Around the World

This recipe is really 180 degrees around the world from the one below. But this whole recipe experience is about my sharing my favorite foods with you and, as you can see, I'm a "promiscuous eater." I'm also hugely curious about new foods and cuisines and am trying new things all the time (had a new Thai dish at lunch I'd never tried before today, it was delicious and I'll see if I can't cobble together a recipe for you during the week.) I just ran into a recipe for Jerusalem artichokes baked with herbs which I'm dying to try with lamb chops. I have never eaten a Jerusalem artichoke before and didn't know how to cook them.

This recipe is for a classic treatment of Chicken Kiev, decidedly not a diet food. In my second year of graduate school at New England Conservatory many moons ago, I had a roommate who was as interested in food as I was. She was much more experienced with more kinds of foods than I was; her family was Ukrainian and many of them lived in the Ukraine and Europe and she had traveled a lot. I had never heard of Chicken Kiev, much less eaten it, until I met her. I remember the first time she made it for me. I was thunderstruck that such simple ingredients could make such a spectacular dish. It was her mother's recipe, which is very close to the one I reproduce here. While that year wasn't one of the great roommate experiences of my life (current total=0) she taught me to try everything and we explored some of the outer reaches of cuisine that Boston offered in the late '70's. Boston was and is a great restaurant town, and though we were pretty poor, there were still terrific great ethnic restaurants to try, and a Chinatown and North End to wander. Our apartment was in Brookline, then heavily Jewish, and some of the finest really kosher delis were a couple of blocks away at Cleveland Corner. We didn't eat out much, couldn't afford it, but we always went for maximum bang for the buck. It was during grad school (round 1) that I really started to learn ethnic cooking, and if I was too tired to cook, there was the little Japanese hole in the wall around the corner that served soup, salad and a couple of tempura fried veggies with rice for $1.99. Boy, are those days long gone!

So here is my Chicken Kiev recipe for the adventurous eater. I like to serve this with steamed fresh asparagus with a lemon and tarragon vinaigrette and plain long grained white rice to soak up the herb butter. Serve a buttery Chardonnay with this and keep dessert simple. This is a company meal your guests will be talking about for a long time.

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus extra for seasoning chicken
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus extra for seasoning chicken
4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
1 cup seasoned flour
2 large whole eggs, beaten with 1 teaspoon water
2 cups Japanese bread crumbs (panko), plus 1/4 cup for filling
Vegetable oil, for frying (I like canola for this)

Combine butter, parsley, tarragon, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper in the bowl of a stand mixer. Place mixture on plastic wrap or waxed paper and roll into small log; place in freezer.

Place chicken breasts, 1 at a time, between 2 pieces of plastic wrap. Squirt chicken lightly with water and squirt the top of the plastic wrap as well. Pound to no less than 1/8-inch thickness. Season each piece of chicken with salt and pepper.

Lay 1 chicken breast on a new piece of plastic wrap and place 1/4 of the compound butter and 1 tablespoon bread crumbs in the center of each breast. Using the plastic wrap to assist, fold in ends of breast and roll breast into a log, completely enclosing the butter; roll very tightly. Repeat with each breast. Place chicken in refrigerator for 2 hours, or up to overnight.

Place egg and water mixture in 1 pie pan, 1 cup of seasoned flour and 2 cups bread crumbs in a different pie pan.

Dredge each breast in flour then dip each breast in the egg mixture and then roll in the bread crumbs. Let them rest and the coating dry on a cooling rack over a cookie sheet for 10 minutes.Heat 1/2-inch of vegetable oil in a 12-inch saute pan over medium-high heat until oil reaches 375 degrees F.

Gently place each breast in oil, sealed-side down, and cook until golden brown, approximately 4 to 5 minutes on each side, until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F. Remove to a cooling rack set in sheet pan and allow to drain for 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

Because you can start this a day ahead, this is a good dish for entertaining. The night of your dinner, all you have to do is finish the frying, after starting the rice. The asparagus are waiting and I steam my veggies in the mike. The vegetables finish faster and hold their "crisp" better. Just rinse the asparagus and nuke it in a covered cassarole dish. Barbara Kafka's Microwave Gourmet is a reference book you shouldn't be without. It taught me how to maximize my use of microwave cooking techniques, and now I nearly always use it for veggies and fish in preference to any other cooking technique.

Saigon Street Food

I love the Vietnamese beef noodle soup known as pho but I've never made it before. Today I just found this new recipe at www.epcurious.com, one of my favorite food websites, with the resources of Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines. I'm definitely going to make a big batch of this and freeze it down in single serving containers this weekend. No two bowls of pho are ever the same: you finish off the basic broth, steak and noodles with whichever condiments, herbs or vegetables you have around. I like a squeeze of lime, cilantro, thai basil and Vietnamese chile sauce with mung bean sprouts and chopped scallions in mine. This recipe looks just like the way I've watched dozens of pho cooks make this soup in any of the many little pho shops around me (the area near me is called Little Saigon.)

2 large onions, halved lengthwise
1 (3-inch) piece fresh ginger, left unpeeled
4 lb meaty cross-cut beef shanks (sometimes called beef shins; 1 1/2 inches thick)
7 qt cold water
2 teaspoons star anise pieces
1 (3-inch) cinnamon stick
3 whole cloves
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1 (1/2-lb) piece boneless beef sirloin steak or tenderloin
1 lb dried flat thin or medium rice noodles (banh pho or pad Thai)
1/2 cup Asian fish sauce (preferably Vietnamese nuoc mam), or to taste
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Special equipment: cheesecloth; kitchen string
Accompaniments: fresh bean sprouts; very thinly sliced onion (rinsed and drained); fresh cilantro, mint, and basil (preferably Thai) leaves; thinly sliced scallions; lime wedges; thinly sliced fresh Thai or serrano chiles; Asian fish sauce (preferably nuoc mam)

Make broth:
Roast onions and ginger directly on rack of a gas burner over high heat, turning with tongs, until blistered and blackened, 10 to 15 minutes. (Alternatively, broil onions and ginger on foil-lined rack of a broiler pan about 5 inches from heat, turning occasionally, until charred, 20 to 25 minutes for onions; 25 to 30 minutes for ginger.) Transfer to a bowl and cool. When cool enough to handle, rinse and rub under cold running water to remove any blackened pieces (some areas will remain browned).

While onions and ginger roast, cover shanks with 2 quarts cold water in a 6- to 8-quart pot. Bring to a boil, then drain in a large colander (discard cooking water) and rinse well with cold water. Clean pot.

Wrap star anise, cinnamon stick, cloves, and peppercorns in cheesecloth and tie into a bundle with kitchen string to make a spice bag, then add to cleaned pot along with 4 quarts water, shanks, onions, and ginger. Simmer, uncovered, skimming froth occasionally, 2 hours. Add remaining quart water and return to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, skimming froth occasionally, until shanks are very tender, about 1 hour more.

Prepare sirloin and noodles for soup while broth simmers:
Freeze steak until firm but not frozen solid, 30 to 45 minutes, then slice across the grain with a sharp thin knife into less than 1/8-inch-thick slices.

Soak rice noodles in cold water to cover until softened, about 30 minutes, then drain in cleaned large colander. Cook noodles in a 6-quart pot of boiling water, uncovered, stirring, 1 minute, then drain.

Finish soup:
Transfer shanks with tongs to a cutting board. Clean pot. When shanks are cool enough to handle, remove meat from bones and cut into small pieces, discarding bones, fat, and sinew. Set aside 2 cups beef (reserve remainder for another use).

Pour broth through a fine-mesh sieve into a large heatproof bowl, discarding solids. Measure broth: If there is more than 3 quarts (12 cups), boil in cleaned pot until reduced; if there is less, add water. Let stand until fat rises to top, 1 to 2 minutes, then skim off fat if desired.

Combine broth and beef (2 cups) in cleaned 6- to 8-quart pot and bring to a boil, then add fish sauce and salt and return to a boil just before serving.

Divide noodles among 6 large deep bowls. Top noodles with uncooked sliced steak and ladle boiling-hot broth (with pieces of beef shanks) over steak and noodles. (Hot broth will cook steak.)

Serve soup with accompaniments.

Cooks' notes:
• Broth can be made (and strained) 3 days ahead and cooled completely, uncovered, then chilled with 2 cups beef, covered. Bring to a boil just before serving.
• In place of the sliced sirloin steak or tenderloin, you can use beef shabu-shabu (paper-thin slices of meat available at Asian markets) or thinly sliced rare roast beef (from deli counter), torn into pieces.

Makes 6 main-course servings.

Down, Down, Down

President facing ‘gray and gloomy’ electorate
NBC/WSJ poll: Small slice of good news for Bush on domestic wiretap issue

By Mark Murray
Political reporter
NBC News
Updated: 7:53 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - Heading into Tuesday's State of the Union address and the beginning of the 2006 political season, President Bush faces an electorate that continues to be dissatisfied with his job performance, increasingly wants U.S. soldiers to come home from Iraq, and believes the Republican Party is associated more with special interests and lobbyists, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The overall political climate for Bush is “gray and gloomy,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. “In general, people are just not in a happy mood.”

The poll, however, contains a slice of good news for the Bush administration: A small majority approves of the administration’s controversial use of domestic wiretaps without a court order to track calls between terrorist suspects and U.S. residents. But a majority also believes that these wiretaps could be misused.

The survey, which was conducted from Jan. 26-29 of 1,011 adults and which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, shows Bush’s approval rating at 39 percent, which is unchanged from last month’s NBC/Journal poll. (Other recent national surveys have shown his approval rating to be slightly higher, in the low 40s.) In addition, only 25 percent say they want to see Bush take the lead role in setting policy for the country, while 49 percent say they prefer Congress.

“He’s off track,” says Hart, who wonders if Bush will use his State of the Union address to strike a more conciliatory tone with his political opponents. “If it is ‘our way or the highway,’ it will be a very long year for the president.”

W would need a temperament transplant to achieve this. The bad news: a long year for W means a very long year for the rest of us.

SOTU Crystal Ball

WaPo's Dan Froomkin on yesterday's gaggle:

Elevating the Tone

Here's another theme you can expect tonight, again telegraphed by Bush after his Cabinet meeting yesterday:

"One of the things I will do is call for Congress and the executive branch to have a good, honest dialogue, but to speak candidly with each other, but to do so in a way that brings credit to the process. And I'll do my best to elevate the tone here in Washington, D.C. so we can work together to achieve big things for the American people."

But just how exactly will he do that?

That very question came up at the press briefing. And it turns out that when Bush talks about trying to elevate the tone, he doesn't mean his own.

"Q Let me ask you a question about elevating the tone, because, obviously, a lot of Americans are familiar with this talk from the President, even though it didn't really come to pass after he was elected in 2000. . . . So could you be a little bit more specific about what he thinks he can do to elevate the tone?

"MR. McCLELLAN: Just exactly what he's been doing throughout his administration. This President has always worked, whether it was when he was governor of Texas or since he's been President of the United States, has always worked to reach out and elevate the discourse. If you look at his tone, this President has focused on how we can work together to get things done, and focused on what the American people expect us to do. And that's what -- and that's what he will continue to do. . . .

"Q You said the President is going to continue doing what he's doing in terms of elevating the tone in Washington. So to whom, exactly, is he referring?

"MR. McCLELLAN: To elevating the tone?

"Q Yes.

"MR. McCLELLAN: All of us. Both parties, to work together to get things done for the American people.

"Q So everybody is kicking in the gutter, except him? (Laughter.)

"MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's not what he said. That's what you said. . . . The President has reached out. It requires others to reach back."

No, I won't by liveblogging the SOTU tonight, because I could probably sit down and write it out for you word for word right now. ThinkProgress will be live blogging, webcasting and basically be your go to site for the speech, and that's where I'll be.

The More Things Change...

Via Suze:

The Fear That Kills

By Marjorie Cohn, TruthOut.org. Posted January 31, 2006.

Appalling new evidence reveals that female soldiers serving in Iraq made fatal decisions in their attempts to avoid rape.

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq. .... Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

"And rather than make everybody aware of that -- because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader -- what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."

For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.

Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

"It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

"There were countless such situations all over the theater of operations -- Iraq and Kuwait -- because female soldiers didn't have a voice, individually or collectively," Karpinski told Hackworth. "Even as a general I didn't have a voice with Sanchez, so I know what the soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier requirements and/or issues."

Karpinski was the highest officer reprimanded for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, although the details of interrogations were carefully hidden from her. Demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, Karpinski feels she was chosen as a scapegoat because she was a female.

Sexual assault in the US military has become a hot topic in the last few years, "not just because of the high number of rapes and other assaults, but also because of the tendency to cover up assaults and to harass or retaliate against women who report assaults," according to Kathy Gilberd, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild's Military Law Task Force.

This problem has become so acute that the Army has set up its own sexual assault web site.

PTSD

Via Juan Cole:

Mental disorders affect third of Iraq vets

Date: Friday, January 27, 2006 9:26:15 PM EST By OLGA PIERCE, UPI Health Business Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- About 40,000 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been found to show symptoms of mental health disorders, a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) representative said Friday.

In fact, a mental condition known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) --first recognized during the Vietnam era -- is being diagnosed frequently among troops returning from the Middle East, and the VA has had to adjust its treatments and infrastructure to accommodate this, as well as the changing face of the American soldier.

Although the fraction of soldiers diagnosed, about one-third, is higher than in the past, the VA has "no real way to know - in a true epidemiological sense - whether the rate is higher than past conflicts," Antoinette Zeiss of the VA office of mental health services, said at the National Press Club.

The higher fraction could, in part, be due to increased screening, she said.

As troops return home, they face the challenge of restarting their lives. Though most of the approximately 400,000 servicemen and women never seek help from the VA, those who do often must cope with the lingering effects of debilitating mental and physical injuries that differ from those in previous wars. Fortunately, new approaches to treatment are available as well.
....
Another more-frequent phenomenon is known as poly-trauma, when returning soldiers have both severe physical and mental wounds.

Many soldiers with severe injuries, who would have died in past conflicts, are now surviving and require specialized care, Zeiss said.

The VA has plans to expand the number of poly-trauma centers it operates from four to 21 to accommodate this increased need.

For all veterans who suffer from mental disorders, methods of treatment are changing.

The past practice of isolating them in hospitals has been replaced by an approach that stresses integrating patients into the community, and the support it can provide, as soon as possible.

And recent studies have confirmed that new medications, such as SSRI drugs developed to treat depression, can be effective in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an option not available in the past.

A 2004 study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, of nearly 6,000 Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan found that between 15 and 17 percent of Iraq conflict veterans and about 11 percent of veterans who served in Afghanistan suffered symptoms of mental disorders when they returned home. However, less than half of those affected sought care, in part because they feared they would be looked down on by their fellow soldiers and superior officers.

The VA is reaching out to veterans to overcome attitudes and get them the help they need, Zeiss said.

What the article doesn't tell you: this is the next generation of homeless and substance addicted vets.

Equality For All

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies

By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: January 31, 2006

Coretta Scott King, first known as the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then as his widow, then as an avid proselytizer for his vision of racial peace and non-violent social change died Monday night, according to Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador who is an old friend of the King family. She was 78 and had been in failing health for years following a stroke.

Mr. Young said in a phone call to NBC's "Today" show that Mrs. King died last night at her home in Atlanta.

"I understand she was asleep last night and her daughter tried to wake her up," Mr. King said.

Mrs. King rose from rural poverty in Heiberger, Ala., to become an international symbol of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and a tireless advocate for a long litany of social and political issues ranging from women's rights to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa that followed in its wake.

She was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1952 when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who on their first date told her: "The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all." A year later she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with Dr. King's assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Mrs. King did not hesitate to pick up his mantle, marching before her husband was even buried at the head of the garbage workers he had gone to Memphis to champion. She then went on to lead the effort for a national holiday in his honor and to found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, dedicated both to scholarship and to activism, where Dr. King is buried.

Aside from the trauma of her husband's death, which left her alone with four young children, Mrs. King faced other trials and controversies over the years. She was at times viewed as chilly and aloof by others in the movement. The King Center was criticized first as competing for funds and siphoning energy from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King had headed. In recent years, it has been widely viewed as adrift, characterized by intra-family squabbling and a focus more on Dr. King's legacy than continuing his work. And even many allies were baffled and hurt by her campaign to exonerate James Earl Ray, who in 1969 had pleaded guilty to her husband's murder, and her contention Ray did not commit the crime.

But more often, Mrs. King has been seen as an inspirational figure around the world, a dogged advocate for her husband's causes and a woman of enormous spiritual depth who came to personify the ideals Dr. King fought for.

Granted, there will be all sorts of opportunists that will spend the next few days trying to co-opt her legacy, but let's remained focued on her true message, especially after monumental setbacks like Alito.

“Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation.”

Let's all take a few minutes today to reflect and give say some prayers for the family and then roll up our sleeves and get back to work because the struggle is far from over.

Community Action

Via Sean-Paul Kelley:

Wikipedia takes action:

This RFC is being opened in order to further a centralized discussion concerning actions to be taken against US Congressional staffers and possibly other federal employees who have engaged in unethical and possibly libelous behavior in violation of Wikipedia policies (WP:NPOV, WP:CIV). The editors from these IP ranges have been rude, abrasive, immature, and show disregard for Wikipedia policy. The editors have frequently tried to censor the history of elected officials, often replacing community articles with censored biographies despite other users' attempts to dispute these violations. They also violate Wikipedia:Verifiability, by deleting verified reports, while adding flattering things about members of Congress that are unverified.

The offending editors have been blocked. This RFC is needed to gather community comments. It is proposed that a one week block is not enough.

The links gives an editing history of the abuses and the IP addresses. Wikipedia is fighting back.

Circular Firing Squad

Via Liza Sabater here are the Republicrats who voted for cloture yesterday:

# Akaka (Hawaii)
# Baucus (Montana)
# Bingaman (New Mexico)
# Byrd (West Virginia)
# Cantwell (Washington)
# Carper (Delaware)
# Conrad (North Dakota)
# Dorgan (North Dakota)
# Inouye (Hawaii)
# Johnson (South Dakota)
# Kohl (Wisconsin)
# Landrieu (Louisiana)
# Lieberman (Connecticut)
# Lincoln (Arkansas)
# Nelson (Florida)
# Nelson (Nebraska)
# Pryor (Arkansas)
# Rockefeller (West Virginia)
# Salazar (Colorado)
# Harkin (Iowa) abstained from voting.

It's time to support the primary challenger in Connecticut.

If these 20 had voted with the other 25 Democrats, the filibuster would have succeeded. The Democrats defeated it.

On-Going Disaster

Pre-Katrina Emergency Plan for Elderly Faulted

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; Page A07

Louisiana officials did virtually nothing to prepare to evacuate poor, sick or elderly people as required under a state emergency plan adopted months before Hurricane Katrina hit, according to newly released documents.

State Transportation and Development Secretary Johnny B. Bradberry told Senate investigators that he was assigned the task in April, months before the Aug. 29 storm. But his department had no buses or drivers to execute the mission.

"We have done nothing to fulfill this responsibility," Bradberry said, according to a transcript of a Dec. 21 deposition obtained by The Washington Post. "We put no plans in place to do any of this."

Bradberry approved the plan, "but I signed it under the condition that I wanted to keep things moving. . . . We had issues with that, because we didn't feel like we were the best, quote, 'agency,' or group to coordinate that," he said.

Anticipating 100,000 New Orleans residents might be left behind, state officials spent hours "agonizing" over how to move them in a joint exercise months earlier involving a hypothetical "Hurricane Pam" striking southeast Louisiana, according to a transcript of a Jan. 6 statement by Dolph Diemont, a U.S. Department of Transportation official.

"We said, 'Oh, this is so huge, we're going to need so many buses, we're going to need all of this planning and communications and cooperation, coordination, all of this to come together.' It's really a massive effort," Diemont said.

In the end, hundreds of New Orleans school buses were left idle in flooded parking lots after Katrina because their drivers fled. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and Mayor C. Ray Nagin have said the Katrina evacuation was much more successful than expected, but they faulted the federal government for not swiftly delivering help.

Parsing Bush's Gulf Coast Promises

Speech Text

In nearly all of Mississippi, electric power has been restored

On Sept. 15, President Bush promised to "do what it takes" to lift the city from the waters. Following are some of the statements his made in the speech and the status of those goals.

Status

Power has been restored to Mississippi and to 92% of affected areas in Louisiana, according to Entergy Corp. However, only 32% of Louisiana customers have returned.

Speech Text

Trade is starting to return to the Port of New Orleans

Status

The port is operating at 70% of pre-storm levels.

