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.

Why didn't they control for the initial health of the women in the study, or collect measures of immune function? Because they didn't have the opportunity. This was what's called retrospective research. They had a lot of data on the health care used by women belonging to a particular health plan, and they sifted through it looking for relationships between medications and cancer. So they didn't have much information on the functioning of these women's immune systems, or on other breast cancer risk factors. The authors of the study admit as much in their abstract in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but the same information is buried in the popular press article.

Given that those of us who grew up in the early years of the antibiotic revolution were dosed with antibiotics for everything from the common cold to acne, and are now coming into the age of highest risk for breast cancer, a one-to-one correspondence between the two isn't unlikely. This is lousy science reporting, written to be deliberately alarming.

Working Stiffs

Wal-Mart foes detail costs to community
Public subsidizes workers, study says
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The closely watched campaign in Contra Costa County to block Wal-Mart superstores brought out its heavy political guns Monday when Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, flanked by local lawmakers, released a blistering report on "labor abuses and hidden costs" of the corporate Goliath
.
"We see a downward spiral within the community that is led by Wal-Mart," Miller said at a news conference at his Concord office.

Two weeks remain before voters decide the fate of hotly contested Measure L, which would in effect bar Wal-Mart Supercenters in unincorporated areas of the county.

Substandard pay and health care benefits for Wal-Mart workers allow the firm to charge very low prices that force nearby stores to slash their workers' pay and benefits in order to compete, said Miller, ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Plans by Wal-Mart to introduce 40 Supercenters into California are behind the bitter 4-month-old grocery store strike in Southern California, where supermarkets are demanding that workers assume a greater share of health care costs, Miller said.

Miller released a 22-page report by the Democratic staff of his House committee detailing how nonunionized Wal-Mart, the largest employer in both the United States and Mexico, allegedly imposes financial burdens on local governments. A certain percentage of its workers must turn to subsidized medical care, free school lunches, housing subsidies and other taxpayer-supported welfare services, Miller said.

A typical Wal-Mart store with 200 employees would cost taxpayers $420,750 per year, according to the report. Its employees were paid an average of $8.23 an hour in 2001, compared with $10.35 for a supermarket worker, the report said.

Wal-Mart's chief spokeswoman, Mona Williams, called Miller's attack irresponsible and his figures "pure fantasy."

"His so-called study is clearly aimed at pleasing the labor unions who make up such a large part of his financial support," Williams said by phone Monday from the company headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

She said a Wal-Mart Supercenter creates 400 to 500 jobs.
"Are our competitors offering these same jobs -- or would many of these people remain jobless without Wal-Mart?" she said.

Hourly pay varies across the country, but wages at a Supercenter in Northern California would probably be around the $9.55 paid in Las Vegas, which she called "very close to the union wage."

Roughly 90 percent of Wal-Mart employees have health insurance coverage, Williams added.

"More than 40 percent of associates (employees) on our health care plan had no coverage at all before coming to Wal-Mart," Williams said. "We are talking about people who might have fallen through the cracks without Wal-Mart -- and then truly become a financial burden to local communities."

Other localities in the state, including Alameda County, are battling Wal-Mart in similar attempts to block the retail giant.

Wal-Mart operates 14,071 Supercenters in the United States, and its first California one is due to open in La Quinta, near Palm Springs, next month, said Bob McAdam, a company spokesman for California.

California has 138 regular Wal-Mart stores, which are smaller and, unlike Supercenters, don't sell groceries.

Barbara Carpenter, head of Local 1179 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, says two supermarkets are shut down by the opening of each Supercenter. She says the firm's "profit-first philosophy" is "undermining the living standards of American families."

Some things to look for when reading media stories about labor disputes: the management will never tell you what the real wage is for new employees, they’ll tout an “average”; the number of people actually able to take part in health insurance will include management; the number of new hires and 1-2 year employees restricted to part time schedules will never be revealed. The “90%” figure offered by the company spokesperson is the number of people to whom health insurance is available—not the number who are actually able to afford it.

In retail and other parts of the service sector, new employees routinely work restricted schedules designed to keep them out of the benefits package. That Wal-Mart hands out an instruction sheet on how to apply for welfare to its new hires tells you most of what you need to know about how it treats the new folks.

It Depends on Where You Park Your Credit Card

Arabs in U.S. Raising Money to Back Bush
By LESLIE WAYNE

Published: February 17, 2004

Iraqis are adding their names to the ranks of Pioneers and Rangers, the elite Bush supporters who have raised $100,000 or more for his re-election.

This new crop of fund-raisers comes as some opinion polls suggest support for the president among Arab-Americans is sinking and at a time when strategists from both parties say Mr. Bush is losing ground with this group. Mr. Bush has been criticized by Arab-Americans who feel they are being singled out in the fight against terrorism and who are uneasy over the administration's Palestinian-Israeli policies.Yet the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq have been a catalyst for some wealthy Arab-Americans to become more involved in politics. And there are still others who have a more practical reason for opening their checkbooks: access to a business-friendly White House. Already, their efforts have brought them visits with the president at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., as well as White House dinners and meetings with top administration officials.

The fund-raisers are people like Mori Hosseini, the Iranian-born chief executive of ICI Homes, a home builder in Daytona Beach, Fla. Mr. Hosseini is a Ranger, gaining the top designation after raising $200,000 from his family and acquaintances. (The minimum level of money raised for a Ranger is $200,000, while it takes $100,000 to be a Pioneer.)

Never before has Mr. Hosseini been this active politically. But he said he was inspired by Mr. Bush's "decisive" action, especially in Iraq, and Mr. Hosseini's efforts have led to an invitation to a White House Christmas party and a private meeting with the president and a handful of other donors at a recent fund-raiser at Disney World.

"He has saved Iraq," said Mr. Hosseini, who left Iran when he was 13. "He's the savior, if not of Iraq, but also of the other countries around Iraq. They want freedom. I am so sure of this because I am from that part of the world."

Mr. Hosseini's enthusiasm runs counter to what some polls say is a drop in Mr. Bush's popularity among Arab-Americans. In a recent release, the Arab American Institute, a nonprofit organization representing Arab-American interests in government and politics, said Mr. Bush's support had fallen sharply since the 2000 election. A January poll conducted for the group by Zogby International, which is headed by John Zogby, a Lebanese-American, found that Mr. Bush's approval rating among Arab-Americans had fallen to 38 percent from as high as 83 percent in October 2001.

The biggest reason for this drop-off, according to the institute's poll, is concern over Arab-Americans' No. 1 issue, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. To many Arab-Americans, the administration's actions are seen as more pro-Israel than evenhanded, especially its support of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister.
In addition, a program begun after 9/11 that required thousands of Arab and Muslim men to register with the immigration officials has sent chills through Arab-Americans, as has the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, which Arab-Americans say is a threat to their civil liberties.
Even so, prominent Arab-Americans have kept the money flowing.

"It's like the Catholic Church," said Mr. Zogby, whose brother, James, is president of the Arab American Institute. "The total dollars are up, but the number of donors is down."

