Philoblogging

I had dinner last night with friends, a physicist and an anthropologist, who had lots of questions about blogging. The anthropologist said that the blogging phenomenon and the Internet are going to fundamentally change society in ways which we won't understand for hundreds of years. She compared the development and growth of this interactive medium to the development of literacy. If she is correct, this is the biggest move forward in information sharing and community formation in about 3,500 years.

I've been aware of the blogosphere for about two years, immersed in it for the last one, and now blogging for about 3 1/2 months. I'm aware of the fact that new kinds of relationships are being created, along with new rules for maintaining those relationships (do you have any rules about how long you'll let email sit, for example? If you blog, do you have for criteria for when you respond to comments, either publically or in email?) I'm still feeling these things out as I come to greater understanding of you, your need for information (you all send me links, you know, or leave them in comments) and your need for connectivity and community. I have nothing definitive to say about this, we are in the very early days of noting this new phenomenon. Anybody else out there philsophizing about the blogosphere, relationships and Internet morality? Hey, David Byron, this is your territory!

4GW and the CFR

William Lind is a paleo-con with gold plated credentials, as well as one of the most prolific contemporary thinkers on the subject of Fourth Generation Warfare, the kind of insurgency quagmire we are stuck in in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He posts regularly at the Defense and the National Interest website, which means that he is very highly thought of, indeed.

He was recently invited to participate in a panel on 4GW at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank which has seen better days, currently, like the American Enterprise Institute, a hangout of the neo-cons. Here's his report on the experience.

The other panelists were two retired Army officers, both of whom have written some good things on Third and Fourth Generation war, and a retired Marine Corps general who served as moderator. One panelist noted the degree to which we remain stuck in the Second Generation, especially in what is taught in the various armed forces schools and staff colleges. Another took the neo-con line, predicting a "coming American century," which is about as likely as a coming Austro-Hungarian century. Surprisingly, we all agreed on one point: however good the American military may be from the battalion level down, what goes on above that level doesn't make much sense. One panelist hit the pig right on the snout on the Air Force's F-22 fighter; the only way we will ever be able to use it is if we first give some to whoever is fighting us.

There is nothing left of the vaunted Council on Foreign Relations, or of the Establishment it represents, but dead leaves and dry bones.

Rummy has successfully cleansed the DoD of most of the brass who understood why Rummy's "running light" doctrine for 4GW is utterly wrong--it isn't a good strategy for any of the earlier generations of warfighting, either--and we are left with the amateurs playing at war. If they want to do this in somebody's sandbox with toys, fine. They have those kinds of things at the War College, let them go up there and play. But to do it with real lives and real guns....this is an impeachable offense.

Lousy prep=Lousy job

Officers failed us in Iraq, say soldiers
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 29/02/2004)

Thousands of British soldiers have complained that they were failed by their senior officers during the war in Iraq, the Telegraph has learnt. The unprecedented criticisms are contained in a confidential document which will be presented to Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the Army, next month.

Using highly critical language, the report states that troops who fought in Iraq believe that the kit crisis that affected thousands of British servicemen was caused by a lack of planning by senior officers.

The report will also disclose that many soldiers believe that too much "Government spin" supporting the need for war was passed down the chain of command in the build up to the conflict.
....
The report, entitled the CGS's Briefing Team Winter Session, states that many soldiers were "frustrated that they were not properly equipped when they crossed the line of departure [the military term for the frontline]". It adds that the failure to get the right equipment to soldiers led to "significant morale and leadership issues".

The most notorious example of the planning failures involved the death of Sgt Steve Roberts, who died after he was ordered to hand over his body armour to an infantry soldier.

Before he died, the tank commander committed his innermost thoughts and concerns to a tape diary. In one entry, he said: "We have not got things we have been told we are going to get and it's disheartening because we know we are going to go to war without the correct equipment."

Last week, a soldier who fought in the Iraq war risked certain court martial when he told Channel Four that he was sent into battle with just five bullets.

The unnamed soldier, who said he came under fire several times in southern Iraq, told Channel Four News: "We had five rounds each to defend ourselves. I actually crossed the border with five rounds."

Shortages of clothing, boots, weapons, chemical warfare equipment and ammunition have also been claimed.

Last year, a report by the National Audit Office criticised the Ministry of Defence when it stated that kit shortages could have had disastrous consequences for the 46,000 troops stationed in the Gulf. The briefing team was established in March 2000 with the task of keeping senior Army officers in touch with ordinary soldiers. The team goes on "tour" four times a year and speaks to soldiers on an off-the-record basis.

One senior officer told the Telegraph: "The report identifies a perception, at a junior level, that there has been a breach of trust between soldiers and officers. The war in Iraq was a military success but that was because, for the most part, the Iraqis didn't put up a fight.

"If they had, we would have had serious problems because of the kit shortages. That fact hasn't been lost on the troops - they aren't stupid."

Here is the tactical error being made by both Bush and Blair: they are cynically counting on our being stupid. Quite frankly, this is the thing which enrages me the most about Team Rove. The lies, misdirection, up-is-downism and all the rest is an insult to my intelligence. The thought that kept running through my mind when Bush was on Russert's program was, "What kind of moron does this guy think I am?"

Kinda reminds me of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, but that's a post for another time. I'm not quite ready to write that one yet.

Clinging to the Cross

Fr. Bojangles has put up a powerful meditation on Gibson's Passion, turning symbols into idols, and faith and social justice. I love this guy's writing and am so glad he finally finished his D. Div. thesis, returned from his fishing trip and re-built his site after Userland bolixed it up. A sample:

I just don't get it. People want to hold that their Christianity is predicated on the brutal murder of Jesus. They want to hold on to all sorts of conspiracy theories and mysterious equations to prove their faith. Yet all through scripture, particularly the scriptures for Ash Wednesday, we are told NOT to take on an air of sadness and pain, NOT to let other people know that we are fasting. Instead, we are told to feed the hungry, free the oppressed, seek justice and work for peace. That is the sacrifice that God desires and the expression of faith that causes people to take notice. Instead, we revel in the blood and agony of Jesus, seek constitutional amendments against loving people because they aren't like us, arrogantly wrap our faith in the flag, and let everyone know that unless they believe in Jesus, they're not worth much. All of Gibson's movies are about payback. This one is no different. And maybe, instead of an expression of his faith, Gibson is just mirroring the sentiment of society: "Let's git those bastards that did this to us, our country, 'n our Lord!"

There's a big controversy growing here on the Mountain Top. The Ministerial Association, which consists of conservative "Christian" clergy, has purchased a piece of land on The Overlook, a high point overlooking downtown, for $25,000. They intend to put a thirty foot cross up there, right next to the huge American flag, to let all know that our town is a God-fearing Christian town. You can imagine the letters to the editor, both pro and con. I think about what the $25,000 could have gone to accomplish instead of putting up a symbol of agony and oppression and I don't feel good. The Ministerial Association has a hard time coming up with the money to buy a meal for a transient coming through town, or to buy groceries for a family down on their luck. Yet they'll come up with an obscene amount of money to put up a symbol and stand arrogantly on their God-given right to do it.

There is lots of room for conversation here, about the big gap between our walk and our talk. I'm reminded again of an aphorism attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: Always preach the Gospel. Use words when necessary.

Governing the Dead

Under Pressure, Aristide Leaves Haiti
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: February 29, 2004

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 29 --- President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stepped down Sunday at dawn, resigning under intense pressure from the United States, according to Haitian and American officials.

Mr. Aristide was Haiti's first democratically elected president in the island’s 200 years of independence. But his presidency crumbled as armed rebels seized Haiti’s north this month and Washington adopted their position of “Aristide must go” this weekend.

The rebels, led by veterans of Haiti’s army, disbanded by Mr. Aristide, had threatened an attack at the capital unless the president left power.

Mr. Aristide was a radical Catholic priest when he rose to prominence in the 1980’s as an opponent of military rule and political dictatorship in Haiti. He was expelled from his order for his politics in 1988 and became the leader of a political coalition seeking democracy. Elected president overwhelmingly in 1990, he was overthrown in a violent military coup in 1991 and fled into exile, first to Venezuela, then the United States.

He was returned to power in 1994 by a military invasion and occupation led by 20,000 United States soldiers. Haiti’s constitution barred him from succeeding himself as president, but he won a second five-year term in 2000.

Over the next three years, his power was eroded as political corruption in his government and political anger in the street grew out of control.

Many of his former supporters became his sworn enemies. With the legislature dissolved, Mr. Aristide ruled, erratically, by decree. His political base crumbled down to a dissolute and disgruntled national police force and a rabble of street gangs in the slums of the capital.

An armed rebellion erupted in Haiti’s north on Feb. 5, and several hundred of the rebels quickly seized half the nation and threatened to storm the capital, sparking fear and havoc.

As recently as July, the foreign policy of the United States toward Haiti was to let Mr. Aristide serve out his five-year term. “The United States accepts President Aristide as the constitutional president of Haiti for his term of office ending in 2006,” Brian Dean Curran, then the United States Ambassador here, said eight months ago.

Things changed. The Bush administration clearly decided in the past three days, as a senior administration official said Saturday, that “Aristide must go,” and that message was communicated directly to Mr. Aristide hours before he left this morning. France, Haiti’s colonial occupier, also called for the president to step down.

Haitian officials said that after landing in the Dominican Republic, Mr. Aristide might seek refuge in Morocco, Taiwan or Panama.

This obscenity is brought to you by the Bush administration, whose campaign slogan is "greater peace, greater freedom, greater democracy, but only where we say so." Those "rebels" were paid in American cash.

Note to Iraq, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and Iran: you are a democracy when we say you are and not a minute sooner. We'll install what we want to install, when we want to install it. And, by the way, we are bigger than you are.

Do I sound almost incoherent with rage? Good. I'm almost incoherent with rage, and I just want to represent myself well here.

Jeanne D'Arc, spiritual mother of this blog, comments:

Whatever the reasons for Bush's dislike of Aristide, it's becoming more and more obvious that this administration is not remotely interested in any sort of "political solution," as they've been suggesting. They simply want Aristide gone, and don't seem particularly concerned with what amalgamation of business elites and death squad leaders takes his place. If this administration were interested in compromise, we wouldn't have a Republican congressman saying that Aristide has two choices -- he can leave in a plane, or leave in a body bag.

Read Jeanne on the conflict between Aristide's liberation theology and Bush's Christian domination theology. And rather than sit and seethe, it is once again time to fax your congresscritter and let him or her know that overthrowing governments is important enough to you that it might have something to do with whether or not they get re-elected.

Grrr....

Looters step over the dead as Haiti collapses into anarchy
By Phil Davison in Port-au-Prince

29 February 2004

Hundreds of Haitians trampled over the body as they looted everything they could lay their hands on from the port of this lawless city. The more ambitious were towing cars away, some using other vehicles or some with their bare hands. Such is the poverty of this nation that many ran off merely with crates of empty soft drinks bottles.

The photographer did not take a picture. When I returned to our vehicle, he was looking down the barrel of a very big, very old pistol in the small hands of a teenage boy. The pistol was cocked. "No pictures. No pictures. You go now. You leave," he shouted in the local French Creole. We did.

The looters will be branded as supporters of the Haitian President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, for indeed they are. But they were literally starving and were merely taking what they could as this city collapsed into total anarchy yesterday. The young man was apparently shot by one of Aristide's armed supporters, the so-called chimères, or phantoms, trying to stop the looting.

So-called anti-Aristide rebels are now said to surround the Haitian capital. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has taken to calling them "the resistance" to elected President Aristide, the man he and his administration long supported. In fact, they are just other starving Haitians, led and armed by former officers of the Haitian army that once served Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

When I covered earlier stories in this country - Aristide's dramatic and popular surge to power, the military coup that ousted him and the American intervention that restored him - these leaders were known as the Fraph. It was an acronym, in French, for the Revolutionary Front for the Advancement of the Haitian People. But it was no coincidence that, when spoken, it sounded exactly like "frappe", the French for "hit" or "strike".

The mere word struck terrorised Haitians in the same manner as the group's predecessors, the dreaded Tontons Macoutes of the 30-year- Duvalier family dictatorship.

"The resistance" was one of Colin Powell's least well-chosen expressions.

Thanatocracy: to govern on the backs of the dead. As long as they are poor and black their lives don't matter, so neither do their deaths.

Tools

A whole lot of you are a whole lot smarter and more experienced with computers than I am. I'm a writer, I like the way the tools help me write, but I'm not particularly clued in about the way the tools work.

I've extolled my recent discovery of Mozilla 1.6, which I really do love, but I'm not a power user and don't aspire to be, I just want to read and write. That said, if any of you are power users or Mozilla developers and would be willing to answer some questions, please shoot me an email. There are some things I want to do, especially with the browser-based email client, that I can't figure out how to do on my own. Can you help?

Leak Factory

Senate plans secret session on Iraq

Thu Feb 26, 9:40 AM ET

By Kristina Herrndobler Washington Bureau

The last time the Senate met in a closed-door session--excluding press and visitors, shutting out most staffers and imposing a television blackout--was during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) in 1999.

The Senate is again gearing up for a rare secret session, this time to scrutinize flaws in America's prewar intelligence about Iraqi weapons. And like last time, political charges and countercharges are swirling about the motivation and agenda for the session.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) agreed on the closed session, which will be held in coming weeks, after Democrats threatened to force the issue.

Any two senators can force a closed session, and Republican leaders decided to go along despite criticism from some in their ranks that the closed session is a political stunt designed to turn up the heat on President Bush (news - web sites).

Democrats insist the session is a legitimate, even important, way for lawmakers to explore how the intelligence community could have been as mistaken as it apparently was in saying that Iraq (news - web sites) was concealing significant stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

That is of particular concern to senators who relied on such assertions when they voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq, Democratic leaders said.
....
It remains unclear how the closed session will proceed or what it will encompass. It is even uncertain how much of it will remain secret, given the participation of 100 senators. But the session is likely to add heat to a debate already fueled by the presidential campaign.

Frist's press secretary confirmed that the majority leader has agreed to a closed session, but he would not offer an estimate on when it would take place. "I wouldn't say it will be within a couple of weeks, because they just haven't gotten that far in discussions yet," Bob Stevenson said.

The Constitution does not require the Senate to meet in open session. In fact, said associate Senate historian Donald Ritchie, senators did not regularly open their debates to the public until 1929.

Precedent for secrecy

Susan Tolchin, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said national security and intelligence are topics that have traditionally prompted the Senate to close its doors.

"Intelligence Committees have never been open," Tolchin said. "In many cases, national security has been used for frivolous reason. But in this case with Iraq, I think our policy of secrecy is sound."

Randall Strahan, a political science professor at Emory University, said it is important that the Senate strike a balance between transparency and security. "This is a case that most citizens might find understandable to hold in closed session," Strahan said.

Still, Strahan said there are obvious reasons Republicans would want to delay the issue.

"I can see why the Republicans would want to resist it," Strahan said. "The best-case scenario would be that they have this session and everyone is satisfied. But the worse case would be that something harmful to the administration comes out."

This is a pretty big deal, particularly in a climate where government transparency and accountability are rapidly sliding down the memory hole, so it is odd that only the Chi Trib and the Seattle Times picked it up.

This is another classic opportunity for the creation of a mammoth leak factory, so when the inevitable stories get written, look at who the sources are and aren't.

Movement of the Spirit

Calif. Court Won't Halt Gay Marriages
Mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., Weds Same-Sex Couples

By Evelyn Nieves and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A03

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27 -- California's Supreme Court declined Friday to immediately halt same-sex marriages and nullify more than 3,400 licenses already issued, while the mayor of a town in New York state began marrying same-sex couples.

In a suit filed in San Francisco, Attorney General Bill Lockyer petitioned the high court to order the city to stop defying a state law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman, arguing that the California constitution prohibits San Francisco from declaring a state law unconstitutional without a binding appellate court decision affirming that position. The justices declined to rule and told the city and a conservative group that opposes gay marriage to file new legal briefs by March 5.

Lockyer's petition also argues that unless there is a binding statewide ruling resolving the validity of these marriages, "there will be tremendous governmental and legal confusion that could affect a wide variety of government functions and personal rights associated with public assistance, property ownership, personal debt liability, spousal and child support, inheritance when there is no will, worker's compensation benefits and tax liabilities."

In response, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said that the attorney general has made an unconvincing case for bypassing lower courts, and that the Supreme Court should be asked to rule regarding rulings in the lower courts, not in the absence of rulings. The court gave no indication when it would respond to Lockyer's petition.

San Francisco officials, who sued the state last week on the grounds that the state law banning gay marriage violates the state constitution's equal-protection clause, have issued more than 3,400 marriage licenses to gay men and lesbians over the past two weeks. Inspired by the city's example, the mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., about 75 miles north of New York City, administered wedding vows to 25 same-sex couples on Friday morning before 1,000 supporters, rows of television cameras and a handful of protesters.

Mayor Jason West, 26, a Green Party member who took office last year, said state law allows him to perform the ceremonies and does not require a license for the marriage to be legally binding.

New Paltz's town clerk had refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, but West provided them with "marriage certificates" that he said are legally binding because they represent his performance of the wedding. About 300 couples put their names on a waiting list to be married there soon and West said he is considering performing more ceremonies.

Nathan Newman is fussing that pushing the issue right now may result in a legislative or judicial backlash which may set gay marriage back decades, and that the prudent path is not to push. I'll not second guess Nathan's radical credentials for a moment, but I look at current events through the eyes of faith and I see something different going on here.

The pictures of all the happy newlyweds that have been featured on the frontpages of papers, newsmagazines and the evening news show me something new: think back to the beginnings of the civil rights struggle for black people. Sympathetic white liberals said, "Of course we agree with you, but we have to take things slowly so that people can learn to accept the changes." But the Supreme Court ruled with Brown v. Board and change came. A similar thing is taking place now as some visionary politicians like Gavin Newsome and Jason West exploit ambiguities in the existing laws to force the issue. No one's carefully scripted political scenario for this fight is going to survive contact with reality. And in the larger scheme of things, meaning presidential electoral politics, it isn't going to matter a bit.

As Atrios pointed out the other day, even our sleepy press corps has begun to figure out that there is no practical difference between "gay marriage" and "gay civil unions." The voters for whom this stuff really matters aren't ever going to vote for a Democrat, anyway.

To use some Christian symbolic language, when the Holy Spirit decides to move, even Karl Rove can't stand against her.

Flotsom in the Sea of Meme

I've received email this past week from a number of friends who have begun reading Bump lately and commented that they don't know how I can stand swimming constantly in the meme soup of bad news, crappy reporting and outright lies that are the stuff of public conversation these days. Well, it isn't easy, but I do little things like looking hard for the occasional good news story, give myself permission for the odd rant here or on someone else's comments thread and try to spend some time daily in prayer with all of the material that comes to my attention. It helps. Do check out that link, it is to a prayer site operated by the Carmelites of Indianapolis, and it is a beauty. It is a wonderful way for these women to maintain the enclosure of their cloistered lives, while allowing us to take part in their contemplative ministry.

One of the blogs that frequently lifts my spirits is Bad Attitudes. The cranky crew that Jerome Doolittle has assembled around himself are terrific writers with a keen eye for the cultural and political scene, served up with wry on the rocks with a twist. BA contributor Moe Blues posted this last night and I crowed as I read it this morning:

Behind Enemy Lines

Although I can’t divulge any of the details about where this took place, I can tell you that all of the politicians and power-brokers involved are in a must-win state for Bush. If the people who should constitute his base are upset enough that they are considering voting against their own man, what does this tell us about Bush’s electoral chances?

Here's something else to feel good about: Tiger Woods is back on the top of his game and very much in the hunt at the Accenture Match Play Championship. It's on ESPN at 10:30 Eastern, switching to ABC at 3 PM Eastern. Finally, something decent to watch on TV.