Speech Text

Agricultural shipments are moving down the Mississippi River

Status

Shipping tonnage is back to normal upriver from New Orleans through the ports of South Louisiana and Greater Baton Rouge.

Speech Text

All major gasoline pipelines are now in operation

Status

Daily U.S. oil production from the Gulf remains down about 26%. Gas production is down about 18%.

The rest of that link is quite illuminating.

Morning After

Kennedy Seen as The Next Justice In Court's Middle
Alito Expected to Tilt Conservative

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; A04

Should Samuel A. Alito Jr. be confirmed to the Supreme Court today, as expected, it will mark the beginning of a new Supreme Court era -- and, perhaps more important, the end of an old, familiar one.

For much of the past 24 years, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Alito would replace, has wielded the swing vote on a split court, usually casting her lot with the court's four other conservative justices, but siding with liberals on such crucial issues as abortion, affirmative action and campaign finance reform.

Alito's arrival, however, may turn the O'Connor Court into the Kennedy Court. If, as many expect, Alito forms a four-vote conservative bloc with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, that would leave Justice Anthony M. Kennedy -- a conservative who has occasionally voted with liberals on gay rights, the death penalty and abortion -- as the court's least predictable member.

"Assuming the predictions about Alito's views are correct, he turns Justice Kennedy into a swing vote on a lot of issues," said Pamela Karlan, a professor of law at Stanford University who teaches a course on the current Supreme Court.

No case illustrates the new dynamic better than the challenge to a Republican-drafted congressional redistricting plan for Texas, which the court will hear on March 1. The stakes in the case are huge and could include eventual control of the closely divided House.

The Texas plan, drafted at the request of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R) and rammed through the state legislature in 2003 over Democratic protests, created a first-ever majority-Republican congressional delegation to match the state's overall GOP voting preference.

But opponents say it was an unconstitutional, partisan gerrymander. The court has split down the middle on such claims in the past, with the four liberal justices -- John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer -- saying that the court can and should decide when partisanship goes too far.

Conservatives -- the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia and Thomas -- said the courts should stay out of this political thicket.

Kennedy, however, said that he would not rule out the possibility that a partisan gerrymander could violate the Constitution, although such a plan had not yet been found.

On this issue, at least, Alito, who acknowledged at his confirmation hearings that he was a youthful skeptic about the court's past efforts to fix legislative districts in the name of "one person, one vote," could vote as O'Connor did. If, as expected, Roberts followed suit, that would leave Kennedy to decide the case.

Another issue on which Alito faced sharp questioning at his hearings -- presidential war powers -- is also on the court's docket. The key case is a challenge to President Bush's plan to try terrorist suspects at military tribunals.

A former aide to Osama bin Laden, Salim Hamdan, claims that his pending trial before a tribunal is unlawful because it has not been authorized by a statute or the Constitution. He also argues that the federal courts should be allowed to enforce his rights as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions.

The WaPo, as they so often do in "war" coverage, neglects to use the word "alleged" aide to ObL, after all the evidence hasn't been supplied in court yet, has it? After all, just yesterday they told us:

Al Qaeda Detainee's Mysterious Release
Moroccan Spoke Of Aiding Bin Laden During 2001 Escape

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 30, 2006; A01

RABAT, Morocco -- For more than a decade, Osama bin Laden had few soldiers more devoted than Abdallah Tabarak. A former Moroccan transit worker, Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show.

During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others fled in the other direction.

Tabarak was captured and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was classified as such a high-value prisoner that the Pentagon repeatedly denied requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him. Then, after spending almost three years at the base, he was suddenly released.

Today, the al Qaeda loyalist known locally as the "emir" of Guantanamo walks the streets of his old neighborhood near Casablanca, more or less a free man. In a decision that neither the Pentagon nor Moroccan officials will explain publicly, Tabarak was transferred to Morocco in August 2004 and released from police custody four months later.

Back to Alito and the upcoming court docket:

The Bush administration argues that the tribunals are based both on the president's constitutional powers as commander in chief and on the Sept. 14, 2001, joint congressional resolution authorizing the use of force to battle terrorists.

The administration prevailed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a decision joined by Roberts while he was still a judge on that court.

Roberts will have to sit out the case at the Supreme Court, leaving just eight justices to decide the matter.

The outcome is difficult to predict; in the past, court conservatives have splintered on similar issues, with Thomas lining up fully behind the administration, Kennedy and Rehnquist lending partial support, and Scalia actually joining with the court's most liberal member, Stevens, in rejecting the administration's claim that it could indefinitely hold a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan without charges.

Given the quizzical nature of what the Bushies actually do rather than what they say, Justice Alito is going to have some fine slicing and dicing to do.

Goodbye Heidi

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein Dies

By MICHAEL KUCHWARA
The Associated Press
Monday, January 30, 2006

NEW YORK -- Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who chronicled the feminist struggles and successes of the baby-boomer generation in such wryly observant works as "The Heidi Chronicles" and "The Sisters Rosensweig," has died of lymphoma at the age of 55.

Wasserstein died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said Andre Bishop, head of Lincoln Center Theater and Wasserstein's close friend and mentor. She had been ill for several months.

Broadway theaters will dim their lights Tuesday in honor of Wasserstein.

"Wendy had a voice like no other and a great sense of the absurd," said Swoosie Kurtz, who appeared in "Uncommon Women and Others," Wasserstein's first stage success. "She could take something that was sad or somber in life, wrap her words around it and somehow make it light and not so disturbing."

Wasserstein's writing was known for its sharp, often comedic look about what women had to do to succeed in a world dominated by men.

"She was an extraordinary human being whose work and whose life were extremely intertwined," said Bishop, who produced most of her works, first at Playwrights Horizons and later at Lincoln Center Theater. "She was not unlike the heroines of most of her plays _ a strong-minded, independent, serious good person who happened to have a wicked sense of humor."

Wasserstein found her greatest popular success with "The Heidi Chronicles," which won the best-play Tony as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989. Its insecure title character (played by Joan Allen) takes a 20-year journey beginning in the late 1960s and changes her attitudes about herself, men and other women. Equally popular was "The Sisters Rosensweig," which moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 1993, and concerned three siblings who find strength in themselves and in each other.

We read and did some scenes from "The Heidi Chronicles" in my Theatre classes in college. I remember them being very witty and moving. I don't it dawned on me, a 20 something kid, how profound that play was in articulating the feelings of people a generation before me.

It's been a tough year for the American theatre with the loss of Arthur Miller, Ozzie Davis, and many others. Another great from the stage is gone leaving our lives a bit dimmer.

A Dying Wage

High wages, low wages, and morality

By David R. Francis

It's unusual for a controversial economic issue to be fought on moral grounds. But ACORN, a public advocacy group, has been winning a higher "living wage" for workers in state after state, city after city, by appealing to voters' sense of justice.

"It's probably the best [argument] we have," says Jen Kern, director of ACORN's Living Wage Resource Center. A decent income is a moral matter of "fairness," she says. Those who "play by the rules of the game should be able to support themselves by their work."

"A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you poor," agrees Paul Sherry, coordinator of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, a church-based coalition in Cleveland seeking to raise low wages.

According to the father of classical capitalism, Adam Smith, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University in the 1700s, the "invisible hand" of self-interest ensures the most efficient use of resources in an economy, and public welfare is a byproduct.

Today Americans are mostly content to let market forces - that is, the law of supply and demand - determine the wage levels for the multiplicity of jobs, professions, and positions that make the economy work. It would be extremely difficult for a bureaucratic group to make detailed, comparative judgments as to the real value of various occupations and place a specific wage level on each.

But at some point, the extremes in wages resulting from what is called "free enterprise" begin to violate people's sense of common justice. They chuckle, then, at the portrayal in a Boston Globe cartoon of two bosses in a fancy office saying to three workers: "Why should you have a minimum wage? We don't have a maximum wage."

As it is, an employee working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour makes $10,712 a year, about $1,000 above the official poverty level for an individual ($9,654).

At the other end of the scale, the compensation of top corporate executives, on average 431 times the salary of a blue-collar worker in his or her company, is widely seen as excessive. Critics often use the word "obscene" - a moral term - to characterize the tens of millions of dollars they get.

Capitalism in regard to pay is "out of whack," says Scott Klinger, codirector of Responsible Wealth, a Boston advocacy group concerned over deepening income inequality in the nation.

Mr. Klinger maintains that Adam Smith assumed equal power in a free market among its players. He didn't see the "enormous concentration" of economic and political power that has enabled the privileged to set the rules of the system. "Supply and demand is not the operative force," he says.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has just proposed that corporations disclose more information about executive compensation beyond salary, such as pensions and other perks.

"A small positive move," says Klinger. He advocates, among other things, that the directors of a firm should include not just executives from other companies, but also representatives of labor, the community, and others to better assure that business decisions take account of "stakeholders" other than company shareholders.

So far, though, rising income inequality has not aroused sufficient public indignation to prompt congressional moves to stem it.

The rising tide of productivity and profits is only lifting all yachts. The rest of us paddle furiously to keep from drowning in debt.

Handing them their talking points on a plate

I really doubt that you're going to see this next item in America's "free press".

Al-Zawahri calls Bush a 'failure'

30/01/2006 - 18:17:22

Al-Qaida’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called US President George Bush a "butcher" and a "failure" in a videotape aired on Arab television today, his first appearance since an American airstrike that targeted him this month in Pakistan.

Al-Qaida’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called US President George Bush a "butcher" and a "failure" in a videotape aired on Arab television today, his first appearance since an American airstrike that targeted him this month in Pakistan.

Al-Zawahri, shown in the video wearing white robes and a white turban, said the January 13 airstrike killed "innocents" and said the United States had ignored an offer from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden for a truce.

"Butcher of Washington, you are not only defeated and a liar, but also a failure. You are a curse on your own nation," he said, referring to Bush.

"Bush, do you know where I am? I am among the Muslim masses."

The airstrike hit a building in the eastern Pakistan village of Damadola, killing four al-Qaida leaders.

Thirteen villagers were also killed in the strike, angering many Pakistanis.

Do I really need to comment upon this?

Save to say that when we hand our enemies plums like this, free, gratis, for nothing, what need have they to lie about us?

Crock Pot Ready

One of the things I love about my crockpot is that I can fill it in the evening and put it in the fridge overnight, put the pot on before I start work for the day and, voila, dinner is all ready for me at the end of the day.

This is a real nice meal to come home to at the end of the day. Pick up a salad at the grocery on the way home or quickly steam some fresh spinich in the microwave. If you've got soup in the freezer, nuke it and dinner for 4 is ready in five minutes.

This recipe doesn't get much easier. If that looks like a lot of garlic to you, it isn't. Slowcooking on low heat mellows the garlic and brings out the nutty flavor, rather like roasting does.

1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, lightly pounded (3 to 4 ounces meat per person)
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8 cloves garlic, smashed
1 cup wild rice blend
1/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
2 1/4 cups water
10 fresh parsley sprigs

Season the chicken breasts generously with salt and pepper. Place the chicken breasts in the bottom of a slow cooker. Add the garlic and rice. Add the lemon juice to the water and stir. Pour this mixture over the rice and chicken. Stir once to coat. Place the lid on the slow cooker and set on low for 8 hours. To plate, place a serving of the rice on each plate and top with 1 chicken breast. Garnish with fresh parsley sprigs.

Get Smart

NSA's Trailblazer loses way

Published: 2006-01-30

A program intended to mine the Internet and telecommunications for bits of data related to terrorism is still on the drawing board, despite costing an estimate $1.2 billion over the past six years, according to a Baltimore Sun investigation.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has spearheaded the initiative, known as Trailblazer, aimed at connecting the dots between various information sources, such as e-mail, cell phone calls and instant messages. After spending almost $1.2 billion on the project since 1999, only a "few isolated analytical and technical tools have been produced," the article stated.

Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed lawsuits against the Bush Administration for conducting wiretaps of American citizens without judicial oversight. President Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States without obtaining a warrant through a secret court system designed to allow foreign surveillance.

The Trailblazer system is reportedly a key technology for enabling the NSA to more broadly identify and eavesdrop on terrorism suspects. The system would allow the agency to automatically fish out key pieces of data from amongst the noise of real-time communications, according to the Baltimore Sun article. The proposed Trailblazer system resembles descriptions of the Echelon surveillance network that has occasionally been the focus of media reports.

So let me see if I am getting this right.

The all-seeing al-knowing all-powerful NSA decides to put together a data mining system, encompassing just about every form of electronic communications there is.

They spend six years doing this.

They also spend 1.2 billion dollars.

And they aren't in view of a finished product now or in the readily foreseeable future.

In fact, it is being called "the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community".

This gets better, as you shall see if you read the Baltimore Sun reference.

The NSA initiative, which was designed to spot and analyze such hints, has resulted in little more than detailed schematic drawings filling almost an entire wall, according to intelligence experts familiar with the program. After an estimated $1.2 billion in development costs, only a few isolated analytical and technical tools have been produced, said an intelligence expert with extensive knowledge of the program.

Trailblazer is "the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community," said Matthew Aid, who has advised three recent federal commissions and panels that investigated the Sept. 11 intelligence failures.

Complex from the start - the initial Trailblazer plan called for more than 1,000 priority items - the project ballooned as it was passed through three separate NSA divisions, each with its own priorities, former intelligence officials said. And, they said, Trailblazer's overseers lacked either the influence or the time to clearly define their goals and keep the project on track.

When the agency's inspector general looked at the NSA's handling of the project in its first three years, it found in a 2003 report "inadequate management and oversight" of private contractors and overpayment for the work that was done, according to a recently declassified version of the report obtained by The Sun through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Meanwhile, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), the lead contractor on the project, did not provide enough people with the technical or management skills to produce such a sophisticated system, according to industry and NSA experts familiar with Trailblazer. And, they said, the company did not say no when the NSA made unrealistic demands.

The company was initially awarded $280 million in 2002 to begin construction.

SAIC spokesman Jared Adams declined to comment, saying, "We have been asked to defer all comment regarding the NSA Trailblazer contract to the NSA."

The reporting in this article includes interviews conducted over the past three months with 25 intelligence professionals, 13 of whom worked on or had oversight of Trailblazer. Because the program is classified, most would not allow their names to be used.

Although the Bush administration spent much of the past week defending the NSA's eavesdropping work as vital to keeping Americans safe from terrorism, virtually no attention has been paid to the agency's failure to deliver the system the NSA said was key to fulfilling that mission.

That means the government has been standing by while the agency has been gradually "going deaf" as unimportant communications drown out key pieces of information, a government official with extensive knowledge of Trailblazer told The Sun.

Now, the only thing I really want at this point is for somebody to please tell me how this administration is "strong on security".

Because as God is my witness, I really do not see how that can be.

Frankly, it reminds me more of Mussolini's navy.

You know what I'm referring to, right?

That cardboard fleet of little toy boats, most of which were blown straight to Hell by a bunch of Royal Navy biplanes at Taranto between November 11 to 12, 1940, and then finished off at Cape Matapan the last week of March of the following year, because their crypto got compromised.

In a safe house somewhere in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off. Right now.

Ugh!

Needless to say, after the depressing ending to the Alito matter and the rest of the bad news today, I'm burnt out on politics for the day. It's going to be recipes, cooking techniques and lifestyle stuff for the rest of the evening. This is one tired blogger.

Your Gas Dollars at Work

Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for U.S. Company

By JOHN HOLUSHA
Published: January 30, 2006

Exxon Mobil Corporation said today that its 2005 earnings totaled $36.13 billion, an increase of 42 percent from the previous year. The amount is the largest annual profit ever for an American company.

The earnings come at a time of high gasoline and heating fuel prices that have prompted some political leaders to call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. But the company said it was reinvesting in exploration and refining capacity to meet the world's need for energy.

"Our strong financial results will continue to allow us to make significant, long-term investments required to do our part in meeting the world's energy needs," the company's chairman, Rex W. Tillerson, said in a statement accompanying the earnings report.

Earnings for the final quarter of the year were $10.71 billion, or $1.71 a share, up 27 percent from the $8.42 billion, or $1.30 a share, in the final quarter of 2004.

The fourth-quarter performance capped a record year for oil companies driven by a surge in crude oil and gas prices. Crude oil prices rose 40 percent last year, driven by rapidly rising demand from economically rising countries like China and India and production problems in oil-producing countries like Nigeria and Iraq.

Total revenues for the quarter reached $99.66 billion from $83.37 in the year-ago period.

Exxon Mobil reported that oil and gas production declined by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. However, the company said that if the lingering effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which crimped production in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Gulf Coast, and other factors are included, production rose 2 percent.

We used to have excess profits taxes for situations like this, but no more

Bird Flu News

Via fellow flu blogger Crawford Killian's excellent H5N1 blog:

Hope in new bird flu cases?

By HELEN BRANSWELL, THE CANADIAN PRESS

Mon, January 30, 2006

With word yesterday that all but three surviving avian flu cases have been discharged from Turkish hospitals, questions are swirling over whether the world has overestimated the virulence of the H5N1 virus.

Some wonder if the fatality rate in the Turkish outbreak - four of 21 cases, if all are confirmed - is proof the assessment of the virus's virulence has been skewed by a failure to detect mild, even symptomless cases in the other countries where human infections have been recorded.

Could H5N1's high death toll - stubbornly hovering over 50% - be the product of faulty math? Of not using the right denominator to calculate the rate?

Experts caution that people shouldn't read too much into the Turkish numbers at this point.

'TOO EARLY TO CONCLUDE'

"I think it's really too early to conclude anything," says Dr. Guenael Rodier, an infectious disease expert with the World Health Organization's European office in Copenhagen.

Rodier led the international team that travelled to Turkey to help contain the outbreak.

"True scientists are patient people. And the ones who are impatient, I tend not to trust their science.

"We know things are often more complex than anticipated.

"It takes time."
....
"The evidence for widespread asymptomatic infections is just not there," says Michael Perdue, a scientist with the World Health Organization's global influenza program in Geneva.

Certainly the odd case here and there probably went unnoticed, the experts assume. Mild cases are more likely to fall through the surveillance net than severe ones.

But a number of studies have been done in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia looking for antibodies to the virus in the blood of people who were exposed but who didn't show signs of being ill. Chicken cullers. Relatives of known cases. Hospital staff who cared for H5N1 patients.

"And they essentially found zero. They haven't found any," says Dr. Scott Dowell, an official with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

This is not good news, by the way. We've all been working under the assumption that case fatality rates were artificially high because we assumed a substantial number of positive cases who were asymptomatic. That does not appear to be the case.

Once again, Helen Branswell gets the exclusive because she knows who to ask and what questions to ask.

Call Senators Now

I just checked the whip counts. We can win this. Call Senators now.

Sign Here
Presidential signing statements are more than just executive branch lunacy.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Jan. 30, 2006, at 5:32 AM ET

There are two ways President Bush likes to wage war on your civil liberties: He either asks you to surrender your rights directly—as he does when he strengthens and broadens provisions of the Patriot Act. Or he simply hoovers up new powers and hopes you won't find out—as he did when he granted himself authority to order warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens. The former category seems more benign, and it's tempting to lump Bush's affinity for "presidential signing statements" in that camp. It's tempting to believe that with these statements he is merely asking that the courts take his legal views into account. But President Bush never asks anything of the courts; he doesn't think he has to. His signing statements are not aimed at persuading the courts, but at reinforcing his claim that both courts and Congress are irrelevant.

Many of us had never heard of a presidential signing statement until last month, when Bush used one to eviscerate the McCain Anti-Torture bill he claimed to endorse. We all saw the big Oval Office reconciliation with McCain; we heard Bush say he was dropping his opposition to the bill, which passed with broad bipartisan support (90-9 in the Senate, 308-122 in the House) and made it illegal for Americans to engage in the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of detainees held here or abroad. What we missed was the actual signing ceremony, which took place two weeks later, at 8 p.m. on Dec. 30.

Unless you spent New Year's weekend trolling the White House Web site or catching up on your latest U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News as you waited for the ball to drop, you probably missed the little "P.S." the president tacked onto the McCain anti-torture bill. The postscript was a statement clearly announcing that the president will only follow the new law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch ... and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power." In other words, it is for the president—not Congress or the courts—to determine when the provisions of this bill interfere with his war-making powers, and when they do, he will freely ignore the law.
....
President Ronald Reagan, guided by his Attorney General Edwin Meese III (and urged on enthusiastically by a young lawyer called Samuel Alito), launched a concerted policy to start to use signing statements as a means of reinforcing the executive's message and consolidating its power. Meese arranged to have them published for this very reason. Until the Reagan presidency, the executive branch had only ever issued a total of 75 signing statements. Reagan, Bush I, and Bill Clinton deployed them 247 times between them. (Clinton issued more statements than Bush I, but fewer than Reagan). According to Cooper, by the end of 2004, Bush had issued 108 signing statements presenting 505 different constitutional challenges. He has yet to veto anything.