One reason may be that Arab-Americans are not a monolithic group. The term is used generally to refer to people from Arab countries, but they may have diverse religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, like Lebanese and other Arab Christians or Muslims from Egypt and Pakistan. Many Arab-Americans left their countries because of political and economic oppression and are now small-business owners or entrepreneurs who say the Republican Party best represents their values.

As with any specific group, it is impossible to determine exactly how much of Mr. Bush's campaign money comes from Arab-Americans.

The rich hang with the rich. This is not a surprise and Bush’s contacts in the wealthy Muslim community, particularly the Saudis, go back generations. Capital accretes, as does poverty. Ordinary Muslims, who voted for Bush in 2000 as social conservatives, are making other plans, according to my reading of the blogosphere.

My reading of the localsphere: they say, "Boosh, Boosh," and shake their heads. The Afghan patriots I know are horrified. Some of these are voters, some are expats.

We'll see.

New Boss : Old Boss

In Iraq, Council Majority Withdraws Support of Caucus Proposal
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 16, 2004; 6:30 PM

BAGHDAD, Feb. 16 -- Most members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council no longer support the Bush administration's plan to choose an interim government through caucuses and instead want the council to assume sovereignty until elections can be held, several members have said.

The caucus proposal, which the council had endorsed in November, is a cornerstone of the administration's plan to end the civil occupation of Iraq this summer. Seeking to lay the foundation for a political system that would shun extremism and keep the country united, the administration had wanted a transitional government selected by carefully vetted local caucuses to run Iraq through the end of next year.

But with Iraqi religious leaders demanding that voting occur much sooner -- and with a growing expectation here that the United Nations will call for elections by the end of this year or early next year -- a majority of Governing Council members have quietly withdrawn their backing for the caucus proposal.
"The caucuses are pretty much dead now," said Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni Muslim council member. Until recently, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, who make up 12 of the council's 25 members, had been the strongest proponents of the caucuses. But in recent days, several Sunni members have joined majority Shiites in opposing the U.S. transition plan.

Another Sunni member, Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, said that abandoning the caucus system and transferring sovereignty to the council on June 30 -- the date by which the administration has promised to hand over power -- now "makes the most sense." A senior Kurdish leader and council member, Jalal Talabani, said on Sunday that he, too, wants the council to assume sovereignty until elections can be convened.

The loss of support for the caucuses poses a complicated new challenge for the U.S. occupation authority. The council is made up of some of the country's most prominent political leaders. "It's hard to imagine pulling off the caucuses without the Governing Council," one U.S. official said. "What happens when these people -- people we selected -- say they do not support the process? It can't work."

Senior U.S. officials said the council's motives were largely selfish. With elections likely to occur by the end of the year or early next year, sovereignty could give council members unrivaled political influence in the months leading up to the vote, allowing them engage in patronage and skew balloting rules in their favor.

I do believe that the Iraqi people may have some reaction to this.

The good news is that we will soon have Steve Gilliard home to tell us what it all means. Thanks to Jen Runne for tending to the man, his blog, his email and his folks while he was facing scary stuff in the hospital.

New! Improved!

Here it is: the first post on the new system. Supple, smooth keyboard, dragless (and getting all stuck-up-less) optical mouse, superfast processor, RAM that makes an SUV look wussie and enough gigs of storage to last for the rest of my natural life.

Yes, the new Bumputer is here! I’m getting used to a keyboard and mouse which, actually, ya know, work and stuff. The software is all mostly new to me (some of it isn’t new enough: gotta replace IE 5) and this version of Word isn’t one I’ve used before, but, all in all, the new machine is great, much more useful and so much faster and stabler than old Faithful. My bro diagnosed that one as being on its last legs, literally within weeks of going down for the last time. Blue-screens-of-death were getting to be a common, daily experience, complete crashes a daily affair, not always repaired by re-boots.

Blogging will be slow, rather than light, for the next few days as I learn my way around new applications and find the strengths and weaknesses of the new set up. Sysadmin bro will be back in a week for final tweaking. He’s available for consults as I learn my way around and I know I can always count on you Bumpers for help. This is an MS Office system and it’ll take me a while to find my way around. Yes, I know you all recommended Open Office. One thing at a time. We’re up and running quickly this way and I’m toggling around the blogosphere getting all my caches renewed (another time-consuming piece of business.) The larger flat screen monitor is next, a little treat for these presbyope eyes.

You, readers, made this possible. Bumpers have to be some of the finest people in the blogosphere.

A Step at a Time

FEC Chairman Backs Organizations' Use of 'Soft Money'
McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law Doesn't Apply to Political Interest Groups, Smith Says
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A04

Defying Republican Party demands to rule illegal the plans of a network of pro-Democratic political committees, Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley A. Smith now argues that these committees should remain free to raise and spend large contributions known as "soft money."

Smith's argument, spelled out in a 37-page proposal to his five FEC colleagues, sharply increases, but does not guarantee, the likelihood that new pro-Democratic groups with multimillion-dollar budgets will become significant forces in the 2004 election and become what amounts to a "shadow" Democratic Party.

One of the new groups, America Coming Together (ACT), has already raised $12.5 million toward an election-year goal of $95 million. Such liberal donors as financier George Soros and Progressive Corp. Chairman Peter B. Lewis have donated $6.5 million and $3.5 million, respectively, to pro-Democratic organizations.

The Republican National Committee, which would not take such action without the blessings of the Bush White House, has called on the FEC to rein in the Democratic and, presumably, pro-Republican groups that are likely to be formed in reaction to the Democratic drive.

After opposing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law in 2002 when it was enacted and later before the Supreme Court, the RNC recently wrote: "It is now incumbent upon the FEC to not sanction the undermining and evasion of [the McCain-Feingold law] through the activities of newly formed 527 organizations dedicated to electing or defeating specific federal candidates."

The new groups planning to spend as much as $300 million, most of it soft money, in 2004 are known as 527s for the section of the tax code they fall under.
Smith, writing a proposed response to a request for an advisory opinion on the legality of many activities 527 groups plan to conduct, contended that the McCain-Feingold law is aimed at political parties and "does not apply to the regulation of political entities outside these specific provisions."

Smith, a Republican appointee and a critic of campaign finance regulation in his academic writings, cited the Supreme Court decision affirming the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold. The ruling noted that the law "imposes numerous restrictions on the fundraising abilities of the political parties. . . . Interest groups, however, remain free to raise money to fund voter registration, [get-out-the-vote] activities, mailings and broadcast advertising."

This is a big deal. The "527" groups are one of the few ways that the Democrats have to even the playing field in issue advocacy--the Republicans simply raise more money for candidates and party activities. The RNC--and White House--have been fighting hard to limit the activites of the 527s, to impose great restrictions on fundraising and to demand more extensive reporting requirements.

This is not the last battle in this fight but it is an important one.

Osama is Serious, Bush Isn't

U.S. Aides Hint Afghan Voting May Be Put Off
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: February 16, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 — The Bush administration has begun suggesting that Afghanistan's elections scheduled for June may have to be postponed because of security problems and the failure to register enough voters.