The Worker Worthy of Hire

Supermarkets, Union Reach Tentative Pact
By CHARLIE LeDUFF and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: February 27, 2004

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 26 — Supermarket executives and union leaders involved in a four-and-a-half month-old labor dispute in Southern California reached a tentative agreement last night after 16 days of intense bargaining, union leaders said.

Officials with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and with California's three largest grocery chains reached the deal which is expected to end a dispute involving 59,000 striking or locked-out workers at 852 supermarkets.

Greg Denier, a spokesman for the union, declined to disclose details about the settlement.

The dispute, which is one of the largest labor disputes in the nation in years, has inconvenienced millions of shoppers, created great financial pain for union members and caused the three supermarket chains to lose more than $2 billion in sales.

The dispute involves Albertsons, Kroger, which owns the Ralphs grocery chain, and Safeway, which owns the Vons and Pavilions grocery chains.

Peter Hurgen, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, has met with the two sides and repeatedly pushed them to reach a deal. The dispute has become a huge cause for all of organized labor, and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential campaign, walked yesterday alongside strikers at a Vons supermarket in Santa Monica.

Vons and Pavilions workers went on strike on Oct. 11 when the union resisted management's demands to create a lower wage tier and a reduced health benefit plan for new employees and to cap the companies' health contributions for current workers. To show solidarity with Safeway, Albertsons and Ralphs locked out their workers the next day.

Officials knowledgeable about the negotiations said the union had agreed to a lower wage tier for new workers. These officials said that the companies had pressured the union into agreeing to have newly hired workers pay some weekly premiums for their health insurance, which is a departure from the policy with current workers, who pay no premium. In addition, these officials said, the union agreed in large part to the companies' demand to freeze their contributions to the health plan for current workers. But these officials said the union achieved its objective of persuading the companies to set aside their demand for a separate health and pension fund for future employees.

The union was under intense pressure to settle because its members were feeling so financially battered by the dispute and because the union and its Southern California locals were financially weakened by the tens of millions of dollars spent to finance strike benefits.

Here's how to parse a story like this--and do it carefully, because very few details are available. The workers themselves should be the first to hear those details at a ratification meeting this weekend. Here's the process: I believe the Union has already rented space for ratification meetings over the weekend. The negotiating team from the Union, with their attorney(s), will address the membership with a document that summarizes the changes in the proposed agreement from the previous contract. In a negotiation as difficult as this one, they will probably also present a summary of the most onerous management proposals and the history of how those proposals changed during the course of the job action and ongoing negotiation.

Without seeing the specifics of those documents, here is what I can read between the lines: while the Union didn't "lose" this negotiation, it fought a barely successful holding action against the most draconian demands of the managements. No union ever wants to accept a two tier wage structure because it pits the members agains themselves, creating classes of have and have-not workers within the bargaining unit who have different economic interests. The Union took a hit on their health benefits, but that's almost a given in the labor climate today. The employers were much better prepared for this negotiation than the Union was, and that is a legitimate knock on the Union. The signs had been in the winds for years, and Wal-Mart didn't really have all that much to do with it. The Union had to end this strike now because the membership couldn't really sustain it any longer. Strike fund benefits, which are always inadequate in these situations, were running out and the membership was losing whaever economic ability it had to stay out much longer. As a general rule, the employers always have better resources for waiting out a strike, unless extraordinary cooperation is acheived with other unions to completely shut down the employers' operations, and there are very tricky legal challenges that have to be met in order to do that. The union who covered my employment in music always worked in a multi-union setting and getting the cooperation of the other unions to honor the picket line was very difficult. In this case, the employers were also able to hire scabs, which decreased the effectiveness of the job action.

I want to address something I read in a long comment thread on this strike over at Calpundit a couple of days ago. I suspect that very few readers here would hold ideas similar to this particular commentor, but a question was implied which is worth a further thought over here. One of Kevin's commentors was simply offended by the whole strike, taking the position that these are no skill jobs and that if people were simply willing to improve themselves and work harder, get an education and dig a little deeper, they wouldn't be working in a grocery store. Therefore there is no reason that grocery workers with decades on the job should be making $17 an hour. If they had any gumption, they'd go out and do what it takes to, you know, get a good job.

I was so offended by that that I went off on that comments thread. I've been at this long enough that I don't flame much anymore, but it still happens when I'm provoked. The idea that $17 an hour constitutes a good middle class wage in Southern California is absurd on its face, to begin with. These are hard and frequently boring jobs that most of us wouldn't want to do, but the reasons that people do work like this is not because they are lazy.

There is a pernicious Calvinism in our culture, a piece of bad theology which has infected the secular, popular culture and it damns the ordinary working man. Kevin's commentor was probably an upper middle class white guy who has no clue about how hard it is to make a living in this counry if you don't come out of that upper middle class white culture to start with.

Every group and every culture has a myth about how its society works. America has one, too, the land of utter opportunity where anyone willing to work hard can be a John Edwards, a millworkers son, and aspire to the presidency after acheiving millions in personal wealth. This myth comes out of the theology of our Puritan past, a theology which said that God's chosen will be known by their worldly success. Anyone who is less than successful is damned in God's eyes. This is one of the factors which has made us so fascinated by wealth and celebrity, and one of the reasons that many Americans think that wealth and celebrity could be theirs with a little good luck or a break. It's hogwash, of course, but an astonishing number of us buy it.

The facts look a little different. If you have an average IQ, about 100 on the Standford Benet exam, you are unlikely to have a lot of success in higher education, and probably won' t have a stellar high school career. If you are born into the lower classes, your financial options for higher education are going to be extremely limited. The skyrocketing costs of higher education make it burdensome for even the upper middle class these days. 30 years ago, I put myself through school by working three jobs while going to college full time. That won't work today, even in public colleges. Even if a person is able to put all those pieces together, so what? Unemployment among electrical engineers is at historic highs right now.

But there is a deeper issue here. Why shouldn't every job pay a living wage? In Biblical language, isn't "every workman worthy of his hire?" I don't want to get into free-trade policy, job off-shoring or macroeconomics, but just look at this one grocery strike and the assumptions that are made about the people who do low skill work like this. I would argue that if Kevin's commentor were placed cold in front of one of those computerized grocery terminals, with minimal training, his first day on the job would pretty much suck. Let's not even get into meat cutting. Stocking shelves properly takes a little training and some experience, and each of those have economic costs. Experience has economic value.

The kind of worldview that treats all low skill workers as fungible widgets (but this is happening in even traditionally high skill/high training industries these days) is supported by theological assumptions that treat the will to work hard enough as some how redemptive on its face. Tell that to the people in my part of the world who clean houses by day and offices by night and live three families to an apartment to try to survive.

My point here is this: more than any other industrialized, first world society, the US partakes of a notion that making a decent wage is about personal worthiness. It fails to take into the real economic advantages of luck of birth, genetic predisposition, geography and a host of other factors and has made us one of the most classist societies in the west. Lack of social safety nets create greater disparities, as does an underlying attitude about those social safety nets which believes that such protections support laziness and help people make self-destructive choices. The unemployment rates may be higher in Europe, but the quality of life is better across all social strata, and life expectency rates, general rates of educational acheivement, literacy and infant mortality demonstrate that maybe they are on to something.

We tolerate really astonishing amounts of inequality in this country (and, yes, this is a subtext, one of many, in the gay marriage conflict) based on subconscious ideas about worthiness and entitlement which come out of a very superficial reading of Puritan theology. The idea that there is a floor of dignity below which no one should fall has a strong economic basis. If large swaths of a society can't be consumers in a consumer society, the whole economy will be subject to wild swings. Of course we aren't seeing anything like that today, as consumer confidence plummeted this month because the public's background theology has come into conflict with their lived experience.

One of my canniest theology teachers likes to say that theology is "unvoiced operating assumptions," the things we believe about how life works which we rarely interrogate to see if it is borne out in fact. There is a theology behind this labor action, and it provides us a window into the collective subconscious about God, human worth and the relationship of money to both.

A Couple of Youngsters in Love

Federal Marriage Amendment: Special "Passion of Christ"/Ash Wednesday Edition

CHYRON fades in from black:

Insight courtesy of Atrios.

Rogue Nation

Bush Shifts U.S. Stance On Use of Land Mines
Policy Slated for 2010 Won't Ban All Devices Designed to Kill Troops
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 2004; Page A01

President Bush will bar the U.S. military from using certain types of land mines after 2010 but will allow forces to continue to employ more sophisticated mines that the administration argues pose little threat to civilians, officials said yesterday.

The new policy, due to be announced today, represents a departure from the previous U.S. goal of banning all land mines designed to kill troops. That plan, established by President Bill Clinton, set a target of 2006 for giving up antipersonnel mines, depending on the success of Pentagon efforts to develop alternatives.

Bush, however, has decided to impose no limits on the use of "smart" land mines, which have timing devices to automatically defuse the explosives within hours or days, officials said.

His ban will apply only to "dumb" mines -- those without self-destruct features. But it will cover devices not only aimed at people but also meant to destroy vehicles. In that way, Bush's policy will extend to a category of mines not included in Clinton's plan, which was limited to antipersonnel devices.
Bush will also propose a 50 percent jump in spending, up to $70 million in fiscal 2005, for a State Department program that provides mine-removal assistance in more than 40 countries, officials said. The program also funds mine-awareness programs abroad and offers some aid to survivors of mine explosions.

A senior State Department official, who disclosed Bush's decision on the condition that he not be named, said the new policy aims at striking a balance between the Pentagon's desire to retain effective weapons and humanitarian concerns about civilian casualties caused by unexploded bombs, which can remain hidden long after combat ends and battlefields return to peaceful use.
The safety problem stems from dumb bombs, which kill as many as 10,000 civilians a year, the official said. Smart bombs, he added, "are not contributors to this humanitarian crisis."

Bush's decision drew expressions of outrage and surprise from representatives of humanitarian organizations that have pressed for a more comprehensive U.S. ban on land mines. They say the danger to civilians and allied soldiers during and after a war outweighs the benefits of such weapons. They also dispute the contention that unexploded smart mines are safe, saying there isn't enough evidence to know.

"We expected we wouldn't be pleased by the president's decision, but we hadn't expected a complete rejection of what has been U.S. policy for the past 10 years," said Steve Goose, who heads the arms division of Human Rights Watch.
"It looks like a victory for those in the Pentagon who want to cling to outmoded weapons, and a failure of political leadership on the part of the White House. And it is stunningly at odds with what's happening in the rest of the world, where governments and armies are giving up these weapons."

Yet another recidivist Bush policy: the rest of the civilized world signed on to the International Landmine Convention years ago. But Bush's form of American Exeptionalism means that the rest of the world's standards about what constitutes best humanitarian practices simply doesn't apply to us. For us, the moral dictum that the end never justifies the means is turned on its head, because might makes right for the power chosen by God to bring peace and freedom to the rest of the world. Bush is on CNN now repeating his "more peaceful, more free" mantra. What a joke as genocides continue in Africa and Haiti stands on the precipice of a bloodbath while Powell "signals" that the freely elected president of the country ought to abdicate. I've spent the last few days googling around to see if I can find any hints in the press that the CIA has been supporting the rebel insurgencies. The conspiracy theory websites are rife with speculation. But there are real signs that the embargo we placed on the island after the Bush installation has done at least as much damage there as it did in Iraq. There are food shortages and hunger in Haiti, and that certainly destabilized the country.

Empire is expensive. It's about time we learned that.

Rummy Don't Care

Afghan fighters pose `serious threat'
Official: Attacks endanger stability

By Cam Simpson
Washington Bureau
Published February 25, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Attacks by a resurgent Taliban and fighters loyal to one of Afghanistan's most powerful warlords have reached "their highest levels since the collapse of the Taliban government," the head of the Pentagon's intelligence agency said Tuesday.

Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, who heads the Defense Intelligence Agency, called the Taliban attacks aimed at humanitarian and reconstruction efforts "a serious threat, potentially eroding commitments to stability and progress in Afghanistan."

U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan will face key tests in coming months because of a possible increase in violence linked to political developments, intelligence community leaders said Tuesday.

Jacoby, addressing a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, said many of the attacks in Afghanistan, orchestrated by fundamentalist Taliban fighters or forces loyal to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former U.S. ally, are ineffective. But he said recent assaults "show increasing accuracy and sophistication."

The rising insecurity in Afghanistan has forced a wholesale retreat of international aid operations across the south and east of the country. A little more than a year ago, there were 26 foreign aid agencies operating in the southern city of Kandahar. Now there are fewer than five.

After Rumsfeld Visit, Afghan Leader Asserts Taliban Is Beaten
By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: February 27, 2004

KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 26 — President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that the Taliban had been defeated and that exiled former members of the leadership were appealing daily to his government to be allowed to return to Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai made his comments at a news conference after meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld at the presidential palace in Kabul. They came shortly after suspected terrorists shot dead five staff members of an Afghan nonprofit organization, and wounded three more in an area east of Kabul. It was one of the worst attacks in months.

Can you say "cognitive dissonance?"

It's appalling to see Karzai tracking with his handlers when the future of his country is in extremely grave risk. At times like this, my most medieval of minds comes to the fore and I hope that there is a special circle of Hell reserved for people like the spectacularly incompetent Donald Rumsfeld who play so loose with the lives of others.

Just War Doctrine holds that for a war to be morally licit, it must be prosecuted correctly, mindful of non-combatents, and fought to win as quickly as possible to minimize death and destruction. If one wishes to make the case that the Afghan campaign was moral in the first place--and one could--the way we are fighting it removes any moral approbrium, as well as doing nothing to make us any safer and demonstrably making the lives of the Afghans worse.

Economics Day

Six or eight months ago, the mention of the word "economics" would cause my eyes to glaze over and my jaw to go slack. Then, I discovered the blogosphere and literate, articulate economists like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Max Sawicky and a host of others with the gift for explaining al the stuff I slept through in college in language the non-specialist reader can understand. Here's today's roundup, which is a bitch-slap to the Bush stump speech.

The Trade Tightrope
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 27, 2004

You can't blame the Democrats for making the most of the Bush administration's message malfunction on trade and jobs. When the president's top economist suggests, even hypothetically, considering hamburger-flipping a form of manufacturing, it's a golden opportunity to accuse the White House of being out of touch with the concerns of working Americans. ("Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?" Representative John Dingell asks.) And the accusation sticks, because it's true.

But the Democratic presidential candidates have to walk a tightrope. To exploit the administration's vulnerability, they must offer relief to threatened workers. But they also have to avoid falling into destructive protectionism.

Let me spare you the usual economist's sermon on the virtues of free trade, except to say this: although old fallacies about international trade have been making a comeback lately (yes, Senator Charles Schumer, that means you), it is as true as ever that the U.S. economy would be poorer and less productive if we turned our back on world markets. Furthermore, if the United States were to turn protectionist, other countries would follow. The result would be a less hopeful, more dangerous world.

Yet it's bad economics to pretend that free trade is good for everyone, all the time. "Trade often produces losers as well as winners," declares the best-selling textbook in international economics (by Maurice Obstfeld and yours truly). The accelerated pace of globalization means more losers as well as more winners; workers' fears that they will lose their jobs to Chinese factories and Indian call centers aren't irrational.

Addressing those fears isn't protectionist. On the contrary, it's an essential part of any realistic political strategy in support of world trade. That's why the Nelson Report, a strongly free-trade newsletter on international affairs, recently had kind words for John Kerry. It suggested that he is basically a free trader who understands that "without some kind of political safety valve, Congress may yet be stampeded into protectionism, which benefits no one."

Mr. Kerry's Wednesday speech on trade seemed consistent with that interpretation. He decried the loss of jobs to imports, but was careful not to promise too much. You might say that he proposed speed bumps, rather than outright barriers to outsourcing: rules requiring notice to employees and government agencies before jobs are shifted overseas, steps to close tax loopholes that encourage offshore operations, more aggressive enforcement of existing trade agreements, and a review of those agreements with an eye toward seeking tougher labor and environmental standards.

Brad DeLong critiques from a different side of the model, the job creation side.

How costly was the Bush administration's decision not to take out insurance against a weak labor market--not to push for a real jobs program, and to push instead for yet another tax cut for the upper class masquerading as a jobs program? Project employment at the start of 2001 forward by the rate of trend labor force growth and compare it to the current level of payroll employment, and you'll see that we are 6.2 million jobs short. Now the level of employment at the start of 2001 was that of a high boom, and it's not possible to sustain that level of resource mobilization forever. So take off 2 million from the climb-down from boom conditions, and get the reasonable estimate that we are 4.2 million jobs short of where we would like to be. That's an employment shortfall of 3%. Certainly a good portion of that could have been closed by a tax cut that would boost demand by getting the money to middle- and working-class people who would largely spend, instead of to upper-class people who would largely save it.

via corrente:

Number of Mass Layoffs Rose Sharply in January
2,400 Employers Let Go 50 or More

By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 26, 2004; Page E02

More than 2,400 employers across the country reported laying off 50 or more workers in January, the third-highest number of so-called mass layoffs since the government became tracking them a decade ago.

Only in December 2000 and December 2002 were the number of large layoffs higher. A total of 239,454 workers lost their jobs in the January layoffs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, based on unemployment insurance claims filed with state employment agencies. Among them were 17,544 temporary workers.

The total jobs lost in January was the most since November 2002, when 240,171 workers were let go in groups of 50 or more. Manufacturing workers, particularly in transportation, food processing and retail jobs, were hardest hit. The large layoffs also included 10,876 government workers, most at the state and local levels.

On CNN last night, financial guru Lou Dobbs (who is undergoing a public political conversion at least as spectacular as Andrew Sullivan's> interviewed NYT tax policy reporter David Cay Johnston. This interchange pulled my eyes away from my computer monitor and had me glued to the TV screen:

DOBBS: Let's put the graph up. We have a graphic of this from your book that we want to show you maxing Social Security taxes per person doing exactly what David suggested. This is a remarkable -- to look at the income growth from 1970 to 2000, for the bottom, if you will, 99 percent of this country versus the top 100 -- one percent, is staggering. I follow these trends rather carefully but I had no idea of the discrepancy there.

JOHNSTON: If you chart, Lou, the increase in income for the bottom 99 percent of Americans over that 30-year period, for each dollar that each person got in increased income, and the average was $2,700, less than a hundred dollars a year, you made it one inch high for the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent, or 27,000 people, it is 625 feet high. 625 feet to one inch.

DOBBS: And the solution is there, the fact that Alan Greenspan, the fed chairman would raise the issue, I think, is commendable. The suggestion in my opinion that the first solution should be sought is to cut the benefits of future retirees is reprehensible. What is your reaction?

JOHNSTON: Well, we can choose in America, if you want, to have a system in which the middle class and the upper middle class, people making $30,000 to $500,000 a year subsidize people who make millions of dollars. And if Americans want to vote for that they should do it.

I just don't think, Lou, that Americans would have gone for this if they had known what is happening. And since it was Mr. Greenspan who said pay your tax in advance and now he says, no, we're not going to give you the benefits, but we can't raise taxes on the rich. That seems to me morally troubling.

DOBBS: Let me ask the question that everyone listening and watching -- listening to and watching you right now wants to know, that $1.7 trillion in extra collections on Social Security, where is their money?

JOHNSTON: We spent it. We spent it on tax cuts for the super rich. In 1993, the 400 highest income people in America paid 30 cents on the dollar in income taxes. By 2000 they were down to paying 22 cents on the dollar. Had the Bush cuts been in effect they would have paid 17 cents on the dollar. Everybody else in America went from 13 cents up to 15. So the super rich in America have more of their money after taxes and everybody else has less.

DOBBS: David, do you ever share with people your political affiliation?

JOHNSTON: Well, as a matter of public record. I'm a registered Republican.

DOBBS: I just wanted to get it on the record, but I wanted to be sure that was okay with you. David Cay Johnston your presence here tonight is greatly appreciated. We thank you. I want to say I don't often do this. I would like to say to our viewers that his book, "Perfectly Legal," is definitely worth your read. This is a complex issue, but what he reveals in that book is amazing, as you just heard part of it. David Cay Johnston. The book is "Perfectly Legal." Thank you for being with us.