How important are these executive-branch constitutional challenges? Not very. While a few courts—including the Supreme Court on occasion—have nodded their heads at a signing statement in attempting to construe the intent behind a piece of legislation, they are consulted only rarely and given limited legal weight. Bush's legal claims that black is white and up is down won't likely trump the clear and express will of Congress in a courtroom anytime soon. Certainly you'd need at least three more Sam Alitos on the Supreme Court before you need to fear a judicial declaration that they represent some kind of binding legal authority. Does that mean the statements are legally meaningless and that the fretting over them represents yet more reflexive anti-Bush hysteria?
....
Should we dismiss these statements just because President Bush is so brazen in his claims? So willing to take legal positions that are undefended because they're legally indefensible? Will all this just go away someday, when a court dismisses these statements as excessive and unfounded? No. Because President Bush isn't trying to win this war in the courts. Thus far, he has faced each legal setback as though it never happened; or—more often—he's recast it as a victory. He doesn't care what the courts someday make of his signing statements, just as he didn't care what the courts made of his enemy-combatant claims. He views the courts as irrelevant in his pursuit of this war. These signing statements are dangerous because they repeat and normalize—always using seemingly boilerplate language—claims about the boundless powers of a "unitary executive." By questioning the principle of court review in the McCain statement, Bush again erodes the notion of judicial supremacy—an idea we have lived with since Marbury v. Madison. When he asserts that he—and not the courts—is the final arbiter of his constitutional powers, he is calling for a radical shift in the system of checks and balances.

It's so tempting to laugh off Bush's signing statements as puffed-up, groundless claims that he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and also devastatingly handsome. But this is the president talking and instructing his subordinates—and also outlining a broad legal regime that may not technically be constitutional, but that hardly makes it laughable. These declarations promote a view of the law that may have no merit in the courts but may never have the chance to be resolved there in the first place.

We've got a full-scale constitutional crisis underway here, but you won't know about it if you read the mainstream media. I'm grateful to Dahlia Lithwick for elucidating the issues so clearly.

Defining Deviancy Down

Army's Rising Promotion Rate Called Ominous
# Experts say the quality of the officer corps is threatened as the service fights to retain leaders during wartime and fill new command slots.

By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Struggling to retain enough officers to lead its forces, the Army has begun to dramatically increase the number of soldiers it promotes, raising fears within the service that wartime strains are diluting the quality of the officer corps.

Last year, the Army promoted 97% of all eligible captains to the rank of major, Pentagon data show. That was up from a historical average of 70% to 80%.

Traditionally, the Army has used the step to major as a winnowing point to push lower-performing soldiers out of the military.

The service also promoted 86% of eligible majors to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2005, up from the historical average of 65% to 75%.

The higher rates of promotion are part of efforts to fill new slots created by an Army reorganization and to compensate for officers who are resigning from the service, many after multiple rotations to Iraq.

The promotion rates "are much higher than they have been in the past because we need more officers than we did before," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman.

The Army has long taken pride in the competitiveness of its promotions, and insists that only officers that meet rigorous standards are elevated through its ranks.

But the recent trends in promotions have stirred concerns that the Army is being forced to lower its standards to provide leaders for combat units that will be deployed overseas.

"The problem here is that you're not knocking off the bottom 20%," said a high-ranking Army officer at the Pentagon. "Basically, if you haven't been court-martialed, you're going to be promoted to major."

Let's see if this comes up in Rummy's next presser.

Astronomical

Via The Agonist:

U.S. IN TECHNICAL DEFAULT
by Dr. M
(AKA Dr. Chris Martenson)
January 27, 2006

In a shocking development, the Treasury Department website is openly stating that as of January 24, 2006 our national debt stood at $8,185.3 billion and on January 26th at $8,190.5 billion.

http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm

Yet the US national debt ‘ceiling’, the maximum amount of debt the US government may hold at any one time, stands at $8,184 billion – a full $5.5 billion less. Although called upon by John Snow, Congress has not yet passed an expansion of the debt ceiling and so the US government is now operating in technical default.

You may recall that when last the debt ceiling was approached in the months surrounding the 2004 elections, the Treasury department furiously employed every accounting trick in the book (and then some) to avoid breaching the limit. They even went so far as to take the unprecedented step of borrowing $14 billion from the Federal Financing Bank to cover up the shortfall.

But they never breached the ceiling.

On January 24th they breached it brazenly and openly and with nary an accompanying explanation. Neither have any lawmakers have broached this indelicate subject.

I suppose we could write this off as merely an unsurprising development from a government that no longer bothers to even appear to be adhering to rules, laws and procedures, let alone actually doing so.

But the silence is all the more troubling because there is an unprecedented level of government borrowing on the books for 1Q06 with next 2 weeks (Feb 1st to Feb 9th) an especially busy period of time. An ambitious ~$70-$80b in Treasury paper will hit the market.

The federal government does not have the legal authority to borrow above the statutory debt limit, which raises the prospect of emergency congressional action to avoid a full-fledged default.

Congress will probably attach a rider to a “must-pass” defense appropriation bill and ironically title it “The Fiscal Responsibility Amendment of 2006”. And if they do, $50 says they do it very late on Friday night.

Since the debt ceiling has been raised 50 times over the past 40 years, hoping for some rational debate on the matter would be an extravagant indulgence. Time spent wishing pigs could fly would offer a far better potential return.

Another odd facet of this story is the deafening silence from the financial press (and I use that term loosely) regarding this matter. Leaving aside the issue of a technical default, one wonders why questions aren’t being asked about the rate of debt accumulation and whether it’s sustainable.

The last debt-ceiling adjustment was $800 billion and was passed in November 2004. Now, on January 24th 2006, it is entirely gone. $800 billion in only 16 months for an average of $50B a month.

Factoring out the plundering of excess social security contributions, the US government borrowed $52B in 3Q05, $96B in 4Q05 and expects to borrow $171B in 1Q06. A trend nearly as mind-boggling as the soon to be discontinued M3 series.

Why do I even bother to pen such distressing factoids?

Because in all my time studying economics I have determined only one thing; there’s no free lunch. Pay now or pay later but pay we will.

I'm sure DeLong and Sawicky have something to say about this.

Filibuster Alito

The Swing Senators

UP FOR ELECTION IN 2006

Mary Landrieu [LA], currently has NO primary challenger but if she will not listen to the people we have until 8/11 to find an alternative to run against her.

Daniel Akaka [HI], already has two primary challengers, one of whom, Ed Case, is a former elected state representative and is polling well.

Joe Lieberman [CT], already has a primary challenge looming from Ned Lamont who has set up an exploratory site, and until 5/16 to make the decision to jump in. They last thing Joe needs is lots of more encouragement for Lamont.

Bill Nelson [FL], currently has NO primary challenger, with until 5/12 to find one.

Ben Nelson [NE], currently has NO primary challenger, but if there is a concerned citizen in Nebraska who wants to run they have until 3/1 to register as a candidate.

Jeff Bingaman [NM], currently has NO primary challenger but still two weeks remain until the deadline for filing of 2/14.

Carper [DE], currently has NO primary challenger and all the way until 7/28 to enter the primary against him.

Kohl [WI], currently has NO primary challenger. We have heard he plans on skipping the vote, which is the same thing as an abstain. The filing deadline in Wisconsin is 7/11.

Cantwell [WA], is being already challenged by a strong progressive candidate, Mark Wilson.

Byrd [WV], has no serious primary challenger we can confirm and the 1/28 deadline has just expired. Perhaps you can appeal to his professed love of the Constitution which Alito would gut.

Robert Menendez [NJ], was just appointed but has to run himself this year. If he drops the ball there are challengers waiting in the wings and until 4/10 to decide.

Lincoln Chafee [RI] is a Republican who professes to be pro-choice and not feeling very secure right now about her 2006 prospects. Perhaps he is a possibility for abstention on cloture.

Olympia Snowe [ME] is a another Republican who professes to be pro-choice who must face the electorate in 2006. She should also be encouraged to abstain on cloture.

OTHER POSSIBLE SWING SENATORS

Blanche Lambert Lincoln [AR], up for reelection in 2010
Mark Pryor [AR], up for reelection in 2008
Tom Harkin [IA], up for reelection in 2008
Evan Bayh [IN], up for reelection in 2010
Susan Collins [ME], up for reelection in 2008
Carl Levin [MI], up for reelection in 2008
Max Baucus [MT], up for reelection in 2008
Frank Lautenberg [NJ], up for reelection in 2008
Tim Johnson [SD], up for reelection in 2008
Patty Murray [WA], up for reelection in 2010

Just tell them that failure to support this filibuster will be a deal breaker as Alito starts to cast the votes that his reactionary supporters absolutely know he will.

Here is a link for you to find the local office phones and the toll free numbers for the DC offices. Go make that call.

Backwards

The clueless WaPo opines:

The Next Policy Bungle?

Monday, January 30, 2006; Page A16

PRESIDENT BUSH'S State of the Union speech tomorrow night looks set to address health care. Mr. Bush is choosing a ripe topic: The United States spends almost twice as large a share of its economy on health as other rich countries do, yet it still has lower life expectancy and 46 million uninsured people. Some of his team's thinking is good but not entirely new. For example, both Medicare and private insurers are beginning to reward doctors and hospitals that score well on measures of quality and cost-effectiveness. Other administration ideas are good if done the right way, such as caps on doctors' liability. But the president's team is also enthusiastic about the trend toward out-of-pocket payments, which it sees as a way of driving down health costs. Its enthusiasm is misguided.

The theory behind out-of-pocket payments is that patients who pay their bills themselves will shop carefully. This is likely to hold true some of the time but not most of it. Most consumers aren't equipped to distinguish between good medical service and bad; the results of poor service show up only after they've paid for it. A minority of motivated consumers may do the research necessary to judge whether a doctor's advice is sound, but even this minority can't be expected to start poring over medical journals when they are hit by a medical emergency -- and emergencies account for a large chunk of health spending.

Indeed, in many cases the doctors themselves can't be expected to know how much treatment will cost until after the fact. They admit a patient, perform some tests; those tests lead to new tests, and so on. So even if the White House could conjure superhero patients who assiduously researched their options even when in pain, the superheroes couldn't discover what sort of bill they faced before they checked into a hospital.

Nor is that all. No vision of consumer-driven health care assumes that all payments will be out of pocket; above a certain ceiling, insurance would take over. There are limits to how high that ceiling can be. People may be expected to pay $3,000 or $5,000 a year, perhaps a little more if they are affluent. But many medical procedures cost more than any of those ceilings, so the incentive to economize vanishes. Meanwhile, advocates of consumer-driven health care tend to argue that people with chronic diseases deserve a special break; they are faced with large bills that aren't discretionary, so they shouldn't have to pay them out of pocket. But if chronic care and procedures costing more than $5,000 aren't going to be disciplined by consumers, the gains from consumer-driven care can be only limited. They are unlikely to justify the harshness of forcing people to pay for health out of pocket -- or the risk that people will cut back on preventive drugs and so boost health costs in the long run.

Dear WaPo,

This is all about risk shifting and putting the onus on the individual rather than an insurance risk pool. It's another move to make the serf class poorer. There is nothing good or useful about it. Or have you become so wealthy yourselves that you can't see it? This is another Bush recidivist proposal the likes of which have already been rejected by the rest of the West. There might be a reason for that but, like the rest of the US media, you are so US-centric you can't see that, either.

The Coup

The Senate Should Postpone The Samuel Alito Vote For One Week To Increase Awareness Of The Unitary Executive Theory
Tell A Friend
The Public, the Media, and the Senate Republicans are all asleep and not yet informed about this Theory and the danger it presents.

by Rev. Bill McGinnis

http://www.opednews.com

The Bush Machine will obviously not want to do this, because the more the Public finds out about Samuel Alito's enthusiastic support of the dangerous "Unitary Executive Theory," the more they will oppose him. The Public would never accept the Unitary Executive Theory as Law if they knew what it really is. At this moment, the Public, the Media, and the Senate Republicans are all asleep and not informed about this Theory and the danger it presents. But in a week of solid effort, they can all be awakened and informed.

Now the President is outrageously demanding that the Senate give him an "up or down vote" immediately, as if he had the authority to demand anything of the Senate. He has no such authority anywhere in the Constitution. Republican Leadership: Aren't you embarrassed to be continuously bowing down to Mr. Bush, as if he were your Master and you were his slaves? Did you take an oath to support the Constitution, or to support George W. Bush? (They are two different things, you know, frequently in conflict.) Here is the exact text of the oath of office you took when you entered the Senate. When you read it again, does it anywhere say "support the President?" No it does not. It says "support the Constitution." Then why are you so willing to accept orders from the President? Are you in love?

U. S. Senate Oath Of Office

In essence, the Unitary Executive Theory says that the President should have complete control over the Executive Branch, and that the Executive Branch should be in charge of almost everything that the Government actually does, including all the functions of the Independent Agencies, which have always been separate from the Executive Branch. In addition, this Theory insists that the President has "plenary authority" to exercise his powers, and he must not be interfered with by Congress or the Supreme Court. So Congress and the Supreme Court lose their ability to control the President and become mere advisors to him, whom he can disregard if he chooses to do so.

In a particular example we all are familiar with, this Theory says that the President is not obligated to follow either the anti-torture laws or the anti-spying laws. So this is why Bush hasn't been following them: he claims he is not obligated to do so. And why do you suppose the President almost never vetoes any laws? Because why bother to veto a law if you are not obligated to follow it anyway? In fact, to veto it would suggest that somehow it did have authority over you. So it is better for him to let the law be enacted, write a signing statement saying that he doesn't really have to follow it, and then simply disregard it whenever he chooses. And when these outrageous claims are eventually challenged before the Supreme Court, who do you suppose a Justice Samuel Alito would rule in favor of? The President, of course! Wake up, everybody. This is a coup in progress!

I can't disagree. What the Senate is about to do represents the most significant fundamental change in our government since the Civil War, and the country is completely unaware of it.

Missing the Point

A healthcare prescription that's hard to swallow
# Rationing may be the only way to ensure that access for all remains affordable.

By Henry Aaron, HENRY AARON is co-author with Melissa Cox and William B. Schwartz of "Can We Say No? The Challenge of Rationing Health Care.''

SEVEN U.S. WORKERS in 10 still get health insurance coverage as a fringe benefit of employment. But perhaps not for long. Healthcare spending gobbled up nearly $2 trillion in 2004, and it has grown about 2½ percentage points a year faster than income for decades. Yet Americans die younger than citizens of some industrialized nations that spend far less per capita on healthcare. And employers saddled with soaring costs are reducing coverage and raising employee premiums.

Something needs to be done, but no one seems quite ready to come forward with a solution. The only thing American politicians all agree on is this: The United States must at all costs avoid healthcare "rationing." One after another, they step forward to deplore this much-hated approach, insisting they will fight off efforts to deny the insured any beneficial service that their insurance covers.

But it's too late for that. The truth is that sensible rationing may be the only way to make sure that fair access to healthcare for all remains affordable. The U.S. can no longer afford to offer every available service no matter how high the cost or how small the benefit to the patient. Intelligent healthcare rationing — limiting the availability of care that costs society more to produce than it is worth to patients — is not a horror to be avoided. It's a regretfully necessary limit to sustain fair access to healthcare that is worth what it costs.

To see the connection between rationing and affordable care for all, one must recognize that insured patients pay little of the cost of their own care when ill. So they quite understandably want everything that might conceivably add even some tiny benefit — the extra test that provides hardly any information at all, the surgery that is little or no better than watchful waiting, or the costly patented drug that is little or no better than the inexpensive generic.

Gee, Henry, the rest of the industrialized West manages not to ration healthcare, has better outcomes, better lifetimes and better infant mortality rates than we do, but the solution for our problems is rationing? Maybe doing something about the 46 million people in this country without health insurance would do a better job of improving our outcomes. Ya think?

Looking Forward

Interior Offered Extensive Katrina Aid
FEMA Ignored Proposals or Didn't Use Resources Effectively, Department Says

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006; Page A03

Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show.

The Interior Department, which made the offers, also proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provide security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a month would pass before the Federal Emergency Management Agency put the officers to work, according to an Interior document obtained by The Washington Post.

"Although we attempted to provide these assets we were unable to efficiently integrate and deploy these resources," Interior officials said in written response to questions by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Acting in the "immediate aftermath" of the hurricane, Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensive list of assets that were "immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance," according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005. Those assets included more than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles for clearing debris, as well as Interior-owned campgrounds and other land that could be used as staging areas or emergency shelters.

Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, teams specially trained for urban search-and-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats.

"Clearly these assets and skills were precisely relevant to the post-Katrina environment," the memo said. Yet, the rescue teams and boats were not considered in the federal government's planning for hurricane disasters, the memo states.

Ultimately, many Fish and Wildlife teams did travel to the Gulf and assisted in the rescues of more than 4,500 people -- but they were "never formally tasked" for that assignment by FEMA, the document states.

The Interior Department's criticisms echo those expressed by other government agencies that have publicly faulted FEMA's hurricane response. In October, Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta criticized FEMA for moving slowly in requesting buses to evacuate flood victims from central New Orleans. The order for buses was issued in the early hours of Aug. 31, nearly two days after Katrina made landfall.

Hurricane season starts in 5 months. If you, like me, are in a vulnerable zone, I suggest that you begin planning now. We are on our own.

The Movement

In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: January 30, 2006

Last February, as rumors swirled about the failing health of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a team of conservative grass-roots organizers, public relations specialists and legal strategists met to prepare a battle plan to ensure any vacancies were filled by like-minded jurists.

The team recruited conservative lawyers to study the records of 18 potential nominees — including Judges John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — and trained more than three dozen lawyers across the country to respond to news reports on the president's eventual pick.

"We boxed them in," one lawyer present during the strategy meetings said with pride in an interview over the weekend. This lawyer and others present who described the meeting were granted anonymity because the meetings were confidential and because the team had told its allies not to exult publicly until the confirmation vote was cast.

Now, on the eve of what is expected to be the Senate confirmation of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court, coming four months after Chief Justice Roberts was installed, those planners stand on the brink of a watershed for the conservative movement.

In 1982, the year after Mr. Alito first joined the Reagan administration, that movement was little more than the handful of legal scholars who gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist Society, a newly formed conservative legal group.

Judge Alito's ascent to join Chief Justice Roberts on the court "would have been beyond our best expectations," said Spencer Abraham, one of the society's founders, a former secretary of energy under President Bush and now the chairman of the Committee for Justice, one of many conservative organizations set up to support judicial nominees.

He added, "I don't think we would have put a lot of money on it in a friendly wager."

Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement.

Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court.

"It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true," said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. "It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives."

Click the link and read the rest. The "conservative base" has had a plan for a long time. These are people who don't have any interest in representing you.

Good Morning, Sunshine!

CHILES STUFFED WITH SCRAMBLED EGGS AND BACON WITH CHIHUAHUA CHEESE SAUCE

This is a deliciously different way to consume your morning bacon and eggs. It's spicy!

1 1/2 cups (or more) whipping cream
1 1/2 cups (packed) coarsely grated queso chihuahua* (about 6 ounces)

6 large fresh poblano chiles (each about 4 ounces)

12 ounces bacon slices, coarsely chopped
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) butter
16 large eggs, beaten to blend in large bowl

2 dried guajillo chiles, seeded, sliced very thinly into strips
Fresh cilantro sprigs
Corn tortilla chips
Sliced tomatoes

Bring 1 1/2 cups cream to boil in medium saucepan over medium-high heat; whisk in cheese. Boil sauce until reduced to 1 cup, whisking occasionally, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover; chill. Before serving, rewarm over low heat, and thin with cream by tablespoonfuls if desired.)

Char poblano chiles over gas flame or in broiler until blackened. Enclose in paper bag 10 minutes. Peel chiles, leaving stem intact. Cut 1 slit lengthwise down side of each chile; carefully remove seeds.

Cook bacon in large skillet over medium-high heat until brown and crisp. Using slotted spoon, transfer to paper towels to drain. Pour off drippings from skillet. Add butter to same skillet and melt over medium heat. Add eggs and stir gently until softly set, about 4 minutes. Mix in bacon. Season eggs with salt and pepper.

