary Committee to make its requests, and then we can evaluate the requests and hopefully reach an appropriate accommodation.''

The committee has yet to ask for such material. But some Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have urged the White House to release ``in their entirety'' any documents written by Roberts.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said other nominees, including Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, have provided material they wrote in confidence while working in the Justice Department.

``It's a total red herring to say, 'Oh, we can't show this,''' Leahy told ABC's ``This Week.'' ``

``And of course there is no lawyer-client privilege,'' he said. ``Those working in the solicitor general's office are not working for the president. They're working for you and me and all the American people.''

Here is the possibility of an opening to resist Roberts. It's not the best in the world, but given the fact that Bush's favorbility ratings are under 50% even in the recent FOX poll and that almost one half of Americans view him as untrustowrthy, this is an excellent time to start pounding this theme of "why won't they release the documents?" No documents, then there will be war (and there may be anyways depending on what's in them) and Bush will have to gamble that he can go nuclear and win.

And the best part is, the Democrats already some established precidents! Remember what happened the last time the White House tried to bully through an appointment by withholding documents from Congress and refused to answer questions? Granted, he may still get a recess appointment, but there were a whole lot of Republicans that started to get unnerved when the White House told the Senate to F you on the Bolton documents.

Besides, even your most ardent Bush zombie understands that you aren't going to give a lifetime job to someone that you can't ask questions to. Anyone who has ever done a job interview knows that. And that's exactly how it should be phrased in clear and simple terms.

Spud Love

Yer bloghostess never ran into a potato she didn't like. About the worst food you can eat if you are watching your weight is the fried potato, which means french fries and hash browns. Fat and the potato have an affinity for each other and the spud really soaks up the oil and is a perfect delivery system for it. What's a potato lover to do? Eat them rarely and eat them cooked like this:

Oven Fried Potatoes

Serving Size : 6
Preparation Time :0:15

Ingredients:
6 potatoes
1 tablespoon parsley
1 tablespoon basil
1 dash garlic powder
1 dash pepper
2 tablespoons oil

Spread oil in 13-by-9 inch baking dish.

Clean and cut potatoes into bite sized chunks. Toss potatoes in pan and sprinkle on spices. Put in oven at 375 degrees for about an hour possibly an hour and a half. Start these bad boys early because you are never quite sure how long it will take for them to become edible. I like to leave mine bake long enough for the outside to become crunchy and the inside to become soft.

This is one of those dishes that it is hard to screw up unless you forget to check on it once in a while.

This recipe reprinted by permission of The Real Man's Cookbook.

Yer bloghostess suggests: one you've peeled and cut your spuds, soak them for an hour in cold, lightly salted water for an hour before you put them in the oven. Add a little acid to the water to keep them from oxidizing and turning brown. Drain them and pat dry before you put them in the oven. This procedure gives you the crusty-on-the-outside, fluffy-on-the-inside type of fry. And really crispy potatoe-y shoestrings, if that's the way you want to cook 'em. Shoestrings should be roasted in a single layer, you might need several cookie pans.

The cooking shops are selling an oil spritzer, a pump bottle for spritzing your cooking pans or the foods themselves, which is another way to handle this procedure. More potato, less oil. Yes!

Not Moving On

Now, this is a different perspective.

Conductor unbecoming

Richard Ingrams
Sunday July 24, 2005
The Observer

War games

It is fascinating to compare the way the Americans and the British have been unravelling the story of the Iraq war in their various postmortems.

In many ways, the stories run on parallel lines. In both countries, official inquiries have uncovered much the same story - the attempts by politicians, often desperate, to provide the public with evidence of the threat posed by Iraq, the reluctance of the intelligence services to provide the politicians with what they wanted, the proof that, in the end, Iraq posed no threat at all.

The story emerging in Washington may also look familiar. Who was it who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame in order, apparently, to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who embarrassed Bush by disproving claims that Saddam had been buying African uranium? The finger of suspicion points at Bush's right-hand man, Karl Rove.

But was Bush himself involved? It is all reminiscent of the story of Dr Kelly, whose name was also leaked in a roundabout way to the press in order to discredit the BBC.

Blair's right-hand man, Alastair Campbell, played much the same sort of role as Rove, tipping off friendly journalists. Blair himself denied any involvement, though later it was shown that he had chaired meetings at which the matter was discussed.

But there any resemblance ends. The Americans will pursue their story to the bitter end. Rove may end up charged with a criminal offence; Bush might even be impeached.

Here in Britain, Blair, with Campbell still in tow, carries on regardless. He may have been involved in skulduggery, he may have tried to lie his way out of it, but nobody is too bothered about any of that. We have moved on.

Even a couple of weeks ago, I would have called Ingrams' assessment of the US situation hopelessly optimistic, but I could see an impeachment down the road. Pew says that 43% of the population is already in favor of it if it can be proved that Bush lied.

Looming Black Hole

U.S. official warns of a health care crisis
At Utah panel: Comptroller general says the fiscal problems may well rival a terrorist threat
By Ronnie Lynn
The Salt Lake Tribune

Skyrocketing health-care costs could plunge the United States into a fiscal hole so dire that it would rival any terrorist threat, the U.S. comptroller general warned Friday in Salt Lake City.

Saying policymakers must get a grip on the crisis now, David Walker asserted they need to tackle three politically dicey problems to regain control over runaway federal spending on health and welfare programs: Reform Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare; bring more restraint to other federal spending; and revise tax policy.

"The federal government is on an imprudent and unsustainable fiscal path. It has serious problems. . . . We ought to take a modern Hippocratic oath [to] do no harm. Don't dig the hole deeper. How can we use what we have more wisely? Because the answer is not spending more money."

Walker was the first to testify at an all-day hearing before the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, a committee created by Congress to study health care coverage, costs and access. Friday's hearing, held at the state Capitol, was the second of several regional hearings across the country.

The 14-member group, assembled in February, will issue a health report to the public when it completes its two-year study. Its recommendations are expected to result in federal legislation.
Walker said policymakers can start by answering fundamental questions:

l What are the basic and essential services every American should get?
l What is the appropriate balance of responsibility - between government, employers and individuals - in financing health care?
l What types of incentives are needed for medical providers to make prudent decisions to reduce costs.

This should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention, but it's a little startling to hear it from the lips of someone in the Bush administration.

Iraqification

3 Afghan Election Workers Abducted; Judge Is Fatally Shot in Kandahar

Reuters
Sunday, July 24, 2005; Page A18

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 23 -- Three Afghan election workers were kidnapped by suspected Taliban or al Qaeda insurgents in the northeastern province of Nurestan while suspected Taliban fighters fatally shot a district judge in southern Kandahar province, officials reported Saturday.

The unrelated incidents took place hundreds of miles apart, but they fit a pattern of violent assaults that have escalated in recent months, apparently aimed at disrupting parliamentary elections scheduled for Sept. 18.

The three election workers, all men, were seized Wednesday night after a voter registration program in a village, said Mohammad Yusouf, secretary for Nurestan's governor. The abduction took place in the same district where a female election worker was wounded last week in an attack.

"There were signs of blood in the house from where they were kidnapped and we do not know where they have been taken to," Yusouf said. "We suspect al Qaeda or Taliban were behind the kidnappings."

No group has asserted responsibility for the attacks.

It looks to me like a centralized Al Qaeda is coordinating tactics between Iraq and Afghanistan. All of the whoosh we're hearing about how we're taking AQ apart is horseshft.

The Nightmare

Iraq has descended into chaos way beyond West's worst-case scenario
July 24, 2005

By Patrick Cockburn

The war in Iraq is now joining the South African War (1899-1902) and the Suez crisis in 1956 as ill-considered ventures that have done Britain more harm than good. It has demonstrably strengthened al-Qaeda by providing it with a large pool of activists and sympathisers across the Muslim world it did not possess before the invasion of 2003. The war that started out as a demonstration of US strength as the world's only superpower has turned into a demonstration of weakness. Its 135 000-strong army does not control much of Iraq.

The suicide bombing campaign in Iraq is unique. Never before have so many fanatical young Muslims been willing to kill themselves trying to destroy those they see as their enemies. On a single day in Baghdad this month 12 bombers blew themselves up. There have been more than 500 suicide attacks in Iraq during the past year.

It is this campaign that has now spread to Britain and Egypt. The Iraq war has radicalised a significant part of the Muslim world. Most of the bombers in Iraq are non-Iraqi, but the network of sympathisers and supporters who provide safe houses, money, explosives, detonators, vehicles and intelligence is home-grown.

The shrill denials by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, that hostility to the invasion of Iraq motivated the bombers are demonstrably untrue. A soon-to-be-published investigation of 300 young Saudis caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qaeda or any other terror organisation before 2003. The invasion of Iraq made them decide to die.

Bush and Blair can issue all the righteous blather they wish, but they've made a mess they don't know how to get out of, and we're paying for it in blood and treasure.

Out of Bounds

"Tell us what we want to hear or we will ruin you."

Hunting Witches

THIS IS HIGHLY usual," declared a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when asked this week whether the request by committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) for information from three climate scientists was out of the ordinary. He and his boss are alone in that view. Many scientists and some of Mr. Barton's Republican colleagues say they were stunned by the manner in which the committee, whose chairman rejects the existence of climate change, demanded personal and private information last month from researchers whose work supports a contrary conclusion. The scientists, co-authors of an influential 1999 study showing a dramatic increase in global warming over the past millennium, were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes.

Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science Committee, has called the investigation "misguided and illegitimate." Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, one of the targets, calls it "intrusive, far-reaching and intimidating." Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that although scientists "are used to answering really hard questions," in his 22 years as a government scientist he never heard of a similar inquiry, which he suspects could "have a chilling effect on the willingness of people to work in areas that are politically relevant."

Mr. Barton's attempt to dismiss all this as turf-battling on the part of Mr. Boehlert, like his spokesman's claim that such demands for data are normal, is disingenuous. While the Energy and Commerce Committee does sometimes ask for raw data when it looks at regulatory decisions or particular government technology purchases, there is no precedent for congressional intervention in a scientific debate. As Mr. Bradley pointed out in his response to Mr. Barton, scientific progress is incremental: "We publish a paper, and others may point out why its conclusions or methods might be wrong. We publish the results of additional studies . . . as time goes on robust results generally become accepted." Science moves forward following these "well-established procedures," and not through the intervention of a congressional committee that is partial to one side of the argument.

If Mr. Barton wants to discuss the science of climate change, there are many accepted ways to do so. He could ask for a report from the Congressional Research Service or the National Academy of Sciences. He could hold a hearing. He could even read all of the literature himself: There are hundreds of studies in addition to the single one that he has fixated on. But to pretend that he is going to learn something useful by requesting extensive data on 15th-century tree rings is ludicrous; to pretend that it is "normal" to demand decades worth of unrelated financial information from scientists who are not suspected of fraud is outrageous. The only conceivable purpose of these letters is harassment. This bizarre episode deserves much wider condemnation from congressional leaders.

This is utterly bizarre. Over the years, I've had many friends who testify before Congress and none of them have been subjected to this kind of treatment. Republican overreach knows no bounds.

The Definition of Neurosis

Terror strikes in Egypt
Egypt's worst terror attack kills more than 80, signaling jihad has come home
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer

CAIRO, EGYPT — Two powerful car-bombs struck at the heart of Egypt's $6 billion tourism industry early Saturday, killing 83 people from at least 5 countries. Officials say the death toll is likely to rise.

The bombs in Sharm al-Sheikh, a vibrant resort town that is the hub for the popular beaches and dive spots along Egypt's Red Sea, confirmed to analysts that the global jihad has come home to its intellectual birthplace after eight years of surprising calm.

Three bombs exploded in the city between 1 and 1:15 a.m. on Saturday morning, two car-bombs that witnesses said were still moving when they exploded, according to Associated Press, and a smaller bomb on a popular tourist walk near the beach. Most of the damage was done at the Ghazala Garden's Hotel, where the lobby was reduced to twisted medal and rubble, while at least 19 Egyptians were killed at a café in Sharm al-Sheikh's old city.

Egypt's first terrorist attack since 1997 came last October in a series of coordinated suicide attacks on the resort of Taba, along the Israeli border, that killed 34. Those attacks were followed by two smaller attacks on tourists in Cairo this April that killed three foreigners.

What ties the Taba, Sharm al-Sheikh and Cairo attacks together is that they were all attacks on Egyptian tourism, the country's largest foreign currency earner, and in that sense were clearly attempts to weaken Hosni Mubarak's regime. "Tourism is the main money earner, and if you hit that you hit the state," says Josh Stacher, a political scientist in Cairo. "You can't blow up an army induction center or get at the country's leaders, so you hit tourism."

The car-bombing in Taba, and the April attacks in Cairo were presented by the Egyptian authorities as carried out by a small group of radicals with no ties to existing Islamist organizations. The government has said repeatedly that it had caught or killed everyone involved.

Egyptian security officials say the tough tactics they'd used on militants in the 1990s - and a pledge to renounce violence that extracted from the country's militant groups - had removed most of the terror threats inside the country, and said further attempts were unlikely. Thousand's of residents on the Sinai peninsula, particularly around the city of Al-Arish, were rounded up after the Taba arrest, and a trial for men linked to that blast was scheduled to resume on Monday.

Well, I guess that tactic didn't work, and I'm sure that rounding up thousands of residents will promote further pacifism on the part of your citizens. I hear that Egyptian jails are particularly *cough* hospitable.

Jeebus, doesn't anybody get it that fourth generation warfare gets fed by tactics like this?

Want more bombings? Do more of the same thing.

What's At Stake

This press release came from the Coalition for a Free and Independent Judiciary.

Washington, DC - Three ordinary Americans - Beverly Jones, Patti Philips and Dr. Scott Spear - joined Senator Ted Kennedy (MA) and Rep. Mel Watt (GA) this morning to show how the cases the Supreme Court decides impact the everyday lives and rights and freedoms of millions of Americans. Their stories put a face on abstract terms like judicial philosophy and legal precedents and underscore the need for the Senate to conduct a thorough review of Judge John Roberts's record.

"I was a plaintiff in a disability rights case that went up to the Supreme Court," said Beverly Jones. "My case was about the rights of people with disabilities to have access to the courts in Tennessee. I am here today to tell my story because I am very concerned that the individual that the President has named to succeed Justice O'Connor, John Roberts, must show that he is committed to guaranteeing and upholding the rights of all Americans, and for me, that means for people with disabilities."

Beverly, who lives Lafayette, Tennessee, is one of millions of Americans with a disability. She praises the Court's 5-4 decision in Tennessee v. Lane and Jones (2004) - in which she was a plaintiff - for allowing her to work with dignity.

"It is my hope that the Senate - led by my own Senator, Bill Frist - takes the time it needs to carefully review the record of John Roberts to determine if he is committed to the protection of the rights and freedoms of every American," said Jones.

Beverly was joined by Dr. Scott Spears who practices at the University of Wisconsin Health Center and is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University.

"Access to safe healthcare is a fundamental human right," said Dr. Spear. "In my experience, confidentiality is the key to providing high quality health care, especially reproductive health care. Threats to medical privacy frighten people from seeking needed health care services and being responsible about their health. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld the constitutional protections for women's health, safety and privacy and, as a doctor, I urge the Senate to seek a nominee with a strong commitment to protecting medical privacy and reproductive freedom."

Patti Phillips of Atlanta, Georgia told the room that she and her family lost her youngest daughter to cancer in February. She credits the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) - most recently upheld by the Supreme Court decision in Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v. Hibbs (2003) - with giving her family the security and flexibility they needed to care for and spend time with their daughter.

"I'm not an 'inside the Beltway' type. I'm not a political activist. I'm a mom," said Patti. "For the past six years, my family and I have been fighting cancer. I'm here today because FMLA protected my job and my family's health insurance. Just recently, the Supreme Court decided whether or not state employees could hold their state employers accountable for violating the FMLA. And if the decision had gone the wrong way, millions of Americans would be denied the full protection of this important law."

"We need our Senators to do their jobs and conduct an independent, thorough and fair review of Judge Roberts' position on this and other issues important to women and their families," Patti added. "And we need Judge Roberts to answer their questions fully and honestly about his record and his views."

I'm one of those Americans who has needed all of these laws at different points in my life. When my dad was dying, when I was sick myself, I needed a humane country which wouldn't penalize me for those turns in my life. I still had to fight for my rights with the employer. The courts backed me up. But I wonder how much longer I'll have judicial support if I need it again.

Do you really want to have to go to court when you are at one of the most fragile places that life offers? Me, neither. I'd rather hope that settled law would keep you and me out of court and in the bedrooms of our loved ones or at the office of the practioner who could give us the best rehab. It's about damn time that we got world-class care for our buck, instead of intrusive investigation.

Live by the Sword

For Bush, Effect of Investigation of C.I.A. Leak Case Is Uncertain

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
Published: July 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 23 - His former secretary of state, most of his closest aides and a parade of other senior officials have testified to a grand jury. His political strategist has emerged as a central figure in the case, as has his vice president's chief of staff. His spokesman has taken a pounding for making public statements about the matter that now appear not to be accurate.

President Bush said in the fall of 2003 that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the C.I.A. leak case more than he did.

For all that, it is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative's identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president.

Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely.

For starters, did Mr. Bush know in the fall of 2003, when he was telling the public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did, that Mr. Rove, his longtime strategist and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had touched on the C.I.A. officer's identity in conversations with journalists before the officer's name became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay say in particular about his relationship with Mr. Rove, whose career and Mr. Bush's have been intertwined for decades?

Then there is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer's identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.

For the last several weeks, Mr. Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, have declined to address the leak in any substantive way, citing the continuing federal criminal investigation.

But Democrats increasingly see an opportunity to raise questions about Mr. Bush's credibility, and to reopen a debate about whether the White House leveled with the nation about the urgency of going to war with Iraq. And even some Republicans say Mr. Bush cannot assume that he will escape from the investigation politically unscathed.

"Until all the facts come out, no one is really going to know who the fickle finger of fate points at," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.

The case centers on how the name of a C.I.A. operative came to be appear two years ago in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. The operative, who is more usually known as Valerie Wilson, is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration eight days before Mr. Novak's column of twisting some of the intelligence used to justify going to war with Iraq. Under some conditions, the disclosure of a covert intelligence agent's name can be a federal crime.