Bushonomics is a giant shell game, with your ability to earn a livelihood, your ability to retire, your ability to see a doctor all dependent on watching the montebanc's hands as he moves the shells around. Comforting, isn't it?

When the Media Does Good, Praise Them

As you have often heard me complain here, most news and opinion coverage of religion in the American media is dreadful. Our uncurious secular media doesn't know what questions to ask, and when they ask anything at all, they don't have enough background to understand and evaluate the answers. There is one shining exception, however. The Dallas Morning News has some of the most intelligent and informed religion coverage in the country, at least since Lynn Neary left the religion beat at NPR--which was a huge loss to religion reporting.

I've been so busy digging into the Bushleague for the last few months that I haven't had any time to spend in the archives of the DMN site, but got around to it tonight. I found this recent commentary and thought you might enjoy hearing from a thoughtful, progressive Baptist.

Margaret Kimberley: Not all Christians are right

02:41 PM CST on Friday, February 13, 2004

By MARGARET KIMBERLEY / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Conservative Christians have espoused their views on school prayer, public displays of the Ten Commandments, abortion, gay rights and other issues so vociferously that they have succeeded in making conservative synonymous with Christian.

The David Limbaugh book Persecuted: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (Regnery Publishing, $27.95) is the culmination of this effort. Not only are Christians alleged to be persecuted, a specious argument at best, but they are allegedly persecuted by liberals. It of course follows that liberals must not be Christians.

As a political liberal who is also a devout Baptist, I have grudging admiration for my conservative coreligionists. They are unrelenting in the promotion of their beliefs and in their alliance with conservative politics. The ascendancy of George W. Bush has made them all the more powerful.

Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson and groups such as the Traditional Values Coalition denounce gay marriage, the ACLU, the United Nations, the Supreme Court, all liberals and any opinions or policies connected to them. But while Jesus said, "As you do unto the least of these you have done it unto me," I see no mention of the least among us in the conservative agenda.

The president and the Republican-controlled Congress so beloved by religious conservatives recently passed legislation eliminating overtime pay for as many as 5 million working Americans. Are working people not the least among us? Do Christian conservatives approve of tax breaks that favor the wealthiest at the expense of the middle class?

It appears that the operative word for those who describe themselves as Christian conservatives is conservative, not Christian. They thrive on the idea of controlling the behavior of others, whether by restricting gay marriage, preventing abortion or establishing the supremacy of their religious and political beliefs, even if their actions subvert religious life as experienced by millions of other Americans.

The Ten Commandments controversy is a case in point. Former Alabama judge Roy Moore made his display of the Ten Commandments in the courtroom a rallying point for conservatives, many of whom believe they are persecuted by those who disagree on this and other issues. In fact, many Christians argue that secular display of the Ten Commandments places them in an improper context and trivializes the important role those teachings play in our lives.

The most prominent Christian conservative, President Bush, once said that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. It is unlikely that Jesus would approve of challenging Iraqi insurgents to "bring 'em on" when American soldiers, international aid workers, and Iraqi civilians are in harms way.

It is time for this president and other conservatives to be taken to task when they claim to follow the word of God. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill alleges that the Bush administration planned for a war with Iraq as soon as it came into office, well before the terror attacks Sept. 11, 2001. A good Christian would be reluctant to make war and would certainly not make a case based on lies. Unfortunately, liberal Christians are less comfortable making public proclamations of faith and are reluctant to debate their conservative brethren.

Well, we need to get better at it. And here is a place where we can learn to do it. As I told you last month, Allen Brill of The Right Christians has put together a Meetup for religious progressives. The first meetings were held last month. My local Meetup didn't make the 5 person minimum, but we were close. Let's take another shot at it on Thursday, March 18 at 8:00 PM. I'll be hosting the DC Meetup. If any readers did attend a Meetup which "made" last month,as we say in academia, I'd love to hear about it.

You can register here. Join with other religious progessives to have a good time and talk about how we can take this country back from the fundamentalist preachers who are getting the biggest megaphones. As Margaret Kimberly says in the DMN piece above, we have some work to do. Let's have some fun while we're doing it.

The Passion of Bob Kerrey

9/11 panelist may quit over Bush secrecy

WASHINGTON - Frustrated by Bush administration restrictions, a former senator said yesterday he might quit the special commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Ex-Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), now president of New York's New School University, told the Daily News that resigning is "on my list of possibilities" because the administration continues to block the full panel's access to top intelligence officials and materials.

"I am no longer ... feeling comfortable that I'm going to be able to read and process what I need in order to participate in writing a report about how it was that 19 men defeated every single defensive system the U.S. put up to kill 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11," said Kerrey.

The commission said yesterday that President Bush and Vice President Cheney would meet privately with only the panel's two chairmen - although former President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, said they would meet with all 10 members.

The White House recently allowed only three commissioners and their staff director to read secret CIA briefings on Al Qaeda given to Bush and Clinton before the 2001 attacks.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) yesterday refused pleas by Bush to extend the commission's May 27 deadline by two months.

Not sure why only the Daily News has this story. It looks like a big one. Bob Kerrey is on of the names on this commission which gives it credibility.

We have tantalizing bits of information about what happened on 9/11 and the lead up to it. Gail Sheehy had a brilliant and devastating article about what Norad did and did not do on the day, including painful interviews with spouses and colleagues of the flight attendents who made cell phone calls from the doomed and embattled plains on that day. Cooperative Research has constructed a timeline of the day from the public record.

When former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies : Inside the White House's War on Terror--What Really Happened is released at the end of March, we should have a much better idea of who knew what in the summer of 2001.

I share Bob Kerrey's frustration, with both the White House and Speaker Hastert, but there is more than one way to skin this cat.

Soft Recovery

Orders for Durable Goods Fall in January

By Jeannine Aversa
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, February 26, 2004; 11:15 AM

Factories saw orders for big-ticket goods drop by 1.8 percent in January, but much of that reflected huge declines in bookings for commercial and military airplanes.

The overall figure, released by the Commerce Department Thursday, obscured gains in other areas as the nation's manufacturers work to keep their recovery moving along.

The 1.8 percent decrease in orders for "durable" goods - costly manufactured products expected to last at least three years - came after a revised 1.6 percent gain registered in December, which was better than previously estimated.

Although economists were forecasting a 1.4 percent rise in new bookings in January, the decline actually appeared to overstate the weakness.

"Orders are bouncing around like crazy, but when you cut through the clutter, demand remains pretty good," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors. "The general trend is still decent, but there is reason to be cautious as it would be nice to see a more consistent upward trend."

In other economic news, the Labor Department said new claims for unemployment benefits last week rose by 6,000 to 350,000, highlighting the uneven recovery taking place in the jobs market.

The complementary Reuters story ledes with the soundness of the underlying economic fundamentals, but stagnant to falling wages and increasing unemployment--along with the big decline in consumer confidence reported earlier this week--means that the danger of softness in consumer demand is real. If that actually falls, industrial fundamentals are going to take a beating

Passion or Pornography?

By comments and email, several readers have asked if I am going to weigh in on Mel Gibson's much hyped film, The Passion of the Christ. I've been carrying on an interior debate about this for a couple of days, because I have no intention of seeing the movie. Perhaps my objections are worth airing here.

I belong to an interfaith discussion group which has been meeting by email now for a year. We are spread out across the continent and include a Jew, an Evangelical Christian, an American Buddhist, a Canadian Catholic theologian and myself. We've been discussing the movie for several days. Our Evangelical member has been encouraged to see the movie by his pastor. Our Canadian theologian, a graduate student in theology at a Canadian university, has been asked to be a part of a CBC radio discussion panel tomorrow and has screened the film twice and shared her reactions with us. Last night she wrote to say that after seeing it for the second time yesterday, she felt like she needed a shower. If I can get from here a link to the CBC web broadcast tomorrow, I'll put it up.

Yesterday, I shared a reflection with them about my reasons for giving this one a pass. One of my principle objections is that Mel Gibson is a "Tridentine Catholic" with a very specific agenda I find distasteful. Our Evangelical member asked me to define that, so I begin my reflection with a definition:

A "Tridentine Catholic" is one that refuses to accept the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, 1962-65. They are actually not Catholic anymore, since refusing to accept the teaching of a major ecumenical council is tantamount to apostasy. Gibson's father, Hudson, is 'way out of communion with Rome, and the son shares some of the father's prejudices. Hudson is a "sedevacantist," one who believes that no pope since Pius XII--the predecessor of John XXIII-- was validly elected and the See of Peter has been vacant ever since, which makes the Vatican Council invalid. Tthe hallmarks of Tridentine Catholicism, the kind of Catholicism that was taught in the 1940s through mid 60s in this country, were an emphasis on sinfulness, suffering, magical thinking, scriptural literalism (although RCs have always been poorly connected to the Bible--pre-Vat II, RCs were generally told that they were going to get all the Gospel they were going to need from the lectionary for the Mass and sermon which would explain it, lay people being too stupid to read the book on their own) and an absolute sense of the superiority of the clerical to the lay state in life.

The agenda Gibson is flakking is not interesting to me: seperating Jesus' death from the reason for that death, his ministry and life, makes no sense to me. It's bad theology. We are an Easter people, we all have our Good Fridays, but treating this piece of history as spectacle nauseates me. As I said in aside to our Canadian theologian the other day, I'm a very impressionable person. It's one of the hazards of being a poet. Movie violence affects me, I have nightmares for weeks. There were substantial sections of the latest Lord of the Rings movie where I had to avert my eyes, and that was pretty cartoonish stuff. I watched The Lion King on TV the other week and nearly had to turn it off at the death of the lion's father. Yup. That's me. I don't watch movies much, although romantic comedies are okay. I did watch one of those meteors hit the earth movies last month, but that was so hokey it didn't bother me. Generally, the excessive violence in most contemporary movies is such a turn-off that I just avoid them. Disaster movies are totally out of bounds.

Much to my surprise, Andy Sullivan may begin putting in the occasional appearance here at Bump. Andy saw the movie last night and his reaction is pretty similar to what I've heard from others. Early this morning Andy wrote:

At the same time, the movie was to me deeply disturbing. In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene. No human being could sruvive it. Yet for Gibson, it is the h'ors d'oeuvre for his porn movie. The whole movie is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates this level of extreme, endless savagery and there is no theological reason for it.

Cincinnatti ArchbishopDaniel Pilarczyk is turning into one of the American heirarchies out of the box liberals. His spokesman told the Cincy Post, "while the film makes some important points, he did not want to see it because he does not want to view the violence, spokesman Dan Andriacco said."

Theologically speaking, confessional Christianity sees the historical Jesus become the Christ of faith through his life, death and resurrection. To pull out any one of those elements and treat it alone rather misses the point of what Christianity is. Additionally, the synoptic Gospels are not histories: they are faith documents which record the theological understandings of the meaning of the "Christ Event" by followers removed from the events between 40 and 60 years following Jesus' life and death. While I understand that Gibson's film is an artistic rendering of his own understanding of those documents, presenting them as documentary fact defiles their actual significance.

Reader TAK pointed me to a review in the new New Yorker by David Denby which sums up my understanding of the cinematic flaws of the movie:

Mel Gibson is an extremely conservative Catholic who rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican council. He’s against complacent, feel-good Christianity, and, judging from his movie, he must despise the grandiose old Hollywood kitsch of “The Robe,” “The King of Kings,” “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” and “Ben-Hur,” with their Hallmark twinkling skies, their big stars treading across sacred California sands, and their lamblike Jesus, whose simple presence overwhelms Charlton Heston. But saying that Gibson is sincere doesn’t mean he isn’t foolish, or worse. He can rightly claim that there’s a strain of morbidity running through Christian iconography—one thinks of the reliquaries in Roman churches and the bloody and ravaged Christ in Northern Renaissance and German art, culminating in such works as Matthias Grünewald’s 1515 “Isenheim Altarpiece,” with its thorned Christ in full torment on the Cross. But the central tradition of Italian Renaissance painting left Christ relatively unscathed; the artists emphasized not the physical suffering of the man but the sacrificial nature of his death and the astonishing mystery of his transformation into godhood—the Resurrection and the triumph over carnality. Gibson instructed Deschanel to make the movie look like the paintings of Caravaggio, but in Caravaggio’s own “Flagellation of Christ” the body of Jesus is only slightly marked. Even Goya, who hardly shrank from dismemberment and pain in his work, created a “Crucifixion” with a nearly unblemished Jesus. Crucifixion, as the Romans used it, was meant to make a spectacle out of degradation and suffering—to humiliate the victim through the apparatus of torture. By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. And by casting James Caviezel, an actor without charisma here, and then feasting on his physical destruction, he has turned Jesus back into a mere body. The depictions in “The Passion,” one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema, are akin to the bloody Pop representation of Jesus found in, say, a roadside shrine in Mexico, where the addition of an Aztec sacrificial flourish makes the passion a little more passionate. Such are the traps of literal-mindedness. The great modernist artists, aware of the danger of kitsch and the fascination of sado-masochism, have largely withdrawn into austerity and awed abstraction or into fervent humanism, as in Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), which features an existential Jesus sorely tried by the difficulty of the task before him. There are many ways of putting Jesus at risk and making us feel his suffering.

These are the reasons for my choice. You are free to make your own and discuss in comments. If you've seen the film and have a counter argument, share freely.

UPDATE:

The New Republic has a critique of the movie by their literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, an observant Jew and one of the finest writers in matters of the human heart and transcendent spirit working today. His memoir, Kaddish, is both a moving tribute to his father and a conversion story which happens unexpectedly in the year in which he promises to pray the mourner's kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, every day for the year following his father's death. The article is long, but worth it. Here is a sample:

The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.

UPDATE 2:

Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist, attended the movie with his wife last night and hated it. The link takes you to his critique. Here is an excerpt:

A Passion For Blood

The film is horribly, horribly anti-Semitic and I guarantee you it is but a first. This one is going to makes oodles of money and we all know Americans love a winner. As Leon Wiesseltier sadly says:"The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film." Which is also the same reaction my wife had.

What Did You Do in the War?

For Ex-Senator, Kerry Race Is Chance to Rejoin the Battle
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: February 26, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 — Before he lost his Senate seat, before his entire world seemed to collapse around him, Max Cleland would have had little reason to go to a forlorn union hall, way out in Wisconsin's dairy country.

Yet there he was last week, a biography of John Kerry tucked under his arm and a "Veterans for Kerry" bumper sticker on his wheelchair, talking to a room that had more folding chairs than people.

Mr. Cleland, a former Georgia senator who lost both legs and an arm in the Vietnam War, was hustling votes for Mr. Kerry, his fellow Vietnam veteran and the man he calls "my brother." Suddenly, a young man in blue jeans and a purple shirt burst into the conversation, spilling forth a tale of rage and suffering after the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

"I just want to give you a hug," Mr. Cleland said, reaching his stubby right arm and his intact left one around the man's neck. "I love you, brother."

Still bitter over what he regards as Republican attacks on his patriotism in the 2002 Senate race, Mr. Cleland is apparently on a mission, collecting what he calls a "band of brothers" along the way to help Senator Kerry of Massachusetts defeat President Bush. Now on the rebound from his loss to Saxby Chambliss, Mr. Cleland, 62, is emerging as a powerful symbol for both veterans and Democrats — and becoming nettlesome for Republicans, some of whom complain he is exploiting his war wounds for Mr. Kerry's benefit.

With Republicans, including Mr. Chambliss, calling Mr. Kerry soft on defense — the same accusation they used to defeat Mr. Cleland — the presidential race is increasingly turning into a reprise of the 2002 Georgia campaign.

On Wednesday, Mr. Cleland began appearing in television advertisements for Mr. Kerry in his native Georgia. He also held a conference call to criticize Ed Gillespie, the Republican National Committee chairman, saying that for Mr. Gillespie, who did not serve in the military, to criticize Mr. Kerry, who was wounded three times in Vietnam, "is like a mackerel in the moonlight — it both shines and stinks at the same time." Earlier, he used the same line against Senator Chambliss.

Democrats are delighted.

Politics is America's civic religion. Just like it's transcendent cousin, metaphysics, it needs symbols and narratives to establish its place in the public mind. George W. Bush has chosen to frame this year's election on the war, he's a "war president." When he chose that vocabulary in his interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press he clearly didn't have a clue about the constellation of symbols and stories he would be allowing onstage.

And here is something else he didn't think about: somewhere on the campus of Walter Reed Army Medical Center is a young soldier who suffered Max Cleland's injuries and discovered John Kerry's outrage over a disasterous and unnecessary war. The metanarrative of the Kerry campaign is 30 years old, but the metanarrative which is only 30 days old is just waiting to be discovered.

I do, I do

Another Bush Culture War

By Harold Meyerson
Thursday, February 26, 2004; Page A21

This is the way that Bushes run for president when they fall behind: They plunge us into culture wars.

It was only when Poppy Bush fell behind Michael Dukakis in the summer of '88 that he made an issue of Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. It was only when George W. fell behind John McCain in the winter of 2000 that he went to Bob Jones University to align himself with the old white South.

And now the president has fallen behind John Kerry. Abruptly, it is the season of doctored photos showing Kerry alongside Jane Fonda, of Internet and Murdoch-media rumor campaigns about affairs that never were. Like father, like son; like Atwater, like Rove; no one spreads sewage quite like the Bushes.

But the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage, which our current Bush endorsed on Tuesday, is more than just wedge politics as usual. It would actually create within the Constitution a permanent secondary caste in American life. Not untouchables, certainly; we're beyond that. Just unmarriageables.

That's a tricky distinction, though, and it's one that Bush and all but the most benighted opponents of gay marriage have to make all the time. Bush must affirm -- because most Americans now believe -- that gays and lesbians are created equal to heterosexuals; they have all the rights of Americans save those commonly associated with marriage and, in some states, parenting. And there's the rub: Once a group is viewed as fully human, it grows harder to accord it some rights and deny it others. In the early 20th century, the laws banning miscegenation were justified as protecting whites against "inferior" blacks. By mid-century, in much of the nation, blacks were no longer inferior, and the case for miscegenation had dwindled to a defense of marriage as such. But if whites and blacks were no longer really different, what was it that marriage needed to be defended against?

Now the issue is joined again. Bush took care to affirm that his amendment wasn't really about gay and lesbian rights, just about marriage. "If we're to prevent the meaning of marriage from being changed forever," he said, "our nation must enact a constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America."

But the meaning of marriage changes all the time as our views of human equality change. Women used to take a vow to obey their husbands because marriage sanctified the inequality of the sexes. The rising acceptance of gender equality -- and with it, the advent of birth control -- has vastly reshaped marriage over the past century.

Champions of the constitutional amendment want to freeze an institution that has been evolving in an egalitarian direction for the past century. They cannot attack gays and lesbians as such, however, so they seek to define marriage exclusively as heterosexual child-rearing. "If marriage had nothing to do with procreation," Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council argued on Tuesday, "there would be no reason for government to license and regulate it at all. . . . Yes, infertile and childless opposite-sex couples are allowed to marry, too -- but that is only because excluding them would require either an invasion of privacy or the drawing of arbitrary and inexact lines."

Let's take the Family Research Council guy on his own argument. "Yes, infertile and childless opposite-sex couples are allowed to marry, too -- but that is only because excluding them would require either an invasion of privacy or the drawing of arbitrary and inexact lines." So, how is denying matrimony to gay men and lesbians not a violation of their privacy?

In reality, homosexual couples do have children. If you want to see what kinds of horrors the states visit on those children, take a look at this piece by publius at Legal Fiction who begins his list of shame with a Kantian riff on the limits of reason alone:

[R]ational argument usually doesn't lead anyone to change their minds, because rationality is merely a tool to justify pre-existing preferences that are the result of non-rational factors such as one's upbringing, or social network, or parents, etc. Anyway, here are more of the horrible cases.