Spoon eggs into roasted chiles through slit. Arrange 1 stuffed chile on each plate. Spoon warm cheese sauce over. Garnish with guajillo chile strips, cilantro, tortilla chips, and tomatoes.

*Melting cheese available in balls, braids, or rounds. Sometimes labeled queso asadero or queso oaxaca. Substitute Monterey Jack, I've also used Queso Fresco, which is also easier to find..

Makes 6 servings.

Something Special

GOAT CHEESE SOUFFLES AND MIXED GREENS WITH RASPBERRY VINAIGRETTE

2 4-ounce logs soft fresh goat cheese (such as Montrachet)

2/3 cup whole milk
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
3 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (about 1 1/2 ounces)
4 large egg yolks
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

6 large egg whites
1/4 teaspoon salt

Mixed Greens with Raspberry Vinaigrette

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter six 3/4-cup soufflé dishes or custard cups.

Cut one 4-ounce goat cheese log into 6 equal rounds. Place 1 round in each prepared dish. Crumble remaining 4-ounce cheese log into large bowl.

Bring milk to simmer in small saucepan. Remove from heat. Melt butter in heavy medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add flour and stir 2 minutes. Gradually whisk in hot milk. Continue cooking until mixture is smooth and resembles thick paste, whisking constantly, about 2 minutes. Pour mixture over crumbled goat cheese in large bowl. Whisk in Parmesan, yolks, herbs and pepper. Cool soufflé base to lukewarm.

Using electric mixer, beat egg whites with 1/4 teaspoon salt in another large bowl until stiff but not dry. Gently fold 1/4 of egg whites into lukewarm soufflé base to lighten. Fold in remaining egg whites. Divide soufflé mixture among prepared dishes. Transfer dishes to baking sheet and bake until soufflés are puffed and golden brown on top, about 22 minutes.

Place soufflé dishes on serving plates. Mound Mixed Greens with Raspberry Vinaigrette alongside and serve.

Serves 6.

Even if you've never made a souffle before, these are easy and the combination of the cheese and herbs is unspeakably good. I prefer a lemon/olive oil vinaigrette to the raspberry with the salad, but I really like to serve these with a minestrone soup with pesto.

Special Side Dish

CAULIFLOWER CHEDDAR GRATIN WITH HORSERADISH CRUMBS

This is a very special side dish to partner an expensive cut of meat. I generally prefer my cauliflower raw, but this is the recipe that made me a cauliflower believer. I had it for the first time at the home of friends.

3 lb cauliflower (1 large head), cut into 1 1/2- to 2-inch florets
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole milk
6 oz sharp Cheddar, coarsely grated (2 cups)
1/2 cup finely chopped scallion greens
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
20 (2-inch) square saltine crackers or half a cup of panko
4 tablespoons drained bottled horseradish

Preheat oven to 450°F. Butter a 2-quart shallow baking dish.

Cook cauliflower in a 5- to 6-quart pot of boiling salted water until just tender, 6 to 8 minutes. Drain cauliflower well in a colander and transfer to baking dish.

While cauliflower cooks, melt 2 tablespoons butter in a 3- to 4-quart heavy saucepan over moderately low heat and whisk in flour. Cook roux, whisking, 3 minutes. Add milk in a slow stream, whisking, and bring to a boil, whisking frequently. Reduce heat and simmer sauce, whisking occasionally, 8 minutes. Remove from heat and add cheese, scallion greens, salt, and pepper, whisking until cheese is melted. Pour cheese sauce over cauliflower and stir gently to combine.

Coarsely crumble crackers into a bowl. Melt remaining 2 tablespoons butter in a small saucepan, then remove from heat and stir in horseradish. Pour over crumbs and toss to coat.

Sprinkle crumb topping evenly over cauliflower.

Bake gratin until topping is golden brown, about 10 minutes.

Comfort Food

MAHOGANY BEEF STEW WITH RED WINE AND HOISIN SAUCE

4 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/2 pounds boneless beef chuck roast, trimmed, cut into one-inch pieces
3 1/2 cups chopped onions
2 cups Cabernet Sauvignon
1/2 cup beef broth
1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes with Italian herbs, undrained
1/4 cup hoisin sauce*
2 bay leaves

1 pound slender carrots, peeled, cut diagonally into 1-inch lengths
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1/2 pound baby portabello mushrooms cut in bite size pieces

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in heavy large pot over high heat. Sprinkle meat with salt and pepper. Add meat to pot; sauté until brown on all sides, about 10 minutes. Push meat to sides of pot. Reduce heat to medium; add 2 tablespoons oil to pot. Add onions; sauté until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Mix meat into onions. Add 1 cup wine, beef broth, tomatoes with juices, hoisin sauce, and bay leaves. Bring to boil.

Reduce heat to low, cover pot and simmer 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add mushrooms,carrots and 1 cup wine. Cover; simmer 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Uncover, increase heat to high; boil until sauce is slightly thickened, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes longer. Reduce heat to medium. Discard bay leaves. Season stew with salt and pepper. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cool slightly. Chill uncovered until cold, then cover and keep refrigerated. Bring to simmer before serving, stirring occasionally.) Transfer stew to large bowl. Sprinkle with parsley; serve.

* Available at Asian markets and in the Asian foods section of some supermarkets.

Makes 6 large servings. You will have leftover and you will be happy about that, this is better the second day.

Cook's notes: I prefer this with the beef dredged in seasoned floor before browning. This recipe is extremely successful in the crock pot. Throw everything in together and cook on high for about 6 hours.

Bird Brain

Ron Brownstein is on a collision course with himself.

Ronald Brownstein:
Washington Outlook
State of the Union Puts Bush on Collision Course With Himself

On the nation's biggest domestic problems, President Bush faces a clear choice as he approaches Tuesday's State of the Union address. He can make a political point. Or he can make progress against the problems. It's probably not possible to do both — unless Bush wants to radically reconfigure his political strategy.

Here's the tension. Since 2000, Bush's electoral game plan has relied mostly on inspiring a big turnout from his Republican base. With a few exceptions (education, immigration), this has encouraged him to advance policy proposals that excite his half of the electorate — while often infuriating the other half.

At times, the White House seems to welcome Democratic opposition. The greater the disagreement between the parties, the sharper the contrast Bush and GOP candidates can use to energize their core supporters at election time.

But on crucial issues such as the federal budget deficit, access to healthcare and America's dependence on foreign oil — all concerns Bush is likely to emphasize Tuesday — the nation is unlikely to make significant progress unless the parties narrow their differences. The evidence suggests that the best way to confront these problems is to blend ideas each side favors. The political imperative of greater contrast collides with the substantive imperative of more cooperation.

Consider healthcare. About 46 million Americans lack health insurance. All indications are that Bush wants to expand coverage by offering Americans sweetened tax incentives to open health savings accounts. With these tax-free accounts, people pay much more of their initial medical costs out of pocket (at least $2,100 for a family). Then they buy an insurance plan for catastrophic expenses.

These accounts can be a good deal for healthy people, and they might attract younger workers who now choose to remain uninsured. With proper safeguards to prevent a migration that leaves only the oldest and sickest in traditional insurance programs, Bush's health savings accounts could help expand access.

But these accounts alone are unlikely to significantly shrink the number of uninsured. Two-thirds of the uninsured come from families with incomes at twice the poverty line, or about $38,614 for a family of four, or less.

Even with tax benefits, health savings accounts "really don't lend themselves to the vast majority of the uninsured, because they don't have the money to pay" the required out-of-pocket expenses, says Bruce Bodaken, chairman and chief executive of Blue Shield of California.

Since most Democrats resist these accounts as a threat to traditional insurance, a Bush plan built on them alone would guarantee plenty of campaign contrast. But a compromise that joined these accounts with expansions of government programs, and perhaps new requirements on employers, could meaningfully expand access to care.

Ron, how are those uninsured going to be able to afford both premiums and saving accounts when you point out that they already can't?

Hubris Always Brings Nemesis

Polls Show Many Americans are Simply Dumber Than Bush

By Paul Craig Roberts

01/29/06 "ICH" -- -- Two recent polls, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate why Bush is getting away with impeachable offenses. Half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information.

Much of the problem is the media itself, which serves as a disinformation agency for the Bush administration. Fox "News" and right-wing talk radio are the worst, but with propagandistic outlets setting the standard for truth and patriotism, all of the media is affected to some degree.

Despite the media's failure, about half the population has managed to discern that the US invasion of Iraq has not made them safer and that the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties is not a necessary component of the war on terror. The problem, thus, lies with the absence of due diligence on the part of the other half of the population.

Consider the New York Times/CBS poll. Sixty-four percent of the respondents have concerns about losing civil liberties as a result of anti-terrorism measures put in place by President Bush. Yet, 53
percent approve of spying without obtaining court warrants "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism."

Why does any American think that spying without a warrant has any more effect in reducing the threat of terrorism than spying with a warrant? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Bush is disobeying, requires the executive to obtain from a secret panel of federal judges a warrant for spying on Americans. The purpose of the law is to prevent a president from spying for partisan political reasons. The law permits the president to spy first (for 72 hours) and then come to the court for permission. As the court meets in secret, spying without a warrant is no more effective in reducing the threat of terrorism than spying with a warrant.

Instead of explaining this basic truth, the media has played along with the Bush administration and formulated the question as a trade-off between civil liberties and protection from terrorists. This formulation is false and nonsensical. Why does the media enable the Bush administration to escape accountability for illegal behavior by putting false and misleading choices before the people?

The LA Times/Bloomberg poll has equally striking anomalies. Only 43 percent said they approved of Bush's performance as president. But a majority believe Bush's policies have made the US more secure.

It is extraordinary that anyone would think Americans are safer as a result of Bush invading two Muslim countries and constantly threatening two more with military attack. The invasions and threats have caused a dramatic swing in Muslim sentiment away from the US.
Prior to Bush's invasion of Iraq, a large majority of Muslims had a favorable opinion of America. Now only about 5 percent do.

A number of US commanders in Iraq and many Middle East experts have told the American public that the three year-old war in Iraq is serving both to recruit and to train terrorists for al Qaeda, which has grown many times its former size. Moreover, the US military has concluded that al Qaeda has succeeded in having its members elected to the new Iraqi government.

We have seen similar developments both in Egypt and in Pakistan. In the recent Egyptian elections, the radical Muslim Brotherhood, despite being suppressed by the Egyptian government, won a large number of seats. In Pakistan elements friendly or neutral toward al Qaeda control about half of the government. In Iraq, Bush's invasion has replaced secular Sunnis with Islamist Shia allied with Iran.

And now with the triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian election, we see the total failure of Bush's Middle Eastern policy. Bush has succeeded in displacing secular moderates from Middle Eastern governments and replacing them with Islamic extremists. It boggles the mind that this disastrous result makes Americans feel safer!

What does it say for democracy that half of the American population is unable to draw a rational conclusion from unambiguous facts?
....
Americans need desperately to understand that 95 percent of all Muslim terrorists in the world were created in the past three years by Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Americans need desperately to comprehend that if Bush attacks Iran and Syria, as he intends, terrorism will explode, and American civil liberties will disappear into a thirty year war that will bankrupt the United States.

The total lack of rationality and competence in the White House and the inability of half of the US population to acquire and understand information are far larger threats to Americans than terrorism.

America has become a rogue nation, flying blind, guided only by ignorance and hubris. A terrible catastrophe awaits.

Call 'Em Like You See 'Em

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," he told Republican officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable suspicion" for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical issues" and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

Who is the Goat?

Plantation' Politics and Other Games

By Michael Kinsley

Sunday, January 29, 2006; Page B07

It seems to be time once again to play Kick the Democrats. Everyone can play, including Democrats. The rules are simple. When Republicans lose elections, it is because they didn't get enough votes. When Democrats lose elections, it is because they have lost their principles and lost their way. Or they have kept their principles, which is an even worse mistake.

They represent no one who is not actually waiting in line for a latte at a Starbucks within 150 yards of the east or west coastline. They are mired in trivial lifestyle issues like, oh, abortion and gay rights and Americans killing and dying in Iraq, while the Republicans serve up meat and potatoes for real Americans like privatizing Social Security and making damned sure the government knows who is Googling whom in this great country.

Just repeat these formulas until a Democrat has been sent into frenzies of self-flagellation or reduced to tears.

There is always a pickup game of Kick the Democrats going on somewhere. But something about the Alito confirmation -- the pathetic and apparently surprising inability of 45 Democratic senators to stop 55 Republicans from approving anyone they want -- seems to have made the game suddenly a lot more popular.

How dire is it for the Democrats? George Will noted on TV the other day that they have lost five of the past seven presidential elections. This baseball-like statistic -- "Democrats have lost X of the past Y elections" -- has been one of Will's favorite tropes over the generations. But why now five out of seven? Two out of the past four would be equally accurate, and not nearly as grim. And then there is the election of 2000. We can argue forever (and will) about who won that election, but if the question is whose views attracted more voters, there is no dispute that the answer is the Democrats. Attributing 2000 to the Democrats means they have won two of the past three elections, three of the past four, and a non-apocalyptic three of the magic seven.
....
Nevertheless, I've been impressed all over again the past couple weeks with the Republicans' skill at political stone soup -- making something out of nothing. In this case it's a remark by Hillary Clinton comparing Congress to a plantation. Near as I can tell, the alleged objection to "plantation" is -- by analogy to the Holocaust -- that any metaphorical use of the word is an insult to the real slaves and their descendants. This particular stone soup would be overheated even if the ingredients were fresh and sincere. But the fuss is obviously cynical, coming as it does from people -- talk radio hosts, the editors of the Wall Street Journal: you know the type -- who usually stalk the microphones to denounce excessive sensitivity and its smothering effect on political debate.

It appears that we need to update Godwin's law.

Feeling Safer?

Courtesy of ThinkProgress here's a reminder of the KATRINA TIMELINE, while the MSM is in the process of obscuring the facts:

Friday, August 26

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA [Office of the Governor]

GULF COAST STATES REQUEST TROOP ASSISTANCE FROM PENTAGON: At a 9/1 press conference, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, commander, Joint Task Force Katrina, said that the Gulf States began the process of requesting additional forces on Friday, 8/26. [DOD]
Saturday, August 27

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN MISSISSIPPI [Office of the Governor]

5AM CDT — KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 3 HURRICANE [CNN]

GOV. BLANCO ASKS BUSH TO DECLARE FEDERAL STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA: “I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster.” [Office of the Governor]

FEDERAL EMERGENCY DECLARED, DHS AND FEMA GIVEN FULL AUTHORITY TO RESPOND TO KATRINA: “Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.” [White House]
Sunday, August 28

2AM CDT – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

7AM CDT – KATRINA UPGRADED TO CATEGORY 5 HURRICANE [CNN]

MORNING — LOUISIANA NEWSPAPER SIGNALS LEVEES MAY GIVE: “Forecasters Fear Levees Won’t Hold Katrina”: “Forecasters feared Sunday afternoon that storm driven waters will lap over the New Orleans levees when monster Hurricane Katrina pushes past the Crescent City tomorrow.” [Lafayette Daily Advertiser]

9:30 AM CDT — MAYOR NAGIN ISSUES FIRST EVER MANDATORY EVACUATION OF NEW ORLEANS: “We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” said Nagin. “This is going to be an unprecedented event.” [Times-Picayune]

AFTERNOON — BUSH, BROWN, CHERTOFF WARNED OF LEVEE FAILURE BY NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR: Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center: “‘We were briefing them way before landfall. … It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped.’” [Times-Picayune; St. Petersburg Times]

4PM CDT – NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ISSUES SPECIAL HURRICANE WARNING: In the event of a category 4 or 5 hit, “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer. … At least one-half of well-coseverely damaged or destroyed. … Power outages will last for weeks. … Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.” [National Weather Service]

LATE PM - REPORTS OF WATER TOPPLING OVER LEVEE: “Waves crashed atop the exercise path on the Lake Pontchartrain levee in Kenner early Monday as Katrina churned closer.” [Times-Picayune]

APPROXIMATELY 30,000 EVACUEES GATHER AT SUPERDOME WITH ROUGHLY 36 HOURS WORTH OF FOOD [Times-Picayune]

LOUISIANA NATIONAL GUARD REQUESTS 700 BUSES FROM FEMA FOR EVACUATIONS: FEMA sends only 100 buses. [Boston Globe]
Monday, August 29

7AM CDT - KATRINA MAKES LANDFALL AS A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE [CNN]

8AM CDT – MAYOR NAGIN REPORTS THAT WATER IS FLOWING OVER LEVEE: “I’ve gotten reports this morning that there is already water coming over some of the levee systems. In the lower ninth ward, we’ve had one of our pumping stations to stop operating, so we will have significant flooding, it is just a matter of how much.” [NBC’s “Today Show”]

MORNING — BUSH CALLS SECRETARY CHERTOFF TO DISCUSS IMMIGRATION: “I spoke to Mike Chertoff today — he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I knew people would want me to discuss this issue [immigration], so we got us an airplane on — a telephone on Air Force One, so I called him. I said, are you working with the governor? He said, you bet we are.” [White House]

MORNING – BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House]

11AM CDT — MICHAEL BROWN FINALLY REQUESTS THAT DHS DISPATCH 1,000 EMPLOYEES TO REGION, GIVES THEM TWO DAYS TO ARRIVE: “Brown’s memo to Chertoff described Katrina as ‘this near catastrophic event’ but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, ‘Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities.’” [AP]

The Day of the Lizard

Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change
Some Experts on Global Warming Foresee 'Tipping Point' When It Is Too Late to Act

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 29, 2006; Page A01

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.

There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world's fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.

The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."

"It's not something you can adapt to," Hansen said in an interview. "We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."

Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.

While both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets as a whole are gaining some mass in their cold interiors because of increasing snowfall, they are losing ice along their peripheries. That indicates that scientists may have underestimated the rate of disintegration they face in the future, Oppenheimer said. Greenland's current net ice loss is equivalent to an annual 0.008 inch sea level rise.

The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be "huge," Oppenheimer said. "Once you lost one of these ice sheets, there's really no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever."

Last year, the British government sponsored a scientific symposium on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change," which examined a number of possible tipping points. A book based on that conference, due to be published Tuesday, suggests that disintegration of the two ice sheets becomes more likely if average temperatures rise by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, a prospect "well within the range of climate change projections for this century."

The report concludes that a temperature rise of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit "is likely to lead to extensive coral bleaching," destroying critical fish nurseries in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Too-warm sea temperatures stress corals, causing them to expel symbiotic micro-algae that live in their tissues and provide them with food, and thus making the reefs appear bleached. Bleaching that lasts longer than a week can kill corals. This fall there was widespread bleaching from Texas to Trinidad that killed broad swaths of corals, in part because ocean temperatures were 2 degrees Fahrenheit above average monthly maximums.

Many scientists are also worried about a possible collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, a current that brings warm surface water to northern Europe and returns cold, deep-ocean water south. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who directs Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has run multiple computer models to determine when climate change could disrupt this "conveyor belt," which, according to one study, is already slower than it was 30 years ago. According to these simulations, there is a 50 percent chance the current will collapse within 200 years.

It's taken the WaPo a while to get on board. We reported what the rest of the scientists are thinking for quite some time now.

peratures rise by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, a prospect "well within the range of climate change projections for this century."

The report concludes that a temperature rise of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit "is likel

Wishful Thinking

When I lived in Boston, lo, these many years ago, there was this cool service that would deliver breakfast to your door on Sundays. They put a card on your house door on Saturdays, just like a hotel would, and you ticked the boxes for the things you wanted. I could never actually afford to use this service back then, but I sure could use it now. It sure would be delightful to have somebody else bring me a steaming plate of Eggs Benedict on a cold morning.

Skimming

Poor Nations Complain Not All Charity Reaches Victims

By STEPHANIE STROM
Published: January 29, 2006

Some foreign governments have begun to criticize international aid agencies for the way they raise and spend money, echoing the demands of many American donors that a larger part of their charitable gifts be used for the purposes for which they were originally intended.

The health minister of Niger fired the opening salvo at the end of the year, charging that some international aid groups had overstated the extent of the hunger crisis in his drought- and locust-ravaged country as part of a strategy to raise money for their own purposes.

"We will not allow any NGO or any other organization to manage funds behind our backs and make publicity, propaganda even, to raise money," said Aby Ibrahim, the Niger minister, referring to nongovernmental organizations by the international shorthand by which they are known, Reuters reported.

He said Niger would begin investigating organizations to ascertain how they are using the money, though relief workers there say there is no evidence that his government has carried through on that threat.