Administration officials said in recent days that security conditions remained dangerous or at least uncertain in a third of the country, hampering registration so badly that only 8 percent of eligible Afghan voters have been enrolled. Among women, only 2 percent have registered.

The United Nations has said at least 70 percent of eligible voters should be registered for the elections to be considered successful. That leaves only four months to achieve a daunting objective at a time when registration workers are avoiding large swaths of the country that are considered unsafe. Afghanistan has about 10.5 million eligible voters.

"I am reasonably confident that we can get enough voters registered and provide security — it won't be perfect — that at least the presidential election can take place in June, or maybe July," said an administration official. But he added that security would have to improve to reach that goal, and that this might not happen.

President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government bear the responsibility for deciding whether the elections must be postponed, administration officials said. But the United States is also expected to play a decisive role in advising the Karzai government about what to do in that regard.

Mr. Karzai is said to be determined to hold at least the presidential election on time, in part because he expects to win. He is also said to be haunted by the memory that civil war erupted in the early 1990's when Burhanuddin Rabbani, a onetime anti-Russia guerrilla leader, refused to step down as president.

Under the Constitution that was agreed upon in early January, Afghanistan is supposed to try to schedule both presidential and parliamentary elections in June.

The administration official said it was very likely that the parliamentary elections, as opposed to presidential elections, would be postponed, possibly until next year, because even beyond security concerns, there were difficulties in setting district boundaries, choosing candidates and organizing political parties for the parliamentary elections. Registration is also hampered by Afghanistan's extensive illiteracy and the fact that perhaps most cities and towns do not have streets or addresses.

Many other experts say that in discussions with administration officials, there is a growing sense that the goal of holding prompt elections of any kind this year is receding.

Bush administration officials insist that American politics are playing no role in the decisions about whether to push for elections, but there is little doubt that President Bush would like to claim an electoral success in Afghanistan as he runs for re-election himself.

Similarly, the administration is pushing for a transfer of sovereignty to Iraq in June, another goal that some in the administration say is being influenced at least partly by the domestic political calendar.

Throw the incompetents out!

I grudgingly supported the Afghan campaign because it was clearly linked to Al Qaeda, but I winced because I was pretty sure C+ Augustus would screw it up. We've been there nearly a year and a half and have accomplished exactly what? Hamid Karzai is the emperor of Kabul, OBL and his minions are no where to be found, and we don't have enough boots to really change the situation. A spring offensive? Only in some PR shop's dreams.

If Al Qaeda is the issue in the war on terror, Bush is a complete failure since we can't prosecute a decent campaign in the neighborhood of its headquarters. A war in Afghanistan would be a gold-plated **tch to carry out with the best of resources--ask the Russians--but we are playing at this, at best. And playing with the lives of the troops we send, thanks to President Unserious. This is obscene, and the career military knows it.

Something to Hide?

Bush to Limit 9/11 Panel Session
President to Meet With Only a Few Members, Official Says
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A12

The White House said yesterday that President Bush plans to meet only with a limited number of representatives from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite a statement issued Friday that suggested he would meet with the whole panel.

The new details surprised some commission officials and members -- who believed they had secured a promise from Bush for a private meeting with all 10 members -- and could add to the tensions that have strained relations between the two sides.

"While details of the private sessions are still to be determined, the White House does not expect the president to meet with the entire commission," an administration official said yesterday.

The official added that the White House had not decided whether a meeting would include only the panel's chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), and vice chairman, former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), or other members, as well.

Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat and former Watergate prosecutor, said it "would be important for all the members of the commission to have an opportunity to participate in an interview such as this. . . ."

"There is a significant difference in being present, seeing a witness in person and having an opportunity to ask follow-up questions, and simply reading a transcript or memo," he said.

Kean and Hamilton on Friday sent letters to Bush, Vice President Cheney and their predecessors, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, requesting private meetings with the commission and also welcoming the possibility of public appearances. The commission wants to question them about intelligence relating to al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and whether signs of an impending attack may have been missed.

In a statement later Friday, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan said that "9/11 Commission Chair Kean and Vice Chair Hamilton today requested a private meeting with the president to discuss information relevant to the commission's work. The president has agreed to the request. . . ." McClellan added that Bush would not testify publicly.

Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said yesterday that the panel's letter was sent on behalf of the full panel and McClellan's subsequent statement had been taken as agreement to those terms. "The chair and vice chair clearly wrote on behalf of the commission to request a meeting with the whole commission," Felzenberg said.

Unbelievable

Evil Genius?

Curtain Goes Up on Glass-House Attack
By Dana Milbank
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A04

Well, isn't that special.

On Thursday, the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign sent an e-mail to 6 million people with an Internet advertisement attacking Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) over his special-interest money. The ad, subtly titled "Unprincipled," took on Bush's likely opponent for his claim that he will kick out "the special interests."

The ad accurately points out that Kerry has raised $640,000 from lobbyists, "more special-interest money than any other senator." And it fairly questions whether Kerry is disingenuous to accept money from those he would vanquish.

But the Center for Responsive Politics, which calculated the figure Bush cited about Kerry ($638,358 raised from lobbyists since 1989, to be exact), has some bad news for Bush, too. The president raised $842,262 from lobbyists in the current election cycle -- almost four times the $226,450 Kerry raised. And if you take away the funds Kerry collected for the presidential campaign, he is no longer the Senate's top recipient of special-interest funds.

Does Bush have a glass-houses problem here?

"The point is that [Kerry] rails against special interests from his very own glass house as the number one recipient of special-interest money in the Senate over the last 15 years," Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said.

Keep an eye out for more Internet attack ads from both sides. The new campaign finance law deters candidates from making television attack ads by requiring the candidates to appear in the ads and approve the message. But Internet ads are exempt.

I have a real hard time seeing the Bushies go down this road. Are they begging for it, or what? Rove=Genius? I don't think so.

Pain

U.S. Is Working to Make Painkillers Harder to Obtain
Patients May Suffer as DEA Battles Abuse
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A03

Drug Enforcement Administration is working to make one of the nation's most widely prescribed medications more difficult for patients to obtain as part of its stepped-up offensive against the diversion and abuse of prescription painkillers.

Top DEA officials confirm that the agency is eager to change the official listing of the narcotic hydrocodone -- which was prescribed more than 100 million times last year -- to the highly restricted Schedule II category of the Controlled Substances Act. A painkiller and cough suppressant sold as Lortab, Vicodin and 200 generic brands, hydrocodone combined with other medications has long been available under the less stringent rules of Schedule III.

The DEA effort is part of a broad campaign to address the problem of prescription drug abuse, which the agency says is growing quickly around the nation. But the initiative has repeatedly pitted the agency against doctors, pharmacists and pain sufferers, and it is doing so again with the hydrocodone proposal.

Pain specialists and pharmacy representatives say that the new restrictions would be a burden on the millions of Americans who need the drug to treat serious pain from arthritis, AIDS, cancer and chronic injuries, and that many sufferers are likely to be prescribed other, less effective drugs as a result.