The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has kept a tight curtain of secrecy around his investigation. But he spent more than an hour in the Oval Office on June 24, 2004, interviewing Mr. Bush about the case. Mr. Bush was not under oath, but he had his personal lawyer for the case, James E. Sharp, with him.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department has said what Mr. Bush was asked about, but prosecutors do not lightly seek to put questions directly to any president, suggesting that there was some information that Mr. Fitzgerald felt he could get only from Mr. Bush.

Live by dirty tricks, die by dirty tricks. We won't know the full story of this White House until some second term cabinet member writes a book, but we already know plenty from the books by Paul O'Neil, Richard Clarke and others. These are small minded people concerned with power rather than governance. The people who know how to prosecute conspiracies are going to have a field day. Criminal prosecutions of conspiracies are effective because most people are lousy conspirators. They leak like sieves.

Blogging

Hi, all,

I'm still fighting a bug and new software. Oh, how I hate new software (and bugs) so today's coda is going to be short and sweet before I head for the sheets. The trip to the Farmers market on a queasy stomach was a bust, not surprisingly. It's hard to get excited about corn when the tummy wants water, not fiber.

The other software issues were visits to singles' sites, and the quality of the software varies wildly. Some of this is kludge, some is pretty sophisticated. Tech types who have used this are invited to post their reflections here.

Yes, I'm looking. I got dumped a couple of weeks ago by the man that I thought was my dreams. I have no clue what that was all about. Outside of the fact that I won't entertain men who think that "Peter Pan" is a fabulous book.

As I told a friend earlier this evening, to be a cynic is to be a cop-out. I retain my ideals. Prove me wrong.

The latest word is that Rehnquist announces his retirement tomorrow. We'll see. I can't live in a state of permanent emergancy.

Melanie

Devolution

Iraq's Guerrillas: Tougher, With Expanded Goals

By DEXTER FILKINS and DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: July 24, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 23 - They just keep getting stronger.

Despite months of assurances that the forces were on the wane, the guerrillas and terrorists battling the American-backed enterprise here appear to be growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever.

A string of recent attacks, including the execution of moderate Sunni leaders and the kidnapping of foreign diplomats, has brought home for many Iraqis that the democratic process that has been unfolding since the Americans restored Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004 has failed to isolate the guerrillas and, indeed, has become the target itself.

After concentrating their efforts for two and a half years on driving out the 138,000-plus American troops, the insurgents appear to be shifting their focus to the political and sectarian polarization of the country - apparently hoping to ignite a civil war - and to the isolation of the Iraqi government abroad.

And the guerrillas are choosing their targets with greater precision, and executing and dramatizing their attacks with more sophistication than they have in the past.

American commanders say the number of attacks against American and Iraqi forces has held steady over the last year, averaging about 65 a day.

But the Americans concede the growing sophistication of guerrilla attacks and the insurgents' ability to replenish their ranks as fast as they are killed.

"We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents," a senior Army intelligence officer in a sensitive position said in an interview. "But they're being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge."

At the same time, the Americans acknowledge that they are no closer to understanding the inner workings of the insurgency or stemming the flow of foreign fighters, who are believed to be conducting the vast majority of suicide attacks. The insurgency, believed to be an unlikely mix of Baath Party die-hards and Islamic fanatics, has largely eluded the understanding of American intelligence officers since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 27 months ago.

The danger is that the violence could overwhelm the intensive American-backed efforts now under way to draw Iraq's Sunni Arabs into the political mainstream, leaving the community more embittered than ever and setting the stage for even more violence and possibly civil war.

We have no clue, no exit strategy. The incompetent prosecution of this illegal war is sufficient grounds for impeachment.

Game Over

The WaPo's Colby King writes today's installment of "sad but true."

Democrats Are on the Wrong Battlefield

By Colbert I. King

Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A17

Just how far Republicans have succeeded in converting Washington into a safe place for Bush can be found in the recent Senate compromise on the use of the filibuster in judicial nominations. (The agreement was hailed by People for the American Way's Ralph Neas as a "major defeat for the radical right." Replied one right-wing wag, "This is like Custer declaring victory at Little Bighorn.")

Oh, well, be that as it may.

Back to my example: Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu was one of 14 senators -- seven Republicans and seven Democrats -- who cut the deal allowing up-or-down votes on three of Bush's U.S. appeals court nominees whom civil rights groups labeled as extremists unfit to serve. I asked the leader of a national civil rights organization how the senator, who counts on a strong African American base of support, could buy into a scheme that virtually guaranteed confirmation and lifetime jobs to judges billed as civil rights disasters. He said Landrieu "no longer has [former Louisiana Democratic] senator John Breaux at her side." With newly elected conservative Republican and Bush loyalist David Vitter now occupying Breaux's seat, Landrieu has to watch her flanks down in Louisiana, he lamely explained.

From the standpoint of protecting civil rights in the United States, this development in the Senate is sad and disturbing. Capitol Hill, not the West Wing, is the true battleground. Federal judges can't reach the bench without the Senate. And Congress, not the executive, has been known to overturn Supreme Court decisions.

The greatest civil rights lobbyist to walk the face of the earth, the late Clarence Mitchell Jr., director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP and a respected figure in the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, liked to tell the story about the lesson President Lyndon Johnson taught him when he was pressing for legislation. As reported in the Mitchell biography "Lion in the Lobby," by Denton L. Watson, Johnson used to say, "Clarence, you can get anything you want if you've got the votes. How many votes have you got?"

Mitchell said his hackles would rise whenever Johnson would say that. But the more he reflected on that refrain, Mitchell said, "the more I realized that this was the best advice that anybody could give."

The lesson seems lost on some civil rights standard-bearers, who appear to be more attuned to the slick ways of Washington: reliance on catchy sound bites, swift gut shots and fundraisers that require schmoozing with the fawning.

Mitchell believed that the only way to get what you want was to have enough votes to outvote your opponent; that the votes you got came from hard work where it counts; and that the real work was done away from the cameras and down in the trenches, whether working on the Hill or as a catalyst mobilizing voters back home.

To deal with the Bush White House from a position of strength, that's exactly what it's going to take. Winning judicial nomination fights in Washington over the next three years will require scoring victories far beyond the Beltway. Good places to start? Next year's U.S. Senate races in Arizona, Indiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming.

Unlike churning out news releases and holding grip-and-grin sessions around Washington, that takes real work.

At the time, I said the gang of 14 had performed legislative ju-jitsu on the Dems. They are neutered now.

The Rag Heads

White House Aims to Block Legislation on Detainees

By Josh White and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A01

The Bush administration in recent days has been lobbying to block legislation supported by Republican senators that would bar the U.S. military from engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees, from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, and from using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual.

Vice President Cheney met Thursday evening with three senior Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the administration's case that legislation on these matters would usurp the president's authority and -- in the words of a White House official -- interfere with his ability "to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack."

It was the second time that Cheney has met with Senate members to tamp down what the White House views as an incipient Republican rebellion. The lawmakers have publicly expressed frustration about what they consider to be the administration's failure to hold any senior military officials responsible for notorious detainee abuse in Iraq and the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

This week's session was attended by Armed Services Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) and committee members John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). Warner and Graham last week chaired hearings that explored detainee abuse and interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay and the concerns of senior military lawyers that vague administration policies have left the door open to abuse.

Defense Department Refuses to Turn Over Abuse Photographs; Asks to File Secret Brief Justifying Refusal

July 22, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Erica Pelletreau, 212-519-7829; 549-2666; [email protected]

NEW YORK -- Today was the day the government was supposed to process and redact photographs and videos relating to the abuse and torture of prisoners held abroad. Raising new arguments on the eve of its deadline, the United States government refused to release the materials to the public. The photographs and videos were to be processed for eventual release as a result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations.

"The government is raising newfound reasons for withholding records to which the public has an undeniable right," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "Instead of releasing these records and holding officials accountable for detainee abuse, the government now seeks to shield itself from public scrutiny by filing these reasons in secret."

In a letter filed at the eleventh hour, the Department of Defense claims that photographs and videos of abuse that the court had previously ordered redacted for future release "could result in harm to individuals" for reasons that will be set forth in a memorandum and three declarations that the government will file under seal with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.

Under the government’s proposal, the documents explaining the government’s reasons for withholding the images of abuse will not be available to the public except in redacted form, and the photographs and videos may never be made public.

The ACLU has expressed skepticism at what appears to be yet another attempt by the government to deny the public critical information about the abuse and torture of prisoners.

Thanks, Suze.

Use Them, Then Lose Them

GOP scrambles to fill veterans' shortfall

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fellow Republicans warned House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay more than a year ago that the government would come up short — by at least $750 million — for veterans' health care. The leaders' response: Fire the messengers. Now that the Bush administration has acknowledged a shortfall of at least $1.2 billion, embarrassed Republicans are scrambling to fill the gap. Meanwhile, Democrats portray the problem as another example of the GOP and the White House taking a shortsighted approach to the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and criticize their commitment to the troops.

New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, as chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, had told the House GOP leadership that the Veterans Affairs Department needed at least $2.5 billion more in its budget. The Senate passed a bill with that increase; the House's bill was $750 million short.

Smith and 30 other Republicans wrote to their leaders in March 2004 to make the point that lawmakers who were not the usual outspoken advocates for veterans were troubled by the move. Failure to come up with the additional $2.5 billion, they contended, could mean higher co-payments and "rationing of health care services, leading to long waiting times or other equally unacceptable reductions in services to veterans."

Still, the House ignored them.