Such a posture is risky, since volunteer organizations could simply withdraw and leave Niger to cope with its problems on its own.

But many governments are prickly about seeming unable to handle domestic crises on their own. Officials of relief groups hinted privately that just such sensitivity might have motivated Mr. Ibrahim's outburst and said they stood by their assessments of Niger's problems.

"Unless the international community renews its commitment to deal with the consequences of the food crisis in Niger, including the prevailing level of malnutrition, the country faces a second year of extreme suffering and hardship," said Trevor Rowe, of the United Nations World Food Program.

Since Mr. Ibrahim spoke, other government officials have expressed frustration with how aid groups deploy the private money they raise.

An official in Sri Lanka said his government had quietly complained to the French government about Doctors Without Borders after the group contacted donors following the tsunami in December 2004 and asked if it could use more than three-quarters of the money it had raised for that disaster to address other crises.

Indonesia, too, is vexed that aid agencies have scaled back their commitments to build housing in Banda Aceh after raising money for that purpose and other projects to aid tsunami victims.

The countries are asking: "Are you spending the money you collected for my country and where are you spending it?" said Richard Walden, president and chief executive of Operation USA, a Los Angeles-based disaster relief organization.

Let's see. We have The Red Cross Scandal and the Katrina disaster, so it is only natural to wonder what else has gone wrong.

Our Booming Economy

Via Suze:

Max speaks:

A number of observers seem to suggest that the economy is doing very well and that people mistakenly believe that the economy is on the wrong track. The facts are that trends in almost every indicator of the aggregate ‘macro’ economy –- GDP growth, investment, payroll employment, personal income-- have been inferior in this business cycle and recovery when measured against earlier comparable periods.

Moreover, the wages of workers (inflation-adjusted) fell in 2005 from 2004 levels and have been falling for several years. For instance, the wage (inflation-adjusted) of the median worker fell 1.3% in 2005. Given declining wages it is not surprising that the typical (median) household income fell for five years in a row through 2004 (2005 income data are not yet available), poverty has risen, and families have gone deeper into debt. Furthermore, health care costs are taking a bigger bite out of family incomes. The bottom line is that people do not feel good about trends in the economy because the things that matter most to them - wages, jobs, family income -- have not been making them better off.

The administration claims that its tax cuts have led to jobs and growth. Yet, as we have shown, GDP, investment and other trends do not support this claim. A simpler way of showing the failure of the tax cuts to deliver jobs is to note that private sector jobs, excluding those generated by military or other government spending, have not increased since early 2001. If private sector jobs have not been created in significant numbers, how can one say that the tax cuts have worked?

The folks I hang out with are hurting, since we don't live on our investments.

The Foreign Press

While you are bleeding at the gas pump, the oil companies are taking record profits home to their shareholders. Just thought you'd want to know.

But you have to read the foreign press to learn this.

Cred

Here is the link to the bird flu session from the World Economic Summit in Davos last week. If your relatives and friends won't listen to you, maybe they will listen to the world's bankers, who are scared out of their very expensive suits by the prospect. This is an audio file.

Fun With Protein

Not everyone loves goat cheese. I do. I'm nuts about it. If you aren't, skip this post and go to those below. You'll find politics, religion and food from the left side. Hmm, on food, there is no partisan reaction. This is just plain good food, the stuff I cook in my kitchen, and you are welcome to my table regardless of your politics. We are all humans here, and we need to eat.

This is a recipe that's cheap. The Italians call that "cucina de magre," the cooking of the poor, and it is the way I prefer to eat most of the time. Goat cheese is fairly pricey here, but it isn't in in Italy.

Goat Cheese Ravioli with Creamy Walnut Sauce

Filling:
1 cup crumbled goat cheese
1/2 cup finely chopped toasted walnuts
1/2 cup minced fresh basil
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon minced lemon peel

3 large pasta sheets

Sauce:
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup finely chopped shallots
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 cups whipping cream
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup freshly grated Asiago or Parmesan

In a bowl combine the goat cheese, walnuts, basil, oil, garlic and lemon peel, and mix well. Set aside.

Put pasta sheet on work surface with long side facing you and put packed teaspoon of filling 2 inches apart lengthwise along half of the pasta sheet (you should have 10 to 12 mounds). Around each mound of filling brush dough very lightly with water. Fold dough lengthwise in half over mounds of filling, gently pressing around mounds to force out any air, and seal edges well. With a fluted pastry wheel trim edges and cut between mounds of filling to separate ravioli.

Line a large tray with a dry kitchen towel and arrange ravioli in 1 layer. Make more ravioli with remaining 2 pieces of dough and remaining filling in same manner, transferring to kitchen-towel-lined tray and arranging in 1 layer. Ravioli may be made 8 hours ahead and chilled on towel-lined tray, covered loosely with plastic wrap.

Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the walnuts and cook, stirring, until brown and fragrant, about 3 minutes. Remove nuts from the pan. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter, shallots and garlic, and saute for 1 minute. Add the wine and cream, and bring to a boil. Cook over medium-high until the liquid has thickened and reduced by nearly 50 percent in volume, about 4 minutes. Stir in the basil, salt and pepper. Remove from the heat and cover to keep warm.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the ravioli until they are tender and rise to the surface, carefully stirring to keep them from sticking together, 3 to 4 minutes. Drain in a colander. Transfer the cooked ravioli to the pan with the sauce, and gently toss to coat and heat through. Divide the ravioli among 6 serving plates or shallow bowls, and sprinkle each serving with grated cheese. Serve immediately.

This is another of those dishes which will cause you to hug yourself. This is earthy cooking and worthy of sharing with friend. If you have the pasta in the freezer, which is the way to keep this dish pre-cooking the pasta, you have an instant hit on your hands.

Frozen fresh pasta takes a minute or so to cook longer than that which just came up off your pastry board. Check it with a slotted spoon and your teeth.

This recipe is so good that I serve it as a main course. You can't really follow it with anything other than Tiramisu. Trust me on this, this is so good your guests will be talking about it for weeks, and your spouse will be asking when you are going to make it again.

Spinach Pasta

I'm completely politic'd out after that intense phone call with Senator Kennedy (we'll have another tomorrow or Monday morning, the Senator understands the power of the Netroots) and it is time for me to give you something to eat. Yes, I am thinking about Valentine's day recipes but haven't come up with a menu for you yet, though I have some "interesting" ideas.

Here's another of the "base" recipes, a standard spinach pasta from scratch. This is for the food processor, and if you don't own one, I recommend it as part of your "batterie de cuisine." Yes, I've lived without one. Life is better with one. Ask for it for your birthday if you can't fund it yourself. It will make your life so much easier that you really won't believe it. I have the basic, bottom of the line Cuisanart, and I recommend nearly everything that manufacturer makes (I love their cookware, as well.) I assume the other manufacturers do the same, but the cookbook included with the Cuisanart machine is just excellent and using the book taught me how to use the machine. Life is better with homemade mayonaisse.

I love spinach pasta and the extra hit of vitamins and minerals it gives your cooking. This is easy with a food processor.

5 ounces fresh spinach, blanched and squeezed dry
1 pound all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
6 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, salt and blanched spinach. Process to mix well. With the machine running, add the eggs, egg yolks, and olive oil through the feed tube, and process until it resembles wet cornmeal, about 2 minutes.

Take a handful of dough at a time and form into a firm ball. Repeat with the remaining dough. Roll out each dough ball into desired shape in a pasta machine according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Bring a pot of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta until just al dente, about 2 minutes. Drain in a colander and serve with desired sauce.

You might find this amusing, but I use a laundry rack, the kind you keep in the laundry, for drying my pasta, I don't have room for a formal pasta rack. This is a small place. This recipe makes about a pound and a half of pasta which will serve six as main course. I don't have room for six people in my dining room, so the overage goes into the refrigerator after it has dried. The laundry rack gets wiped down carefully before I put it into food use.

If you don't have a pasta rolling machine, make your noodles the old fashioned way. Sprinkle some flour on a pastry board and get out a rolling pin. Take that lump of dough and roll it out like you would a pie crust, about a 1/8th inch thick and slice the noodles with a knife. Fresh noodles are so good that you will pinch yourself and wonder why you haven't made them before. I have a food processor and a pasta machine, a virtual pasta factory for a solo householder. If you like pasta and eat it often, you will be happy with this combo, which will set you back about $150 bucks, and give you many meals of great pleasure. And, omigod, will your dinner guests love you. The "fresh pasta" you get in the dairy case at the grocery can't hold a candle to this.

I don't eBay, but you can probably find all of this equipment used much more cheaply. It will need to be cleaned very carefully before you use it if you buy it used. The Atlas Pasta Machine is what most Italian home cooks use. Having spent a fair amount of time in Italian homes, I endorse it as well and it is what I use.

No, they don't advertise here, the fools, so this is an independent endorsement.

Filibuster Alito

If you live in a state with a Democratic Senator, you need to get on the horn and call them now. Tell the staffer who answers the phone that you are absolutely opposed to Judge Alito and that you expect your Democratic Senators to support the filibuster. This stuff works. I'm hearing about voice mail boxes which are already stuffed. Use the fax machine, write emails, use every mode possible. Even Senators like Bob Byrd who have declared that they are supporting Alito, get on the horn and let them know you are not happy about that. Alito has a track record of supporting business over the individual, the state over the disabled and we know he'll vote to restrict and abolish women's right to their own bodies. This is the critical weekend and if we can muster sufficient outrage, we have a chance to defeat Scalito. We do have the power.

Blogs and Politics

Blogs Attack From Left as Democrats Reach for Center

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 28, 2006; A06

Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience.

These activists -- spearheaded by battle-ready bloggers and making their influence felt through relentless e-mail campaigns -- have denounced what they regard as a flaccid Democratic response to the Supreme Court fight, President Bush's upcoming State of the Union address and the Iraq war. In every case, they have portrayed party leaders as gutless sellouts.

First, liberal Web logs went after Democrats for selecting Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to deliver the response to Bush's speech next Tuesday. Kaine's political sins: He was too willing to drape his candidacy in references to religion and too unwilling to speak out aggressively against Bush on the Iraq war. Kaine has been lauded by party officials for finding a victory formula in Bush country by running on faith, values and fiscal discipline.

Many Web commentators wanted Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a leading critic of the Iraq war who advocates a speedy withdrawal, to be the opposition voice on the State of the Union night. Most Democratic lawmakers have distanced themselves from the Murtha position. "What the hell are they thinking?" was the title of liberal blogger Arianna Huffington's column blasting the Kaine selection.

"Blogs can take up a lot of time if you're on them," Kaine said to reporters Thursday. "You can get a lot done if you're not bitterly partisan.
....
Liberal activists seemed to have slightly more influence with their campaign to persuade Senate Democrats to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. Despite several polls showing that the public opposes the effort, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday strongly advocated the filibuster plan -- and wrote about his choice on the Daily Kos, a Web site popular with liberals. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), a leading liberal and critic of the Iraq war, told reporters Kerry's viewpoint is not shared by most in a culturally conservative swing state such as West Virginia. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) also opposes the filibuster.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is another frequent target of the Internet attacks. Code Pink, an antiwar women's group with a flashy Web site, plans to protest one of Clinton's weekend fundraisers and is using the Web site to rally people against the New York Democrat. The critics say Clinton has not challenged Bush aggressively enough on Iraq.

"The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left."

The blogs-vs.-establishment fight represents the latest version of a familiar Democratic dispute. It boils down to how much national candidates should compromise on what are considered core Democratic values -- such as abortion rights, gun control and opposition to conservative judges -- to win national elections.

Hmmm. Makes you wonder why I'm about to get on a conference call with Senator Kennedy.

Making Shft Up

Alito's mythical feel-good America
# Alito's feel-good vision of America before hippies and protests simply isn't true.

By Jonathan Zimmerman, JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools."

ONCE UPON A TIME, Americans lived by a few simple maxims: God, country and family. Children respected their parents; students listened to their teachers; citizens followed the law. Then along came the 1960s, when liberal elites undermined traditional sources of authority. College kids smoked dope, feminists burned their bras and black militants burned down the cities. So now we have welfare, divorce, crime and a sick society that has lost its moral compass.

That's the Republican Party line on the 1960s, when everything good turned sour. Well, maybe not everything. Amid the tumult and violence, a few Americans held fast to timeless American values. And that's where our next prospective Supreme Court justice comes in.

Samuel A. Alito Jr., you see, has become the GOP's anti-'60s cultural hero. Republican supporters seized eagerly on Alito's opening remarks at his confirmation hearing, when he compared his traditional upbringing in Hamilton Township, N.J., to the chaos and unrest he encountered at Princeton University.

Hamilton was "an unpretentious, down-to-earth community," Alito recalled, where kids went to school in the morning and played baseball in the afternoon. But at Princeton, where Alito enrolled in 1968, he found something else. "I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly," Alito said at the hearing. "I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community."

Alito's story meshes perfectly with the larger Republican narrative about the 1960s: A lot of bad things happened, but a few good people resisted them. "Judge Alito is a paragon of the oldfashioned working-class ethic," gushed the New York Times' David Brooks. "In a culture that celebrates the rebel … he respects tradition, order and authority."

To Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report, Alito symbolizes the "dutiful people" who adhered to tradition when the "beautiful people" attacked it. "While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein's apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers," Barone declared, "ordinary people … were going to work, raising their families and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world."

There's only one problem with this GOP version of postwar history: It isn't true. The feel-good Republican vision of pre-'60s America is a myth. Urban kids were already using drugs in the 1950s, when J. Edgar Hoover called heroin a menace to American society. The FBI was busily harassing gays, who formed visible communities in many cities. And urban poverty was on the rise, even as most middle-class Americans looked the other away.

Most of all, a vicious racism infected enormous swaths of American society. And not just in the "Jim Crow" South, which is the story we know best, but in the urban North as well. In such cities as Chicago and Detroit, whites organized to keep African Americans out of their neighborhoods. They rallied outside city housing agencies to bar black tenants; they picketed white homeowners who sold property to black buyers. Even more, as University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue has shown, whites often assaulted and vandalized blacks who did move into white areas. Were all whites racist? Of course not. But we can no longer pretend that they uniformly "respected authority" and "followed the law," as Brooks and Barone maintain.

This is what truly infuriates me about the Alito nomination. He and Bush are alike in this regard: it's all about resentment by the privileged class who feel that their entitlements are being challenged. Demonizing poor people, women (feminazis) and minorities who have the temerity to demand that they be treated like human beings has been the Republican way for decades.

SOP

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: January 29, 2006

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," he said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

Mr. Acosta said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on the earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute on Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.

He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled, and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.

But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

I have a lot of acquaintances in the career civil service across all the agencies. I'm hearing the same from all of them.

Action Now

Bob Fertik writes:

The Alito 48 Submitted by Bob Fertik on January 27, 2006 - 12:13am.Sam Alito

Saturday Updates:

* Bush is freaking out! He used his Saturday radio address to demand an "upperdown" vote, exactly 91 days after denying Harriet Miers her "upperdown" vote! Maybe he's reading his hopeless polls?
* The corporate media whores are freaking out!
* Pro-filibuster additions: Paul Sarbanes
* Three Democratic men tell us to go fuck ourselves: Mark Pryor, Ken Salazar, and Kent Conrad
* Read these great blogs from BuzzFlash and BradBlog. And for off-topic fun, don't miss Bob Geiger's Saturday Cartoons.

We need to stop George Bush from getting 60 Senators to end the filibuster on Monday at 4:30 p.m.

That means we must convince 41 Senators to either support a filibuster or stay away from the Senate on Monday, preferably by visiting maimed soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital.

Below is a list of 44 Democrats, 1 Independent, and 3 Republicans whose support is possible - the "Alito 48."

We will keep a tally below, relying on you to report back on your calls.

* Crossed out names support the filibuster - don't call them
* Underlined names will be absent - which is good but keep calling them
* Bold names will probably vote against Alito, but oppose the filibuster - call them first! (Our info sources are numbered and linked)
* Regular names will probably vote against Alito, but have not declared their position on a filibuster - call them second!
* Italic names will vote for Alito and against the filibuster - call them third and try to convince them to change!

This is the latest tally:

Current
Total Goal We Lose
Filibuster supporter: 13 Plan to be Absent: 0 13 48 -
Filibuster opponent: 6+3 Alito supporter: 4 13 0 8

Here are the "Filibuster 48" with their direct phone numbers. You can also use these toll-free numbers (and ask for the Senators by name): 888-355-3588 or 888-818-6641.

Ask the question clearly: will Senator X support John Kerry's filibuster of Judge Alito, or will (s)he oppose Kerry's filibuster?

We need a firm yes or no - be polite but persistent.

Post the results of your calls in the comments below.

Filibuster Supporters

Barbara Boxer (D- CA) , 202-224-3553
Dianne Feinstein (D- CA) , 202-224-3841 (1,)
Christopher J. Dodd (D- CT), 202-224-2823 (1,)
Richard J. Durbin (D- IL) , 202-224-2152
John F. Kerry (D- MA) , 202-224-2742
Edward M. Kennedy (D- MA) , 202-224-4543
Paul S. Sarbanes (D- MD), 202-224-4524
Debbie A. Stabenow (D- MI) , 202-224-4822
Harry Reid (D- NV) , 202-224-3542
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D- NY) , 202-224-4451
Charles Schumer (D- NY) , 202-224-6542
Ron Wyden (D- OR) , 202-224-5244
Russell D. Feingold (D- WI) , 202-224-5323

Filibuster Undecideds

Blanche Lambert Lincoln (D- AR), 202-224-4843
Joseph I. Lieberman (D- CT), 202-224-4041
Thomas R. Carper (D- DE), 202-224-2441
Daniel K. Inouye (D- HI), 202-224-3934
Tom Harkin (D- IA), 202-224-3254
Barack Obama (D- IL), 202-224-2854
Evan Bayh (D- IN), 202-224-5623
Barbara A. Mikulski (D- MD), 202-224-4654
Carl Levin (D- MI), 202-224-6221
Mark Dayton (D- MN), 202-224-3244
Max Baucus (D- MT), 202-224-2651
Frank Lautenberg (D- NJ), 202-224-3224
Robert Menendez (D- NJ), 202-224-4744
Jeff Bingaman (D- NM), 202-224-5521
Jack Reed (D- RI), 202-224-4642
Lincoln D. Chafee (R- RI), 202-224-2921
Patrick J. Leahy (D- VT), 202-224-4242
Maria Cantwell (D- WA), 202-224-3441
Patty Murray (D- WA), 202-224-2621
Herb Kohl (D- WI), 202-224-5653
John D. Rockefeller, IV (D- WV), 202-224-6472
James M. Jeffords (I- VT), 202-224-5141

Filibuster Opponents - silent & scared

Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D- DE) , 202-224-5042
Bill Nelson (D- FL), 202-224-5274
Daniel K. Akaka (D- HI) (1,), 202-224-6361
Mary Landrieu (D- LA) (1,), 202-224-5824
Byron L. Dorgan (D- ND) (1,), 202-224-2551
Olympia Snowe (R- ME) (1,), 202-224-5344

Filibuster Opponents - loud & proud

Mark Pryor (D- AR), 202-224-2353
Ken Salazar (D- CO) , 202-224-5852
Kent Conrad (D- ND) (1,), 202-224-2043
Alito Supporters

Ben Nelson (D-NE) 202-224-6551
Tim Johnson (D- SD) , 202-224-5842
Robert C. Byrd (D- WV) , 202-224-3954
Ted Stevens (R- AK) , 202-224-3004

Pick up the phone or the fax machine.

The Pattern of Not Caring

Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: January 28, 2006

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — The White House was beset by the "fog of war" in the crucial days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, leaving it unable to respond properly to the unfolding catastrophe, House investigators said Friday after getting the most detailed briefing yet on how President Bush's staff had handled the events.

The closed-door briefing, attended mostly by House committee aides, was provided by Kenneth Rapuano, who as Mr. Bush's deputy domestic security adviser was the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck. The meeting was a compromise, a result of White House objections to the investigators' requests for copies of e-mail messages and other correspondence from top presidential aides.

Mr. Rapuano, those present said, acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.

But Mr. Rapuano said that before he left that night, the White House received a separate report from the Army Corps of Engineers saying an evaluation of the levees was still under way.

The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."

"We are left with a picture of a White House that was plagued by the fog of war," said David Marin, the Republican staff director to the House committee investigating the government's response to the hurricane. "The committee is likely to find a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information — and that had consequences."