If the change is made, millions of patients, doctors and pharmacists will be affected, some substantially. Patients, for instance, would have to visit their doctors more often for hydrocodone prescriptions, because they could not be refilled; doctors could no longer phone in prescriptions; and pharmacists would have to fill out significantly more paperwork and keep the drugs in a safe. Improper prescribing would carry potentially greater penalties.

The DEA says the change is necessary because hydrocodone is being widely misused -- with a 48 percent increase in emergency room reports of hydrocodone abuse from 1998 to 2001. The drug, a semisynthetic chemical cousin of opium, produces a morphine-like euphoria if taken without a medical purpose but generally does not produce a similar "high" in patients with severe or chronic pain. Hydrocodone was one of several prescription painkillers that radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh acknowledged last year that he was addicted to.

"Hydrocodone is one of the most abused drugs in the nation," said Christine Sannerud, deputy chief of the drug and chemical evaluation section of the DEA. "The agency thinks it would be wise to move it to Schedule II, because that would help a lot in terms of reducing abuse and trafficking."

DEA officials would not say when they might begin the process of changing the schedule, but other federal officials said they understand that the DEA wants to act soon.

Under the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the DEA places all narcotic or mind-altering drugs into one of five "schedules," and the medications are more or less available based on the potential dangers they pose and benefits they provide. Morphine-based hydrocodone, when combined with aspirin, acetaminophen or other common analgesics, has been a Schedule III drug since the act went into effect.

The DEA effort comes as the agency is already embroiled in a dispute with many pain specialists over the use -- and alleged overprescribing -- of another powerful painkiller, OxyContin. Scores of doctors have been arrested on felony charges of conspiracy, drug trafficking and even murder in connection with their prescribing.

Although the agency says the prosecutions are needed to shut down "pill mills" and stop unscrupulous doctors, many pain specialists say that the agency has become overzealous and that some doctors are refusing to prescribe needed painkillers because they fear DEA investigation.

"Rescheduling the drug will bring more hoops and barriers to getting access to the drugs, and it may prevent some minimal amount of abuse," said Richard Payne, president of the American Pain Society. "But my concern is that it will come at the cost of denying access to thousands of patients."

Susan Winkler of the American Pharmacists Association said her organization is concerned that the "ripple effects" would be substantial and negative.

"Our members and doctors would have increased liability if [hydrocodones] are rescheduled, and that will inevitably reduce prescribing," she said. "We urge the DEA to make sure their decision is based on science and will make the situation better, not worse."

Are these drugs abused? Sure. Show me a drug that isn't.

However, denying pain medication to people who need it is some sort of Calvinist scheme to turn us into a bunch of sufferers. This is simply cruelty applied at the level of policy. It stinks.

Pain is under-treated in this country. We seem to love crucifictions.

The Fly Boy

While we are all turning--or scrolling--through the New York Times and Washington Post looking for those service dates in Alabama (hint: the new document dump leaves a number of questions unanswered) the LA Weekly asks a larger question:

Via TalkLeft:

Rather than only asking how a young George W. got out of the National Guard, we ought to ask how he got in when 350 American men were dying each week in Vietnam and 100,000 were on National Guard waiting lists across the country.

For years the talk in Austin political circles had Bush using his father’s stroke as a Republican congressman from Houston to secure one of two or three rare open billets in an Air National Guard Unit — after scoring in the 25th percentile on the standard test given to flight-program candidates. There was also the story of a political contribution conveyed to the Democratic speaker of the Texas House to secure a slot for Bush. When Bush moved into the Governor’s Mansion, the stories dried up — as did two of the sources who circulated them in Austin bars frequented by the state’s political cognoscenti.

But there’s something about the risk of perjury in federal court that focuses the mind on the truth. In 1999, the former Democratic speaker of the House who secured Bush’s spot in the Texas Air National Guard was a witness in a lawsuit involving two seemingly unrelated subjects: the Texas lottery and George W. Bush’s military service. The story the former Texas politician told doesn’t square with what Bush père et fils told reporters at the same time. But neither of the Bushes told his version of the story under oath after a hard-ass federal judge (who recently jailed a former Democratic attorney general for lying in his courtroom) ordered a deposition.

Ben Barnes did. Barnes was a Texas power politician from the other side of the state and the other side of the tracks from the River Oaks neighborhood that elected the senior Bush to Congress in the 1960s. He was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman from Brownwood (a.k.a. Deadwood), Texas, elected to the Statehouse when he was 22. Three years later, he was elected speaker. By the time he was 30, he won his first statewide election and was the youngest lieutenant governor in the history of the state. Lyndon Johnson compared him to Thomas Jefferson and predicted he would be the next Texan elected president. The Texas Monthly called him the Golden Boy of Texas politics. He was a young man at the top of his game. Then a bank-stock scandal in the early-’70s got in the way of his next career move, and he came in third in the 1972 Democratic primary election for governor. (Republicans at the time were irrelevant.) He was never charged in the stock-fraud case that sent his successor in the Speaker’s Office to prison. But the throw-the-bastards-out election of 1972 ended Ben Barnes’ career. Or so it seemed. By 1998, Barnes was on top again, as a millionaire lobbyist working for GTech, the company operating public lotteries in 37 states. But lottery revenues were plummeting, and lottery- commission chair Harriet Miers (who was also Bush’s personal lawyer and once was paid $19,000 to look into the National Guard story for a gubernatorial campaign) re-bid GTech’s contract. GTech sued, threatened to shut down the Texas lottery for a year, and hired a new lobbyist — after providing Barnes a $23 million severance package.

Read the whole thing for an inside look at Texas insider politics in the 1960s, a close up look at the Bush Family Network and a personality portrait of a young W. There is a warning of a personality problem here: Bush Jr. apparently lost interest in his ANG assignment about four years in. This has been one of his patterns, and is reason enough not to return him to Washington

Blogkeeping

Blogging will be light this weekend. I spent much of Friday preparing for a presentation on spirituality, contemplation and the Incarnation which will take most of the day on Saturday, off site. I have a boodle of "housekeeping" housekeeping to take care of on Sunday, preparatory to the delivery and installation of the new Bump computer system on Monday. My brother will be here and if he saw the kind of condition that his sister let her floors devolve to, well, I don't want to have that conversation, Sunday will be a cleaning Sabbath. The system installation will take most of Monday afternoon, and should make for better blogging for you and me: the new system will replace this crash and kludge-laden Win 95 platform with the zippiest P-X cpu, modern RAM and Win 98 SE, which my sysadmin bro says is the correct compromise for the ancient applications I prefer. And enough hard drive space to save my deathless prose for the rest of my life. Bottom line: faster, better system means more content for you, less crashes for me. More room to play for all of us. It's appalling, the amount of time I've spent re-creating posts lost to the dreaded blue-screens-of-death, and sometimes I just didn't have enough time to do it twice. 98SE isn't a panecea, I've had enough experience with it to know that it isn't crash proof, but it sure beats the crap out of 95. And I get a USB buss. I can't tell you how happy this makes me. Finally, an optical mouse. For those of us who live by cut-and-paste, this is bliss on a stick. I've killed three ordinary ball mice in the last year.