People need to understand that homosexuality is a reality. These people raise children, seek adoption, get divorces, and have custody battles. By banning gay marriage and civil unions, the state does the opposite of strengthening the family. It destroys families and prevents them from being created. And it crushes individuals who are torn from the children they have raised since birth. These laws are cruel. And well-intentioned or not, those people who support such discriminatory laws are advocating cruelty and creating pain and destroying families. I dare call it immoral.

The laws of matrimony are not now nor have never been solely about procreation. They have evolved as the property rights of the two partners have changed over time. Via Atrios, here is the Government Accounting Agency's list of 1049specific rights accorded to the partners by law.

It seems to me that it is time to start looking at these rights as things accorded to people because they are human, not because they are straight. If we really took human rights seriously, we would look at the many ways in which our laws and attitudes dehumanize people by groups. That is what this is really all about.

Rev. Allen Brill of The Right Christianshas been running a terrific series of essays on Biblical morality and marriage rights. He and publius have become daily must reads to follow both the legal and religious sides of the arguments on this issue.

Solidarity Forever

Stores Facing Hard Sell to Refill Aisles

By James F. Peltz, Times Staff Writer

When the supermarket strike ends, another headache will begin for the major grocery chains in Central and Southern California. They'll have to deal with the likes of Ronnie Bertrand.

The 69-year-old Bakersfield resident, a self-described "person who doesn't like change," was a longtime Vons patron until picket lines sent her to check out alternative aisles. At some point after the strike began 4½ months ago, Vons lost her to a Foods Co. store in her neighborhood.

"As time went on, I found I was spending less money," Bertrand said. Once the pickets are gone, she might visit Vons to buy fresh vegetables, she added, but "I really think I'm going to continue shopping at Foods Co."

Luring back once-loyal customers will be a major task for Vons, Pavilions, Ralphs and Albertsons. A new Los Angeles Times poll indicates they have their work cut out: Among people who shopped at the three chains before the labor dispute, 59% said they had stopped shopping there during the picketing. And 14% of the chains' total pre-strike customers said they would continue to shop elsewhere after a settlement.

This is a very long and pretty bloody strike. Neither the managements, the employees or the public are going to get over it in a week. The outlines of any possible final settlement are not at all clear in what little has been leaked to the SoCal press: the discipline on both sides has been impressive, which means that whatever is going on won't be helped by negotiating in the press.

The strikes and lockouts are about keeping Wal-Mart wages and benefits out of the big national grocery chains. This negotiation is a test case for the rest of the country. On this coast, the managements of the national chains here have already let it be known that a strike threat will result in a lockout when the contract here comes up for re-negotiation with the UFCW next month.

Just as Ben Chandler in the KY6 Congressional District was a test case for the next national election, this grocery strike is a finger in the wind for the entire grocery industry. Wal-Mart has nationalized all labor negotiations in the retail industry. The SoCal grocery negs are just the first the first tremor. What do you Californians call those tremors that presage a quake? This is it.

The next big labor battle is going to be fought in the retail sector. I hope the unions are ready, but I don't think they saw this one coming. This sector is poorly organized and the managements have enormous power over the ability to move people to a full-time work schedule, which is what qualifies you for benefits in the retail workplace--which allows the managements to divide the workers into groups of have and have nots. This is not a great environment for the kind of labor solidarity it takes to negotiate a nationwide move against labor in a major economic sector.

The profit and hurt sharing strategy the grocery managements are pursuing in SoCal shows that they have really thought this out. In a better labor climate (when was the last time we had one of those?) what they are doing would be perceived as a violation of the anti-trust laws and prosecuted as such. Not today. The labor world changed forever after Reagan busted the air traffic controllers.

I live in a "Right to Work" state. We in labor call that a "Right to Work for Less" state, since the RTW states have much lower average wages than do the states without such provisions. RTW laws forbid exclusive bargaining units in the workplace, and that has weakened the few protections allowed in labor law for organized workplaces. In a RTW state, you don't have to join the union or pay dues when you enter employment in an "organized" workplace--"organized" in only the filmiest sense of the word, since the union has lost its power to speak as a unified voice, with predictably lower wages and fewer benefits.

If your local bargaining unit of the UFCW has a contract expiring in your area soon, expect trouble. Think about this in advance. As the LAT article above points out, when a strike happens, it is inconvenient for the public and you will have some decisions to make. Will you cross a picket line in order to save the time it will take you to drive a few more blocks, to a store which doesn't necessarily carry your favorite brands, in an act of support for a bunch of lower middle class people who have given up their entire income to protect what little they have? That's what a strike or lock out is. I've been on long strikes and they are always more painful for the workers than they are for the employers, but they can work. A bunch of little people can get justice if they work together.

It worked the last time the UFCW took a grocery strike here in a right to work state, a negotiation which was a feint for the action going on in SoCal right now, an attempt to weaken benefits. The union ate some wage increases to keep access to benefits for more of their workers, the mass sacrificed for the most vulnerable. At its best, that's what organized labor does.

If you think this doesn't apply to you, Ms. Middle Manager, consider this: the 40 hour week, the minimum wage, health benefits, sick days, the ADA and what little there is of OSHA all came to you, yes, you, because the labor movement negotiated it for the least protected workers first. All of this law started at the bottom and filtered up. If the bottom loses these benefits, there is nothing between you and management to save you. You don't have a bargaining unit. You are on your own.

Think about it before you cross a picket line at your grocery store because it's simpler to shop at Stop and Shop rather than drive another 10 blocks. Think about it.

Puzzle Palace

Via War and Piece:

'CIA chief removed for incompetence'
Saturday, 21 February , 2004, 01:07

Washington: The CIA recently recalled its top officer in Baghdad over doubts about his leadership abilities, and it has closed several offices in Afghanistan amid security concerns, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday, citing US intelligence sources.

The top Central Intelligence Agency officer in Baghdad was replaced in December, in the face of stepped-up attacks targeting civilians and coalition forces, the daily said.

It marked the second time that the CIA chief there had been replaced since President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq last May.

The Baghdad office has become the biggest in CIA history, even surpassing the size of its Saigon post at the height of the Vietnam War, the daily said.

There are nearly 500 CIA agents in Iraq.

A lack of Arabic-speaking agents and qualified officers willing to accept dangerous postings has forced the CIA to hire dozens or perhaps even hundreds of the agency's retirees, to rely heavily on translators and to enlist soldiers to fulfill CIA officers' tasks.

To add to its woes, the CIA is being taken to task in the United States, charged with providing President George W. Bush's administration with faulty intelligence on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which served as Washington's justification for launching its war.

It seems to me that we've got a few more things to worry about than gay marriage.

Let's see: our hands are tied in Haiti because the military is stretched too thin in Afghanistan and Iraq (I watched little Scotty go over and over and over our immigration policy toward Haiti at the gaggle today, as if that's going to keep the hoardes away) and we've got our entire ME intelligence operation bogged down in Baghdad. If this is leadership, it looks like we'd better hire a new team

Conversion Story

Not such a special relationship

US Republicans and the British Conservative party are split on the issue of gay marriage, writes Tom Happold

Wednesday February 25, 2004

Margaret Thatcher's introduction of section 28 in the 1980s politicised many in the gay community, setting them against the Tory party in the process. The measure, banning the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools, was seen as an attempt to suggest that gay people were set on "converting" young people and frighten teachers off discussing sexuality in the classroom.

Attempts to demonstrate that the party had changed, particularly in its attitude to gay people, following its catastrophic election defeat in 1997, came against a background of virulent Tory opposition to the repeal of section 28 in the House of Lords. Mr Portillo's warm words about tolerance were often drowned out by Baroness Young's rants about sodomy.

Gay rights have divided the party ever since. John Bercow resigned from its shadow cabinet after the then Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith insisted on forcing his MPs to vote against proposals allowing gay and unmarried couples to adopt. Fortunately for the Tories, their new leader Michael Howard has proved better at articulating a more liberal line without infuriating his traditional followers.

Earlier this month Mr Howard surprised many by endorsing same-sex partnerships and applauding those "same-sex couples [who] want to take on the shared responsibilities of a committed relationship". He did, however, stop short of backing gay marriage, insisting that "civil partnership differs from marriage".

Nonetheless, the announcement was significant. It marked a real effort to court the pink vote, as well as a genuine change of heart. As Charles Hendry, the Tory MP who is organising the "gay summit", said: "There are many gay and lesbian people who are instinctively Conservative, but in the past they could not vote for the party because of section 28. We are saying we have changed. We are different."

The same will happen here, we're just further behind in the cycle. GLBTs have been growing more political since Stonewall, and this is an issue which will serve as a unifying focus. With Andrew Sullivan and the Log Cabin Republicans deserting Bush on this issue, at some point the Republicans are going to have to make peace. We are still a couple of election cycles away from it, but it will happen.

Family Values

"Today, I call upon the Congress to promptly pass and to send to the states for ratification an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife."

WITH THESE WORDS, President Bush abandoned the Constitution to election-year politics. Until yesterday, he had said he believed in defending traditional marriage and would support a constitutional amendment if necessary -- but only if there were no other way to prevent judges from forcing gay marriage on an unwilling American public. Now, Mr. Bush has abandoned nuance. A federal definition of marriage, which has been governed primarily by state law since the beginning, would prevent any state, whatever the views of its residents, from recognizing the equality and legitimacy of same-sex marriages.

The president's explanation of his reversal is unconvincing. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, he noted, "will order the issuance of marriage licenses to applicants of the same gender in May of this year." And, "In San Francisco, city officials have issued thousands of marriage licenses to people of the same gender, contrary to the California Family Code" -- as has one county in New Mexico. All true, and all controversial. We believe that extending the benefits and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples would be fair and beneficial; we understand that many Americans feel otherwise. But whatever one thinks of the Massachusetts courts or the San Francisco mayor, there is no evidence that state political systems are incapable of responding. Why can't California be trusted to sort out the situation in San Francisco, and Massachusetts legislators and voters to address whatever deficiencies they find in their own court's rulings? And if down the road the voters of some state opt for a legal regime different than that favored by Mr. Bush, why should the Constitution impede their democratic choice? The federal Defense of Marriage Act already guarantees that no state has to recognize a same-sex union performed in another state.

Of course, this is nothing more than political posturing, but I'm also thinking that this is religious conservatives "jump the shark" moment. In ten years this is not going to be an issue and we will look back on this era and wonder "what were they thinking?"

Power

I'm putting this up, not because I necessarily agree with it, but because Bob Kuttner is a smart guy and the meme is already out there. Barring a real health crisis, I don't think there is any way that Dick Cheney is off the ticket this year. Yes, there is some inside-the-beltway buzz about replacing him, but I think that's echo chamber talk. Since most of America doesn't read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Prospect, or The Nation, Cheney's influence and entanglements aren't on the electoral radar screen, which is already cluttered with gay marriage, Iraq and the continuing gloomy job scene. This could change, of course, it just doesn't seem likely to me at this point. That said, given how ineptly the Rovebushcheney campaign is cranking up, anything is possible.

Cheney's unprecedented power

By Robert Kuttner, 2/25/2004

DICK CHENEY is the most powerful vice president in US history. Indeed, there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that Cheney, not Bush, is the real power at the White House and Bush the figurehead.

The true role of the shadowy Cheney is finally becoming an issue in the election, and it deserves to be. A recent piece in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer lays out in devastating detail how Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, created the blueprint for shifting much of the military's support role from the armed services to private contractors. The leading contractor, of course, is Halliburton. When Cheney became vice president, Halliburton was perfectly positioned to make out like a bandit.
....
What is significant about Mayer's New Yorker piece is that it was pieced together mainly from the public record. Cheney's unprecedented role and dubious history are mostly hidden in plain view, just like Bush's. The press needs only to decide that it's a story.

Yesterday the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon has belatedly opened a formal criminal investigation into Halliburton's grotesque overcharging of the Pentagon for oil delivered to Iraq. The oil was deliberately routed through a previously unknown intermediary in Kuwait, which charged Halliburton's subsidiary far above the going rate. The whole deal is fishy because the oil business in Kuwait is closely controlled by the Kuwaiti government, which works closely with the Bush administration.

In December, Pentagon auditors concluded that Halliburton had overcharged the US government for the oil by $61 million. Nonetheless, the same US government has just awarded Halliburton another contract, worth $1.2 billion, to repair oil fields in southern Iraq. If the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service does its job, it will be hard to avoid a close examination of the role of Cheney. Though Bush is already on record that he wants to keep Cheney as his running mate this November, I would not be at all surprised if Cheney were dropped from the Republican ticket. For one thing, Cheney could become a real liability.

Second, there are more attractive alternatives. There is already talk among Republican strategists of replacing Cheney with a tactical choice such as homeland security secretary and former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge or former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Why Ridge or Giuliani? Both are Northeastern and Catholic, and Ridge's Pennsylvania will be a crucial swing state this year. Even more important, both are intimately associated with Sept. 11, 2001. As Bush declines in the polls, he will wrap himself ever more tightly in that legacy. The Republican National Convention will be in New York City, almost on the eve of the third anniversary of 9/11, and that event will be invoked ad nauseam.

What would be Cheney's motivation for leaving? Taking one for the team? I don't think so. He's already enormously wealthy, and could go out and aquire even more wealth. But, by Kuttner's own argument, Cheney is probably the most powerful man on the planet right now, and power is a far more addictive drug than wealth. Like all drugs, it eventually leads to self-distructive behavior, but we aren't there yet.

However, I have seen a worm turn this week which may redound badly on the B/C re-elect. More on that after I've had more coffee.

Pragmatism

Mary Cheney Urged to Fight A Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 24, 2004; Page A03

Thousands of gay rights supporters are posting open letters on the Internet urging Mary Cheney, the vice president's daughter, to speak out against amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

The campaign targets Cheney, 34, because she is openly gay and is running her father's part of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign but has not taken a public position on the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

"As an open lesbian who has worked for years as a public advocate for gay civil rights, you are in a unique position to defend yourself and your community in this dire hour," the Web site DearMary.com says in a model letter.

John Aravosis, a Washington political consultant who set up the site, acknowledged that it is an unusually personal challenge to a member of Vice President Cheney's family.

"If I were a fly on the White House wall, I think they might be saying, 'Wow, this is very personal.' And we would say, 'You're right, this is very personal,' " Aravosis said. "The White House has no problem publicly discussing whether my family's relationships are valid and healthy, yet they refuse to discuss their own."

Jennifer Millerwise, a spokeswoman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, declined to comment on behalf of the campaign and Mary Cheney.
....
But [Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director Patrick]Guerriero agreed that the debate over a constitutional amendment is highly charged, both politically and emotionally. Log Cabin Republicans, which supported the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000, has warned that it will break with the campaign if President Bush formally endorses the proposed amendment, as White House aides have said he intends to do.

"If the effort to write discrimination into the Constitution and use gay and lesbian Americans as a wedge issue becomes a centerpiece of the president's reelection campaign, then it's really the line in the sand for this organization," Guerriero said. "We've been extremely loyal to this president and party through thick and thin . . . but we are forced by this particular moment in history not to sit silent in what has emerged as the cultural war that far right groups have been wanting for years."

I wrote my letter to Dearmary.com. Did you?

By the way, a number of religions perform marriages for same-sex couples, including the Unitarian Universalists, Reform Jews and, on a parish by parish basis, the Episcopalians. On a congregation by congregation basis, so does the United Church of Christ. Many individual Main Line Protestant ministers perform these ceremonies on the basis of individual conscience, so therefore the proposed amendment is a violation of the First Amendment "free exercise" clause, as is most current law.

Bush's support for this so-called amendment is, of course, moot, since the damned thing is a dead letter. As Jack Balkin (my go-to guy on constitutional issues) notes, the Musgrave language proposed for this amendment won't fly as it prohibits civil unions or any other legal strategy, and Congress ain't going to go there. Jack concludes:

Because Bush wants to appeal both to his base and to moderate voters, this semantic strategy makes perfect sense. But it is well worth considering what he and other conservatives have given up in the process. The fact that Bush appears to have given up trying to prevent states from passing civil unions laws signals that the fight over same sex marriage has shifted ground decisively in favor of civil rights advocates and against the Christian right. The best that the Christian right can hope for now is a world in which some states have civil unions and others do not.

I suspect that some pundits will declare this to be a major offensive in culture wars. To me it looks like an admission of defeat.

UPDATE: Editor Nick at The Agonist looks at what Bush isn't doing about real threats to marriage:

Bush has no plans to back a constitutional amendment banning, say, marrying purely for citizenship, no-fault divorce, Las Vegas chapels, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, Married by America, Who Wants to Mary a Millionaire, or any of the multitude of other things which can cheapen or weaken the institution of marriage. Nor will Bush back constitutional amendments against adultery, fornication, witchcraft, working on Sunday, wearing garments made of interwoven linen and wool, letting women be uncovered, women having authority over men, or any of the multitude of other biblical laws which are no longer followed by the state. Also, I am willing to bet he has no plans to make an intellectual argument as to why gay marriage should be banned and how it fits in with the freedom-enhancing Constitution.

Excuse me, Nick, an intellectual argument out of George W. Bush? Brad DeLong reminds us that this administration doesn't need intellectual work, it clears brush. Brad quotes the Ron O'Neill/Ron Susskind book:

O'Neill was surprised at [Whitman's] memo's frankness. Whitman was laying down the gauntlet. Hers were fighting words, but certainly true. As Whitman noted, Bush had "credibility" issues. O'Neill thought about Gerald Ford. Was Ford smarter than Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger--or for that matter him and Greenspan. All four regularly struggled, openly and fiercely, on various landscapes of public policy. And all could claim expertise that Ford couldn't match. Yet everyone, eventually, had deferred to Ford's judgment. Why? It wasn't just because he was the president, O'Neill thought. If only it could be that easy. It was respect born from a deeper constant. After Ford finally held forth, settling this issue or that, each man had the same thought: I like the way he thinks.

O'Neill knew that Whitman had never heard [George W. Bush] analyze a complex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle on a judicious path. In fact, no one--inside or outside the government, here or across the globe--had heard him do that.... And that, O'Neill decided, was what Whitman was getting at.... It was not just [George W. Bush's] credibility around the world. It was his credibility with his most senior officials.

It looks to me like we get a choice between several movies this fall: Dumb and Dumber, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Groundhog Day or Being There. None of which were very good. If John Kerry wants to tell a different story, he's got some work to do.

Dumping Ground

For News Hounds, TGIF

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, February 24, 2004; Page A19

The White House is moving swiftly to establish the administration's place in history as the Friday Night Presidency.

Last Friday afternoon, President Bush announced that he was circumventing the Senate confirmation process and appointing controversial judicial nominee William H. Pryor Jr. to the federal bench. It was the second such recess appointment to be made late on a Friday, following last month's appointment of Charles W. Pickering Sr.

The Friday before the Pryor nomination, the White House had two other late-day announcements: word that Bush would testify privately to the 9/11 commission, and a 7 p.m. dump of hundreds of documents from Bush's National Guard files. Other Friday surprises in recent months include the Justice Department's approval of a Texas redistricting plan expected to give the GOP as many as seven House seats; a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency not to regulate dioxins in sewage sludge; and the news from the Commerce Department that household incomes had declined for three years in a row and 1.7 million people had fallen into poverty -- the first time such statistics were announced on a Friday.

It is an old political tradition to dump unpopular news on Friday, because fewer people are reading newspapers or watching television news over the weekend. But the Bush administration has been using the trick so routinely that it is losing effectiveness. "They're not as successful now in hiding these Friday stories," said Robert Lichter of the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs. "Everybody does it, but this administration has done it too much for their own good."

Indeed, Friday has become a Bush favorite both for dropping bad news and for making announcements that appeal to the president's conservative base, not necessarily the general public. It was on a Friday, for example, that the administration disclosed its long-awaited decision that it would eliminate requirements that thousands of the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries make anti-pollution improvements as they upgrade facilities. On another Friday, the administration announced new rules giving new rights to fetuses. Yet another Friday brought an announcement virtually ensuring that Republicans would prevail in a dispute over the 2000 census count.