Trent Duffy, the deputy White House press secretary, who also attended the briefing, acknowledged that all levels of the government had suffered from a lack of clarity about the events as they developed.

"There was a lack of situational awareness at all levels," Mr. Duffy said in an interview on Friday. "That is one of the biggest lessons everyone in emergency preparedness has learned because of the storm."

With the House not yet in session, only one lawmaker from the investigative committee — its chairman, Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia — was present for the briefing. Mr. Rapuano told him and the staff investigators that the White House role had been to monitor the situation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, were operationally in charge, he said.

The investigators expressed frustration that the White House did not seem to have been more actively involved. But Mr. Duffy, echoing a point made by Mr. Rapuano, said: "The White House should not be making combat decisions in Iraq. The same is true for a domestic emergency response."

The committee staff members also asked why it had taken Mr. Bush until the following Saturday, nearly a week after the storm, to order a large number of federal troops to the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Rapuano said that the Pentagon had already started to send troops and that in fact 5,000 of them had arrived by that point.

Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, had asked for many more three days earlier, but Mr. Rapuano said the problem was that she had not provided specifics as to what kind of troops she needed.

Eric Lipton, this is inadequate reporting. We now know that W was warned about possible breach of the levees 48 hours before Katrina hit. Fog of war my ass. This is plain and simple incompetence and the NYT is too fucking cowardly to call it.

Anyone who knew anything about disaster planning knew about this.

W was cutting brush in Crawford and couldn't be bothered to notice this anymore than he could be bothered to notice the Presidential Daily Brief on August 6, 2001 which warned of the coming attack.

Scorpions

A wrong-way agency

FOR TOO LONG, THE EPA HAS BEEN AWOL. Once a proud protector of public well-being, the Environmental Protection Agency has become an agency that too often ignores science and must be dragged into taking even the smallest steps. Even worse, it prevents other public agencies from moving forward with plans to protect the environment.

The EPA was criticized last week by the Government Accountability Office for its weak efforts to keep lead out of drinking water. Its own inspector general reported last year that the agency ignored scientific evidence in its poorly planned effort to come up with soft limits on mercury pollution. Its requirements for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada were thrown out of court in 2004 because they fell far short of those called for by the National Academy of Sciences.

Now the EPA would like to weaken rules on toxic reporting, and it is ignoring a key recommendation of its own Scientific Advisory Committee — a first, according to many veterans — to propose keeping annual levels of particulates at their current levels. The microscopic particles are a stubborn pollutant in Southern California's air and can cause heart disease, asthma and poor lung development in children.

Perhaps most frustrating to the rest of the world — and many U.S. states — the EPA wants nothing to do with regulating greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Twelve states, including California, sued to force the EPA into doing its rightful job, but the courts ruled against them; the EPA claims it lacks the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Last month, the top U.S. negotiator walked out of the international talks in Montreal on cutting greenhouse gases. It was left to representatives of individual states to show the world that this country does care about global warming — even if its leaders don't.

I know some of the career civil servants at EPA. They are frustrated and angry that the "leadership" of the agency are political appointees with ties to the industries which they are supposed to regulate. That's the pattern of Bush appointees.

Whatever they tell you, they are knifing you behind your back.

Hearts and Minds

Documents show U.S. military in Iraq detain wives
27 Jan 2006 23:49:56 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - U.S. forces in Iraq, in two instances described in military documents, took custody of the wives of men believed to be insurgents in an apparent attempt to pressure the suspects into giving themselves up.

Both incidents occurred in 2004. In one, members of a shadowy military task force seized a mother who had three young children, still nursing the youngest, "in order to leverage" her husband's surrender, according to an account by a civilian Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer.

In the other, an e-mail exchange includes a U.S. military officer asking "have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?"

The documents were among thousands obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

"This is not an acceptable tactic," ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said on Friday, referring to seizing a wife to try to catch a husband, "nor are any of the other abusive techniques acceptable. We know that abusive techniques were employed in a systemic manner across Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay."

Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said: "It's very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened. ... When you see an individual e-mail note, it's oftentimes very confusing to figure out how that particular case fits into an overall, larger puzzle."

Boyce also said the military has thoroughly looked at "any allegation against soldiers of misconduct or abuse of detainees."

A June 10, 2004, memo written by the DIA employee, labeled as "secret," referred to "violations of the Geneva Convention" relating to detainee abuse and illegal detention of noncombatants.

'THREE YOUNG CHILDREN'

It described the actions of Task Force 6-26, which has been mentioned in other documents in connection with allegations of detainee abuse, and stated that on May 9, 2004, task force personnel detained the wife of "a suspected terrorist" in Tarmiya, Iraq.

"The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the house, one being as young as six months and still nursing. Her husband was the primary target of the raid, with other suspect personnel subject to detainment as well," the memo stated.

"During the pre-operational brief, it was recommended by TF (task force) personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender," the memo stated. Its author said that "I objected to the detainment of the young mother to the raid team leader" and "I believed it was a dead issue."

The memo stated that "I determined that the wife could provide no actionable intelligence leading to the arrest of her husband."

"Despite my protest, (the) raid team leader detained her anyway," stated the memo, whose author officially reported the incident within the chain of command. The memo said the wife was released two days later to the custody of a tribal sheik.

In the other case, a U.S. lieutenant colonel e-mailed, "What are you guys doing to try to get the husband -- have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife? ... or something more sophisticated, I suspect, from the 'not necessarily the cool guys, but the guys with the cool stuff?'"

A later e-mail stated, "These ladies fought back extremely hard during the original detention. They have shown indications of deceipt (sic) and misinformation."

I'm checking to see how many Geneva Conventions this violates.

IOKIYAR

Mr. Abramoff's Meetings, Again

Saturday, January 28, 2006; Page A20

IF A TYPICAL picture is worth a thousand words, a picture of President Bush with Jack Abramoff, we suppose, might be worth about 10,000. And so we understand the desire of our more visually inclined colleagues to obtain photos of the president and the criminal. But the focus on the photos distracts from a more important question that the president managed to duck in his news conference Thursday: Who in the White House and administration met with Mr. Abramoff, and what were those meetings about? .... The president himself attended a White House meeting with some of Mr. Abramoff's clients. How did that get set up? The White House acknowledges that Mr. Abramoff had some "staff-level meetings" there. With whom, and about what?

Republicans didn't tolerate this kind of behavior from the Clinton White House in the midst of its fundraising scandal. "At every turn, they are stonewalling, covering up and hiding," Haley Barbour, then the head of the Republican National Committee, said as the Clinton administration tried to brush off questions about its fundraising before the 1996 election. Mr. Barbour complained of the administration's "utter contempt . . . for the public's right to know."

Such obstructionism is no more acceptable now. The public understands this: Three-fourths of those surveyed in a new Washington Post/ABC poll said the White House should disclose the contacts. "This needs to be cleared up so the people have confidence in the system," Mr. Bush said. Our point exactly.

It's OK if you are a Republican.

The Pattern

Post-Katrina Promises Unfulfilled
On the Gulf Coast, Federal Recovery Effort Makes Halting Progress

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 28, 2006; A01

Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities, a review of events since the hurricane shows.

While the administration can claim some clear progress, Bush's ringing call from New Orleans's Jackson Square on Sept. 15 to "do what it takes" to make the city rise from the waters has not been matched by action, critics at multiple levels of government say, resulting in a record that is largely incomplete as Bush heads into next week's State of the Union address.

The problems include the slow federal cleanup of debris in Mississippi and Louisiana; a lack of authority for Bush's handpicked recovery coordinator, Donald E. Powell; the shortage and poor quality of housing for evacuees; and federal restrictions on reconstruction money and where coastal communities can rebuild.

With the onset of the hurricane season just four months away, there is no agreement on how to rebuild New Orleans, how to pay for that effort or even who is leading the cross-governmental partnership, according to elected leaders. While there is money to restore the city's flood defenses to protect against another Category 3 hurricane, it remains unclear whether merely reinforcing the levees will be enough to draw residents back.

New strains emerged this week when Bush aides rejected a plan by Rep. Richard H. Baker (R-La.) to set up a government corporation that would buy back the mortgages of storm-damaged homes around New Orleans. Instead, the government limited the use of $6.2 billion in grants to the rebuilding of 20,000 homes destroyed outside federally insured flood zones.

Dismayed state and local officials said the president's approach does not provide help for an additional 185,000 destroyed homes. They warned that the federal government's halting recovery effort is undermining, at a critical juncture, the confidence of homeowners, insurers and investors about returning.

"They gave us a ladder to reach all of our housing needs, but the top rungs are missing," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) said in statement from Baton Rouge. "You can't fix a $12 billion problem with $6 billion."

Without a government mechanism to compensate homeowners and then clean up and repackage entire, devastated neighborhoods for developers, much of the city will never be rebuilt, Baker said.

Below are some of the major promises Bush made in his Jackson Square speech, and how the government has fared:

· Housing. Bush promised to empty shelters quickly, meet the immediate needs of the displaced, register victims, and provide housing aid in the form of rental assistance and trailers.

In Mississippi, 33,378 occupied trailers are meeting 89 percent of the estimated housing needs. But there have been 34,000 repair requests and maintenance complaints, according to Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.).

In Louisiana, trailers have been provided for about 37 percent of the estimated 90,000 displaced families in need of housing. Officials acknowledge production bottlenecks and in-state battles over sites. Trailer costs have swelled from $19,000 to $75,000 apiece.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration are struggling to meet unprecedented demands. FEMA is providing rental assistance to 700,000 families, but about 75,000 people are still in hotels. In some places, there is a shortage of rental housing available for evacuees.

As of Jan. 16, 18,943 applications for rental help had yet to be processed. As of this week, the SBA said that 190,000 of 363,000 applications for disaster loans to homeowners and businesses are still pending.

"It just doesn't seem to be well organized," said Ronald D. Utt, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has written about disaster housing policy. "Things in some respects have gotten more confused than they were a couple weeks after the storm."

The reconstruction of New Orleans is brought to you by the same people who organized the reconstruction of Iraq. There is no plan.

The Souperbowl

These potato skins are simply sinful. If you are contributing to a pot luck, do the finish cooking at the host's house. The rest can be assembled the day before and refrigerated tightly covered.

3 lb russet (baking) potatoes (6 to 8 medium; preferably organic)
2 small heads garlic (2 inches in diameter)
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Prick each potato once or twice with a fork. Cut off and discard top fourth of garlic head, then wrap garlic tightly in foil. Bake garlic and potatoes on same rack in lower third of oven until potatoes are tender, 50 minutes to 1 hour. Remove potatoes from oven and cool on a metal rack 15 minutes. Continue to bake garlic until tender, about 15 minutes more, then cool in foil on rack.

While garlic cools, halve potatoes lengthwise, then quarter each half (to form short wedges). Scoop out potato flesh (reserving it for another use), leaving 1/4-inch-thick potato skins.

Increase oven temperature to 425°F.

Squeeze garlic into a small bowl, discarding garlic skins, and mash to a paste with butter, salt, and pepper using a fork.

Divide garlic paste among potato skins (about 1/2 teaspoon each), spreading evenly, then roast skins in a large shallow baking pan (1 inch deep) until golden and crisp, 20 to 25 minutes.

Cooks' note:
• Potato skins can be scooped out and spread with garlic paste (but not baked) 1 day ahead and chilled, loosely covered with foil. Bring to room temperature before baking.

Makes 8 servings.

Your guests might enjoy some herbed sour cream with this, but I'm a fan of Allouette's garlic and herb low fat spread. Which I also use in twiced baked potatoes topped with fresh chives. You can make a meal with those and some cruditees.

Expect these skins to vanish off the serving platter. They will be inhaled.

What to do with the potato innards leftover from this recipe? Serve potato and fennel soup with one of the sandwiches below.

CREAMY FENNEL AND POTATO SOUP

Fresh fennel bulbs and crushed fennel seeds add subtle anise flavor. Use a mortar and pestle to crush the fennel seeds, or simply place them in a plastic bag and pound them with a rolling pin. The soup can be made a day ahead and rewarmed before serving.

2 tablespoons olive oil
6 cups coarsely chopped cored fresh fennel bulbs (from about 4 large), fronds reserved
2 medium onions, chopped
8 ounces white-skinned potatoes, peeled, diced
4 cups (or more) canned low-salt chicken broth
2 teaspoons (or more) fresh lemon juice

1 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon fennel seeds, finely crushed
3/4 teaspoon dried tarragon

Heat oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add fennel bulbs, onions, and potatoes; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sauté until slightly softened, about 8 minutes. Add 4 cups broth and 2 teaspoons lemon juice; bring to boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until vegetables are very tender, about 30 minutes. Cool slightly.

Meanwhile, bring cream, fennel seeds, and tarragon to boil in heavy small saucepan. Reduce heat and simmer 5 minutes. Remove from heat; cover and let stand 20 minutes so that flavors blend.

Working in batches, puree soup in blender until smooth. Return soup to same pot. Stir in cream mixture. Simmer until flavors blend, thinning with more broth if desired, about 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and more lemon juice, if desired. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cool slightly. Chill until cold, then cover and keep chilled. Rewarm over medium heat, stirring occasionally.)

Ladle soup into 8 bowls. Garnish with reserved fennel fronds and serve.

Makes 8 first-course servings.

Because the potatoes are already cooked, don't add them until after the broth has already been boiled and reduced to a simmer.

As with the chili below, serve this to your football crowd in oversize disposable coffee cups with plastic spoons to make it spill-less and ease the clean up. This is an exceptional soup with the two sandwiches two posts below.

The Next Dinner

My next big cooking/kitchen intensive will be over Easter, probably but not necessarily at my brother the chef's place. We did this last year and it worked very well. He gets a little itchy when I'm in his kitchen and he's used to being the chef, so if he has something to say, I listen. I've been looking at my recipe collection and saving some new ones from my cookbooks and off the internets but haven't come up with a menu yet. Do you have a suggestion? Do you have a traditional menu for Easter that you'd like to tell us about? He's on a diet which he is pretty disciplined about, but even his doctor gives him Sundays off. That said, he's become a big proponent of lighter cuisine and I must say that Christmas was different but damn delicious. He's an innovative cook. My S-I-L has a tummy which is touchy to garlic and onions. I, of course, feel pretty crippled without garlic and onions, but my repertoire is fairly large. Suggest things which fall in the broad middle of standard American cooking and maybe I'll be cooking *your* menu for the next holiday.

I will be bringing wild rice bread. What goes with that besides some herbed "I can't believe it's not butter?"

Here is your Iron Chef challenge: the mystery ingedient for this meal is fresh herbs. Just don't ask me to make ice cream. Iron Chef insiders will get the joke.

I'm thinking stuffed chicken, they aren't fish people. But I'm open to pursuasion.

Hearty Pot Luck Fare

Are you going to a potluck this weekend? This baked pasta always gets rave reviews, it's an old Bon Apetit recipe from a dozen years ago or so that I've tinkered with.

PASTA SHELLS FILLED WITH FETA AND HERBS

Sauce
1/4 cup olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
2 28-ounce cans Italian plum tomatoes, chopped in processor with juices
1 cup chopped fresh basil

Filling
2 15-ounce containers ricotta cheese
14 ounces feta cheese, chopped
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
2 fresh chive bunches, chopped
2 eggs

1 12-ounce package jumbo pasta shells

Fresh basil sprigs

For sauce:
Heat oil in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and sauté 5 minutes. Add garlic and sauté until onion is tender, about 5 minutes. Add crushed red pepper and sauté 30 seconds. Add tomatoes. Simmer until sauce is reduced to 5 cups, stirring occasionally, about 1 hour. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Remove from heat and mix in basil. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover and chill.)

For filling:
Combine ricotta, 1 1/3 cups feta, 1/2 cup chopped basil and chives. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Mix in eggs.

Cook shells in large pot of boiling salted water until just tender but still firm to bite. Drain. Rinse with cold water until cool. Drain thoroughly.

Preheat oven 350°F. Spread 3/4 cup sauce over bottom of each of two 13 x 9 x 2-inch glass baking dishes. Fill 30 shells and divide between dishes. Top with remaining sauce. Sprinkle with remaining feta. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cool and refrigerate.) Bake shells until heated through, about 30 minutes. Garnish with basil sprigs.

Serves 6.

Since this recipe makes two pans, you can serve one and freeze the other. For a variation with meat, add a 1/4 pound of thinly juillienned prosciutto to the cheese sauce with no added salt. Or, add pealed and devained shrimp to the tomato sauce at the very end of its simmering, just before the dish is assembled. This is a truly delicious recipe with an amazing balance of textures and flavors, you will get many requests for the recipe.

If you are going to serve this at a buffet or sit down dinner party, serve fruit salad marinated in champagne with cinnamon and nutmeg for desert.

Croque-Monsieur

Are you having or contributing to a Superbowl party this weekend? Think beyond take-out and nachos. I'll have some ideas for you here.

These hearty sandwiches are a bistro staple. I lived on them on my first trip to France (given my very limited French at that time, I'd learned to say "croque-monsieur avec un vin blanc, s'il vous plait" and that was about it.) They are very satisfying, a little messy and meant to be eaten with knife and fork. This is the classic treatment.

1 cup finely grated Gruyère plus 2 tablespoons for sprinkling the sandwiches
2 tablespoons sour cream
3/4 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard
3/4 teaspoon kirsch
8 slices of homemade-type white bread
4 thin slices of cooked ham
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, softened
In a bowl stir together 1 cup Gruyère, the sour cream, the mustard, and the kirsch and spread 1 tablespoon of the mixture evenly over each bread slice. Arrange the ham on 4 of the bread slices and top it with the remaining bread slices, spread side down. Remove the crusts with a sharp knife and spread the tops of the sandwiches lightly with 2 tablespoons of the butter. Invert the sandwiches into a large skillet, spread the tops with the remaining 2 tablespoons butter, and grill the sandwiches over moderately high heat, turning them once, for 6 to 8 minutes, or until they are golden brown on both sides. Transfer the sandwiches with a metal spatula to a baking sheet, sprinkling them with the remaining 2 tablespoons Gruyère, and broil them under a preheated broiler about 4 inches from the heat for 2 to 3 minutes, or until the Gruyère is just melted.

Serves 4.

This is a very tasty vegetarian variation on the sandwich above.

TOASTED GRUYERE, GOLDEN ONION, AND APPLE SANDWICHES

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound onions, sliced thin
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves or 1/4 teaspoon dried, crumbled
2 teaspoons white-wine vinegar
4 oval slices rye bread
1/2 Granny Smith apple
1/4 pound thinly sliced Gruyère cheese (use a cheese plane if possible)
In a 10-inch heavy skillet heat oil over moderate heat until hot but not smoking and cook onions with rosemary, stirring occasionally, until golden, about 10 minutes. Stir in vinegar and salt and pepper to taste and cook until vinegar evaporates. Cool onion mixture.

Preheat broiler.

On a baking sheet toast both sides of bread about 3 inches from heat until golden. Core apple with a melon-ball cutter and cut crosswise into very thin slices. Divide onion mixture among toasts, spreading evenly, and cover with overlapping apple slices. Cover apple slices with Gruyère and broil sandwiches until cheese is melted and bubbling, about 1 minute.

Serves 4.

The Only Real Reporter In DC

As usual, Dan Froomkin comes up with better questions than anyone in the White House press pool:

Executive Power

Jim VandeHei writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush set limits yesterday on White House cooperation in three political disputes, saying he is determined to assert presidential prerogatives on such matters as domestic eavesdropping and congressional inquiries into Hurricane Katrina.

"In a mid-morning news conference, Bush told reporters he is skeptical of a proposed law imposing new oversights on his use of the National Security Agency to listen in on electronic communications. He also said that he will block White House aides from testifying about the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and that he will not release official White House photos of himself with former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff."

Bush made it sound like his pictures with Abramoff were purely from assembly-line style receiving lines. But that's not necessarily so. Some of the pictures appear to have been taken at the more intimate sort of events typically reserved to reward political allies.

VandeHei writes that Bush was also "adamant about not allowing top aides to testify about Hurricane Katrina. Bush, who has moved on several fronts over the past five years to strengthen the power of the presidency, said it would be damaging to him and future presidents if aides feared providing candid advice."

But what kind of advice Bush got is not the central point -- it's what kind of information he got, and what did he do with it? Isn't that fair game?

250 and going strong

For those of you who don't know... today is the 250th birthday of Mozart!

Kevin Drumm has a nice series of links for quizes and other fun things related to Wolfgang.

As for me... I've had on WCPE all day in my classroom since they are doing all Mozart all day. The also do streaming music over the web, so if you want to listen to some while at work, check them out.