I'm hoping to learn more about graphics software and be able to add graphics to Bump, the new system makes that possible. I like charts and graphs and the odd photograph and am a disciple of Edward Tufte, but don't expect Powerpoint style presentations here. I hate Powerpoint with a passion. It is the enemy of good graphical information. What you will see here mostly is prose with the occasional illustration if it will help the text. You graphical types can send me tips on what software to use. I'm still a virgin in this area.

By the way, you made this possible. Thanks for your donations. The tipjar up top still could use a little help getting rid of this ancient 14" monitor, adding a laser printer and a keyboard that doesn't stick on all the vowels. I don't understand why only the vowels and the letter T sticks, but this keyboard came with the system in 1997 and God only knows what's fallen into it. Thank my brother for donating his labor to make the new system possible. Use comments below to talk to him, he'll get your messages through me.

Bottom line: there are going to be software issues while I move over to new clients for email, browser and wp that will slow me down for a few days. Be patient. I'm a quick study, but I'm human. Having been through the upgrade cycle before, I know there will be days when I want to pitch the thing out of the window. The difference this time is that I'm doing it in public. Silly me.

Mr. Plainspoken

9/11 Panel Could Pare Down Intel Probe
By Hope Yen
The Associated Press
Friday, February 13, 2004; 5:12 PM

The chairman of the commission reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks says it will be forced to pare down inquiries into intelligence failures if Congress doesn't give it more time.

The bipartisan panel faces a May 27 deadline but has asked for at least a two-month extension. President Bush last week reversed course and said he favors more time, too, but House Republican leaders remain opposed.

The panel planned 10 more public meetings but now says it will only have time for seven. Commissioners also will be forced to do without some follow-up interviews with officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations, said former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, the panel's Republican chairman.

"If it is evident in the next month that May 27 is our deadline, there are things we will not be able to do in the areas of intelligence," Kean said. That area is particularly complex and time-consuming, he said.

"There are many paths to follow, including how intelligence was used, where it came from, and what was known by the FBI, CIA and National Security Council," he said. A May 27 deadline would force the panel to put out a report "that we, as commissioners, would feel very frustrated by."

Relatives of Sept. 11 victims have said better intelligence might have helped prevent the attacks. Last week, Bush announced that he would form a separate investigatory panel to examine prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Legislation is pending in the House and Senate that would extend the Sept. 11 panel's deadline to Jan. 10, 2005, a date that supporters say will limit the influence of election-year politics.

But House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) opposes any extension, citing a need to quickly have the panel's recommendations on how to improve the nation's security.
"The worst thing that can happen to this commission is that the report gets released in the middle of the presidential campaign and then it becomes a political football," Hastert spokesman John Feehery said. "Every commission created has always asked for more time. We need the recommendations as soon as possible."

The Sept. 11 panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was established by Congress to study the nation's preparedness before the attacks and its response afterward, and to recommend ways to guard against similar disasters.
....
The commission is seeking private meetings and public testimony from Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Bush and Cheney have not said whether they will accept the invitations, while Clinton and Gore have pledged to cooperate.

Commissioners have complained that their work has been delayed repeatedly because of disputes with the administration over access to documents and witnesses.

Earlier this week, the White House agreed to give the panel greater access to classified intelligence briefings after some commissioners threatened a subpoena. The panel said afterward the material raised new questions that have prompted them to seek additional interviews with officials, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

New developments: Bush willtalk to the 9/11 commission, but it is unclear if this will be a "visit" or sworn testimony.

In announcing that Mr. Bush would submit to questions from the Sept. 11 commission, the White House statement suggested that the president would not appear in public but would meet with a delegation of the commissioners in private.

"The president has agreed to the request," the statement said. "While the chair and vice chair have suggested the possibility of a public session at a later time, we believe the president can provide all the requested information in the private meeting, and there is no need for any additional testimony."

Commission officials said that a letter requesting testimony from Mr. Bush had been delivered to the White House only late this afternoon. On Thursday, the commission announced that it intended to seek testimony from Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and several senior White House officials and cabinet officers.

"The commission is delighted that the president has responded favorable to the invitation to appear at a private session," said Al Felzenberg, the panel's spokesman. "There will now be meetings between the commission staff and White House aides about time and place and format."

The decision to accept the commission's invitation for testimony has political risks for Mr. Bush, since it will be the first time he has been subjected to extensive outside questioning about his actions in the weeks and months before the Sept. 11 attacks, and whether he had intelligence before Sept. 11 that suggested a catastrophic attack was being planned on American soil.

He can expect to be questioned in detail about an intelligence briefing report that he received on Aug. 6, 2001, that suggested that Al Qaeda might be planning a major terrorist attack using commercial airplanes. The White House has declined to release the briefing papers but has confirmed news reports that they contained the warning.
The commission, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has required all of its witnesses at public hearings to be placed under oath.

But it has generally not required witnesses who testify in private sessions to be sworn in, and commission officials have said it was unclear whether Mr. Bush would be asked to testify under oath.

"Some people in the past in the private sessions have been placed under oath and some people have not," Mr. Felzenberg said. `It's too early to say what will happen."

He said it was also too early say if the commission would press for Mr. Bush to appear at a public hearing as well. He said the letter to Mr. Bush this afternoon requested a private meeting but also noted that the commission would "welcome" public testimony, as well.
Mr. Bush, who initially opposed creation of an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks, has had a strained relationship with the panel throughout its existence. White House lawyers battled for months to block, and then to limit, the commission's access to the daily White House intelligence digests that were presented to Mr. Bush in the months before Sept. 11.

I'm guessing "modified limited hangout."

Intel Shake-up

To cap a week which was thoroughly bad for the White House, and thoroughly good for democracy:

Senate's Iraq Probe to Include Bush, Aides
by Greg Miller

WASHINGTON — In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.

The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation, and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign.

The White House and Republican leaders in Congress had sought for months to confine the inquiry to the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and to insulate the administration. But the Senate panel voted unanimously Thursday to expand the probe after some GOP members appeared ready to break from the Republican position.

The expansion was a victory for Democrats, who have argued for months that many of the claims made by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others were not backed up by the intelligence.
"We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused by reviewing statements by senior policymakers to determine if those statements were substantiated by the intelligence," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

The change in scope was announced in a statement issued by Rockefeller and the chairman of the panel, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). The statement outlined a new course for an investigation that is already several months along, and has involved interviews with dozens of U.S. intelligence officials and reviews of thousands of pages of classified documents.

New areas of inquiry will include "whether any influence was brought to bear on anyone to shape their analysis to support policy objectives," the statement said. Sources involved in the investigation said they had turned up no evidence so far that there was such pressure, or that analysts shaded their assessments to please the White House.