Resignations often see daylight on Fridays. The ouster of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and of Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey came on a Friday, as did the resignation of Army Secretary Thomas E. White, a former Enron Corp. executive, announced on a Friday.

Speaking of Enron, the Justice Department chose a Friday night for directing administration officials to preserve papers related to Enron. Likewise, the White House selected Friday as the day to oppose a probe of discussions Karl Rove had with companies in which he held stock.

It starts as a trend, becomes an art form and then descends to cliche. Milbank's article manages to avoid a peevish tone, but I have to think that the White House press corps must hate this: you spend the week dealing with little Scotty's incoherent press gaggles and then have to leave the beeper on late on Friday to catch whatever bad news the Bushies want to hide, and spend Friday night on the computer trying to get some kind of analysis onto an editor's desk before the Saturday edition closes.

It's STILL The Economy

You have to love the gift for understatement possessed by WaPo headline writers.

White House Forecasts Often Miss The Mark

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 24, 2004; Page A01

President Bush last week caused a stir when he declined to endorse a projection, made by his own Council of Economic Advisers, that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year. But that forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years.

Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for fiscal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit for this year is on course to be $521 billion.

These are not isolated cases. Over three years, the administration has repeatedly and significantly overstated the government's fiscal health and the number of jobs the economy would create, but economists and politicians disagree about why.

The president, though not addressing the predictions directly, regularly points to four events that altered economic expectations: the recession; the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; the corporate governance scandals; and war in Iraq. "We've been through a lot," Bush said in an economics speech Thursday. "But we acted, here in Washington. I led."

The opposition has sought to portray the economic forecasts as evidence of Bush's dishonesty, similar to the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that have not materialized. "Every day, this administration's credibility gap grows wider," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the leading prospect to challenge Bush in November, said Friday. "They didn't tell Americans the truth about Iraq. They didn't tell Americans the truth about the economy. And now they're trying to manufacture the 2.6 million manufacturing jobs they've destroyed."
....
Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that the administration has been "a little exuberant" in its forecasts but that the problem is more a statistical one. "The patterns that prevailed before don't seem to be holding in this current recovery," Reischauer said.

Figures released by the White House show that its overestimate of job creation in 2003 was the largest forecast error made in at least 15 years, and its 2002 underestimate of the deficit was the largest in at least 21 years. But the statistics show that forecast errors began to increase considerably around 1997, under the Clinton administration. By contrast, the Bush administration's GDP forecasts have been relatively accurate, indicating job growth and tax receipts have shed their historical correlation to GDP growth.

What the diplomatic Milbank is not telling you: what the Clinton CEA (Council of Economic Advisors), OMB and CBO did was underestimate the surpluses.

Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that the administration has been "a little exuberant" in its forecasts but that the problem is more a statistical one. "The patterns that prevailed before don't seem to be holding in this current recovery," Reischauer said.

Figures released by the White House show that its overestimate of job creation in 2003 was the largest forecast error made in at least 15 years, and its 2002 underestimate of the deficit was the largest in at least 21 years. But the statistics show that forecast errors began to increase considerably around 1997, under the Clinton administration. By contrast, the Bush administration's GDP forecasts have been relatively accurate, indicating job growth and tax receipts have shed their historical correlation to GDP growth.

Since I won't be in Berkeley tonight for The Atlantic MonthlyTown Hall to hear his thoughts on the subject, Brad DeLong has kindly put his notes for today's forum up on his website. Shorter DeLong: the productivity gains threw us all for a loop:

What's Going on with the Economy?

America is immensely strong. America is immensely productive. America is immensely inventive. What threatens us via Bush economic mismanagement--it is not anything that can be called "disaster." It is only the waste of opportunity--the opportunity to construct a great society. Nevertheless, I find this waste of opportunity to be heartbreaking.

Bush's campaign slogan so far: we've been through a lot. I led.

Catchy, ain't it.

Oh, and that tax cut for "small business?" Smoke and mirrors. About 4% of small businesses qualified. Under the Bush definition, partners at Big Four accounting firms qualify as "entrepreneurs." The link has some interesting tidbits from the Bush and Cheney 1040s last year.

Waste, Fraud and Abuse

Pentagon Opens Criminal Inquiry of Halliburton Pricing
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Published: February 24, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — Pentagon officials said Monday night that they have opened a criminal fraud investigation of Halliburton, the giant Texas oil-services concern, in an inquiry that will examine "potential overpricing" of fuel taken into Iraq by one of the company's subcontractors.

A Pentagon official said the investigation is focused on the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has drawn fire from critics in Congress since the disclosure in December that Pentagon auditors had found evidence that it had allowed a Kuwaiti subcontractor, Altanmia, to overcharge the government by at least $61 million for fuel shipped into Iraq from Kuwait.

A Pentagon spokesman said the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the criminal investigative arm of the Office of the Inspector General, would act as a result of a referral on Jan. 13 from officials at the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

My source in Baghdad say that the level of corruption in which Halliburton and KB&R; float is beyond belief, and this is coming from someone used to working in a " baksheesh" culture. Gas prices are the least of the sins.

Here's a little summary by Dave Neiwert of the too-numerous-to-count fudges, fibs and perjuries of Pentagon Inspector General L. Jean Lewis. This is the corrupt inspecting the corrupt.

Then there are the multiple investigations of Haliburton on Cheney's watch for bribery in Liberia and securities fraud by the SEC and DoJ. So many scandals, so little time.

Faith Matters

Tomorrow is Mardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday" in the Christian liturgical calendar. It's the last chance for a blow-out before the fast of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. My Anglican/Episcopalian friends will be attending Shrove Tuesday Pancake Breakfasts and Dinners (with all of the liturgical flourishes so beloved by Episcopalians, who even have a liturgy for the butter and syrup,) Catholics will be doing their standard Mardi Gras thing--any excuse for a blow out with us Catholics. It's already been Shrove Tuesday for a while for our readers in Oceania and I'd love to hear about what's customary Down Under.

On Wednesday, the tone changes dramatically. Lent (the word is derived from lenctes, a middle English word, meaning a fallow period, i.e. the time that the fields lay fallow before spring planting) has been historically understood as a fast of purification and preparation for the celebration of Christianity's most important holiday and feast, Easter, the celebration of the Resurrection, the redemption of humanity from bodily death. The period of preparation before the feast is and has always been a period of self-examination, not unlike the High Holidays for Jews or Ramadan for Muslims. Many Christians observe some kind of ascetical discipline during the season of Lent in order to get rid of some of the clutter in our lives and spead this period paying a little closer attention to our faith, our relationship with God and with each other. I've observed a Lenten fast of some kind for many years, since long before I ever considered myself a Christian. I've found that a well-chosen fast helps me to take a closer look at my life. Over the years I've fasted from meat, bookbuying (that was a real tough one, I was in Borders right after church on Easter Sunday) and media--doing without both radio and TV was hard to get used to, but by the end of Lent I found I had little interest in turning them back on again, having gotten used to the silence in the house.) For the last two years, I've fasted from judgements of others and this has been the hardest fast of all. On the Myers-Briggs type indicator, I'm an INTJ who does not suffer fools gladly. For these last two years, every time I detected myself forming a judgement of someone else (I drive in the Washington, DC, area, so...) I recited the Lord's Prayer. Thus, my last two Lents were an experience of "pray without ceasing." Some people give up sweets every Lent. I don't have a sweet tooth, so this wouldn't be a big deal for me, but it is very popular with many of my Catholic friends. Some Catholics, if they aren't daily Mass-goers, will make the attempt during Lent. Retreats during the Triduum, the three solemn days between Holy Thursday and Easter, are quite popular. Catholics and Episcopalians, in particular, have some beautiful and solemn liturgies for these days.

This year, I'm going back to fasting from meat for the season. I don't eat that much of it, but I'm concerned that my diet isn't what it should be--I've developed some very lazy habits in the last six months--and the last time I fasted off meat I paid much better attention to all of the ways I was failing to take decent care of myself, learned some new recipes, did a surprising amount of entertaining as I learned the recipes and developed some better habits. Since I'm also a Lay Cistercian who lives according to the Rule of Benedict, hospitality is an important value in my life and I look forward to spending some intentional time this Lent thinking about ways I can extend greater hospitality to the world around me, and then doing something about it.

What about you? Do you have any special plans for Fat Tuesday? I'm going to have a steak dinner, a rarity since I was laid off, before going veggie. Do you have a spiritual discipline or fast that you adopt for Lent? For any other time of the year? Lent is also spring cleaning season for me, time to get the windows ready for spring's sunshine. When the forsythia by the back door blooms (it will be late this year, we had an unusually cold winter) it is time to match the pungence of the forsythia scent with the Murphy's Oil Soap smell and do a hands and knees job on the floors, move the furniture to vacuum under everything and the like, including getting the vacuum crevice tool out to shove into the nasty folds in the carpeting on the stairs. Fastidious observant Jews will be going through the same exercise in the run-up to Passover, to rid the house of any bit of leavened bread. If you've been reading Riverbend's Baghdad Burning blog over the winter, you know how much housecleaning is a part of the preparation for the major Muslim winter holidays, the big Eids that end Ramadan and celebrate the Sunni and Shia founders. Christians decorate for Christmas and clean for Easter.

I'm looking forward to getting out my vegetarian cookbooks and renewing my aquaintance with that way of life, and looking forward to what I learn from being a little more intentional about nutrition and care for my community. I've learned something important from every Lent I've observed in this way. I don't know what I'll learn this year, but I know I'll learn something.

For the Triduum, I have an ecumenical habit. Holy Thursday is a re-enactment of the Gospel's footwashing story in many churches. I'll attend that liturgy, which is followed by the stripping of the altars in many denominations which have seasonal colors for their vestments and altar furnishings in preparation for Good Friday. On Good Friday, I love the Episcopalian liturgy of the Three Hours, which I combine with the Catholic "Way of the Cross" devotion (a devotion is a private practice, rather than a formal liturgy for the whole Church.) The ecumenical Georgetown Cluster of Churches in DC takes turns with the Triduum liturgies, and I usually attend the Three Hours with them. Holy Saturday I always take as a retreat day, a time for introspection, journaling and a "retreat in place." I prepare meals in advance, so there is no cooking, the phone is off, and there is time for prayer and meditation on the Gospel story of the passion and the apostle's human response to the devestation of the Crucifixion. For Catholics, the liturgical highpoint of the church year is the Easter Vigil mass on Holy Saturday night. It is the biggest liturgical deal we do: it is long, extremely symbolic, and, since Vatican II, the liturgy at which new people are welcomed into the Roman Communion with baptism, if they haven't been baptised before, confirmation and first Communion. This year, I'll be celebrating my third anniversary as a Catholic.

This year, my prayer for you is for an abundance of faith, hope and love, the theological virtues, as we journey through Lent. I know from the more than 1700 comments that you've left at Bump that this is already a community of big hearts.

UPDATE:

Best pancakes EVER (serves 2)

Combine:

2 eggs, beaten
2/3 cup small-curd cottage cheese
2 tablespoons unbleached white flour sifted with 1 tablespoon soy flour
1 1/2 teaspoons melted butter
1/4 teaspoon salt

Spoon several tablespoons of batter at a time onto a hot, greased griddle, brown on both sides turning only once. Butter works best for this.

Serve with apple sauce, honey or fresh fruit.

Coming Up Short

Greenspan: Most Household Finances in Good Shape

By Jeannine Aversa
Associated Press
Monday, February 23, 2004; 9:21 AM

The balance sheets of American households are generally in "good shape" as extra cash from a huge wave of home mortgage refinancing and decades-low interest rates helped consumers better manage their debt, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday.

The financial health of consumers is important to the economy, which in the second half of last year finally cast off its lethargy and has been growing at a healthy pace. Consumer spending accounts for roughly two-thirds of all economic activity in the United States.

Greenspan, in a speech to a credit union conference meeting here, pointed out that U.S. households own more than $14 trillion in real estate assets -- almost twice the amount they own in mutual funds and directly hold in stocks.

Home mortgage refinancings and a solid rise in home values helped to bolster consumer spending during economic hard times as well as during the recovery, Greenspan said.

"Over the past two years, significant increases in the value of real estate assets have, for some households, mitigated stock market losses and supported consumption," Greenspan said in his prepared remarks.

Apparently, Chairman Greenspan doesn't think this is particularly significant:

Feb. 19 - Proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress would change the rules for filing bankruptcy, and area attorneys say the changes would be for the worse.

If passed, the legislation would force more debtors to file Chapter 13 bankruptcy as opposed to Chapter 7. Under Chapter 13, debtors work out a plan for repayment with the federal bankruptcy court. With Chapter 7, the court forgives all or much of a filer's debt.

Proponents say the legislation is a way to curb the rising numbers of bankruptcy filings and to halt abuse on the system.

American Bankruptcy Institute figures show that from 1993 through 2002, bankruptcy filings across the country jumped 93 percent. A record 1.7 million people filed for personal bankruptcy in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30 -- 7.8 percent more than in the previous year.

While this surge has made bankruptcy a huge business for lawyers and debt-counseling services, it is also fueling the debate among lawyers, consumer advocates, bankers, retailers and credit card issuers over the proposal that some see as making bankruptcy more difficult for filers to achieve and painful for them to live with.

Many area attorneys say the proposals are a bit drastic.

"Where I practice, this legislation is like using a sledge hammer to kill a mosquito," said Roanoke bankruptcy and creditors' rights attorney Rich Maxwell.

"Most of the people we see around here truly have nothing. They don't have enough money coming in to defraud their creditors -- if they did they would probably be paying them."

Taking It To The Street

To Greet G.O.P., Protests of Varying Volume
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: February 23, 2004

Though the Police Department and many protest organizers have been reluctant to predict how many people will ultimately turn out for protests, estimates have ranged from 500,000 people to a million.

Six months before any delegate is to take a seat at Madison Square Garden, it is clear that many groups are already planning strategy and activities. Labor unions, environmentalists, self-declared anarchists and others who merely label themselves as anti-Bush or anti-Republican are making plans to turn out. Barely a week passes without several planning sessions in New York, focusing on everything from housing and tactics to legal strategy and what to expect in interactions with the police.

Organizers have gathered in a private loft in SoHo, in offices owned by the United Federation of Teachers near Wall Street, in a church in the East Village, and in offices around the city. The groups have names like United for Peace and Justice and Not in Our Name, and their intentions run the gamut from wanting to shut the convention down to holding the Labor Day parade on Thursday, Sept. 2, the day President Bush is scheduled to accept his party's nomination.

There are people planning tent cities to accommodate protesters from across the country, lawyers' committees to assist those who are arrested, legal observers to monitor the police, and baby sitters, dog walkers, translators, medics, even clergy members. All are working to help protesters overwhelm the positive message Republicans are hoping their convention generates.

500K to a million? Londoners managed to do that with only Bush in town. The provocation of having the entire RN Convention in town is going to have lot more than the tattooed and pierced crowd in the streets.

What "Middle Class?"

Bob Herbert in today's NYT:

One of the great achievements of the United States has been the high standard of living of the average American worker. This was the result of many long years of struggle to obtain higher wages, shorter work weeks, health and pension benefits, paid vacations, safe working conditions, a measure of job security and so on.

It is not an advance to move to a situation in which all of that can vanish with the flick of a computerized switch. High-quality employment is the cornerstone of the economic well-being of America's vast middle class.

Among the questions we should be asking about the real-world effects of unrestrained trade is what happens to the U.S. economy after we've shipped so many jobs from so many sectors overseas that American families no longer have the disposable income to buy all the products and services they need to buy to keep the consumer economy going.

That's not supposed to happen. In theory. But American workers are filled with anxiety because they understand that disaster can result when theory comes face to face with reality. One of the things that sank with the Titanic was the theory that it was unsinkable.

Note to Mr. Herbert: this has already been happening for over a decade, Bob. My bargaining unit took four strikes or lock-outs in the early '90s as the employers sought to get rid of benefits. It is happening now as employers seek to turn us into Wal-Mart Nation. Have you forgotten this:

The United Food and Commercial Workers union has been on strike against Safeway Inc., the parent of Vons and Pavilions, since Oct. 11. Kroger Co.'s Ralphs and Albertsons Inc., which are bargaining jointly with Safeway, locked out their UFCW workers the next day.

Brad DeLong has the charts and graphs about how bad this unemployment hole is. The job dearth works for employers: plain old supply and demand keeps the competition for benefits low.

I'd also like to know what Bob Herbert considers"the vast middle class." The numbers show that all of those wonderful "advancements" have been systematically undermined for 30 years.

Do You Feel a Draft?

Reservists told to shoulder greater burdens in Iraq

A massive rotation of U.S. forces is now under way in Iraq. One of the goals of this movement is to bring home troops who have been "in country" for almost a year now. Another is to reduce the overall number of U.S. troops. But there is one aspect of the U.S. military contingent in Iraq that will not decrease but rather will grow once the rotations are completed, and that is the role played by National Guardsmen and reservists.

Before the rotations, these citizen soldiers comprised a little more than 20 percent of the total U.S. force in Iraq. Once the rotations are complete, they will make up almost 40 percent of the American force there. And that's something worth thinking about.

The Army Reserve's on-line recruiting page tells prospective enlistees that "When you join the Army Reserve, you can serve your country and keep a lifestyle all your own." The understanding among reservists from all branches of the service is that you could be placed on active duty at a moment's notice, and you could be called upon to fight for the United States far away from home. The unwritten corollary to this understanding is that this sort of a call-up will either be for short-term duty or in the event of an all-out, everybody-sacrifices war.

Right now neither situation seems to apply. America is not engaged in all-out war, and U.S. reservists are not facing short-term duty. This country's armed forces are fighting a guerrilla insurgency in Iraq, without a draft or a corresponding mobilization of citizens and industry. And reservists are looking at potentially long tours of duty in Iraq -- away from home, away from families and away from their jobs or businesses.

These are men and women whom we are calling on to make a double sacrifice: First to face the horrors, the dangers and the deprivations of war in a far-off country, and second to risk the stability of the lives they live in the civilian world. A reservist's business or medical practice might be able to carry on for a couple of months without him or her, but extend that period to six months or even a year, and the prospects become decidedly less bright. The same goes for reservist employees. Despite reports that employers are generally respecting reservists and retaining their jobs while they are in Iraq, it seems fairly obvious that you can't just pick up where you left off after six months to a year away from work. At best, many reservists will likely return to months of missed opportunities.

U.S. armed forces are stretched thin around the world, and this is especially true of the Army. There is little question that America needs its citizen soldiers, now more than ever. But it might be time for this country to engage in an open debate about whether such a heavy reliance on reservists is a good thing -- and if it is, how we as a nation might ease the sacrifices that reservists make on the civilian side.

If a consensus were to emerge that perhaps the burden borne by our reserves is too heavy, then we would need to look at what the alternatives might be. Should we enlarge the regular forces of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines? Should we reinstitute some form of draft?

"Stop-loss" is already a form of impressment. It is a breaking of the contract between enlisters and the nation: it says, implicitly, that if you sign up to serve your country and Constitution under arms, we, the government, will decided how and when such service will end. In some ways, this is much onerous than a universal draft.

As a practical matter, the "continual war for continual peace" policy of the Bush administration means that the Army, our major player in any ground action, is two divisions too small, and Guard/Reserve units will be activated to fill the gap. The implicit contract between the country and the troops is explicitly broken, and the failure of re-enlistment targets will mean that the draft, the one we remember, is the next step, waiting around the corner.

Jobs, jobs,jobs

Poll: Most Say Jobs a Top Campaign Issue
By The Associated Press

American jobs and foreign competition will be important issues in the 2004 elections, say nine in 10 in a poll released Saturday that highlighted the increasing importance of jobs to the campaign.