Systematic Violations

ACLU Releases Government Photos

Reported By: Jon Shirek
Web Editor: Tracey Christensen
Last Modified: 1/25/2006 9:41:15 PM

The ACLU of Georgia released copies of government files on Wednesday that illustrate the extent to which the FBI, the DeKalb County Division of Homeland Security and other government agencies have gone to compile information on Georgians suspected of being threats simply for expressing controversial opinions.

Two documents relating to anti-war and anti-government protests, and a vegan rally, prove the agencies have been "spying" on Georgia residents unconstitutionally, the ACLU said. (Related: ACLU Complaint -- PDF file)

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

"They told me if I didn't give over the piece of paper I would go to jail and I refused and I went to jail, and the piece of paper was taken away from me at the jail and the officer who transferred me said that was why I was arrested," Childs said on Wednesday.

The government file lists anti-war protesters in Atlanta as threats, the ACLU said. The ACLU of Georgia accuses the Bush administration of labeling those who disagree with its policy as disloyal Americans.

"We believe that spying on American citizens for no good reason is fundamentally un-American, that it's not the place of the goverment or the best use of resources to spy on its own citizens and we want it to stop. We want the spies in our government to pack their bags, close up their notebooks, take their cameras home and not engage in the spying anymore," Gerald Weber of the ACLU of Georgia said during a news conference.

I guess once you start violating Constitutional amendments the urge to try to collect them all becomes inexorable.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Tentacles

Justice and Junkets

Published: January 27, 2006

Justice Antonin Scalia certainly has poor judgment when it comes to vacations.

Justice Scalia was apparently unchastened by the criticism of his 2004 duck-hunting excursion with Vice President Dick Cheney, one of that term's most prominent Supreme Court litigants. Last September, he skipped the swearing-in of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. because of another ethically dubious trip, this time to the posh Ritz-Carlton at the Beaver Creek ski resort in Colorado.

He was there to teach a 10-hour seminar over a couple of days for a conservative group, the Federalist Society. "Nightline" recently reported that the gig had left Justice Scalia plenty of time for tennis, fly-fishing and socializing with seminar participants, some of whom may have business before the Supreme Court. One Federalist Society cocktail reception was sponsored in part by the lobbying and law firm that used to employ Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay's convicted pal and benefactor for golf trips.

Justice Scalia's travel is part of a broader affliction on the federal bench. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2004, for example, that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts in recent years, including an $800 leather jacket, a $1,200 set of tires from Nascar and an extravagant vacation from a conservative activist. Federal judges below the Supreme Court level accept dozens of free vacations each year from well-heeled special interests under the guise of "judicial education."

The judicial lobbying problem is more serious in one respect than the scandal enveloping Congress. Lawmakers operate in an overtly political environment, but the decision-making process of judges is supposed to be impermeable to clever efforts by special interests to buy access and favor.

Three Democratic senators with a longstanding concern about this problem — Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and John Kerry of Massachusetts — are readying provisions to ban junkets and other compromising gifts for judges, which they hope to make part of their party's lobbying reform proposal. For Congress to pass a lobbying reform bill that curbs inappropriate perks for lawmakers but not for federal judges would be a scandal in itself.

One wonders about the song Abramoff is singing to the feds.

A Sinkhole, Not a Pothole

U.S. Economy Grows at Slowest Pace in 3 Years

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 27, 2006

Filed at 9:11 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy grew at only a 1.1 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year, the slowest pace in three years, amid belt-tightening by consumers facing spiraling energy costs.

Even with the feeble showing from October through December, the economy registered respectable overall growth of 3.5 percent for all of 2005 -- a year when business expansion was undermined by devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The Commerce Department report, released Friday, offered the latest figures on gross domestic product, the best measure of the country's economic standing.

The 1.1 percent growth rate in the fourth quarter marked a considerable loss of momentum from the third quarter's brisk 4.1 percent pace. The fourth-quarter's performance was even weaker than many analysts were forecasting. Before the release of the report, they were predicting the GDP to clock in at a 2.8 percent pace.

The 1.1 percent growth rate was the smallest gain since the final quarter of 2002, when the economy expanded at just a 0.2 percent rate.

The weakness in the final quarter of last year reflected consumers pulling back, cuts in government spending and businesses being more restrained in their capital spending.

Economists felt that the slowdown in the final quarter was more of a temporary setback rather than any harbinger of a sustained period of economic weakness ahead.

''The economy hit a pothole in the fourth quarter. I'm not at all worried about the health of the economy,'' said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. Zandi believes that economy in the current January-to-March quarter is already doing better and predicts economic growth will come in around a 4 percent pace.

In the fourth quarter, though, consumers turned cautious as high energy prices and rising borrowing costs took their toll budgets.

Consumer spending rose by just 1.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter, the slowest since the second quarter of 2001 when the economy was suffering through a recession.

Most of the weakness came as people sharply cut back on purchases of big-ticket goods, including cars and appliances. Spending on such ''durable'' goods dropped by a hefty 17.5 percent rate in the final quarter, the sharpest decline since the first quarter of 1987.

I don't know what the Moody's guy is smoking, but the winter isn't over and gas prices are still going up. I don't know what your heating bill looks like, but mine is a horror and this has been a mild winter so far.

The Unserious Administration

Using Our Fear

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, January 27, 2006; Page A23

Once upon a time we had a great wartime president who told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Now we have George W. Bush, who uses fear as a tool of executive power and as a political weapon against his opponents.

Franklin D. Roosevelt tried his best to allay his nation's fears in the midst of an epic struggle against fascism. Bush, as he leads the country in a war whose nature he is constantly redefining, keeps fear alive because it has been so useful. His political grand vizier, Karl Rove, was perfectly transparent the other day when he emerged from wherever he's been hiding the past few months -- consulting omens, reading entrails -- and gave the Republican National Committee its positioning statement for the fall elections: Vote for us or die.

Democrats "have a pre-9/11 worldview" of national security that is "deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong," Rove said. The clear subtext was that Americans would court mortal danger by electing Democrats. Go forth and scare the bejesus out of them, Rove was telling his party, because the more frightened they are, the better our chances.

To cultivate fear for partisan gain is never a political tactic to be proud of, but Rove's prescription of naked fearmongering is just plain reprehensible when the nation faces a shifting array of genuine, serious threats. This is a moment for ethical politicians -- and, yes, these days that seems like an oxymoron -- to speak honestly about what dangers have receded, what new dangers have emerged, and how the imperatives of liberty and security can be balanced.

From the likes of Rove, I guess, we shouldn't expect anything more noble than win-at-all-costs. But we do have the right to expect more from the president of the United States, and while Bush gives off none of Rove's Sith-lord menace, he has made the cultivation of fear a hallmark of his governance.

I can't get the thought of that August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief, the one headed "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US as Shrubelyu cut brush in Crawford

Son King

How do you stick a story like this on pg.6? Bush basically flipped off the Constitution yesterday!

Bush Reasserts Presidential Prerogatives

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 27, 2006

President Bush set limits yesterday on White House cooperation in three political disputes, saying he is determined to assert presidential prerogatives on such matters as domestic eavesdropping and congressional inquiries into Hurricane Katrina.

In a mid-morning news conference, Bush told reporters he is skeptical of a proposed law imposing new oversights on his use of the National Security Agency to listen in on electronic communications. He also said that he will block White House aides from testifying about the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and that he will not release official White House photos of himself with former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Facing repeated questions, Bush distanced himself from Abramoff, who is at the center of the biggest political corruption and bribery scandal in a generation. Bush said he does not recall having his picture taken with Abramoff or ever meeting him. Abramoff was a member of the exclusive club of Bush's $100,000 fundraisers known as Pioneers.

"Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that I'm a friend with him or know him very well," Bush told reporters.

Of course not, except when there is clear evidence that there is more than one picture and there is a huge effort on the part of the President's supporters to *ahem* delete all existing pictures and deny the ones that exist. Conservatives need to apply the Clinton test... namely if the President's last name was Clinton, would they approve. Better yet, if they were pictures of Al Gore at a Buddhist Temple would they be so calm?

It gets better though after the bump.

The president was similarly adamant about not allowing top aides to testify about Hurricane Katrina. Bush, who has moved on several fronts over the past five years to strengthen the power of the presidency, said it would be damaging to him and future presidents if aides feared providing candid advice.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a staunch supporter of Bush on foreign policy, has accused the White House of undermining the probe by refusing to detail the role of White House officials. "If people give me advice and they're forced to disclose that advice, it means the next time an issue comes up I might not be able to get unvarnished advice from my advisers," Bush said. "And that's just the way it works."

Umm... no. That didn't stop your friends in Congress 8 years ago from hauling everyone from the President to his girlfriend's book seller in front of a rouge lawyer determined to bring the President down at all costs.

On the issue of NSA eavesdropping on overseas communications to or from U.S. citizens, Bush said he is concerned about Congress writing a new spying law because it could force the government to provide details and clues about a top-secret program used to hunt down terrorists.

We need to know what did/did not take place with your pathetic efforts in the Gulf. Otherwise, you are in contempt of Congress and that's not a partisan issue.

What else was covered yesterday?

"There's no doubt in my mind it is legal," Bush said. Democrats have accused Bush of breaking the law by authorizing the spying program without approval from Congress or the courts. The debate is expected to dominate hearings, scheduled to begin Feb. 6, on the highly classified NSA program.

"But it's important for people to understand that this program is so sensitive and so important that if information gets out to how we run it or how we operate it, it'll help the enemy," he said. "Why tell the enemy what we're doing?"

Bush, why do you think that Bin Laden doesn't use cell phones anymore? The enemy isn't some comic book villain like HYDRA or S.P.E.C.T.R.E. from James Bond. .. they can adapt and plan and anticipate what you may do. More importantly, they know that the more you destroy the freedons that Americans have, the easier their job is.

If Clinton had done even a third of this, the public would have happily accepted his impeachment instead of trashing the Republican party in the '98 election. Why are their no principled Republicans willing to stand up to this blatant abuse of power?

Things That Make You Go "Hmmm"

Prosecutor Will Step Down From Lobbyist Case

By PHILIP SHENON and ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: January 27, 2006

WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 — The investigation of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist, took a surprising new turn on Thursday when the Justice Department said the chief prosecutor in the inquiry would step down next week because he had been nominated to a federal judgeship by President Bush.

The prosecutor, Noel L. Hillman, is chief of the department's public integrity division, and the move ends his involvement in an inquiry that has reached into the administration as well as the top ranks of the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.

The administration said that the appointment was routine and that it would not affect the investigation, but Democrats swiftly questioned the timing of the move and called for a special prosecutor.

The announcement came as Mr. Bush faced a barrage of questions about why he would not make public "grip-and-grin" photographs of him with Mr. Abramoff. The photographs apparently show Mr. Bush and Mr. Abramoff smiling at White House Hanukkah parties and Republican fund-raising receptions.

Mr. Bush's position, which he offered at a news conference on Thursday morning that was peppered with questions about Mr. Abramoff, was that the photographs were so common as to be almost meaningless and that it was part of his job "to shake hands with people and smile." He said he could not remember posing for the pictures, or, for that matter, even meeting Mr. Abramoff.

"I had my picture taken with him, evidently," Mr. Bush said. "I've had my picture taken with a lot of people. Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that I'm a friend with them or know them very well."

He said, "I'm also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they're not relevant to the investigation."

The White House, which announced Mr. Bush's selection of Mr. Hillman for the court in a routine e-mail message on Wednesday that included 15 other nominations to judgeships and federal jobs, dismissed the calls for a special prosecutor.

Hmmm. And I spent the afternoon yesterday talking about what a terrific job the career prosecutors in the public integrity section are going with Bob Borosage.

The Corrupt System

Medicare Drug Plan Leaves Out Supplies
# The benefit covers home IV medication but not the implements and care needed to administer it.

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The new Medicare drug program is denying supplies that seriously ill patients need to administer intravenous antibiotics and other medications at home. As a result, some patients are being referred to nursing homes, and others have had to go into hospitals.

Although no national estimates are available, the number of patients affected — including some with life-threatening diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis — could run into the thousands. One Anaheim pharmacy says 200 of its patients are having trouble.

Medicare officials say they are aggressively addressing the problem, which they attribute to restrictions in the law that created the prescription benefit and to difficulty communicating with states, pharmacies and medical providers.

Essentially, the prescription program allows coverage of the drugs but does not pay for the medical supplies and nursing help needed for the home infusion treatments to be safe and effective — a policy that effectively shuts down such treatment for some patients, even though it is substantially cheaper than the alternatives. Two GOP senators warned the Medicare agency last fall that the gap in coverage "may limit access to home infusion therapy."

Home infusion pharmacies say they are overwhelmed trying to help patients deal with the problem. "It's like I'm doing triage in a MASH unit," said pharmacist Michael Rigas, vice president for clinical affairs with Crescent Healthcare in Anaheim.

The bill was written by the drug companies and passed in the middle of the night. None of this is surprising, even if it is evil.

Planet 9 in Outer Space

Earth-Like Planet Found Outside Solar System

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 26, 2006

Scientists using a technique derived from Albert Einstein's theories said yesterday they have detected the most Earth-like planet ever discovered outside the solar system -- an icy, rocky world 5 1/2 times the size of Earth orbiting a star 28,000 light-years away.

The new planet, given the identifier OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, was discovered last summer by teams of researchers using telescopes throughout the world. The scientists said the discovery suggested Earth-size planets are quite common in the universe.

"We're opening a new window," said University of Notre Dame astrophysicist David P. Bennett in a webcast news conference hosted by the National Science Foundation, a major sponsor of the research. In the future, he added, "we will be able to detect planets down to Earth mass."

That's not too far away and I bet if we get a high definition television, we can even watch new episodes of Battlestar Galactica as the ships roll by. We just might need to point out to the commander that he needs to avoid surfing the net or the government will wonder what a "Daggit" is.

Rock and Hard Place

Most evacuees in hotels haven't sought extension

By ERIC BERGER
Houston Chronicle
Jan. 26, 2006

Just 40 percent of the 6,000 hurricane evacuees remaining in Texas hotels have sought permission from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stay beyond Feb. 7.

That's when the agency will stop paying hotel and motel costs for Texas and Louisiana residents who fled Hurricanes Katrina and Rita during the summer. People remaining in hotels who wish to stay beyond that deadline must call the agency to obtain an authorization code by Monday.

With 3,490 hotel rooms still occupied in Greater Houston, a large number of families and individuals could be evicted in a couple of weeks.

"Instantly, we could be looking at a 30 to 40 percent increase in homeless people on the streets," said Thao Costis, an executive vice president with SEARCH, a Houston-based service provider for the homeless. "Our shelters are already filled to the gills with people who were here. We'll do what we can, but our resources are pretty maxed out."

.........

Gloria Carter, 41, has been staying at a hotel in Webster since she was forced to leave her condemned apartment in Lake Charles, La., in December. The single mother of three children and an older son couldn't find any vacant places in her hometown, so she came to the Houston area hoping to find work and assistance for rent.

Carter has applied for FEMA's Individual Assistance Program, which provides long-term housing assistance for natural-disaster victims, and has already registered to have her hotel stay extended until Feb. 13. But she has gotten no solid answers to her question: "What do we do at that point in time?"

She hopes to be out of a hotel by then, but she's waiting for her application to clear or for a place to become available at one of several apartment complexes. There's a job prospect at a McDonald's in Alvin.

So what does FEMA expect these people to do? It's not like a job at McDonald's is going to cover the living expenses of 5 people! The longer they don't have a stable place and a job, the less likely they are to find work and be self sufficient.

Where are all of the pious Christians who scream about family values? I know the winters in Houston aren't as cold as many other places, but forcing families onto the street because you REFUSE to help them rebuild their homes and lives is inexcuseable. According to them, it's more important to get a judge that will tell everyone how to live their lives instead of taking care of the sick and needy.

Unbelievable.

The Basic Pantry

Here is another of those "base" recipes that take well to personal variations. This is both low fat and filling, two things which you don't find together too often. Serve with an artisanal bread and cheese and fruit for desert and you have a comforting quick dinner for cold days (here in the Mid-atlantic, winter is finally threatening, the last week has been cold and I've been downing a lot of soup.)

CREAMY BEAN SOUP WITH FRESH HERBS AND SPINACH

3 tablespoons olive oil
3 cups chopped onions (about 2 medium)
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
5 cups low-salt chicken broth
2 15- to 16-ounce cans white beans, drained
2 15- to 16-ounce cans garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained

1 6-ounce package baby spinach leaves
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage
Grated Parmesan cheese
Extra-virgin olive oil (optional)

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in large pot over medium-high heat. Add onions and garlic and sauté until onions are golden, about 15 minutes. Add rosemary and stir 1 minute. Add all broth and beans. Bring soup to boil; reduce to medium-low and simmer until flavors blend, about 10 minutes.

Working in batches, transfer soup to blender and puree until smooth; return to pot. Mix in spinach and sage; stir until spinach wilts, about 1 minute. Season soup to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle soup into bowls. Sprinkle each with Parmesan cheese and drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil, if desired.

Makes 8 first-course servings.

Cook's notes: the EVO isn't optional! Save your parmesan rinds in the freezer and add them to this while it is simmering, remove before pureeing. If you have the calorie budget, you can add a little heavy cream at the point where everything goes into the blender. I cook with virtually no salt, but this might need a little (tastes differ) but I like lots and lots of freshly ground pepper on everything. I use freshly ground peppercorn melange, but you might prefer white pepper with this for the look. Skip the cheese and use a vegetable broth and you have a vegan dish, but then add a little lemon juice. You can also up the protein by adding some turkey sausage (or Aidell's Chicken and Apple, which I love) during the sauteeing stage.

This is nourishing and comforting dish for Lent if you are going to be fasting off meat. I did that the very first time I made a Lenten fast. It was too easy. I'm a really good vegetarian cook and a fast of any kind should leave you different from the way you were when you began it. I've tried lots of different fasts over the years. The one I've found the hardest, and the one I'm going to try again this year because it really does change me, is fasting off judging others. In the Myers-Briggs typology, I'm an INTJ with a really strong J (for judging as personality type, if you don't know the lingo.) One of the reasons I never seriously considered going into parish ministry is that Melanie doesn't suffer fools gladly, which means that I'd last maybe a week. Fasting off judging other people is the hardest thing I've ever done and it seems like I can't do it often enough. A three day water-juice fast is no biggy anymore and something I do when I have a decision to make that I'm having a hard time with. In previous Lents I've gone off buying books for the duration (no longer a problem, a couple of years of poverty cured the habit. In the past, bookstores were to me what bars are to an alcoholic: a trip to Borders was the cure for a bad day.) At the time, that was really hard and I headed for the bookstore after church on Easter. One year, I turned off the radio and the TV for Lent. With the kind of work I do now that's not really possible, but, let me tell you, I came to love the silence and was in no big rush to turn the media whirl back on. It took about six months before I was a regular consumer of the electronic media again.

How about that: food, spirituality and cultural criticism, all in one post. Whatever your religious tradition, nearly all the ones I know about have a fast tied to the annual calendar or to the lifespan. What has been your experience with fasting?

The Theory of Everything

I was able to get an hour interview with Robert Borosage in his office at Campaign for America's Future late this afternoon. We talked about the "culture of corruption," the Abramoff fiasco, and indictments pending. I'll have more on the interview this weekend. It was a very interesting discussion. Bob is more plugged in to the ways the political process works and doesn't than the average lefty. The theme for any Dem challenger to run on this year is cleaning up the process.

This will play a part in the grand unified theory of the neo-cons, popular culture and bad theology that I'm coming up with. I discussed some of it with Bob, but it is still pretty unfinished.

The No News Conference

Spinning the Hamas Victory

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, January 26, 2006; 12:54 PM

President Bush this morning faced a conundrum: How to reconcile all his soaring rhetoric about democracy with the democratic election victory of a radical Islamic group he has labeled as a terrorist organization?

The answer: Spin that conundrum away.

The words "terrorist organization" never came out of Bush's mouth in his hastily-called news conference, just hours after it became clear that Hamas won a huge upset victory in the Palestinian elections.

Hamas has claimed responsibility for many attacks on Israel over the years and continues to deny Israel's right to exist. Bush as recently as yesterday, in a Wall Street Journal interview, flatly declared that the U.S. won't deal with the group regardless of the election results.

But this morning, Bush was looking hard for the positive. The Palestinian vote was "a wakeup call to the leadership," he said.

"The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find health care. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories."

He only grudgingly acknowledged the central problem: "On the other hand, I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform.