The committee said it would examine the role played by a controversial intelligence unit set up secretly at the Pentagon to search for ties between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The unit in the so-called Office of Special Plans has been accused of cherry-picking data to help bolster White House claims of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that the CIA and other agencies viewed far more skeptically.

The committee also will focus new scrutiny on the intelligence community's use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group during Saddam Hussein's regime that lobbied for years for a U.S. effort to oust the Iraqi president, and whose leaders have ties to senior members of the Bush administration. Critics say the INC has served up a stream of Iraqi defectors with exaggerated or unfounded claims about Iraq's weapons programs and other activities.

But the most significant shift for the committee is its determination to now examine "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq" by administration figures were "substantiated by intelligence information." The statement said the committee would examine public comments and claims made not only by the current administration but by officials in the Clinton administration.

So, the Intelligence Committee is going to take on the work that the Presidential Commission has been forbidden to do, and with the subpeona power denied to the Commission. That the Republicans on Committee agreed to this unanimously says that the President has lost his cover, at least in the Senate.

Secret Report

Secret report warns of Iraq 'Balkanisation'
By Nicolas Pelham in Baghdad
Published: February 12 2004 21:21 | Last Updated: February 12 2004 21:21

A confidential report prepared by the US-led administration in Iraq says that the attacks by insurgents in the country have escalated sharply, prompting fears of what it terms Iraq's "Balkanisation". The findings emerged after a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the top US general in Iraq, John Abizaid, on Thursday.

"January has the highest rate of violence since September 2003," the report said. "The violence continues despite the expansion of the Iraqi security services and increased arrests by coalition forces in December and January." The report, which is based on military data and circulated to foreign organisations by the US aid agency USAid, diverges with public statements by US officials who claim that security in the country is improving.

"The security risks are not as bad as they appear on TV," Tom Foley, the coalition official overseeing Iraq's private-sector development, said at the US Commerce Department headquarters in Washington on Wednesday. "Western civilians are not the targets themselves. These are acceptable risks."

According to the report, "January national review of Iraq", strikes against international and non-governmental organisations increased from 19 to 26 in January. It said that high-intensity attacks involving mortars and explosives grew by 103 per cent from 316 in December to 642 in January; non-life threatening attacks, including drive-by shootings and rock-throwing, soared by 186 per cent from 182 in December.

It also recorded an average of eight attacks a day in Baghdad alone, up from four a day in September, and a total of 11 attacks on coalition aircraft. The report emerged as Iraq faced one of its worst weeks of violence in the 10-month occupation of Iraq. According US military officials, General Abizaid escaped unharmed but cancelled a walkabout, after attackers hiding in a mosque fired on his convoy as it entered a military base in the town of Falluja, west of Baghdad. It was not clear if the insurgents knew they were targeting Gen Abizaid and officials said a six-minute gun-battle ensued.

Thank God for the foreign press.

Weekly Roundup

Anxiety Takes Hold of Presidential Aides Caught Up in Leak Inquiry
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: February 12, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — It started almost casually last fall, with F.B.I. agents leaving business cards under doors around the White House, politely calling for appointments and even meeting some officials, without any lawyers present, over a few beers at a nearby bar.

But the investigation into who at the White House leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer has become much more intense in the last few weeks. Some administration officials have been summoned for confrontational interviews. Current and former members of the White House's communications and foreign policy teams have hired lawyers. At least a handful of White House aides have had to appear before a federal grand jury.

At the White House, the topic is rarely discussed openly among those who have already been drawn into the investigation and those who think they may be, people who have been questioned in the case said. The result, they said, is an information vacuum that is being filled to some extent by fear of what current or former colleagues may be telling investigators.

Some officials now find themselves in a bind borne of the potentially huge political stakes of the case. Since the investigation began in September, President Bush has said repeatedly that he wants to get to the bottom of the matter and that he has directed everyone on his staff to cooperate fully. Some lawyers involved in the case said White House officials were now trapped between that direction from the president and legal advice that they aggressively assert their own rights.

So although White House officials have publicly pledged to help investigators, there is some resistance just beneath the surface. Some people who have spoken with investigators say they have refused to sign statements that would waive any promise of confidentiality they received from reporters. The effort to obtain the statements is apparently intended to deprive journalists who wrote about the leak an ability, if questioned or subpoenaed, to cite the need to protect anonymous sources.

Some people questioned in the case say they have also declined to sign agreements that they will not disclose any information about their encounters with investigators.
At a White House that has largely avoided scandal — and one that has been distinguished by remarkable internal cohesion — the escalating investigation has brought unusual personal stress and the uncertainties that afflict anyone caught up in a full-scale criminal inquiry.

Some White House officials, concerned about what the investigation might mean for themselves or their bosses, have been pumping reporters for information about what they know. Others, so far untouched by the investigation, are sighing with relief.
But like any institution caught up in a criminal inquiry, this one appears intent on getting on with business as usual, and avoiding the spectacle of colleagues' turning on colleagues, even as investigators turn up the pressure.

"The mood is concern, not worry," said one Republican with close ties to the White House. "It's attention, not fear. And so far it hasn't caused any dysfunctional relationships to crop up."

The investigation has already spread through much of the White House. Among those who have been interviewed by the F.B.I. are Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, and powerful behind-the-scenes figures like I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Those who have trooped in to answer questions from the grand jury include Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's press secretary; Claire Buchan, a deputy press secretary; Mary Matalin, a former top adviser to Mr. Cheney; and Adam Levine, a former White House communications aide.

Investigators appear to be amassing as much information as they can about how the White House press and political operations work and asking those they question about specific conversations with other White House aides and with reporters.

The goal of the inquiry is to determine who told the syndicated columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was an undercover C.I.A. officer. In a column that appeared in The Washington Post on July 14, Mr. Novak attributed the information to two "senior administration officials." Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a crime.

The case has heated up since December, when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from it and the Justice Department put the matter in the hands of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago. Soon afterward, some administration officials were summoned to interviews at an office building a few blocks from the White House that is customarily used for investigations of national security breaches.

There, a two-member team of prosecutors, referring to specific e-mail messages, notes and phone calls, started asking tough, confrontational questions about the leak and who might have been behind it. Then came the grand jury, where as usual witnesses must answer questions without a lawyer present, not knowing what their colleagues have testified.

Sept. 11 Panel Will Ask Bush, Clinton to Testify
The Associated Press
Thursday, February 12, 2004; 2:00 PM

MADISON, N.J. -- The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will soon ask President Bush, former President Clinton and their vice presidents to testify in public about possible warnings they might have received from U.S. intelligence sources before the attacks.

"We need them to testify," former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, the bipartisan commission's chairman, told The Record of Bergen County in a story published Thursday. He said the panel would issue formal invitations within the next few weeks, although he conceded that all four men would probably decline to be questioned at a public forum.

However, Kean said their cooperation was crucial to the commission's work, so he hoped they would at least consent to private interviews with the panel.