Smith was rebuked by several Republicans for sounding the spending alarm, and House leaders yanked his chairmanship in January. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., lost his chairmanship of the VA health subcommittee, and Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., is no longer on the committee. They too had signed the letters to Hastert, R-Ill., and DeLay, R-Texas.

Support the troops at your peril if you serve in Congress. Ya know, this is really despicable.

The Numbers

Pentagon Proposes Rise in Age Limit for Recruits
By DAMIEN CAVE

The Army told John Conroy on July 8 that it did not want him, despite his master's degree in business and his marathon-proven fitness. Just shy of 41, he is too old.

But by next year, Mr. Conroy could be in a uniform.

With the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard all on pace to fall short of their recruitment goals for the year, the military is reconsidering its age limits for recruits.

Allowing older soldiers could be costly in terms of benefits, and there is the thorny issue of whether older men and women can keep up with the young. But many in the military argue that 40-somethings are in better physical shape today and point out that thousands of middle-age soldiers are already rotating through Iraq.

On Monday, the Pentagon filed documents asking Congress to increase the maximum age for military recruits to 42, in all branches of the service. Now, the limit is 39 for people without previous military service who want to enlist in the reserves and the National Guard, and 35 for those seeking active duty.

At a subcommittee hearing in the House on Tuesday, David S. C. Chu, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said lifting the age limit was one of several tools needed to turn recruitment around.

"There is a segment of the population that is older, that would like to serve," Mr. Chu said at the hearing, "and we'd like to open up that aperture for the military departments to use as they see fit."

When asked how 42 was chosen, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Wednesday that it would bring the policy in line with a recent provision that allows the military to commission officers until that age. Even if the age limit is raised, she said, the Marines and Air Force planned to accept new enlistees only through age 35.

The proposal, intended for the 2006 defense budget now pending in Congress, could further ease the military's historic reliance on young recruits. In March, the Pentagon rewrote its policy from the 1960's that limited new recruits to people under 36, raising the age limit for Army Reserve and Guard recruits by five years, to anyone younger than 40.

Another step-up in age, like other ideas now being discussed - like the Guard's request to expand the number of legal immigrants allowed to enlist - would add millions of people to the military's pool of potential applicants. In a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the military was studying how many people 40 and over might enlist.

"It's not the answer exclusively," said Lt. Col. Mike Jones, the Army National Guard's deputy division chief for recruiting and retention. "But we tend to miss our numbers on the margins, by 10 or 11 percent." If people who are older filled half of that, he said, "maybe it's good for America."

Mr. Conroy, a married father of two young children, says he wants to tackle a new challenge, and to give back to the country that has helped him succeed. He says he earns a six-figure salary and owns his house and cars debt free, so it is the perfect time for him to start a new, meaningful adventure.

Mr. Conroy could go to work for Blackwell Security for 10 times the money. No wonder the Pentagon is having trouble recruiting.

Inspector Hound

CIA Leak Investigation Turns to Possible Perjury, Obstruction
By Douglas Frantz, Sonni Efron and Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The special prosecutor in the CIA leak investigation has shifted his focus from determining whether White House officials violated a law against exposing undercover agents to determining whether evidence exists to bring perjury or obstruction of justice charges, according to people briefed in recent days on the inquiry's status.

Differences have arisen in witnesses' statements to federal agents and a grand jury about how the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, was leaked to the press two years ago.

According to lawyers familiar with the case, investigators are comparing statements by two top White House aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, with testimony from reporters who have acknowledged talking to the officials.

Although no one has suggested that the investigation into who leaked Plame's name has been shelved, the intensity of the inquiry into possible perjury charges has increased, according to one lawyer familiar with events who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, and his team have made no decision on whether to seek indictments.

The investigation focused initially on whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a campaign to discredit Wilson after he wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times criticizing the Bush administration's grounds for going to war in Iraq.

The sources said prosecutors were comparing the various statements to the FBI and the grand jury by Rove, who is a White House deputy chief of staff and President Bush's chief political strategist. In Rove's first interview with the FBI, he did not mention a telephone conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, according to lawyers involved in the case. Cooper has since said that he called Rove specifically to discuss the matter.

Rove has been interviewed twice by the FBI and has made three appearances before the grand jury, according to lawyers familiar with the case.

Rove was told by prosecutors in October that he was not a target of the inquiry, said his lawyer, Robert Luskin. Rove, through his lawyer, has denied being the source of Plame's name.

"I am quite sure that if his status has changed, I would be informed about it," Luskin said Friday. "I am not aware of anything that has come to light that would change the facts in front of the prosecutor that would change that assurance."

Rove "has, from the beginning, been candid, forthcoming and accurate," Luskin said. "There has never been any moment when the government, prosecutors or investigators have suggested that they thought he was being anything but truthful or cooperative."

The investigation's change in emphasis comes amid indications that Fitzgerald's inquiry has gone beyond the White House and scrutiny of officials such as Rove and Libby, who is Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

A former senior State Department official has acknowledged that he testified before the grand jury in Washington, and a congressional source confirmed that Robert Joseph — who worked on the White House National Security Council — told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had been questioned by the special prosecutor. Karen P. Hughes, a former top aide to Bush, also told the committee that she had been questioned, the source said.

In addition, a senior U.S. official said that several State Department officials — including then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — were questioned months ago about the creation and distribution of a classified memo that mentioned Plame. Prosecutors are interested in the memo because it may have been a vehicle for spreading Plame's name among administration staff members.

Disclosing the identity of a CIA undercover agent is a crime under some circumstances, but legal experts have said that elements of the law make it difficult to prove a violation. Prosecutors could have an easier time winning a conviction under another law that makes it a crime for officials with security clearances to disseminate certain information. According to that statute, it could be a crime to have confirmed that Plame was a CIA agent if she was operating undercover.

Plame was first identified as a CIA operative by syndicated columnist Robert Novak in an article that appeared July 14, 2003 — eight days after Wilson's op-ed piece challenged administration claims that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium for its nuclear program from the African nation of Niger.

An official close to the investigation said Fitzgerald was concentrating on what happened in the White House and other parts of the administration in those eight days.

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that Rove and Libby were intensely focused on discrediting Wilson during that period. Prosecutors have been told that although lower-level aides routinely handled media inquiries, Rove and Libby began communicating directly with reporters about Wilson, the Times report said.

The CIA requested the inquiry into Plame's unmasking. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed a special prosecutor in December 2003 and was given wide latitude to conduct his investigation. He is working with FBI agents, a team of attorneys from the Justice Department in Washington and four prosecutors from his Chicago office.

The investigation has led to the jailing of Judith Miller of the New York Times, found in civil contempt for refusing to reveal her sources in inquiring about the Plame case; she did not publish any stories on the matter. Other reporters have testified before the grand jury about conversations with sources after receiving waivers of confidentiality from their sources.

Fitzgerald has asked witnesses not to discuss their grand jury testimony, but the law does not prohibit them from speaking publicly.

Looks like this one is a two-fer.

Col Mustard in the Greenhouse with a Pipebomb

Here is the morning jazz on the Rovegate affair:

LAT is pursuing the obstruction of justice angle.

The WashPo Testimony By Rove And Libby Examined
Leak Prosecutor Seeks Discrepancies> is headed in subtler directions. Well, this isn't going to get boring any time soon.

By Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A01

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has been reviewing over the past several months discrepancies and gaps in witness testimony in his investigation of the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to lawyers in the case and witness statements.

Fitzgerald has spent considerable time since the summer of 2004 looking at possible conflicts between what White House senior adviser Karl Rove and vice presidential staff chief I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a grand jury and investigators, and the accounts of reporters who talked with the two men, according to various sources in the case.

Libby has testified that he learned about Plame from NBC correspondent Tim Russert, according to a source who spoke with The Washington Post some months ago. Russert said in a statement last year that he told the prosecutor that "he did not know Ms. Plame's name or that she was a CIA operative" and that he did not provide such information to Libby in July 2003.

Prosecutors have also probed Rove's testimony about his telephone conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in the crucial days before Plame's name was revealed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak.

Rove has testified thathe and Cooper talked about welfare reform foremost and turned to the topic of Plame only near the end, lawyers involved in the case said. But Cooper, writing about his testimony in the most recent issue of Time, said he "can't find any record of talking about" welfare reform. "I don't recall doing so," Cooper wrote.

Both Libby's attorney and Rove's attorney declined to comment yesterday, as did Fitzgerald's office. The possible conflicts in the accounts given by Russert and Libby were first reported yesterday by Bloomberg News.

Fitzgerald's review of apparent discrepancies are further evidence that his investigation has ranged beyond his original mission to determine if someone broke the law by knowingly revealing the identity of a covert operative.

The leaks case centers on the Bush administration's response in the days after July 6, 2003, when former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV accused the Bush administration in the New York Times and The Washington Post of twisting intelligence to justify a war with Iraq. He wrote in an op-ed piece that on a U.S. mission to Niger, he found no proof of the claim that Iraq was trying to acquire materials for nuclear weapons. Eight days later, Novak published a column suggesting that the administration did not take Wilson's findings seriously and noting that Wilson's wife -- Plame -- was a CIA operative who had suggested him for the trip.

After building criticism that someone in the administration had jeopardized an agent in political retaliation, Fitzgerald was appointed by the Justice Department in December 2003 to conduct an independent investigation.