"And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing."

Meanwhile, Bush urged Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to remain in office for now.

Here's the transcript of the 45-minute news conference, held in the dilapidated White House Briefing Room -- which showed its true nature when a boom microphone started flapping uncontrollably over Bush's head moments after he walked to the podium.

Bush faced many questions about his secret National Security Agency domestic spying program. He repeatedly insisted it was legal, in spite of the conclusion by many legal scholars that his position runs counter to the checks and balances required by the Constitution.

Asked why he wouldn't go to Congress -- even now -- for approval of the program, he said more public knowledge about it would "help the enemy."

Bush denied that he had circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which makes it a crime to conduct domestic surveillance without a criminal or intelligence warrant.

"You know, 'circumventing' is a loaded word. And I refuse to accept it, because I believe what I'm doing is legally right."

Describing how he came give his approval, Bush said: "I said, 'Look, is it possible to conduct this program under the old law?' And people said, 'It doesn't work in order to be able do the job we expect to us do.' "

Asked if he would please release the photos of him with disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Bush refused. "We live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they're not relevant to the investigation," he said. "I frankly don't even remember having my picture taken with the guy. I don't know him."

Asked to summon some "Texas straight talk" and make a clear and unambiguous statement about torture, Bush did so: "No American will be allowed to torture another human being anywhere in the world."

But by and large, the press conference was a frustrating experience for journalists whose specific questions were largely answered with imprecise comments related to their general topic. Bush's discountenance of follow-up questions means he fully controls the discourse.

One journalist asked: "Your explanation on the monitoring program seems to say that when the nation is at war, the president, by definition, can order measures that might not be acceptable or even perhaps legal in peacetime. And this seems to sound like something President Nixon once said, which was, 'When the president does it, then that means that it's not illegal in areas involving national security.' So how do the two differ?"

Bush wouldn't address that comparison.

And some of the questions were very incremental and small-bore.

I wonder if reporters shouldn't ask him some more basic questions that might be of interest to the American people. For instance, why not ask Bush what he considers the limits of executive power? Why not ask him about the competence of his administration, in the wake of the response to Hurricane Katrina and the rollout of the Medicare prescription plan? Why not ask about his credibility gap, in light of all his false statements and predictions about Iraq?

And -- one of my pet peeves -- why not ask him about these unspecified people he and his aides refer to all the time? For instance, who precisely does he think Karl Rove was talking about when Rove said last week that "some important Democrats" don't want to know who al Qaeda is calling in America? And precisely who was Bush himself talking about when he said yesterday: "I understand there's some in America who say, well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack"?

I have an idea: what if W gave a "press conference" and nobody came?

Social Darwinism II

Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis
By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix
Le Figaro

Monday 12 September 2005

According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the decline of the American system.

Research engineer at the National Institute of Demographic Studies, historian, author of Après l'empire [After the Empire], published by Gallimard in 2002 - an essay in which he predicted the "breakdown" of the American system - Emmanuel Todd reviews for Le Figaro the serious failures revealed by the storm.

Le Figaro - What is the first moral and political lesson we can learn from the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a "global" change in our relationship with nature?

Emmanuel Todd - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's not lose sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of extraordinary scope that would have produced monstrous damage anywhere. An element that surprised a great many people - the eruption of the black population, a supermajority in this disaster - did not really surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal of work on the mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States. I have known for a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United States is always an exact copy of the map of the density of black populations. On the other hand, I was surprised that spectators to this catastrophe should appear to have suddenly discovered that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are not particularly representative icons of the conditions of black America. What really resonates with my representation of the United States - as developed in Après l'empire - is the fact that the United States was disabled and ineffectual. The myth of the efficiency and super-dynamism of the American economy is in danger.

We were able to observe the inadequacy of the technical resources, of the engineers, of the military forces on the scene to confront the crisis. That lifted the veil on an American economy globally perceived as very dynamic, benefiting from a low unemployment rate, credited with a strong GDP growth rate. As opposed to the United States, Europe is supposed to be rather pathetic, clobbered with endemic unemployment and stricken with anemic growth. But what people have not wanted to see is that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a dynamism of consumption.

Is American household consumption artificially stimulated?

The American economy is at the heart of a globalized economic system, and the United States acts as a remarkable financial pump, importing capital to the tune of 700 to 800 billion dollars a year. These funds, after redistribution, finance the consumption of imported goods - a truly dynamic sector. What has characterized the United States for years is the tendency to swell the monstrous trade deficit, which is now close to 700 billion dollars. The great weakness of this economic system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic industrial capacity.

American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis situation: to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated financial techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a date, tax consultants, or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a global level, but you do need materiel, engineers, and technicians, as well as a feeling of collective solidarity. A natural catastrophe on national territory confronts a country with its deepest identity, with its capacities for technical and social response. Now, if the American population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production, of long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be disastrous. The storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that identifies the world as a vast video game.

This last shows the ultimate fallacy of the Straussian neo-cons. Unless everyone has the capacity to consume together, the entire system falls apart.

You postulate that the management of Katrina reveals a worrying territorial fragmentation joined to the carelessness of the military apparatus. What must we then fear for the future?

The hypothesis of decline developed in Après l'empire evokes the possibility of a simple return of the United States to normal, certainly associated with a 15-20% decrease in the standard of living, but guaranteeing the population a level of consumption and power "standard" in the developed world. I was only attacking the myth of hyper-power. Today, I am afraid I was too optimistic. The United States' inability to respond to industrial competition, their heavy deficit in high-technology goods, the upturn in infant mortality rates, the military apparatus' desuetude and practical ineffectiveness, the elites' persistent negligence incite me to consider the possibility in the medium term of a real Soviet-style crisis in the United States.

Would such a crisis be the consequence of Bush Administration policy, which you stigmatize for its paternalistic and social Darwinism aspects? Or would its causes be more structural?

American neo-conservatism is not alone to blame. What seems to me more striking is the way this America that incarnates the absolute opposite of the Soviet Union is on the point of producing the same catastrophe by the opposite route. Communism, in its madness, supposed that society was everything and that the individual was nothing, an ideological basis that caused its own ruin. Today, the United States assures us, with a blind faith as intense as Stalin's, that the individual is everything, that the market is enough and that the state is hateful. The intensity of the ideological fixation is altogether comparable to the Communist delirium. This individualist and inequalitarian posture disorganizes American capacity for action. The real mystery to me is situated there: how can a society renounce common sense and pragmatism to such an extent and enter into such a process of ideological self-destruction? It's a historical aporia to which I have no answer and the problem with which cannot be abstracted from the present administration's policies alone. It's all of American society that seems to be launched into a scorpion policy, a sick system that ends up injecting itself with its own venom. Such behavior is not rational, but it does not all the same contradict the logic of history. The post-war generations have lost acquaintance with the tragic and with the spectacle of self-destroying systems. But the empirical reality of human history is that it is not rational.

This is the first installment of a longer meditation which has been growing since yesterday and will probably take until the weekend to bear written fruit. I found this link by way of another sterling rant from James Wolcott which Susie pointed out today.

In the interview excerpted above, Emmanuel Todd doesn't come right out and say it, but there has to be something in the popular culture which allowed neo-con theories to take root and grow and for the Southern lower class to buy into so much of these theories which actively work against their self interest (which, as Todd points out, is irrational, unpragmatic behavior.) I want to spend a few more days thinking about this and working out a theory about this which just started purcolating yesterday. This interview in Figaro sort of focused everything. Your thoughts and comments are welcomed as I run this through my writer's grist mill.

The Empire

Of Cabbages and Kings

By STEVE FORRESTER
The Daily Astorian [Astoria, Oregon]

The New York Times published an eloquent rebuttal to the nomination of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court Monday. The gist of the Times’ message was that Alito believed in wider presidential powers and “a radically narrow view of Congress’ power.”

In the run-up to Alito’s nomination as well as that of Chief Justice John Roberts, I have been struck by how bloodless these judicial nominees are. Except for having gone through some kind of ideological outsiderism at elite Ivy League schools, I don’t see the face of America on them.

There was a time when some Supreme Court justices were marked by the physical place or the life struggle that had shaped them. These days they seem to be largely shaped by a private educational system, and they’ve been on a narrow track to the federal judiciary, with relatively little contact with the ordinary business of life. Some on the federal bench have no experience with the public schools.

Chief Justice Earl Warren had been governor of a state. Thurgood Marshall was shaped by the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s, when a black man had to assert his right to practice law. Sandra Day O’Connor was marked forever by returning to Phoenix after graduating near the top of her Stanford Law School class, only to be told by the city’s most eminent law firm that it might have a secretarial position for her.

One of the arguments made in favor of confirmation of Alito is that a conservative president gets to pick conservative jurists and that's just politics. But this piece made me think a little further. Roberts and Alito really are different from their immediate predecessors. Roberts is a silver spoon baby who never really had much contact with the reality of the middle class, his college summers spent in factory work not withstanding. Both are Ivy League products who have never had to fear a pink slip. Of course, they have that in common with most of the Senate, which is one of the major reasons I think that the filibuster seems to be off the table. The Democratic Senators have nearly all never had to work a job where they had to worry about being fired or laid off. They've never had to work a job which was physically dangerous. They haven't ever had to live somewhere which was so polluted as to endanger their health. They've never been subject to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or disability. The Senate doesn't reflect America. If it did, they would understand why us working stiffs see Alito as a grave danger to the rest of us. His politics of resentment wears poorly with us.

Chilling Effect

For only the second time in the history of Bump, I deleted a comment. The commentor had an invalid email address so my attempt to notify him directly failed. This deletion occured for the same reason as the first: I don't wish to invite visits from the Secret Service or the FBI. It is not an urban legend that some bloggers have had those visits, and I live a little closer to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than most of them.

A Little Bit of History Returning

White House Dismissed '02 Surveillance Proposal

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 26, 2006; Page A04

The Bush administration rejected a 2002 Senate proposal that would have made it easier for FBI agents to obtain surveillance warrants in terrorism cases, concluding that the system was working well and that it would likely be unconstitutional to lower the legal standard.

The proposed legislation by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) would have allowed the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants for non-U.S. citizens if they had a "reasonable suspicion" they were connected to terrorism -- a lower standard than the "probable cause" requirement in the statute that governs the warrants.

The administration has contended that it launched a secret program of warrantless domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency in part because of the time it takes to obtain such secret warrants from federal judges under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The wiretapping program, ordered by President Bush in 2001, is used when intelligence agents have a "reasonable basis to believe" that a target is tied to al Qaeda or related groups, according to recent statements by administration officials. It can be used on U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals, without court oversight.

Democrats and national security law experts who oppose the NSA program say the Justice Department's opposition to the DeWine legislation seriously undermines arguments by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, who have said the NSA spying is constitutional and that surveillance warrants are often too cumbersome to obtain.

"It's entirely inconsistent with their current position," said Philip B. Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who teaches law at Harvard University. "The only reason to do what they've been doing is because they wanted a lower standard than 'probable cause.' A member of Congress offered that to them, but they turned it down."

Of course they dismissed it. They already knew they didn't need it.

Secret Surveillance May Have Occurred Before Authorization

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 4, 2006; Page A03

Even before the White House formally authorized a secret program to spy on U.S. citizens without obtaining warrants, such eavesdropping was occurring and some of the information was being shared with the FBI, declassified correspondence and interviews with congressional and intelligence officials indicate.

On Oct. 1, 2001, three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was running the National Security Agency at the time, told the House intelligence committee that the agency was broadening its surveillance authorities, according to a newly released letter sent to him that month by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). Pelosi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, raised concerns in the letter, which was declassified with several redactions and made public yesterday by her staff.

"I am concerned whether and to what extent the National Security Agency has received specific presidential authorization for the operations you are conducting," Pelosi wrote on Oct. 11, 2001. The substance of Hayden's response one week later, on Oct. 17, 2001, was redacted.

The secret NSA program, developed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Washington and New York as a way to find any hidden al Qaeda operatives still in the United States, was authorized in October 2001, a senior administration official said.

The president and senior aides have publicly discussed various aspects of the program, but neither the White House, the NSA nor the office of the director of national intelligence would say what day the president authorized it. Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in an e-mail yesterday that it would be inappropriate to "discuss details which could potentially cause harm to the safety of our nation."

Pelosi's letter suggested that she and others on the committee first heard about expanded work by the NSA on Oct. 1, 2001, when Hayden briefed them on NSA activities.

"During your appearance before the committee," she wrote, "you indicated that you had been operating since the September 11 attacks with an expansive view of your authorities with respect to the conduct of electronic surveillance." The letter, while redacted in parts concerned with surveillance, made clear that the agency was "forwarding" intercepts and other collected information to the FBI. Two sources familiar with the NSA program said Pelosi was directly referring to information collected without a warrant on U.S. citizens or residents.

Oooh, oooh, ooh, Congresscritter Pelosi, it's only taken you 5 years to have qualms about this?

Heard Around Town

Via Surburban Guerrilla:

Dave Niewert speaks:

Effective immediately, the Democrats will be known as the lyin'-ass boyfriend party - the perfect date for progressive voters looking to be stood up, bullshitted blind, or left holding the tab.

For five years now it's been "Please baby, baby, baby, please! I'm sorry I was a no-show last time, but hey, that was because I was working overtime to save up to do something extra special for next time, which is the really big event - right, baby?"

Last April, when the Democrats backed away from filibustering extremist appeals court nominees, it was, "Don't you fret, baby. We're not going to go to the mat over small fry like Owen, Pryor, and Brown because we're saving the filibuster for the big one - you know, the Supreme Court, baby." Months later, Democrats folded rather than fight John Roberts, the young-ish yes man with a penchant for executive privilege and a wife who used to head an anti-choice organization. After all, they said, they needed to save their energy, and the filibuster, for the next Supreme Court nominee, who would undoubtedly be worse.

Well, baby, the moment of truth has arrived. It's Alito-time, and the lyin'-ass boyfriends are backpedaling again. Why aren't they going to raise a ruckus this time? Aw, baby... the filibuster is just so darned hard to use with only 45 senators! And what's the point of trying to do anything until we've recaptured the Senate or the White House?

I broke my longstanding policy of not donating money to political parties last fall when the folks from the DNC called and asked for money to help gird them for the upcoming fights over judicial seats. I was assured that indeed they would fight to keep right-wing extremists off the Supreme Court.

And now, faced with a clear-cut extremist (and dissembler) who is about to not only overturn the right to obtain an abortion, but also to pave the path for an imperial executive branch with limitless powers ... nothing.

I'm not terribly inclined, as my readers know, to use profanity in my posts. But if the Democratic Party wants any more of my money, they can just go fuck themselves.

When the Democrats become an opposition party, they'll get a dime out of me. This is the most dangerous Supreme Court nominee in a generation and all the Dems can do is speechify their way onto the moral high ground while Bush crowns himself king? Sorry, kids, that isn't good enough.

If Dick Cheney can use the F-bomb on the floor of the Senate, I guess I can use it on the Internets.

Start the Day with a Smile

Via the reveres, the way to start the day with a smile:

The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

50. Geraldo Rivera

Charges: A mustache only slightly less loathsome than Tom Friedman’s-if only because fewer people take Rivera seriously....

48. Larry the Cable Guy

Charges: The absolute nadir of the American South’s baffling cultural hegemony. A middle-class Nebraskan, raised in Palm Beach, whose parents sent him to private school, masquerading as an Appalachian mutant and making millions off the nine-toed cyclopes in his audience by calling his material "blue collar," when it’s really just a celebration of proud ignorance. The latest in a long line of "entertainers" propagating the lie that real talent is elitist. The South has risen again—just long enough to grab the rest of the nation by the legs and pull it back down to its Lovecraftian depths. Isn’t even "bad funny." Makes Jeff Foxworthy look like Chris Rock.

21. Bill Frist

Charges: A physician whose senatorial career has been a protracted renunciation of the Hippocractic oath. First and foremost, Frist does harm. Drew the scrutiny of the SEC and Department of Justice for directing the sale of $6 million worth of stock in his brother’s company, while claiming not to know he even owned it. Diagnosed Terri Schiavo from the senate floor, proclaiming "that is not somebody in a persistent vegetative state," and then denied ever having made such a judgment. His Harvard Medical School classmates reproached him in a letter for having exploited his medical training. Made protecting drug maker Eli Lilly from litigation for putting mercury in vaccines a provision of the Homeland Security bill. Honed his surgical skills on cats he adopted from pet shelters—really.

This is the Oscars of the progressive Left. Go and read the rest, just make sure to swallow and put down your coffee first.

Wha??

EPA Calls for End to Releases of Chemical in Teflon Process
# The voluntary effort is expected to eliminate public exposure to the widely used industrial compound. The move is hailed by activists.

By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer

In a rare move to phase out a widely used industrial compound, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it was asking all U.S. companies to virtually eliminate public exposure to a toxic chemical used to make Teflon cookware and thousands of other products.

Although the effort is voluntary, the federal government has rarely taken such a sweeping, accelerated action against an industrial compound. The eight major companies that use it to make an array of nonstick and stain-resistant products are expected to comply, cutting releases from their plants and products by 95% over the next four years and completely soon after that.

DuPont, which manufactures Teflon and has used the compound for more than 50 years, pledged to meet the deadlines. The voluntary phaseout will not end the sale of Teflon and other products, but it is expected to drastically curtail the release of the chemical into the atmosphere.

That chemical, a perfluorinated acid called PFOA, has contaminated the bloodstream of most Americans and is polluting the environment throughout much of the world.

In laboratory animals exposed to high doses, PFOA causes liver cancer, reduced birth weight, immune suppression and developmental problems. In humans, the effects of lower doses are unknown, but it is transferred to fetuses.

"The science on PFOA is still coming in, but the concern is there. Acting now to minimize it is really the right thing to do for our health and our environment," said EPA Acting Assistant Administrator Susan Hazen.

Under the EPA plan, the companies can still use the chemical in manufacturing as long as it doesn't turn up in its products and is not released into the environment.

Wednesday's announcement is considered the EPA's most aggressive effort to restrict an industrial compound in more than 15 years, when it enacted a regulation banning asbestos.

Environmentalists, who have criticized most EPA actions under the Bush administration, applauded the move.

"With its announcement today, the EPA is challenging an entire industry to err on the side of precaution and public safety and invent new ways of doing business," said Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook.

The Environmental Working Group, which for several years has investigated and heavily criticized DuPont's handling of PFOA, applauded the company as well, saying its pledge shows it is "forward-looking, environmentally sensitive [and] setting the pace for a cleaner chemical industry."

Last month, the EPA fined DuPont $16.5 million for allegedly hiding data on the toxicity and health effects of PFOA for more than 20 years and contaminating the drinking water supply in the Ohio River Valley, next to a DuPont plant in West Virginia. It was the largest administrative fine in the history of the EPA.

The seven other companies asked to comply are 3M/Dyneon; Arkema Inc.; AGC Chemicals/Asahi Glass; Ciba Specialty Chemicals; Clariant Corp.; Daikin and Solvay Solexis. They were told to respond by March 1.

Under a 30-year-old federal law that governs toxic substances, the EPA cannot ban chemicals outright without a years-long rule-making process and protracted legal fights, so the agency is seeking voluntary compliance.

The companies are being called upon to reduce PFOA released into the environment and the PFOA content in their products by 95% by 2010, from amounts found in 2000. They also are being asked to eliminate all sources of public exposure no later than 2015 — not just in the United States but at all their global operations.

The agreement "will, if properly implemented, dramatically reduce, and eventually eliminate" PFOA in the environment, Cook said.

Environmentalists said they would continue to urge a ban on PFOA as well as other chemicals that build up in the environment. "No one should confuse the agreement announced today with a ban. It is not a ban," Cook said.

It would, however, be the largest voluntary phaseout in EPA history, affecting a line of products worth billions of dollars a year.

Alastair Iles, a chemical policy expert working with UC Berkeley professors, called the effort "definitely unprecedented. It is the first time that I know of EPA actually calling for a reduction of a specific chemical used in products."

DuPont Vice President Susan Stalnecker said her company had already been "aggressively reducing" PFOA emissions into the environment. "Having achieved a 94% reduction in global manufacturing emissions by year-end 2005, we are well on our way to meet the goals and objectives established by the EPA stewardship program," she said.

The chemical for decades has been considered essential in making nonstick and stain-resistant products. In addition to Teflon cookware, it is used by the aerospace, transportation, textile and electronics industries for such products as wiring and fabrics.

George W. Bush's EPA is calling for the end of pollutant? Miracles do happen, I guess.