"They all have important pieces to tell us and important questions to answer, so they will all be getting an invitation and we're in contact already with their staffs in every case," Kean said Wednesday on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

Bush said in an NBC interview broadcast this week that he would "perhaps" submit to questions from the commission.

MEMPHIS - Two members of the Air National Guard unit that President George W. Bush allegedly served with as a young Guard flyer in 1972 had been told to expect him and were on the lookout for him. He never showed, however; of that both Bob Mintz and Paul Bishop are certain.

The question of Bush's presence in 1972 at Dannelly Air National Guard base in Montgomery, Alabama - or the lack of it - has become an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Recalls Memphian Mintz, now 63: "I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with." But, says Mintz, that "somebody" -- better known to the world now as the president of the United States -- never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember.

"And I was looking for him," repeated Mintz, who said that he assumed that Bush "changed his mind and went somewhere else" to do his substitute drill. It was not "somewhere else," however, but the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly to which the young Texas flyer had requested transfer from his regular Texas unit - the reason being Bush's wish to work in Alabama on the ultimately unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of family friend Winton "Red" Blount.

It is the 187th, Mintz's unit, which was cited, during the 2000 presidential campaign, as the place where Bush completed his military obligation. And it is the 187th that the White House continues to contend that Bush belonged to - as recently as this week, when presidential spokesman Scott McClellan released payroll records and, later, evidence suggesting that Bush's dental records might be on file at Dannelly.

"There's no way we wouldn't have noticed a strange rooster in the henhouse, especially since we were looking for him," insists Mintz, who has pored over documents relating to the matter now making their way around the Internet. One of these is a piece of correspondence addressed to the 187th's commanding officer, then Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, concerning Bush's redeployment.
....
"I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush," confirms Bishop, who now lives in Goldsboro, N.C., is a veteran of Gulf War I and, as a Kalitta pilot, has himself flown frequent supply missions into Iraq and to military facilities at Kuwait. He voted for Bush in 2000 and believes that the Iraq war has served some useful purposes - citing, as the White House does, disarmament actions since pursued by Libyan president Moammar Khadaffi - but he is disgruntled both about aspects of the war and about what he sees as Bush's lack of truthfulness about his military record.

Posted by Melanie at 12:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

"Why Can't You Be More Like Your Mother?"

Cloning Creates Human Embryos
By GINA KOLATA

Published: February 12, 2004

Scientists in South Korea report that they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells, the universal cells that hold great promise for medical research.

Their goal, the scientists say, is not to clone humans but to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of disease.

But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite the fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.

The work was led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University and will be published tomorrow in the journal Science. The paper provides a detailed description of how to create human embryos by cloning. Experts in the field not involved with the work said they found the paper persuasive.

"You now have the cookbook, you have a methodology that's publicly available," said Dr. Robert Lanza, medical director of a company, Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., that had tried without success to do what the South Koreans did.

Although the paper, written in dense jargon and summarizing its findings by saying, "We report the derivation of a pluripotent embryonic stem cell line (SCNT-hES-1) from a cloned human blastocyst," its import was immediately clear to researchers.

"My reaction is, basically, wow," said Dr. Richard Rawlins, an embryologist who is director of the assisted reproduction laboratories at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "It's a landmark paper."

It is what patients with diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes had been waiting for, the start of so-called therapeutic cloning. The idea is to clone a patients cells to make embryonic stem cells that are an exact genetic match of the patient. Then those cells, patients hope, could be turned into replacement tissue to treat or cure their disease without provoking rejection from the body's immune system.

Even though the new work clears a significant hurdle, scientists caution that it could take years of further research before stem cell science turns into actual therapies.

Even before the publication — reported last night by a South Korean newspaper, one day ahead of the embargo imposed by Science — the research was criticized by cloning opponents.

Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, called for federal legislation to stop human cloning for any purpose.

"The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today, cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned blastocysts for babymaking," Dr. Kass wrote in an e-mail message. "In my opinion, and that of the majority of the Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium on all human cloning."

The House has twice passed legislation that would ban all human cloning experiments, most recently in February 2003. But the bills have foundered in the Senate, where many members who oppose reproductive cloning do not want to ban it for medical research.

I really, really didn't want to get into this story AT ALL, but listening to "All Things Considered" on the way to the grocery store convinced me that the conversation has to be engaged. Our conversations on matrimonial rights for GLBT citizens over the last few days have demonstrated that the Bump community is more than capable of fairly nuanced moral reasoning.

I'm very conflicted about this and have no easy answers. Some of the Big Questions engaged by this technology: what is a human person? when do you become one? is creating an organism which is a stage of development on the way to a baby, only to destroy it, a moral thing to do? does it degrade the meaning of human life itself to treat it as a means to another end?

Other questions: I have issues with in vitro reproductive technology, in general. I'm afraid that it causes babies to become "products," something to be delivered on demand, rather than a part of the human mystery. How would the world be different if infertile couples had to make the choice between childlessness and adoption? Do we have a right to reproduction, to the experience of pregnancy? This whole corner of the discussion has a flavor to me which is more than slightly consumerist.

In this political year when we are deluged with dental records, rumors of Texas abortions and intern flings, missing WMDs and on and on, we are not going to have a public discussion about this that makes any sense. But this technology has important public policy implications--there are already laws on the books in this country and others governing the use of stem cells and forbidding human cloning--the conversation is going to have to happen. We might as well bone up on the issues. You might want to talk about them at The Right Christians Meetup next Thursday at 8. Click on the link to see if a quorum has formed near you, and join the group if you can. I'll be hosting the DC group.

Sean-Paul Kelly of The Agonist has the same set of worries about this that I have:

At some point in the near future I am going to write about this at length. All I will say now is that attempted cloning, even if it is at the embryonic stage gives me great pause and great cause for concern. It seems science is rushing ahead much faster than our moral and our legal capacity to deal with it is.

Running Away

'Everything on table'
GOP plans cuts, reforms, to tackle budgetary woes
By Alexander Bolton and Sam Dealey

House Republicans hope to enact a host of measures aimed at curbing what both centrist and conservative lawmakers decry as runaway federal spending.

Emerging from a rare members-only "mandatory" two-and-a-half-hour conference called yesterday to deal with mounting budget concerns, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told reporters: "Nothing is sacred in this business. Everything is on the table."

Although Hastert didn't say so, several initiatives under consideration would curb the power of the Republican leadership as well as House appropriators and authorizers.

These initiatives are being pushed most vigorously by a group of young conservative firebrands, many of whom have come to Congress since the so-called Republican revolution of 1995. These ardent conservatives want to reinfuse their senior colleagues with the spirit of that revolution, once led largely by former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

Their actions are in large part a response to constituent complaints about the spiraling budget deficit, as well as growing anger among the conservative base over federal spending, which has reached record levels. It also reflected election-year concerns and signs that the voters are beginning to regard the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, reversing a traditional GOP edge.
....
Said one conservative lawmaker: "In the past, their big goal was to pass a budget. What that budget looked like, they didn't necessarily care, as long as they got one."

The resolve to force budget cuts also reflects concerns about Bush's re-election.