Fitzgerald has long been interested in a Time magazine article co-written by Cooper shortly after Novak's column was published on July 14, 2003. In the article, Cooper and two colleagues wrote about the administration's efforts to discredit Wilson and noted that some government sources had revealed that Plame worked for the CIA.

Lawyers involved in the case said there are now indications that Fitzgerald did not initially know or suspect that Rove was Cooper's primary source for the reporter's information about Plame. That raises questions about how much Rove disclosed when first questioned in the inquiry or how closely he was initially queried about his contacts with reporters. Rove has testified before a grand jury and been questioned by FBI agents on at least five occasions over the past two years.

Where there is smoke, I'd go looking for a fire, if I were a canny prosecutor.

Trust, but Verify

Paper trail required under bill

By GARY D. ROBERTSON
Jul 22, 2005

A Senate committee Thursday recommended new voting machine standards that would require a paper record of each ballot cast and require sample hand counts to ensure accurate totals.

The bill is the outgrowth of recommendations from a commission that met after a Carteret County voting machine lost 4,438 votes in November.

The measure approved by the judiciary panel after numerous rewrites would require counties to use only three voting systems: optical scan ballot machines, electronic recording machines or paper ballots counted by hand.

The electronic machines also would have to generate a paper record that is "viewable by the voter before the vote is cast electronically" so that the voter can correct any error.

The paper record couldn't be touched by the voter because it would be considered the backup record for any recount. Voters might inadvertently take it home otherwise, said Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, a Carrboro Democrat and a primary sponsor of the bill.

Sen. Janet Cowell, a Raleigh Democrat and the only committee member to vote against the bill, said she didn't like a provision that would allow the State Board of Elections to experiment during the 2006 elections with alternatives to a paper record of a ballot. That might include audio playbacks of a voter's choice or a photographic image of an electronic ballot.

Unlike some other states that shall remain nameless (*cough* Georgia *cough*), I think the leaders here in North Carolina got a clue with the last election. Cowell is my State Senator and has a good point about not wanting any experiments during a real election. We still don't have a Supt. of Public Instruction (head of Dept. of Public Instruction) because the election was so close in 2004 that those lost votes could have caused the Republican to win the seat (I personally don't think so, but there is sufficient room for reasonable people to disagree).

A paper trail is a good place to start when it comes to voting but we need to make sure, as much as we can, that every vote that is legally cast is counted. I fully understand that even the optical scanners do make some mistakes and that humans often can't follow the rules and fill them out properly. Still, it's the responsibility of the government to make sure those votes are counted and the voter's intent, if possible, can be understood. Otherwise, what's the point of going to vote except to give the leaders pretty pictures for the daily propaganda?

Gazpacho....mmmmm

Because tomatoes, onions and cukes are in season right now, I'll be shopping for gazpacho ingredients at the Farmers' Market in the morning. This cold soup, with a loaf of good bread and some cheese, makes a meal on those nights when it is too hot to cook. Like right now, for example. I can't imagine turning on the stove or oven right now. Gazpacho is refreshing.

I've been using this Gourmet magazine recipe for years. My "adjustments" are listed below.

3 1/2 cups (or more) tomato juice
8 plum tomatoes (about 18 ounces), seeded, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
1 English hothouse cucumber, cut into 1/4-inch pieces (about 7 ounces)
1 red bell pepper, cut into 1/4-inch pieces (about 1 cup)
1 medium onion, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 green onion, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons minced seeded jalapeño chili
2 garlic cloves, minced

Combine 1 cup tomato juice, half of tomatoes, half of cucumber, and half of bell pepper in blender. Puree until smooth. Pour into large bowl. Stir in remaining tomatoes, cucumber, and bell pepper; add onion, cilantro, parsley, lemon juice, green onion, jalapeño, and garlic. Transfer 1 cup mixture to blender. Add 2 1/2 cups tomato juice to blender and puree. Pour back into large bowl and stir to combine. Thin with additional tomato juice, if desired. Season with salt and pepper. Cover; chill 2 hours. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Keep chilled.)

Serve cold.

Makes 6 to 8 first-course servings.

Melanie says: it is too bland without a lot more garlic (double it) and a dash of Tabasco. I like this soup a little more crude, so I make it in a food processor on steel knife. In different parts of Spain, I've had it as smooth as V8 juice in some regions and nearly as raw as a salad in some others. What I'm looking for is a smooth background with some chunky vegetables in the foreground. This is better made a day ahead of serving, the flavors marry beautifully with a day in the fridge. I recommend a healthy teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, as well. The recipe works without the parsley but can't survive without the cilantro.

You can make this soup to completely different effect with yellow tomatoes, as I had it served once in northern Spain. They give the soup a sweeter background and you can play with some of the other vegetables against that background. Green bell peppers, better than red, for example, and a sweet red onion instead of green.

This is Getting Old

I don't do breaking stories very often, but this one struck an emotional chord with me. I'm so weary and teary of things blowing up in the ME. Sharm el-Sheik has been off limits to this kind of violence, a resort place that feuding parties could safely use for quietly trying to work out disagreements, as well as a high priced family resort. This is new behavior, and a signal of greater violence to come.

Egypt Blasts Kill at Least 25, Wound 110

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 22, 2005

Filed at 7:53 p.m. ET

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- As many as seven explosions struck the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula early Saturday, targeting several hotels and killing at least 25 people, witnesses and police said.

Saturday's explosions at 1:15 a.m., when many tourists would have been asleep, shook windows a mile away. Smoke and fire rose from Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city popular with Israeli and European tourists, witnesses said.

A police official in Sharm el-Sheik said at least 25 were killed and 110 wounded in multiple explosions targeting the Ghazala Gardens and Movenpick hotels in Naama Bay and the Old Market area nearby. Other officials in Sharm said there may have been as many as seven blasts: three in Naama Bay and four in the market.

Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian who was visiting with her family, said she drove by the Ghazala Garden -- a 176-room four-star resort on the main tourist strip in Naama -- and it was ''completely burned down, destroyed.''

Khaled Sakran, a resident, said he saw one explosion from the Old Market. ''I saw the saw the fire in the sky,'' he told The Associated Press. ''Right after, I saw a light in the sky and heard another explosion, coming from Naama Bay.''

''The blast shook my house, I can see the fire and lots of smoke,'' Akram al-Sherif, a Jordanian who was staying at a summer house less than a mile away, said.

I'm going to have to resort to some recipes over the weekend. I'm really bummed on all the bad news. I'll probably write about what I find at the Farmers' Market tomorrow. We need to find a way to maintain our spirits through all this bad news.

Critical Infrastructure

Fixer-Upper Nation

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, July 22, 2005; Page A23

This country is falling apart, and that's no figure of speech. We need an extreme makeover in concrete and steel, and we need it now.

This is a problem I can't blame on George W. Bush, for a change. Well, sure, I can blame him some, but he has to stand in line behind all the other presidents, members of Congress, governors, state legislators and mayors who have let the nation's plumbing rust, its wiring fray, its floor joists warp and its walkways crumble. If this were a house, the neighbors would have called the county inspectors long ago.

At first I thought it was just here, in the nation's capital and environs, where the infrastructure had deteriorated to what sometimes seems like Third World standards. In some cases, make that below Third World standards. In most of the developing countries I've visited, for example, they manage to keep the power on during a garden-variety thunderstorm. But here, in the most powerful city in the world -- a city of humid summers, where thunderstorms are to be expected all season long -- all it takes is a few flashes of lightning, and inevitably at least a few thousand households are left in the dark.

The highways around here are so clogged that there's no longer a predictable rush hour, just random times when the Beltway is at a standstill and other random times when the traffic is merely oppressive. You could take the subway, but whatever station you use, the escalator will probably be broken. Our engineers can design a cruise missile that will turn a 90-degree corner, knock on the target's door and say "Candygram!" to bluff its way inside, but we can't quite master the intricacies of the escalator.

You could just walk, but be advised that occasionally something beneath a heavily trafficked sidewalk will short out and explode, turning innocent manhole covers into Frisbees of Death.

Flying manhole covers aren't something that most Americans have to worry about, fortunately. But the general situation -- nothing seems to work very well anymore; everything seems to be breaking down -- ought to concern us all. The good people of New York, for example, should be inclined to pay attention after a 75-foot retaining wall collapsed a couple of months ago, burying part of a busy highway.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which occasionally issues a report card on the nation's infrastructure, our physical plant is in such need of repair that it rates no more than a D. Since the last full report card, in 2001, there has been modest improvement in the condition of our airports and our school buildings, the group said in March. Everything else has remained the same or gone downhill.

Robinson is spot-on. It doesn't even take a thunderstorm to take the power down here. In fact, if Bump is silent for more than a couple of hours, check the national weather radar. If there is rain in the mid-atlantic, my power might be down. As far as the Beltway is concerned, I try not to use it. If there is a way I can get to where I need to go by using surface street, I do. The Beltway is impossible at mid-day, forget the "rush hour," when it is a parking lot.

Video Games and Politics

So, if you haven't heard on the news, Hillary decided to work on her "liberal" image some this week and tackled a hard hitting problem that has all Americans on the edge of their seat: namely what is going on with the latest Grand Theft game?

You see, as this article from Cnet explains, the game already had a M rating for Mature, meaning no one below 17 was supposed to purchase it, before it was revealed that there is a "secret" scene with a naked woman where the character can appear to have sex with her. To access this scene, a person had to go out a get a modification to their consoles otherwise they would never know it was there.