Two-thirds of those polled for Newsweek said those issues would be "very important." More than half in the poll, 55 percent, disapproved of how President Bush is handling the issues of jobs and foreign competition, while 32 percent approved. Bush had a slight lead over Democratic front-runner John Kerry on how well each would handle those issues.

When asked which presidential candidate would do the best in handling the issues of jobs and foreign competition, 35 percent said Bush and 31 percent Kerry. One in five, 18 percent, said John Edwards, the Democratic candidate who has made foreign trade and its drain of U.S. jobs centerpieces of his campaign.

About four of five in the poll said this country is losing jobs to foreign countries because workers in those countries are willing to work for less pay and said American business executives want profits and don't care where the profits come from.

I was talking with some friends yesterday about how freaked out I am that I’ve been unemployed for so long: I’m not at the end of my resources yet, but I’ve sold everything that I can sell without endangering my ability to retire before I die, and I can now see the date certain for the end of those resources. The Free-traders have got articles out all over the place saying that this out-sourcing thing will be fine in the long haul, but the specifics of the short haul are pretty damn painful. I’m career-changing at 50 and that would be hard under any circumstances, but right now it’s friggin’ terrifying.

I’ve certainly been between jobs before, including in the middle of some of the recessions of the last three decades, but it has never taken me more than a half-dozen applications/resumes or more than a couple of months to secure a position, and each was better than the previous job. This recession, and we are still in a recession until the jobs situation improves, “leading economic indicators” be damned, is different than anything in my lifetime.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong has a chart up today which shows the damage. There is a structural change going on in our economy today that is more significant than any which has happened in at least a generation, and there is more to it than outsourcing (Kevin Drum does a damn fine job of debunking the idea that technology-fueled productivity increases alone are responsible.) We need to think about this some more. The worker is still worthy of her hire, but we need to think a little more about what that means, as the country dives toward The Wal-Mart Economy (Read this one. Glenn and Peter at The Black Commentator are doing some of the best journalism in America, for free.)

In addition to cranking out as many resumes as I can find job postings for this past week, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between work, money, secular culture and theology. Free trade economics is also a form of theology, and I’m probably going to treat that, too. I’m not ready to write this essay yet, but I’ve picked up a couple of magazine commissions in the last couple of weeks and I may try to do a dry run of some of the ideas that will be turned into a larger article. I’ve got to crank out even more resumes this week, but cover letters do not satisfy a creative writing jones, so give me a couple of days and let me see what I can find for you.

That said, on-line job application forms are a visit to the outer circle of Hell. Thank God, I’ve finally got a decent browser that doesn’t break down under the demands.

Signs of the Times

Via Brad DeLong: And This Is What Unmuzzled Republicans Think of George W. Bush...

Reagan's Secretary of the Navy James Webb says that George W. Bush has weakened America's military, harmed America's economy, and damaged our alliances--all while committing the "greatest strategic blunder in modern memory":

And this is what the unmuzzled Republicans think.

And from the NYT:

Disenchanted Bush Voters Consider Crossing Over
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: February 22, 2004

BEACHWOOD, Ohio - In the 2000 presidential election, Bill Flanagan a semiretired newspaper worker, happily voted for George W. Bush. But now, shaking his head, he vows, "Never again."

"The combination of lies and boys coming home in body bags is just too awful," Mr. Flanagan said, drinking coffee and reading newspapers at the local mall. "I could vote for Kerry. I could vote for any Democrat unless he's a real dummy."

Mr. Flanagan is hardly alone, even though polls show that the overwhelming majority of Republicans who supported Mr. Bush in 2000 will do so again in November. In dozens of random interviews around the country, independents and Republicans who said they voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 say they intend to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate this year. Some polls are beginning to bolster the idea of those kind of stirrings among Republicans and independents.

That could change, of course, once the Bush campaign begins pumping millions of dollars into advertising and making the case for his re-election.

But even as Democratic and Republican strategists and pollsters warned that a shift could be transitory, they also said it could prove to be extraordinarily consequential in a year when each side is focused on turning out its most loyal voters.

"The strong Republicans are with him," a senior aide to Senator John Kerry said of Mr. Bush. "But there are independent-minded Republicans among whom he is having serious problems."

"With the nation so polarized," he added, "the defections of a few can make a big difference."

In the interviews, many of those potential "crossover" voters said they supported the invasion of Iraq but had come to see the continuing involvement there as too costly and without clear objectives.

Many also said they believed that the Bush administration had not been honest about its reasons for invading Iraq and were concerned about the failure to find unconventional weapons. Some of these people described themselves as fiscal conservatives who were alarmed by deficit spending, combined with job losses at home. Many are shocked to find themselves switching sides.

While sharing a sandwich at the stylish Beachwood Mall in this Cleveland suburb, one older couple - a judge and a teacher - reluctantly divulged their secret: though they are stalwarts in the local Republican Party, they are planning to vote Democratic this year.

"I feel like a complete traitor, and if you'd asked me four months ago, the answer would have been different," said the judge, after assurances of anonymity. "But we are really disgusted. It's the lies, the war, the economy. We have very good friends who are staunch Republicans, who don't even want to hear the name George Bush anymore."

....
A nationwide CBS News poll released Feb. 16 found that 11 percent of people who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 now say they will vote for the Democratic candidate this fall. But there was some falloff among those who voted against him as well. Five percent of people who said they voted for Mr. Gore in 2000 say this time they will back Mr. Bush.

On individual issues, the poll found some discontent among Republicans but substantial discontent among independents. For instance, on handling the nation's economy, 19 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of independents said they disapproved of the job Mr. Bush was doing.

"As the president's job rating has fallen, his Democratic supporters have pulled away first, then the independents and now we're starting to see a bit of erosion among the Republicans, who used to support him pretty unanimously," said Evans Witt, the chief executive of Princeton Survey Research Associates. "If 10 to 15 percent of Republicans do not support him anymore, that is not trivial for Bush's re-election."

Miserable History

Witness: Rebels attack Haiti's last northern stronghold

Sunday, February 22, 2004 Posted: 1:22 PM EST (1822 GMT)

Students supporting the revolt embrace in front of a sign that reads "Negotiations are not possible with Aristide."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (CNN) -- A day after a U.S.-backed peace plan for Haiti appeared to be on shaky ground, rebels seeking to oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide attacked Cap-Haitien, the government's last stronghold in the north and the country's second-largest city, a witness said Sunday.

"The population is terrorized and the city is completely surrounded," said Walter Eussenius, owner of the Mont Joli Hotel in Cap-Haitien.

Machine-gun fire could be heard in the background as Eussenius spoke to CNN by telephone from his hotel, on a hill overlooking the city of about 500,000.

Eussenius said he drove to the airport and was told that rebels had taken over the airport three miles from the city and tried to hijack an airplane. It was not clear whether they had succeeded.

"They came in, went by the port, locked it up," Eussenius said. "They locked up the international airport, roamed through town firing and commandeered the prison, released the prisoners."

He added, "The situation is chaotic, very chaotic." The police force has been disbanded, Eussenius said.

"Who is in control? I don't know."

I read a truly disturbing but unsurprising analysis of the situation in Haiti at The Black Commentator this week:

The Bush administration is preparing to declare Haiti a “failed state,” so that Washington can step in to put the pieces back together as it chooses. Creating the conditions for such a declaration has been the U.S. objective since George Bush came to power. For three years Washington and the European Union have imposed an aid embargo on Haiti, squeezing the hemisphere’s poorest nation until it screamed – and then squeezing harder.

Despite ever deepening misery, Haiti’s poor majority stuck with their popularly elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Washington had expected to remove the former priest through massive demonstrations – a counter-revolution by acclamation – hopefully before this year’s celebrations of Haiti’s 200th anniversary. U.S. and European media tried mightily to paint a picture of overwhelming popular disaffection with Aristide. However, the Haitian people are intimately familiar with the faces and history of the “opposition,” gathered opportunistically under the banner of Group 184. U.S. media routinely exaggerated the size of opposition demonstrations, while ignoring far larger pro-government rallies. But you can’t tell a bald-faced lie to people about events they have witnessed with their own eyes. Americans may have been fooled, but Haitians were not. Aristide remained.

The grand old American tradition of undermining Caribbean and Latin American governments continues. I don't know enough about this situation--the history of our relationship with Haiti is a long and dirty one and not a specialty of mine--but if this commentary is correct, the level of corruption on the shoulders of Colin Powell is simply off the charts. It's a very long article, but worth reading.

Climate Change: The Movie

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

While I accept the judgement that the UK papers tend to be a little more "over the top" than our own, this story has been lurking on the interior pages of the NYT and the WaPo for months. Thanks should go to The Guardian for putting it on the front page.

Whether the polar ice caps are shrinking because of greenhouse gasses or because of an oscillation in global cycles, we are sitting on a cataclysm, and I don't notice anybody paying any attention to it whatever.

I've watched a couple of those movies, about meteors hitting the earth and what they would do to the coastlines and whatever. This isn't a movie. This is real.

And so is Dr. Walter Gray's hurricane cycle forecast. Isabel, that nasty bit of work that hit here last September, was small beer that mostly avoided major cities and cost the effected states more than $16 Billion. An "Andrew" sized storm that could hit the Jersey shore would cause damage to the world economy.

We should be hurricane-proofing our barrier islands and preparing for overwash in Manhattan. Are we going to do that? Nah.

Read The Guardian/Observer story and make up your own mind. I'll toss up a couple of other links to other related science stories when I retrieve them today. This is real, it isn't going away, and it is another piece of the science (conservative Lysenkoism) that the Bush team wants to disappear.

UPDATE:

Here's a study from our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as the Weather Service) which uses pretty strong language:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Ocean Service released a new report titled, "The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Coastal and Marine Resources," that concludes that climate changes in this century may have serious implications for U.S. coastal and marine resources.

NOAA scientists are concerned. With a coastline of over 95,000 miles and a dependency on the essential goods and services that it provides, the adaptation of the marine environment to climate change is important. According to scientists, climate change will add to the stresses already occurring to coastal and marine resources, as a result of increasing coastal populations, development pressure and habitat loss, over fishing, nutrient enrichment, pollution and invasive species.

"While there are still important uncertainties associated with the assessment, it is clear that critical coastal ecosystems - like corals, wetlands and estuaries - are becoming increasingly stressed by human activities," said Margaret Davidson, acting assistant administrator for NOAA's National Ocean Service. "The climate-related stresses described in the report will certainly add to their vulnerability."

The report, prepared as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, compiles scientific studies by representatives of government, the private sector and academia, to evaluate the implications of both existing climate variability and future climate change on U.S. coastal and marine resources.

"Looking at the findings of this important report, scientists believe it is critical that we integrate human activities with climate changes, in order to minimize future impacts on coastal and marine resources," said NOAA Administrator D. James Baker. "It is very important for those Americans, who are or will likely be effected by climate impacts, to be aware of the risks and potential consequences that future change will pose to their communities and their livelihoods."

The report highlights key issues of climate change - shoreline erosion and human communities, threats to estuarine health, coastal wetland survival, coral reef die-offs, and stresses on marine fisheries. It also addresses that coral reefs are already under severe stress from human activities and high ocean temperatures associated with severe El Niño/southern oscillation events. According to the report, corals have experienced unprecedented increases in the extent of bleaching, emergent coral diseases, and widespread die-offs in recent years. The direct impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on ocean chemistry is likely to severely inhibit the ability of coral reefs to grow and persist in the future, further threatening these already vulnerable ecosystems.

Here is a set of links from Stanford University. Here is The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds study, released last week, which is part of the Observer report. The US National Assessment of Climate Change summary is worth a look. Here is a Brazilian study; this is a country at risk for ocean overwash, desertification and drought. Here is a Canadian greenhouse gasses study.

In short, the world scientific community is alarmed in the short term while the Bush administration is busy playing fast and loose with the science.

UPDATE 2:

While Kevin Drum offers some snark on the tendency of the Brit press to get a little shrill, the fact of the matter is that this story hit the US press last month. David Stipp wrote in Fortune last month:

The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.
FORTUNE
Monday, January 26, 2004
By David Stipp

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.

The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropics—that's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.

But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity—and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The Pentagon put their resident gnome/wizard on this study. Andrew Marshall, 82, has decades of cutting-edge research behind him. If he takes this seriously, I do, too. Here, here and here
are some of the reports and studies printed in the last two years which support the Pentagon's claims. What's really news is that the Observer thinks that this is a new story.

Who Owns These Woods? I think I know; his house is in the Village, though...

Assault Plan For a Forest

Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page B08

Virginia is blessed with more than a million and a half acres of the George Washington and Jefferson national forests. These mountain treasures provide drinking water, crucial wildlife habitat and unparalleled recreational opportunities. They also contain more threatened and endangered species than any other national forests, but the forests themselves are threatened too.

The U.S. Forest Service says its new management plan for the Jefferson protects the national forest. However, its plan allows:

• Logging and road-building in previously roadless areas.

• The cutting of old-growth forest to the ground.

• The elimination or degradation of habitat of rare species, such as the Peaks of Otter salamander and Indiana bat, through logging and road-building.

• The operation of logging, road-building and off-road vehicles in sensitive watersheds, along steep slopes and beside streams.

Along with congressionally designated wilderness areas, our national forest roadless areas are the healthiest and most intact forest ecosystems we have left. During the recent development of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, millions of Americans -- more than for any regulation change in history -- insisted that National Forest roadless areas be protected. This included 98 percent of the 45,500 Virginians who commented. The administration ignored this overwhelming response.

Polls indicate that most people want an end to commercial logging in national forests, yet during the environmental impact statement analysis for the Jefferson National Forest plan, the Forest Service refused to fully examine an alternative that would address this demand, cutting the public out again.

Its plan allows more than twice as much logging as occurs now. Almost every "management prescription" in its plan is loaded with language that ostensibly protects the "forest health" but in reality will allow further exploitation of the Jefferson forest.

Apparently, the 1,200 miles of "permanent" Forest Service roads in the Jefferson forest aren't enough either. The plan forecasts the construction of another 80 miles. And those mileage figures do not include the county, state or federal highways passing through the forest or the logging roads that the Forest Service calls "temporary."

This issue is not just about roads and logging. The Bush administration wants to open more public land to drilling and mining, and, through the removal of legal restrictions, to make drilling and mining easier for private companies. The new Jefferson National Forest plan makes as many as 492,000 acres -- about 70 percent of the forest -- available to oil, gas or mineral development. Contrast this with the mere 3 percent of the forest that the plan recommends for wilderness designation.

The Forest Service's own surveys show that Americans value their national forests most for the protection of clean water and of wildlife and its habitats. Americans want intact natural places to visit and to pass on to future generations. They want to preserve rare species and retain the unique qualities that private lands cannot supply.

Meeting these goals should be the priority of the Forest Service plan, but it isn't. Instead we have a government agency that says one thing and does another.

Forgive me a little parochialism: this is my neighborhood, the place I go camping and day tripping, right down the road from the nation's capitol. This is one of the first parks Teddy Roosevelt called into being, and one of the most over-used today. The park is threatened by East Coast pollution from the I-95 corridor and it is downwind from the smokestacks of the industrial midwest. It has a serious die-off problem from acid rain and is also the home of most of the flora and fauna of the post-Cambrian era east coast: the cougar is beginning to make its east coast come-back here, far too close to population centers.

This park is begging for wildlife management, rather than human exploitation.

Worst. Environmental. President. Ever.

International Law

'We want answers: why have they been held so long without charge?'
By Kim Sengupta and Arifa Akbar

20 February 2004

The images were stark and shocking. Britons, swathed in orange overalls, hooded and shackled, kneeling in front of their American captors. Others, on stretchers, being wheeled into mesh cages. None of them charged, let alone convicted, of any crime, yet facing indefinite sentences in prison.

The unabating controversy caused by the treatment of British citizens arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then shipped off to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, was one of the most embarrassing problems faced by Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, as he stood "shoulder to shoulder" with President George Bush in the war on terror.

The announcement yesterday by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that five of the nine British prisoners at Camp X-Ray were to be released showed, the Government said, that the men had not been forgotten, and that prolonged and painstaking negotiations had been taking place behind the scenes on their behalf.

But even as Mr Straw was making his speech at the Foreign Office, there were accusations and recriminations. The families and lawyers of the four still being held, with support from Muslim organisations and human rights groups, renewed their protest. There were also demands for explanations as to why it had taken so long to secure the freedom of the others.

It may take foreign nationals to blow this situation open. Irony abounds.

With This Ring

For Gay Md. Couple, It's 'Finally Happening'

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 20, 2004; Page A01

Six years ago, James Packard and Erwin Gomez got married in Amsterdam, "but it didn't count because it wasn't in the U.S.," Gomez said.

So when the Rockville [MD] couple heard about the same-sex marriages in San Francisco, Packard persuaded Gomez to hop on a flight west.

They arrived at 2 a.m. Tuesday, the ninth couple from City Hall's door, and slept for eight hours on the steps. By 12:30 that afternoon, they were standing in the marble rotunda of that palatial building and repeating, "For better, for worse . . . in sickness and in health . . . I do."

"I felt like, OH-MY-GOD," Gomez, 39, said yesterday. "This is finally happening." When it came time to order their marriage license, they signed up for not one, not two -- but six -- notarized copies.

Yesterday, the couple returned to Maryland, prepared to file joint tax returns, refile the title on their townhouse and take whatever legal action is necessary to force the state to recognize their marriage.

For now, they "have a valid marriage," said their attorney, Yolanda Faerber. "They had a valid licensing authority, and it's a valid marriage in the eyes of San Francisco authorities."

But San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to issue licenses to gay couples -- 2,700 in the past week -- is facing a legal challenge in the California courts. And the Maryland General Assembly is considering measures to ban such unions.

On Wednesday, the Maryland House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on a proposed constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being between a man and a woman and a bill that would prevent same-sex marriages performed elsewhere from being recognized in Maryland.

Under the U.S. Constitution, Maryland is required to accept the laws of other states, unless those measures are deemed inconsistent with state policy, Assistant Attorney General Kathryn M. Rowe has said.

For the past 30 years, Maryland law has defined marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. But that matter could be clouded by the state's policy of anti-discrimination based on sexual orientation, legal experts say.

Maryland is one of 12 states that have not passed a "defense of marriage" law to prohibit recognition of gay marriages performed elsewhere. In Virginia, which already has such a law, the House of Delegates recently approved legislation to clear up ambiguity over civil unions or partnerships.

The District has a domestic partnership law that, among other things, gives registered partners the right to visit each other in a nursing home or hospital or to take time off from work to care for each other. But city officials have steered clear of the gay marriage debate. They say the Republican-controlled Congress could use its oversight power to block any initiative to allow gay unions and might even reverse the domestic partnership measure.

This is the way this is going to happen. Individual law suits will challenge state laws until a couple of someones take a 14th Amendment suit all the way to the Supreme Court. There is no going back now.

When Did They Know It

9/11 Panel Head Assails Delay
Chairman Warns That Inquiry Might Have to Be Limited

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 20, 2004; Page A03

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will have to consider scaling back the scope of its inquiry and limiting public hearings unless Congress agrees by next week to give the panel more time to finish its work, its chairman said yesterday.

Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R) also said in an interview that the commission has not decided whether to accept an offer from the White House under which President Bush would meet privately with a small delegation, rather than with the panel as a whole.

Kean's comments indicate that two of the most important issues facing the 10-member bipartisan panel have yet to be resolved just three months before its current deadline of May 27. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, created in late 2002 after months of fierce congressional debate, has been hobbled by a series of disputes with the Bush administration over access to documents and other issues.

The White House reversed course earlier this month and announced it would support a two-month extension of the commission's deadline, to July 26, with the panel shutting down a month later. But House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has said he is opposed to any delay. Many Republicans fear that a later deadline would put the release of a potentially damaging report on the terrorist attacks in the middle of the presidential campaign.

Kean said yesterday that he and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, have not yet met with Hastert, but that time is running short for the commission.