So, Hillary swoops in and calls a press conference or two denouncing the game and starts to channel the spirit of Sen. "Holy Joe" Leiberman. Now, many stores are not going to sell the game or are insisting that it be relabelled as A for adult. Of course, like cigarettes, labels don't mean jack if the clerk is willing to sell it to you and what is the greatest way to make something cool to teenagers? Tell them it's not good for them and mean it!

Aside from that, I just want to know what responsibility do the parents have in all of this? It is their house where the game is being played, right? Presumably if the kids don't have a television or game console in their rooms, then the parents will know what the kids are doing (presuming the parents are even around) right? Where are all of those Libertarians and others who preach about the free market?

And more importantly, why was no one complaining about this ultra violent game before this sex scene was discovered? Maybe we are just used to the psycho ratings system that allows for gobs of violence, but not one iota of skin?

Open Thread

I've got a boatload of errands to run this afternoon. The guest posters will be around as they can.

What is everybody doing this weekend? I'm hitting the Farmers' Market tomorrow and looking forward to doing a little gardening this weekend. You?

Personality Cult

Jonathan Chait:
The (over)exercise of power

Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise. His full schedule is not publicly available. The few peeks we get at Bush's daily routine usually come when some sort of disaster prods the White House Press Office to reveal what the president was doing "at the time." Earlier this year, an airplane wandered into restricted Washington air space. Bush, we learned, was bicycling in Maryland. In 2001, a gunman fired shots at the White House. Bush was inside exercising. When planes struck the World Trade Center in 2001, Bush was reading to schoolchildren, but that morning he had gone for a long run with a reporter. Either this is a series of coincidences or Bush spends an enormous amount of time working out.

There's no denying that the results are impressive. Bush can bench press 185 pounds five times, and, before a recent knee injury, he ran three miles at a 6-minute, 45-second pace. That's better than I could manage when I played two sports in high school. And I wasn't holding the most powerful office on Earth. Which is sort of my point: Does the leader of the free world need to attain that level of physical achievement?

Bush not only thinks so, he thinks it goes for the rest of us as well. In 2002, he initiated a national fitness campaign. The four-day kickoff festivities included the president leading 400 White House staffers on a three-mile run. As then-Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said: "When it comes to exercise, there are many people who just need that extra little nudge to go out there and do a little bit more exercise."

Sometimes it takes more than a nudge. In 2002, Bush fired Lawrence Lindsey, his overweight economic advisor. Lindsey's main crime was admitting to Congress that the Iraq war might cost $200 billion, at a time when the administration was trying to cut taxes and was insisting that the war would cost nothing. But compounding things was the fact that, as the Washington Post reported, Bush "complained privately about [Lindsey's] failure to exercise."

My guess is that Bush associates exercise with discipline, and associates a lack of discipline with his younger, boozehound days. "The president," said Fleischer, "finds [exercise] very healthy in terms of … keeping in shape. But it's also good for the mind." The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood — or, perhaps, the president himself.) But Bush's apparent belief in it explains why he would demand well-conditioned economic advisors and Supreme Court justices.

Bush's insistence that the entire populace follow his example, and that his staff join him on a Long March — er, Long Run — carries about it the faint whiff of a cult of personality. It also shows how out of touch he is. It's nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does.

Lessee, mandatory workouts, mandatory Bible studies, mandatory prayer groups: this isn't an executive branch, it is a cult.

A Private President

Bush in town to discuss Social Security, Medicare

By TOM BAXTER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/22/05

Get set for midday traffic snarls in downtown and Midtown Atlanta Friday as President Bush comes for a visit focused on issues affecting seniors.

Bush will begin a "conversation on senior security" with an invited audience shortly before noon at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center.

No flight delays are expected at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport as a result of Bush flying in there. But drivers may find tie-ups as the motorcade moves between the airport and Civic Center. Bush is expected to leave Atlanta by 2 p.m.

The White House originally planned to have Bush visit a Fulton County senior center to talk about the new Medicare prescription drug program, but the president's visit was scaled back to one event.

Bush is expected to talk about both his Social Security proposals and prescription drugs.

I don't get it why the press isn't talking constantly about the fact that the guy who is supposed to be Preznit of all of us is having these private, invitation-only events. This has never happened before in the history of the republic and ought to be a piece of news. Donchathink?

Making It Up As They Go Along

US Report Offers No Word On When Troops May Leave Iraq

WASHINGTON (AP)--The U.S. Defense Department told Congress Thursday that Iraqi insurgents are failing to derail the move toward democracy, but remain "capable, adaptable and intent" on carrying out attacks aided by a continuing inflow of foreign terrorists.

The Pentagon report offered no estimate of when tU.S. troops could be withdrawn. There are about 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

But the Defense Department report did not say when Iraqi security forces will be sufficiently trained to defend the country without direct assistance from U.S. troops.

The 23-page report - the most comprehensive public assessment yet by the military of progress in Iraq - was more than a week overdue. In it, the Pentagon cites progress on political, economic and security fronts.

U.S. officers have developed a method of calculating the combat readiness of the 76,700 Iraqi Army troops, but the Pentagon said it "should not and must not" publicly disclose specific data.

"The enemy's knowledge of such details would put both Iraqi and coalition forces at increased risk," the report said.

That information, along with details on various possible changes in the level of U.S. forces in Iraq next year, were included in an annex, classified as secret, along with the unclassified report delivered to Congress.

Democratic critics of President George W. Bush's policy on Iraq lashed out at the Pentagon for refusing to release a detailed assessment of the readiness of Iraqi forces.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he fears "the American people are going to be left out" of discussions about when the U.S. can bring troops home and turn the country over to Iraqi security forces.

Last week, Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee that said about half of Iraq's new police battalions are still being established and cannot yet conduct operations. He provided the statement in response to a question posed by Levin.

It was not clear how that squared with an assertion in Thursday's report to Congress that "more than half of provincial police headquarters currently are assessed to have control in their province."

Fairytales. The NYT told us yesterday:

About half of Iraq's new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only "partially capable" of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.

Joint Chiefs Chair Peter Pace is just pulling this stuff out of his ass.

Plamegate

For Two Aides in Leak Case, 2nd Issue Rises

By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: July 22, 2005

This article was reported by David Johnston, Douglas Jehl and Richard W. Stevenson and was written by Mr. Johnston.

WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa.

The two issues had become inextricably linked because Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the unmasked C.I.A. officer, had questioned Mr. Bush's assertion, prompting a damage-control effort by the White House that included challenging Mr. Wilson's standing and his credentials. A federal grand jury investigation is under way by a special counsel to determine whether someone illegally leaked the officer's identity and possibly into whether perjury or obstruction of justice occurred during the inquiry.

People who have been briefed on the case said the White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby, were helping prepare what became the administration's primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address six months earlier.

They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president's political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.

At the same time, they were grappling with the fallout from an Op-Ed article on July 6, 2003, in The New York Times by Mr. Wilson, a former diplomat, in which he criticized the way the administration had used intelligence to support the claim in Mr. Bush's speech.

The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement during this intense period has not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed this critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president's address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.

The special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has been examining this period of time to determine whether the officials' work on the Tenet statement led in some way to the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, according to the people who have been briefed.

It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected about Ms. Wilson as they worked on the Tenet statement. Mr. Rove has said he learned her name from Mr. Novak. Mr. Libby has declined to discuss the matter.

The effort was striking because to an unusual degree, the circle of officials involved included those from the White House's political and national security operations, which are often separately run. Both arms were drawn into the effort to defend the administration during the period.

In another indication of how wide a net investigators have cast in the case, Karen Hughes, a former top communications aide to Mr. Bush, and Robert Joseph, who was then the National Security Council's expert on weapons proliferation, have both told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they were interviewed by the special prosecutor.

It only gets better.

The Hearings

Five questions for John Roberts, suggested by Stuart Taylor of The National Journal:

# Past nominees, including Robert Bork, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, have disclosed their views of Roe in their confirmation testimony (and in some cases beforehand). Were they guilty of prejudging cases? What makes you different?

# President Bush has long suggested that his model justices are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Both have assailed Roe as an indefensible decision and voted to overrule it. The president presumably chose you because he has good reason to believe that your views resemble the stated views of Scalia and Thomas on this, the most controversial of issues. So we can logically assume that you agree with Scalia and Thomas on Roe, can we not?

# Would you not agree that the Senate is entitled know everything about your views that the president knows?

# So please tell us everything that you said to the president or any member of his administration, and that any of them said to you, touching on abortion or Roe v. Wade.

# In addition, because the White House has ties to many of your friends and acquaintances outside the administration, please tell us everything that you can recall ever having said, to any other person outside your family, touching on abortion or Roe v. Wade.

Polluted Airwaves

Venezuela Condemns U.S. Push to Broadcast

Friday July 22, 2005
By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuelan leaders have condemned a U.S. decision to transmit broadcasts to this South American country to ensure its citizens receive ``accurate news.''

The U.S. House approved a measure this week authorizing the government ``to initiate radio and television broadcasts that will provide a consistently accurate, objective, and comprehensive source of news to Venezuela.'' It must still be approved by the Senate.

President Hugo Chavez, frequent critic of Washington, has vowed to jam the signals.

National Assembly President Nicolas Maduro, a close ally of Chavez, said Thursday that any such broadcasts ``would violate the sovereignty our airwaves ... and we cannot permit that.''