"Every week that goes by makes the extension less valuable," Kean said. "When you have to work toward the earlier deadline, you have to start canceling things and you can't go over things quite as clearly as you might like. . . . Congress comes back into session next week, and we really need to hear something by then."

A spokesman for Hastert did not return telephone messages left late yesterday.

If the commission wants to work around this, ways can be found. It may be the 9/11 families which keep this panel honest. From their website:

4. In your opinion, why was our nation so utterly unprepared for an attack on our own soil?

9. Beginning with the transition period between the Clinton administration and your own, and ending on 9/11/01, specifically what information (either verbal or written) about terrorists, possible attacks and targets, did you receive from any source?

Blogkeeping

It should be time to go to bed, but I took the advice of all of you who know a lot more about computers than I do and advised me to download Mozilla as a browser and email client. I got the bookmarks imported and changed the defaults.

I’m in love. I want to stay up for hours and play with this, but I’ve got two days of meetings that start early tomorrow, so I can’t.

Light blogging until Saturday night, I hope I’ve left you enough to comment on until I return.

The new computer is utterly fabulous. Thank you.

SME in Seattle is ready to read Chalmers Johnson’s book. Any other volunteers?

Empire and its Discontents

Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist has begun posting excerpts from The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson. Judging from the paragraph Sean-Paul posted today, this is going to be another must-read:

"The first Iraq war produced four classes of casualties--killed in action, wounded in action, killed in accidents (including "friendly fire"), and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During 1990 and 1991 some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of operations. As of May 2002, however, the Veterans Administration reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. . . . In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War may actually be a staggering 29.3 percent."

As Sean-Paul notes, this is not a topic that the major media are interested in taking on. S-P also writes a disclaimer, indicating that he does not endorse Johnson's conclusions. We will have to get into the book ourselves and draw our own conclusions.

This is explosive material. Johnson alleges that "Gulf War Syndrome" is, in all or part, radiation poisoning caused by depleted Uranium used in bombs and shells and also as armor plating. This is controversial and it looks to me that the Pentagon is making sure that no research is being done on it. If Johnson's conclusions are substantially correct, we can expect lots of sick vets from Operations Iraq and Afghan Freedom, since our troops have been on the ground and in contact with this stuff for a much longer period of time than they were in Gulf War I. Since we know so little about the 10,000 American evacuees from Iraq--that number is in addition to those wounded--this may be the explanation.

Here is an excerpt from Stanley Kutler's LAT review of Johnson's book:

Johnson has given us a polemic, but one soundly grounded in an impressive array of facts and data. The costs of empire are our sorrow, he contends.
He anticipates a state of perpetual war, involving more military expenditures and overseas expansion, and presidents who will continue to eclipse or ignore Congress. He documents a growing system of propaganda, disinformation and glorification of war and military power. Finally, he fears economic bankruptcy as the president underwrites these adventures with a congressional blank check while neglecting growing problems of education, health care and a decaying physical infrastructure.

The Sorrows of Empire offers a powerful indictment of current U.S. military and foreign policy. It also provides an occasion to consider the constitutional values of our republic. A national frenzy erupted when Bill Clinton lied under oath about his sexual encounters. The media obsessed on the subject. His enemies passionately exalted the Holy Writ of the Constitution with religious-like devotion. Their silence now is deafening. Loyalty to the flag and the president seems more important, but these are not mandated constitutional principles. Would that these erstwhile defenders of constitutional faith and purity had expressed similar fervor in defense of the Constitution during the last two years.

I'm game for the book. Anyone who is willing to take on Max Boot gets my vote. Anybody want to read it with me?

On-Line Reading

From a review in today's NYT. I went and took a look, it's quite good. The figures cited earlier in the article are quite shocking: "a widely cited 1999 report from the National Endowment for the Arts calculated that about 3 percent of the books published in the United States were translations, compared with 40 to 50 percent in Western European countries."

"Words Without Borders" www.wordswithoutborders.org supported by two grants totaling $65,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, went online in July by presenting what the editors call "literature from the Axis of Evil." The first three issues had essays, reporting and book excerpts from writers in North Korea, Iraq and Iran who might be famous in their own countries and regions but are almost unknown in the United States.

The idea took root well before Sept. 11, when Ms. Mason heard from a group of German publishers, complaining as usual about the provincialism of Americans in the world of letters. She said she began to think about her own lack of knowledge of new writers from other countries, came up with the idea of an online magazine and applied for a grant.

While I will always be a consumer of print--as in, on paper--periodicals, as a creature of the Net these days, this will be a wonderful resource. I enjoy reading good translations and being able to see the world through the eyes and ears of other cultures.

Bush World

From Editor Katrina Vanden Heuval's blog at The Nation:

MSNBC Under 'Seige'

Are Bush's plunging poll numbers rattling them over at MSNBC's Scarborough Country?

Over in Bush World, or Scarborough Country , the consequences of the President's cuts in education may be taking their toll faster than expected. As I sat on the set, waiting to be grilled by Scarborough and denounced by some vile man heading Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry I couldn't help but be mesmerized by what appeared to be a caption malfunction. "Bush Under Seige" was slapped up on the screen for several minutes. Hey guys, great to see that Bush is under fire---but last I checked it was spelled "siege."

The People's Money

CBS to Resume Airing Administration's Medicare Ad
GOP had criticized the network for yanking TV spot publicizing prescription drug law.
From Associated Press

February 19, 2004

WASHINGTON — CBS said Wednesday it will resume airing the Bush administration's television ad about the new Medicare prescription drug law, days after Republicans criticized the network for pulling the spot.

CBS was the only network to have stopped running the publicly funded ad pending a review of its content by congressional investigators. That review is continuing.

A CBS spokesman, Dana McClintock, said the reversal had nothing to do with GOP assertions that Democratic-leaning top CBS executives yanked the ad for partisan reasons. McClintock said changes made to the ad at the insistence of ABC were sufficient to satisfy CBS' concerns as well.

"Based on that alteration and our review, the ad has been cleared to run on the network," he said.

Kevin Keane, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, said last week that the administration edited the ad to acknowledge that savings can vary among older people from the Medicare drug card that goes into effect in June and prescription drug coverage in 2006.

The administration is spending $9.5 million to air the 30-second ad as part of its effort to educate people about the law. Democratic lawmakers and a number of interest groups have called the ad a barely disguised commercial for President Bush's reelection campaign.

Democrats asked the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to examine whether the administration should be using taxpayer money to air the commercial.

Via The Center for American Progress, please send an email urging CBS to stop airing the Medicare ads to [email protected] . Our suggested subject line: "Pull the Medicare Ads Now!"

Iraq Round-up

U.S. Presidential Politics and Self-Rule for Iraqis
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: February 19, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 — In the Bush administration, it is considered heresy to suggest postponing the planned return of sovereignty to Iraq. Turning over control by June 30, administration officials say, is crucial to assuaging Iraqi distress over living under American occupation.

Yet in recent weeks, diplomats and even some in the administration have begun to worry that the date reflects more concern for American politics than Iraqi democracy. Their fear is that an untested government taking power on June 30 may not be strong enough to withstand the pressures bearing down on it.

"When we went into Iraq, our plan was to have a government, build a structure and write a constitution that would be a source of longterm stability," said an administration official. "Now that's out the window."

Many in the administration say that while they have no proof that the urgency to install a government is politically motivated, it feels to them like part of a White House plan to permit President Bush to run for re-election while taking credit for establishing self-rule in Iraq.

"I can make all kinds of arguments about why we need to establish democracy in Iraq on an urgent basis," said another administration official. "But when you hear from on high that this is what we must do, and there can be no questioning of it, it sounds like politics."

This week, the administration is in the odd position of insisting on Iraqi self-rule by June 30, while awaiting a recommendation from the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, on how the interim government should be chosen and the form it should take.

Mr. Annan's special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to work out some sort of consensus on the shape of an interim government.

The United States wants that government to rule while elections are held later in the year or in 2005 for a constitution-writing legislature. Eventually, elections are to be held to ratify the constitution and establish a permanent Iraqi government.

Administration officials say that Mr. Brahimi was told that one option he must not accept is postponement of the June 30 date for the transfer of power.

"It is holy writ," said an administration official.

Yet many experts, including some in the administration, also say they are worried that such a rapid transition entails enormous risks. What happens, some worry, if a major crisis were to occur, resulting from an assassination or bomb explosion in which many Iraqis die?

What happens, moreover, if by accident American forces — which are still likely to retain wide autonomy and authority over security throughout the country — kill a large number of Iraqi citizens? Would a shaky Iraqi government lacking in perceived legitimacy survive a blow like that?

It makes no sense, many experts say, to set a fixed date to hand over sovereignty before having any idea of what sort of government will be given power on that date.

"This is entirely a schedule dictated by Karl Rove," said an Arab diplomat who maintains close contacts with the administration, referring to the White House's political director. "Anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve."

Bush made this a political war and he's going to have to live with the consequences. Unfortunately, so are the Iraqi people, but they don't seem to be any more a part of Karl Rove's calculation than are ordinary Americans.

Or ordinary soldiers. WaPo reports this morning that the Pentagon is covering up soldier suicides:

Suicides in Iraq, Questions at Home
Pentagon Tight-Lipped as Self-Inflicted Military Deaths Mount

According to William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, who discussed the suicides in a briefing last month, that represents a rate of more than 13.5 per 100,000 troops, about 20 percent higher than the recent Army average of 10.5 to 11. The Pentagon plans to release the findings of a team sent to Iraq last fall to investigate the mental health of the troops, including suicides.

The number Winkenwerder cited does not include cases under investigation, so the actual number may be higher. It also excludes the suicides by soldiers who have returned to the United States. For instance, two soldiers undergoing mental health treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington reportedly committed suicide there, in July 2003 and last month. In its weekly report on the treatment of returning battlefield soldiers, the hospital never mentioned the suicides. An official at Walter Reed said the deaths are "suspected" suicides and are being investigated by the Army's criminal division.

Stephen L. Robinson, who visits the hospital regularly and is executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for veterans and soldiers, said there was no public record of the suicides. "They just covered it up," he said.

The military's emphasis on honor, valor and courage makes suicide perhaps one of its last taboos. The Pentagon does not publicly identify a soldier's death as a suicide but may classify it as a "non-hostile gunshot wound," or death from "non-hostile injuries," which can also include accidents such as negligent discharge of a weapon. In comparison, the Pentagon will release a description of the cause of death -- enemy fire, a land mine, a car crash -- for a soldier killed in action or as a result of an accident.

The Washington Post contacted more than a dozen families of soldiers whose causes of death were listed as non-combat related. Some said that although the military had not provided further details, information from soldiers in the field indicated that the deaths were from "friendly fire" or an accidental weapons discharge. For others awaiting the results of an investigation, the possibility of suicide was too painful to bear.

The Iraqis are aware of the larger context, too:

Scattered Attacks Against U.S. Forces as Iraqis Await U.N. Decision on Elections
By Robert H. Reid Associated Press Writer
February 19, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Insurgents launched new attacks Thursday against U.S. occupation troops as the United States was reportedly ready to make major changes in its blueprint for handing over power to a new Iraqi government.

U.S. and Iraqi officials were awaiting an announcement later Thursday by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the feasibility of holding legislative elections here before June 30, as demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani and others in the influential Shiite clergy.

The Bush administration hopes Annan will say that elections are impossible by June 30 and endorse the idea of extending and expanding the U.S.-picked Iraqi Governing Council so it can take interim control of the country on July 1.

The United States is insisting on handing over power at the end of June and transferring considerable responsibility for internal security to the Iraqis. President Bush wants to end the occupation well ahead of the November presidential election in the United States to minimize Iraq as a campaign issue.
In the latest attacks, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. patrol Thursday morning in Khaldiyah, a Sunni Triangle town about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Witnesses said U.S. troops sealed off the area, and there was no word on casualties.

Insurgents also fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an American convoy in the same town Thursday but the projectile missed, witnesses said.

Another roadside bomb exploded Thursday in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, missing U.S. vehicles but wounding an Iraqi policeman, witnesses said. On Wednesday, U.S. troops arrested seven people in Baqouba suspected of links to al-Qaida but gave no further details.

The attacks followed a mortar barrage Wednesday evening against the U.S. base at Abu Ghraib prison on the western edge of Baghdad. The U.S. command said attackers fired 33 mortars and five rockets between 6:30 p.m. and 6:50 p.m., but only one soldier was slightly injured.

The polls show that Iraq is pretty far down the list of voter concerns as we head into the presidential campaign season. That could change as the instability--political, economic, military--increases.

Deep Inside the Beltway

This is a really dishonest headline. Tbhwnwnwtbtt, New York Times, the body of the story says something very different. This story has more details beyond the bare-bones AP story I posted as an update earlier this evening. I'm putting it up as a new post because the story is fairly complex and may have some very important effects on how we activist progressives make some important financial and professional decisions in the coming months. I am personally involved in the early planning stages of a couple of 527 groups, we will need to seek expert advice to see if this changes the way we organize. My early read is "no" and I stick with my earlier judgement: good strategy and good writing will allow a well-funded and well-thought-out project to be quite effective. This will be a little harder than it was last week, but this change isn't a real roadblock.

Advocacy Groups Allowed to Raise Unlimited Funds
By GLEN JUSTICE

Published: February 19, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 — The Federal Election Commission said on Wednesday that advocacy groups that were established to get around fund-raising restrictions in the new campaign finance law could continue to spend unlimited contributions for television commercials and other communications, though they must do so under far more restrictive rules.

The commission's ruling on so-called 527 committees could have profound effects on the 2004 election by helping Democrats, who have been much more aggressive than Republicans in creating these committees to help the party compete with the Republicans' overall 2-to-1 fund-raising advantage. None of this money winds up in the candidates' hands but it can be used to raise issues and attack or promote candidates by name.

Perhaps the best known of these groups, America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, gained widespread attention when George Soros, the philanthropist and international financier, pledged millions to each. Another organization, called Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values ran television advertisements attacking Howard Dean's presidential bid, showing a close-up of Osama bin Laden and questioning Dr. Dean's ability to compete with President Bush on foreign policy. Robert G. Torricelli, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey and a fund-raiser for Senator John Kerry helped finance that organization with $50,000.

The Federal Election Commission took up the matter after Republicans filed a request hoping the commission would curtail the use of unlimited donations, known as soft money contributions, by the committees. Republicans object to the use of the committees because it far outraises the Democrats in so-called hard money, which parties raise in smaller increments.

....
In its ruling, the election commission placed some restrictions on the way these committees operate, including a prohibition on certain advertisements paid for solely with soft money.

But Democratic operatives said that, despite this limitation, their committees would continue to be a force in this year's elections.

"We'll be plowing forward as planned," said Jim Jordan, a spokesman for America Coming Together, one of the most active 527 organizations. "It's clear that today's action is limited in its scope. We remain confident that we'll have the room we need to operate robustly and effectively."

Though the commission's advisory does not carry the force of law, it is a first step by the commission to define how 527 committees — which were named after the section of the Internal Revenue Code that created them — can legally raise and spend money under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and the Supreme Court decision that upheld it.

While some Republicans hoped 527's would be further prevented from using soft money, party leaders portrayed the commission's move as a victory.
....
Ellen Weintraub, the commission's Democratic vice chairwoman and the author of the proposal that passed, also said it will not halt organizations from using soft money.

"I don't think it will put anybody out of business," she said. "But it might make business more expensive."

More rules are going to be made on this in March. In a part of the article I didn't quote, RNC chair Ed Gillespie calls it a victory for the Repubs, which means there is a little something in here for everybody.

Bottom line: this wouldn't be a story at all if the politics this year weren't so bitter. Fer pete's sakes, it's a campaign finance story which has no traction outside the beltway, but the AP, NYT and WaPo know that it is going to have a significant impact on the campaign this year. It's an insider story and I offer it to you. The only growth market in jobs for Democrats this spring will be in going to work for the 527s. They will be mostly making issue ads, setting up some policy/think tank/pr places and DC is suddenly starting to look a whole lot more interesting than it has in years.

Will the AP version of this story show up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the morning? I doubt it. I couldn't find it on the Tampa Bay Online site tonight, and they take the AP feed straight.

This is one of those little stories from the Beltway which matter.

Around the Blogosphere

TomPaine.com is a daily must-read for all of us lefty bloggers. Like many news and commentary sites, it has added a blog, The Dreyfuss Report. Manning the conn is old Middle East hand and veteran investigative reporter Bob Dreyfuss, covering Iraq and national security.

Here's his maiden voyage with a summary of the rapidly changing security, diplomatic and political situation on the sands of Mesopotamia:

U.S. policy in Iraq has screeched to an utter and complete halt, awaiting the arrival of the latest fatwa, not from scowly old Ayatollah Ali Sistani, but from the United Nations. U.S. officials, including the ever more irrelevant Paul Bremer, have pretty much dropped the pretense that they have some idea about what to do next. Iraq is a mess, and maybe one that can't be salvaged by anyone, even the UN. Washington is hoping that the UN can devise a formula that will satisfy Sistani, the Kurds, and the Sunni establishment for elections to be held sometime later in the year, but that's a tall assignment.

That's especially ironic, since more and more it looks Chalabi is being fingered as Person Most Responsible for feeding faked information to the CIA and the Pentagon about Iraq's phantom WMD. A recent story in The New York Times outlined the workings of Chalabi's so-called "information collection program," through a five-man team of INC propagandists who brought "defectors, reports, and raw intelligence" to the attention of U.S. authorities. The CIA is drastically reforming its internal procedures to lessen the chance that a bogus source will be able to hoodwink CIA analysts in the future. Is it possible, after all we know now, that Ahmad Chalabi can still emerge as the leader of Iraq? That the Person Most Responsible for lying about Iraqi WMD will soon be running an entire nation? It is.

There's a lot more and this is one to bookmark if you are following Iraq and national security closely.

Other new entries to the blogosphere this week (also bookmarkable):

Matt Gross, Internet Director for Dean for America, has set up his own place, Deride and Conquer. He gave an interview over the weekend to Garance Franke-Ruta for her new American Prospect Blog and discovered in reviewing his answers and re-writing one that he had discovered a mission for his new blog. On Saturday, Matt wrote:

Last night I was up late, finishing an email exchange about the Dean campaign with Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect, who published the interview online today. But as I drove south today I kept feeling that I hadn't answered one question completely. So here's the second draft of my answer as to what I think the legacy of the Dean campaign will be:

I believe the Dean campaign will be looked on as a seminal moment in American politics. The Dean campaign marks the beginning of the end of the broadcast age in politics, and a change toward more interactive and decentralized campaigning. And the change is going to be even more rapid from here.

Now I know that the retort is that television still mattered greatly in 2004, and of course it did. But for the first time in a generation people all across the country found a way to become involved at an early stage in a national campaign. The ability to participate wasn't reserved for people in Iowa and New Hampshire. And that ability to take action no matter where you live was made possible by the Internet.

But the changing media environment is what seems particularly exciting to me. The influence and reach of the Net is still clearly on the rise, and technology is heading in such a direction-- because of broadband-- that in ten years the distinction between the Internet and broadcast television will be much more narrow than it is today. For example, there isn't a great distinction right now between watching a program you missed on TIVO and watching the same program archived on a website. As broadcast technology becomes increasingly on-demand, it's going to be harder for candidates-- as well as companies-- to reach voters through traditional methods. What this likely means is that campaigns are going to have to become their own media channels, and find ways to attract an increasingly-segmented audience. And I think the Dean campaign-- through Blog for America, through Dean TV, through web radio, and through our online advertising and our focus on building the number of people signed up to receive emails-- has shown the way for other campaigns to do that.

And, of course, elsewhere in this post Matt refers to another new blogger who is setting himself up, along with a lot of us, to document and encourage the kinds of changes the candidacy of Howard Dean brought to the political process. Change for America is now Joe Trippi's group blog.

I've spent a lot of time today reflecting on the Dean movement, and I'm sure I'll have some thoughts to share in days to come as my reflections ripen.

Total War

Democrats gape at DoE info request
By Hans Nichols

House Democratic aides are wondering if the Bush administration, in dealing with Congress, has adopted the Corleone family motto: Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.

Democrats were stunned to receive an e-mail Friday from the office of Assistant Secretary for Education Karen Johnson, asking lawmakers for a schedule of their planned town hall meetings — “ANY town halls” — in the next few months.

Robbi Dicken, a congressional affairs staffer at the Department of Education (DoE), wrote to Hill aides: “Hi All. ... The Assistant Secretary, Karen Johnson, has asked me to compile a schedule of any town hall meetings that will be taking place in your district/state with your boss over the next few months. This is for ANY town halls ... not just events that are geared towards education.”

Dicken added, “If there are any set on the calender [sic] it would be great to see what date you have them scheduled. If you do not have any scheduled just let me know so I don’t have to pester you over the phone.”

The e-mail concluded: “Have a good weekend! Thanks again, Rd.”

Democratic leadership aides suspected a Republican scheme to pepper the audience at this week’s town halls with Republicans — and perhaps even lobbyists — sympathetic to the White House’s initiatives on the No Child Left Behind Act, as well as the recently passed prescription drug benefit legislation, a bill House Democrats vigorously opposed.

House Democrats were worried that Republican provocateurs would swing the audiences towards the GOP view of those bills.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told her caucus members not to comply with Johnson’s request and ordered them not to divulge any party secrets.

“Republican friendly groups are working hard to get lists of Democratic town hall meetings over the recess,” Stacy Kerry, a Pelosi aide, e-mailed the caucus. “You may be contacted by lobbyists or even by administration officials who are asking for events your boss is doing or lists of Democratic town hall meetings.”

She added, “Obviously, everyone should use their best judgment, however please do not share information on events other than those of your boss and remember you do not have to give this information to anyone.”

Here's the playbook then, right off of Ed Gillespie's desk: total war. We are going to need to exercise every tiny positive advantage we can find. Keep your fingers crossed that the FEC follows the recommendation of the Commissioner and doesn't try to re-regulate the 527s. Here's where we are today on that:

F.E.C. Mulls New Limits on Big Donations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: February 18, 2004

Filed at 12:56 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday scolded his own party for trying to get federal regulators to prohibit outside political groups from spending big corporate and union donations in this fall's presidential election.

Democrats are hoping to use the outside groups for fall election activities to make up some of the financial advantage Republicans have enjoyed under the campaign finance law that took effect after the 2002 election.

``It is not our place to measure the law in partisanship,'' Chairman Bradley Smith said. ``If Republicans think they can win by silencing their opponents, I think they are going to lose.''

With both political parties jockeying for financial advantages under the new law, the FEC could determine exactly how much special interest money flows into the campaign this fall.

``I think this is the biggest issue in campaign finance today, and we do have an obligation to let people know where we stand,'' Commissioner Michael Toner said.

The six-member commission is weighing whether the new law placing restrictions on the size of political contributions to the national parties and federal candidates also restricts tax-exempt political groups that have continued to raise large ``soft money'' checks from corporations, unions and wealthy people.

The new law does not specifically address whether tax-exempt groups could collect and spend big donations on federal elections.

The FEC's lawyers have proposed banning such outside political groups from using corporate or union money on get-out-the-vote drives, ads and other spending that supports or opposes specific presidential or congressional candidates, unless state or local candidates are mentioned. If nonfederal candidates are included, the groups could spend a mix of soft money and hard money, the FEC lawyers recommended.

The commission was to decide on that recommendation, although Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said Wednesday she thinks the issue is better handled through a formal rule-making that could take months rather than a quick decision like the one proposed by lawyers.

UPDATE: Here is a late AP story that provides few details on the decisions made by the FEC today. I'll be looking for more heavily reported stories as the evening wears on. It appears the that commissioners agreed to some restrictions, but not on which organizations, and there is a possiblity of court challenges if the commissioners overreach.

UPDATE 2: Still not enough information to know what we are up against. This is going to have to get washed through a couple of days of legal filtering.

The chair of the FEC is a Rep and he is flakking for no restrictions, so the RNC take must be that the no restrictions posture is a net plus for them, at the risk of letting George Soros and the other progressive heavy hitters in to play, as well. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the next couple of weeks.

To the extent that I can suss out what the possible restrictions look like, they will be a pain but not impossible to write around. If you are in a group looking to decide if you are going to form a 527 in the next few weeks, keep an eye on this, but I don't think it is going to be a worst case scenario.

Cingularity

A $41 Billion Telephone Deal, but What's in It for Consumers?
By MATT RICHTEL

Published: February 18, 2004

The blockbuster merger of Cingular Wireless and AT&T; Wireless - and the consolidation of the wireless industry to five major competitors from six - may not lead to higher consumer prices for mobile phone service anytime soon, according to industry analysts. And the merger could spur better quality of service, they said.

Nonetheless, consumer groups plan to challenge the $41 billion merger on the grounds that it could reduce competition in the South and Southwest United States, where BellSouth and SBC, Cingular's parents, are dominant. Consumers Union, an advocacy group, said it thought the acquisition of AT&T; Wireless and its 22 million customers could give those two telephone giants excessive power in their local markets.

SBC and Bell South are "buying up the most likely competition against their own telephone monopoly," said Gene Kimmelman, the policy director for Consumers Union, who added that the group intends to lobby the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to reject the deal as currently constructed. "This needs to be restricted or rejected to continue to provide lower prices and better service to both wireless and wireline consumers," Mr. Kimmelman said.

Some industry researchers, however, have argued that consolidation in the telecommunications market is natural, and could result in better, more reliable service for consumers over the long term. Others have pointed out that new forms of competition - like Internet phone services - will continue to push prices lower throughout the industry.

The Cingular merger with AT&T; Wireless, which would create a company with 46 million subscribers, is a milestone for the wireless industry, which is rapidly becoming integral to consumers' lives as more mobile phones begin to transmit data, like e-mail messages and Web pages, as well as voice calls.
....
Some consumer advocates are not convinced that Cingular's purchase of AT&T; Wireless would lead to better service. A survey published this month in Consumer Reports magazine found that both Cingular and AT&T; Wireless fared less well than the competition in most of a dozen markets where customers were asked to rate their mobile phone provider.
"Two companies that have never been good at customer service are merging," said David Heim, deputy director for special sections at Consumer Reports, which is published by Consumers Union. "I'm not optimistic that their service will improve."
Consumers Union says it is concerned that the emergence of conglomerates that control local, long-distance and wireless communications in a single market could lead to anticompetitive practices.
Mr. Kimmelman said that Bell South and SBC could, for instance, offer a package that cuts the cost of mobile service below market prices, and then makes up for that by bundling long-distance and local phone service for the same customers. That process, he argued, would make it possible for BellSouth and SBC to drive out wireless competitors in the markets where those companies are dominant.
"This solidifies their dominance," Mr. Kimmelman said, "over the most popular telecom services: local phone, mobile, long distance and high-speed access."

Anybody remember the old Ma Bell monopoly? Here we go again. Time to start looking into that Internet long distance service...

The Fallen

Few Americans see caskets come home
Dover: A news media blackout instituted to ensure privacy for soldiers' families also protects policymakers as war casualties mount.
By Gus G. Sentementes
Sun National Staff
Originally published February 17, 2004

DOVER, Del. - If Lupita Rubio's husband died in Iraq, she'd want to see his remains returned to nearby Dover Air Force Base, marked with a ceremony seen by all.

"I would like for him to get the recognition he deserves," said Rubio, 38, while eating lunch at the Corner Eatery with her husband, a load- master on a C-5 military cargo plane.

Jim Sullivan, 43, a cartographer and former Marine, has a different view - one that seems pervasive in a city with deep military roots.

"I don't need to see the caskets coming off" a plane, he said outside the post office downtown. "I grew up watching those images with Vietnam. I don't think it's decent for the families."

As the war in Iraq nears the 12-month mark, Dover Air Force Base is again fulfilling one of its most solemn duties: accepting the flag-draped remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas and, after post-mortem examinations, releasing them to families for burial. So far, the base mortuary has handled the remains of about 550 soldiers, civilians and contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

None of this happens in public view. A Defense Department edict issued in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war keeps reporters and television cameras away from the somber ceremony known as "dignified transfer" that unfolds as the remains are taken off the planes.

During the Vietnam War, images of caskets by the hundreds being unloaded at Dover had a powerful impact on the American public. The images evolved into a kind of political shorthand: Could the nation's resolve survive the "Dover test"?

The media blackout enables the military and policymakers in Washington to sidestep the question. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the policy.
....
Some families who lost a relative overseas disagree with the blackout policy.

"I would've wanted it shown. I would've wanted people to know," said John Gifford, 53, whose 30-year-old son Jonathan, a private in the Marines, was killed March 23 in what he believes was a friendly fire incident in Iraq. An official report on his son's death is pending, he said.

"They should be able to know the truth. There's been too many things covered up since I can remember," said Gifford, who served in the Army for four years, including one in Vietnam.

He said he thinks something better should be done to commemorate those who died.

Carolyn Hutchings, whose son, Marine Pvt. Nolen Ryan Hutchings, 20, was killed the same day and in the same area as Gifford, also was critical of the policy of denying media coverage at Dover.

"That's crap. I'm sorry, that's crap," she said of the government's desire to protect families' privacy. "Everybody knew my son had died," she said. "Why not acknowledge it? We already knew. ... Why not acknowledge it? He died for his country."

She said local news media covered her son's arrival at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in South Carolina, but public ceremonies and national coverage of the totality of the deaths is lacking.

"That's all you hear on TV, it's a count," said Hutchings, her voice quavering. "It's nothing but a count."

She said she received a "typed, generic letter" of condolence from President Bush.

"I'm sure everybody got the same one," Hutchings said. "I'm not impressed at all."

Click on the link to see the pictures. I find this both unbearably sad and angry-making.

Pin the Tail on The Donkey

The motives are most likely political:

Iraq trade ministry official killed

Trade minister says Abdul Fattah killed Wednesday when gunmen riddled his car as it pulled out on street.

BAGHDAD - An Iraqi trade ministry official was shot dead outside his home last week, Trade Minister Ali al-Allawi said Tuesday.
Hussein Abdul Fattah, the trade ministry's deputy director general for administration, was killed early Wednesday when gunmen riddled his car as it pulled out on the street.

"The assassins shot him just as he was leaving his house," Allawi said.
There were probably two men hiding on the street who shot the car up from the front and behind, the trade minister said.

Allawi said the motives were most likely political.
"It was probably not a robbery. It may have been politically motivated," Allawi said.

He said several people in his ministry had received death threats, although it was unclear if the grievances were truly from elements of the old regime hoping to destroy the new Iraq or just people hoping to settle old grudges.
"I assume we are all targets," Allawi said.

Allawi put the number of trade ministry employees killed since the fall of Saddam Hussein last April at between 20 and 30, although he described the bulk of these attacks as crime-related.

Foes of the US-led occupation have killed scores of officials, police and rank-and-file employees working with the coalition.

This website is suspect, but the facts of this hit, for that is what it was, remain.

Crime related? My a**. These are deliberate hits on collaborators.

And the Interim Governing Council really, really wants to take over the top job, at least for the interregnum between 30 June and whenever the UN can arrange elections--or as long as they can stretch it out and arrange to install themselves? They THINK they have great security. I have my reservations.

Curioser and Curioser

Rumsfeld, Tenet to Testify Publicly in Sept. 11 Probe
By Hope Yen Associated Press Writer
Published: Feb 17, 2004

WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet will testify publicly next month in a federal commission inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.

The two-day hearing in late March, to focus on U.S. counterterrorism policy, will be unprecedented in its review of high-level officials in the administrations of both Presidents Clinton and Bush, Philip Zelikow, executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Also scheduled to testify are Secretary of State Colin Powell; his predecessor Madeleine Albright; and Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen.

"We're going to break new ground as we shift the focus from officials in the field to the highest officials in government and foreign policy both before 9-11 and today," Zelikow said.

In previous hearings, the commission has highlighted government missteps before the 2001 attacks, including miscommunications about al-Qaida operatives dating back to the mid-1990s and hijackers who were allowed to enter the United States repeatedly despite lacking proper visa documentation. Up to now, however, the panel has not assigned blame beyond midlevel officials in federal agencies.

The panel is preparing to hold private meetings in the coming weeks with Bush, Vice President Al Cheney, Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore about what their administrations knew before the attacks.

Things to look for at the public hearings: it should be obvious by the time the panel gets to Tenet and Rumsfeld if they've heard from the four principles. Expect a signature performance from Rummy with "unknown unknowns." I've watched his last couple of appearances before the Armed Services Committee, he clearly relishes his little moments in the sun. Tenet is a completely different matter. He's played good soldier so far. Even his speech at Georgetown required a fair amount of translation from Mandarin to be able to determine that he wasn't much interested in providing Bush/Cheney with cover. Aggressive questioning from the 9/11 members may turn up something we didn't already know (although there is certainly a great deal we suspect.) depending on what Tenet's motives are at this time.

The situation is complex. Here are the elements: 1. Tenet was a Clinton appointee, and that is a very strange thing to find in the Bush administration, particularly in a situation which would have gotten anyone else to fall on their sword months ago; 2. Tenet is CIA, it's been his whole career and the Bush family has been fiddling with the Agency and its precursors for at least three generations. I've been trying to determine if there is a relationship with Tenet and the Bushes which antedates Tenet's appointment as DCI, but have found nothing yet (Kevin Phillips book, An American Dynasty has the most extensive documentation of the long-standing relationship between the Bushes and the CIA, but Tenet doesn't figure in Phillips' tale. Readers with clues, feel free to contact me) because 3. It is well known around Washington that Tenet has been talking about retiring for a couple of years, which leads to the following questions: Why is he still here? What does he know that might have led Bush/Cheney to keep him on inspite of numerous provocations to dump him? Which is the least dangerous position for them? And the big speculative question for now: is he moved to defend the career pros, from whose ranks he emerged, or cover for Bush for reasons which are, at this time, obscure?

Things to ponder. But lay in some popcorn. And I suspect we'll begin to learn something about all of the interlocking relationships of the top-tier neocons, which will certainly be at least as interesting as The Young and the Restless, but in fact more like The Old and Extremely Well-Fixed.

Commonwealth into 21st. Century

Gays score civil rights victories in Virginia
House last week reaffirmed ban on same-sex marriage
Tuesday, February 17, 2004 Posted: 10:41 AM EST (1541 GMT)

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Proponents of civil rights for gays scored victories in Virginia's conservative-leaning House of Delegates on measures involving access to health insurance and home loans.

The House, which last week passed a bill reaffirming the state's ban on gay marriage, narrowly passed legislation Monday that would allow employers to offer group insurance benefits to gay partners who live together. It rejected a measure seeking to make state mortgage loans available only to married heterosexuals or blood relatives.

The health insurance bill, sponsored by Republican Delegate James Dillard, passed 50-49 with the support of numerous Republicans, and now advances to the state Senate, which Republicans control 24-16.
Republican Delegate Richard Black's bill to exclude same-sex and unmarried couples from Virginia Housing Development Authority loans failed to advance on a vote of 54-44.

"Virginia families will find it ironic that the same body of legislators voted in favor of a ban on civil unions but continues to give away those rights and privileges that go along with a traditional marriage," said Victoria Cobb, spokeswoman for the Family Foundation, a conservative group.

But Dyana Mason, executive director of gay rights group Equality Virginia, praised the House for recognizing how the housing bill could affect low-income families and other groups.

Frankly, I'm astonished. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both call Virginia home, it is a predictable red state with a conservative lege. If Virginia can make this step, then more of the rest of the country than I previously thought may be ready to move along.

Haiti...Again

Powell Sees 'No Enthusiasm' for Sending Peacekeepers to Haiti
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune

Published: February 17, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called urgently today for talks among opposing forces in increasingly chaotic Haiti, but he said that "there is frankly no enthusiasm" for sending armed peacekeepers to the country.

A scattered uprising against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti has claimed more than 50 lives and pried control of large northern areas, including the city of Hinche, from government troops. "Blood has flowed in Hinche," Mr. Aristide said on Monday as he pleaded for international help.

Today, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, convened a crisis group in Paris to examine how best to help the former French colony and to consider whether to intervene on an emergency basis.

Saying that Haiti was "in a catastrophic situation" and "on the edge of chaos," Mr. Villepin told a radio interviewer that France was conferring with its United Nations partners "to see what can be done urgently."

The options, he suggested, ranged from providing emergency aid to deploying a peacekeeping force, probably drawing from the approximately 4,000 French troops at Caribbean bases on Guadeloupe and Martinique.

But Mr. Powell, noting that he had spoken earlier in the day with Mr. Villepin and last week with representatives of the Organization of American States and of the regional Caribbean Community, said that "there was no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces."

He told reporters at the State Department that he would like to see order restored through talks between opposing sides before any security force is sent in to help maintain the peace.

Mr. Powell called urgently on Mr. Aristide to open such a dialogue, but pointedly rejected the notion that the Haitian leader should be forced to step down.
"We cannot buy into a proposition that says the elected president must be forced out of office by thugs" and those "bringing terrible violence to the Haitian people," he said.

The problem is that no one ever has any enthusiasm for doing anything about Haiti, which is why we are in this situation again.

Fair Trade

Toy-makers try to curb Wal-Mart
By Anne D'Innocenzio

Associated Press

NEW YORK - Led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., discount retailers won a war with other toy stores over the holiday season. Now toy-makers, a casualty in that bitter fight, have decided to make their own stand.
To protect themselves and toy retailers they see as key to their profits, some manufacturers plan to deliver fewer hot toys to Wal-Mart and to have more exclusive launches at chains such as Toys R Us Inc. It is a rare instance of manufacturers challenging the biggest U.S. retail juggernaut and its low-price approach to business.
Wild Planet Toys' Aquapets, an interactive critter, will be at Toys R Us exclusively for three months this spring before it reaches the mass merchants.
"The success of Toys R Us is important for the health of the toy industry," said Danny Grossman, founder and chief executive officer of Wild Planet.
Said Jim Silver, publisher of the Toy Book, an industry magazine: "Wal-Mart is a very important part of the toy business, but toy-makers don't want its low-pricing strategies to devalue their brands and their business - and put more toy retailers out of business."
The price wars contributed to the bankruptcies last holiday season of FAO Inc. - the King of Prussia owner of the famed FAO Schwarz and the Zany Brainy chain - and KB Toys Inc., which plans to close nearly a third of its stores.
"Whether it is exclusive launches or controlled product shipments, they are going to do whatever they can to keep other retailers healthy," Silver said.
Still, given the clout of Wal-Mart, which has a 21 percent share of the toy market, it remains to be seen whether those strategies will be effective. Many manufacturers - who wanted to speak anonymously for fear of losing the discounter's business - said there was only so much they could do. Setting prices with retailers is illegal under antitrust laws.

This is an interesting bind. Last week I blogged an LAT story about the kind of pressures Wal-Mart places on their third world suppliers with constant demand for cost cutting that means that the suppliers are making virtually nothing beyond their cost of production. The race to the bottom will end up putting those suppliers out of business.
It looks like the toy manufacturers are finding a way to fight back, but they really have a limited toolbox, given that price fixing and combination in restraint of trade are illegal. In my earlier Wal-mart thread, a commenter noted that patronizing Wal-Mart amounts to little more than selfishness. For Wal-Mart's suppliers, it also amounts to bad business.

From the Arkansas Republic to the NYT to the LAT, Wal-Mart's been getting some healthy press scrutiny. Shame is an effective social force.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Rivka at Respectful of Otters links to this WaPostory with a scary headline, and proceeds to give us a lesson on how to read a research story like this:

Antibiotic use is associated with an increased risk for breast cancer, a new study has found, raising the possibility that women who take the widely used medicines are prone to one of the most feared malignancies.