Look, I'm not going to sit here and defend everything that Chavez has done as the leader of Venezuela. That much being said, the thought that this administration is going to provide "a consistently accurate, objective, and comprehensive source of news to Venezuela." strikes me as a scene from a Harold Pinter play.

In fact, I think this quote from him sums up the cynical view of the press held by the Bushies:

"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

Besides, who's going to teach Brit Hume enough Spanish to do the broadcasting?

Send in the Clowns

Sudan apologises after scuffles mar Rice visit

Ewen MacAskill
Friday July 22, 2005

The Sudanese government was forced to apologise to the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, yesterday after a series of scuffles between her entourage and Sudanese security.

Officials and reporters travelling with Ms Rice to Khartoum were initially prevented from entering the compound of the president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. After they were allowed in there were further bouts of shouting and shoving, with one reporter being manhandled after shouting a question about alleged atrocities.

Ms Rice, who then left the capital for a trip to the stricken province of Darfur, demanded and received an apology. She said: "It makes me very angry to be sitting there with their president and have this happen. They have no right to push and shove."

The state department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, had phoned Ms Rice while she was on her way to Darfur to apologise.

At the Abu Shouk camp for the internally displaced, near El Fesher in northern Darfur, Ms Rice was in no mood for conciliatory gestures. She said the Sudanese government, which has repeatedly promised to end the violence in the region but failed to do so, would be judged on its actions. "I said to the Sudanese government that they had a credibility problem with the international community," she said.

Well. that was a public relations nightmare for both sides. Everyone came across as the petty thugs they are. No wonder that the US is talking about normalizing relations with Sudan even though the genocide has, for now, lessened and little if anything is being done to help the refugees.

Whose bright idea was it to make Rice our head diplomat again?

Gearing Up for the Fight

Democrats want internal memos on hot-button issues

By Jan Crawford Greenburg, Washington Bureau. Tribune national correspondent Mark Silva in Washington and staff reporter Susan Kuczka in Chicago contributed to this report
Published July 21, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Confronted with a Supreme Court nominee they believe to be deeply conservative--but with little evidence to prove it--Senate Democrats have begun laying the groundwork for a battle with the Bush administration over access to documents and memos that John Roberts Jr. wrote while working in two Republican administrations.

Roberts' professional career as an appellate lawyer and his two-year tenure as a federal judge give Democrats little ammunition for a fight against him. The Senate unanimously confirmed Roberts to a post on the D.C.-based federal appeals court two years ago, and he has yet to confront a hot-button issue on the bench.

While acknowledging his reputation as a first-rate legal thinker, some Democratic senators have indicated they will seek some of the confidential internal documents and memorandums Roberts wrote as a government lawyer, working for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Those documents, they suggest, could give them vital insight into Roberts' views on abortion and other issues.

That sets up a potentially fiery debate, not initially on Roberts' positions, which remain obscure, but on Congress' right to have access to the confidential papers as it decides whether to grant Roberts an appointment to the Supreme Court.

"The Senate's role will be to establish clearly whose side John Roberts would be on if confirmed to the most powerful court in the land," said Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Because Judge Roberts has written relatively few opinions in his brief tenure as a judge, his views on a wide variety of vital issues are still unknown."

Where a fight will focus

The fight is likely to center on Roberts' tenure in the Office of the Solicitor General at the Justice Department, which represents the administration before the Supreme Court.

Abortion will be at the center of that debate, because Roberts was one of nine administration lawyers who signed court papers in a 1991 case that said Roe vs. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973 and should be reconsidered.

A senior Bush administration official told reporters Wednesday that Roberts, who was deputy to then-Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, was simply representing the position of the Bush administration and not revealing his own views on the issue.

But abortion-rights groups already have seized on that brief as ammunition for their charge that, if confirmed for the Supreme Court, he would vote to overturn Roe, which said a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion.

"Everything we know about Judge Roberts' record indicates that he will be a solid vote against women's rights and Roe vs. Wade," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. "If he is to be confirmed by senators who support women's rights, he must say where he stands on Roe and the right to privacy. The burden is on him."

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Wednesday that he believes Roberts would overturn Roe "if his past is any indication of what he'll do once he gets on the Supreme Court."

"He's a pick I would not have made," Blagojevich said. "If I were a senator, based on political philosophy, I would oppose his confirmation."

In 2003, Democrats elected not to fight the White House over Roberts' nomination to the federal appeals court by demanding the administration release his memos before it would confirm him. But they did wage that battle over Miguel Estrada, another Bush nominee to the D.C.-based federal appeals court who also had worked in the solicitor general's office before going into private practice.

Estrada and Roberts were similarly situated. Both were nominated in 2001 by President Bush to the same appeals court, and both were highly regarded Harvard-educated lawyers who had made frequent appearances before the Supreme Court. Neither had taken clear public positions on legal issues in their writings, and Democrats criticized both during their confirmation hearings as being "evasive" and for not clearly articulating their views.

But Senate Democrats filibustered only Estrada after the White House refused to turn over his internal briefs and memos. Backed by every living former solicitor general--four Democrats and three Republicans--the White House said it could not release the documents because that would compromise the ability of the Justice Department to represent the United States in court.

All of the rest of the news I've read today was that the Dems were going to roll over on this confirmation. Jan Greenberg is one of the canniest Washington reporters I know, she really knows how to smell politics in a way that the LATimes Ron Brownstein does not, and she's a judicial reporter. I also know from listening to my spies that the liberal advocacy organizations got into high gear immediately after the nomination event Tuesday night. I know that I was up and blogging with some of them until midnite that night (they were still in the office that night. I imagine that all of us are going to have a scary August.) Maybe we are going to have a fight after all and the DNC has been persuaded by the advocacy groups. Somebody should tell David Boies. He's on Lou Dobbs right now making nice about Roberts.

Nominationwatch is wondering about all of the endorsements by the far right wing. I wonder, too. He's not a moderate.

It's Lurking

Avian flu major threat, VU researcher says
Doctor awarded $2.5 million grant to study vaccines

By CLAUDIA PINTO
Staff Writer

A Vanderbilt doctor warns that the avian flu could make the 1918 flu pandemic that killed more than 50 million people "look like a tea party."

There have been 54 deaths from the 107 cases of avian flu in 11 Southeast Asian countries since 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

"The mortality rates are 60%," said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, the vice chairman of clinical research at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. "Getting a vaccine developed is critical."

And research that Edwards is about to start may help with that. Thanks to a $2.5 million annual grant from the National Institutes of Health, she's able to study several vaccines, including one for avian flu.
....
Edwards, whose vaccine studies have been NIH-funded for about 20 years, said without the money her research wouldn't be possible. She will begin studying the avian flu vaccine in the next month or two.

Worldwide, countries that have experienced outbreaks of the avian flu, such as China, Japan and South Korea, have had to kill hundreds of millions of chickens and other poultry to try and halt the illness.

The virus occurs naturally in birds. Most people have become sick after touching infected poultry or their excretions.

"It can be transmitted person to person, but it's not easily transmitted that way," Edwards said.

The avian flu vaccine was tested in hundreds of healthy people ages 18 to 45 in other NIH-funded studies. Edwards said those studies showed the vaccine is safe; none of the participants had serious side effects.

Her study will focus on fine-tuning vaccine dosage to find out what amount produces the best outcome in people 65 and older.

"We will look at antibody responses to see which doses are most effective," Edwards said. Antibodies are proteins that help the body destroy invading microorganisms.

I suppose this needs to be studied, but the greatest risk is to healthy young adults, 20-40. Pandemic flu kills by creating "cytokine storms," a cascade of powerful immune system chemicals which go haywire and don't turn off in time. An excess of cytokines turns the body against itself and shreds internal organs. In lay terms, a little bit of cytokine response helps us fight off infection, but too much kills. Revere and the visiting editors have put up a very nice explanation at The Flu Wiki. Go take a look.

Irony Abounds

The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran
Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Juan Cole

Although officials in Washington felt constrained to issue polite assurances that they want good relations between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and hawks in the Bush administration all have a grudge against Iran, and would as soon overthrow the mullahs as spit at them. But thanks to the Iraq debacle, that is no longer a viable option. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack revealed the true amount of influence Washington has in Baghdad when he admitted that the Bush administration has not "had a chance" to discuss Jaafari's trip to Iran with the prime minister.

The Iranians hold a powerful hand in the Iraqi poker game. They have geopolitical advantages, are flush with petroleum profits because of the high price of oil, and have much to offer their new Shiite Iraqi partners. Their long alliance with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani gives them Kurdish support as well. Bush's invasion removed the most powerful and dangerous regional enemy of Iran, Saddam Hussein, from power. In its aftermath, the religious Shiites came to power at the ballot box in Iraq, bestowing on Tehran firm allies in Baghdad for the first time since the 1950s. And in a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime -- but succeeded only in defeating itself.

The ongoing chaos in Iraq has made it impossible for Bush administration hawks to carry out their long-held dream of overthrowing the Iranian regime, or even of forcing it to end its nuclear ambitions. (The Iranian nuclear research program will almost certainly continue, since the Iranians are bright enough to see what happened to the one member of the "axis of evil" that did not have an active nuclear weapons program.) The United States lacks the troops, but perhaps even more critically, it is now dependent on Iran to help it deal with a vicious guerrilla war that it cannot win. In the Middle East, the twists and turns of history tend to make strange bedfellows -- something the neocons, whose breathtaking ignorance of the region helped bring us to this place, are now learning to their dismay.

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

Mutually Assured Inspection

From the WashPo's Supreme Court blog:

Bi-partisan "Gang of 14" met today and see little trouble for Roberts.

Here's a Reuters account:

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators who could play a pivotal role in any battle over the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court said on Thursday they saw no reason at this point to block him.

Democrats and Republicans stressed, however, that no final decision would be made until after Roberts is scrutinized at pending Senate confirmation hearings.

"So far, so good," Sen. Mark Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat, said in expressing the sentiment of many of the lawmakers in the group.

"I think no one has seen 'extraordinary circumstances,"' Sen. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican said after a closed-door meeting of the group.

"There's no indication that there will be a filibuster, and I think that was the consensus of the meeting, but I think people are reserving the right to see what comes out of the hearings," DeWine added.

Unless some sort of smoking gun turns up between now and the hearings, he'll be confirmed at a walk. It looks to me like he's been running for the Court his entire adult life and has been very careful about what is available in the public sphere.

Stretching Exercise

This is from this morning's Salon, so you'll have to sit through an ad, but it is worth it:

How Bush picked his justice

If you've got an overwhelming desire to feel uncomfortable about your president this morning, there would be worse ways to scratch that itch than by reading Elisabeth Bumiller's piece in today's New York Times on the process that led George W. Bush to pick John Roberts as his first Supreme Court nominee.

We're not sure what we'd want a president to discuss with somebody he's thinking about putting on the highest court in the land, but it's a safe bet that the potential jurist's exercise habits wouldn't be on our top 10 list of questions. And yet, there's the president of the United States, asking federal appellate judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III about how often he works out. "Well, I told him I ran three and a half miles a day," Judge Wilkinson told Bumiller Wednesday. "And I said my doctor recommends a lot of cross-training, but I said I didn't want to do the elliptical and the bike and the treadmill." Bumiller quotes Wilkinson as saying that Bush "took umbrage at that," and that the president told him -- one of five nominees Bush is said to have interviewed for the job -- that he should do the cross-training his doctor suggested.

OK, so it was a moment of idle chatter, right? Well, no, Bumiller writes. "Judge Wilkinson's conversation with the president about exercise and other personal matters in an interview for a job on the highest court in the land was typical of how Mr. Bush went about picking his eventual nominee, Judge John G. Roberts, White House officials and Republicans said."
....
Could it be that Bush had other concerns in mind when he interviewed Roberts, Wilkerson and other potential nominees? You might get that feeling as you get to the end of Bumiller's report. As Bush was calling a few senators with word of his choice Tuesday night, Karl Rove was on the phone with some of the president's key constituents: C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel and current Fox News contributor; Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society and the head of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party; Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, an evangelical group; and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III of the Heritage Foundation.

I have to wonder if Robert's got picked for his aerobic training as much as for his partisan work.

That Other War

Salon is a really streaky piece of work. It can be trash for days, and then there will be a day when nearly every feature is a keeper. Today is one of those, but, of course, it is Blumenthal Thursday:

"I was horrified by the president's last speech on the war on terror [on June 28] -- so much unsaid, so much disingenuous, so many half-truths," James Dobbins told me. Dobbins was Bush's first envoy to Afghanistan and is now director of international programs at the Rand Corp., a defense think tank. Afghanistan is now the scene of a Taliban revival, chronic Pashtun violence, dominance by U.S.-supported warlords (who have become narco-lords, exploiting the exploding traffic in opium poppies), and a human rights black hole. "Afghanistan is going better than Iraq," Dobbins said. "That's not much of a standard."

From the start, he said, the effort in Afghanistan was "grossly underfunded and undermanned." The military doctrine was the first error. "The U.S. focus on force protection and substitution of firepower for manpower creates significant collateral damage." But the faith in firepower sustained the illusion that the mission could be "quicker, cheaper, easier." And that justification fit with Afghanistan's being relegated to a sideshow to Iraq.

At the same time, according to Dobbins, there was "a generally negative appreciation of peacekeeping and nation building as components of U.S. policy, a disinclination to learn anything from the previous [administration's experience] in Bosnia and Kosovo."

What's more, lack of accountability began at the top and filtered down. On the day of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's inauguration in December 2001, Dobbins met Gen. Tommy Franks, the CentCom commander, at the reopened Afghan airport. As they drove to the ceremony, Dobbins informed Franks of press reports that U.S. planes had mistakenly bombed a delegation of Afghan tribal leaders traveling to Kabul for the inauguration and killed perhaps several dozen people. "It was the first time he heard about it. When he got out of the car, reporters asked him about it. He denied it happened. And he denied it happened for several days. It was classic 'deny first, investigate later.' It turned out to be true. It was a normal reflex."

Democracy was at best an afterthought for the Bush administration, which believed that it had little application to Afghans. At the conference in Bonn, Germany, establishing international legitimacy for the new Afghan government, "the word 'democracy,'" Dobbins points out, "was introduced at the insistence of the Iranian delegation."

Democracy, now the overriding rationale for the global war on terror, does not, however, include support for human rights, at least in Afghanistan. "In terms of the human rights situation," said Dobbins, "Karzai is well meaning and moderate and thoroughly honorable. But he's overwhelmed, he's not a great manager, he has few instruments of power."

Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and the White House removed restraints on torture -- in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. "These were command failures, not just isolated incidents, in that we dismantled systems designed to protect us from these kinds of events. You didn't have the checks and balances. They've had consequences in terms of public image," Dobbins said.

In April, the United States succeeded, after refusing to cooperate for two years with the United Nations rapporteur on human rights for Afghanistan, in abolishing the office altogether. The U.N. representative, Cherif Bassiouini, a distinguished expert on international law who has helped train hundreds of judges in Afghanistan, told me, "Karzai was in favor of keeping the mandate. But the U.S. was quite adamant. The U.S. came to the conclusion they needed to kill the messenger with hope the message would die. The tactics are contrary to any valid strategy. If the strategy is to stabilize Afghanistan, have a democratic regime, cut narco-trafficking and terrorism, what is being done is precisely the opposite."

Dobbins believes that the operation in Afghanistan has improved, but that the U.S. administration "hasn't readily acknowledged its mistakes and has corrected them only after losing a good deal of ground, irrecoverable ground." For all the problems there, "most of the violence is not al-Qaida type, but Pashtun sectarian violence. It's not international terrorism."

Sometimes I wish Sid would rely a little less on his impressive contacts and actually do a little research. He should have taken a look at George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War" to get a handle on the Soviet's failed occupation of Afghanistan. We're trying to do with fewer than 20k troops what the Soviets couldn't do with 10 times that number. Afghanistan is "going better" than Iraq only to the extant that we are taking fewer casualties. In every other regard it is a failure which is different from Iraq only in magnitude.

Distractions

Via Susie:

Supreme Court Pick Shifts Attention From Rove, Agent Disclosure

By Kristin Jensen and Richard Keil

July 20 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's nomination of a new Supreme Court justice may give White House adviser Karl Rove a temporary reprieve from public scrutiny of his role in the disclosure of an intelligence operative's identity.

About six in 10 Americans who are paying close attention to reports about who leaked information that helped unmask a covert intelligence agent say Rove should resign, according to a poll conducted last week by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The Supreme Court announcement may freeze things, ``and that's probably a good thing for the White House,'' said Carroll Doherty, an editor at the Washington-based Pew Center.

Bush accelerated his search for a Supreme Court nominee in part because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name, according to Republicans familiar with administration strategy.

Bush originally had planned to announce a replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on July 26 or 27, just before his planned July 28 departure for a month-long vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, said two administration officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named.

The officials said those plans changed because Rove has become a focus of Fitzgerald's interest and of news accounts about the matter.

Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said the only reason Bush announced his selection of appeals court Judge John G. Roberts Jr. last night was to allow the nominee to pay courtesy calls on members of the Senate before Congress begins its scheduled summer recess on July 29.

Just in case you had questions.

Despamming the News

Iraqis Not Ready to Fight Rebels on Own, U.S. Says

By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: July 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 20 - About half of Iraq's new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only "partially capable" of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.

Only "a small number" of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without American assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of "planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations" with allied support, the analysis said.

The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis' readiness levels that the military has provided. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said the 160,000 American-led allied troops cannot begin to withdraw until Iraqi troops are ready to take over security.

The assessment is described in a brief written response that Gen. Peter Pace, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was provided to The Times by a Senate staff aide. At General Pace's confirmation hearing on June 29, Republicans and Democrats directed him to provide an unclassified accounting of the Iraqis' abilities to allow a fuller public debate. The military had already provided classified assessments to lawmakers.

"We need to know, the American people need to know the status of readiness of the Iraqi military, which is improving, so that we can not only understand but appreciate better the roles and missions that they are capable of carrying out," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said at the hearing.

General Pace's statement comes as the Pentagon prepares to deliver to Congress as early as Thursday a comprehensive report that establishes performance standards and goals on a variety of political and economic matters, as well as the training of Iraqi security forces, and a timetable for achieving those aims. The report was due on July 11, but the Pentagon missed the deadline.

The Defense Department is required to update the assessment every 90 days. From a single American-trained Iraqi battalion a year ago, the Pentagon says there are now more than 100 battalions of Iraqi troops and paramilitary police units, total