"There's no longer talk about the president having coattails," said a conservative lawmaker. "This is Congress worrying about whether the president is going to get reelected, not the president worrying about Congress getting reelected."

Archives are bloggered at the moment or I'd put up a link. When the budget was released last week, I said that congressional Repubs would begin running away from it and the President because of it. We have arrived.

Whitestonewallwash

Investigating the Investigation
By Morton Mintz, AlterNet
February 10, 2004
Editorial writers have rightly slammed the White House for stonewalling two key requests by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. One was for essential information on the lead-up to 9-11. The other was for an extension of the May 27 deadline for completing its investigation.

It was the tough criticism that forced the administration, on Feb. 4, to grant a face-saving but insufficient two-month extension. Two related points need to be made about the stonewalling. The first is that it was entirely predictable, because the administration had tried to prevent any investigation by anybody. The second is that leading newspapers blew the opportunity to report that the administration had done this, thus leaving their readers and those of the hundreds of papers that subscribe to their news services in the dark about this important development. Yet the story was literally staring out at them from the tube.

This was highly newsworthy - how could it not be? The next morning, however, leading national newspapers - including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today - printed not a word about it. It was another big press pass to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This is the first I've heard of it. How about you?

Of course, Daschle could have called a press conference...

Iraq Voting

UN agrees need for Iraq election
By Reuters in Najaf, Iraq, February 12 2004 11:46 .l

A UN envoy says after talks with Iraq's most powerful religious leader that the world body backs his call for elections but that both sides agree any polls must be well prepared.

The most revered man in Iraq for the country's Shi'ites, who make up around 60 per cent of the population, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has called for direct elections before US occupiers hand back sovereignty to Iraqis.

"Sistani is insistent on holding the elections and we are with him on this 100 per cent because elections are the best means to enable any people to set up a state that serves their interest," Lakhdar Brahimi told reporters on Thursday after holding two hours of talks with Sistani.

A UN team led by Brahimi is touring Iraq to assess the feasibility of holding early direct elections that Sistani has been urging in opposition to a US plan to choose a government by regional caucuses before handing over power by June 30.

"We are in agreement with the Sayyid (Sistani) that these elections should be prepared well and should take place in the best possible conditions so that it would bring the results which the Sayyid wants and the people of Iraq and the UN," Brahimi said.

It was not clear if agreement on the need for preparations means Sistani may be flexible on his call for early elections.

The United States favours a gradual approach with caucuses that will eventually lead to direct elections in 2005. Recent suicide bombs and attacks on US troops and those who work with them could cast doubt on the practicality of early elections.

VIOLENCE UNABATED

Brahimi, an Algerian, met the reclusive cleric in the holy city of Najaf the day after a suicide bomb in Baghdad killed 47 people at an army recruitment centre. A similar attack on Tuesday killed 53 people lining up for jobs at a police station.

Brahimi was accompanied by an Arab aide and Iraqi UN guards into Sistani's well-guarded complex. The 73-year-old leader has not ventured out of his house or met a Westerner for years, aides say.

Sistani, whose top religious rank grants him powerful influence in the Shi'ite community, called mass demonstrations earlier this year to press for elections.
Brahimi is due to leave Iraq by Friday at the latest, a senior US-led administration official has said.

The rest of the UN team has started touring provinces. The UN secretary-general Kofi Annan is expected to give his opinion on the elections on February 21.

But,

U.S. commander's convoy attacked in Iraq
Follows 2 bombings that killed more than 100
Thursday, February 12, 2004 Posted: 1530 GMT (11:30 PM HKT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A convoy carrying Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, was attacked Thursday during a visit to Iraqi defense forces in Fallujah, U.S. officials told CNN.

Attackers fired on the convoy with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades as it entered a military compound near Fallujah.
Coalition forces returned fire.

Abizaid is the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. security interests in the 25 countries of the Middle East, Central and Southwest Asia, and Northeast Africa.
No one in his traveling party was injured in the gunbattle.

The attack follows a pair of bombings that killed more than 100 people in two days.

Somehow, I don't see Iraqis being thrilled about queuing up at a polling place anytime soon.

Discernment

Let's just enjoy this, shall we?

Bush Web Site Pulls Clips After NBC Complains
By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: February 11, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — Criticism from Republicans and Democrats that President Bush gave a shaky performance on Sunday on "Meet the Press" did not stop his re-election campaign from incorporating digitally enhanced excerpts from it into a promotional video that it posted on its Web site on Tuesday.

The campaign said it would remove the video from the site after NBC News complained that it was unfairly using the interview to support the re-election effort. The campaign said that it had violated no laws, but that it decided to take the video off after it realized how angry NBC News was over the use.

"Out of respect to NBC and our friends at 'Meet the Press,' we are working to dismantle it," the president's campaign spokeswoman, Nicole Devenish, said.

The campaign sent e-mail to six million people earlier in the day that included a link to the Web site, www.georgewbush.com/, where the video was posted about 4 p.m.
"We got to share with our supporters something in that interview that we thought was very important for them to hear," Ms. Devenish said.

That message, she said, would certainly be a central theme of the re-election effort, "steady leadership in times of change."

The spot opens with an announcer saying, "The president of the United States of America's role in a changing world," as the president is shown in his "Meet the Press" interview with Tim Russert.

As strings play dramatically in the background, Mr. Bush says, "I've got a foreign policy that is one that believes America has a responsibility in this world to lead, a responsibility to lead in the war against terror."

The spot ends with the president saying: "To me that is history's call to America. I accept the call and will continue to lead in that direction."

Throughout the spot, the screen flashes gauzy images of the president as he addressed soldiers, the president as he saluted troops, the president as he shook hands with supporters and the famous view of the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad.

NBC News executives said they were particularly alarmed that the excerpt ran with music and carefully chosen pictures of Mr. Bush.

The organization said in a statement, "This promotional video is set to music, edited for impact, and mixed with other images, graphics and footage unrelated to the interview."
The executives said the words seemed to have been digitally enhanced, to do away with some stammering.

"Some stammering"? Please, the president of the free world looked and sounded like a sixth-grader caught in the headlights. He had some phrases memorized and he used them over and over. Russert rolled over and didn't challenge any of his canned answers, and now Bush's promise to release all of his military record is coming back to haunt him. The mere fact that B/C04 thinks that they can spin the MTP interview into something which will work for them tells me how clueless they are.

But the FCC wants to investigate Janet Jackson's wardrobe, while Comcast is planning to buy Disney.

Yawn.

I'm considering selling my popcorn stock. Except for the fact that I like melted butter so much.

"History's call."

For those of you without the evangelical decoder ring, this means "Called by God." Over here in the Catholic tradition, we do something called "confirmation of vocation", in other words, are there any facts which indicate that your call actually comes from God. We look at things like: do you have any gifts for this particular call? Do you have the necessary skills or does your history indicate that you are likely to develop them? Did you actually win the election? would be a relevant question here. We do take the "vocation" discernment very seriously, but we start from the position of scepticism. If you've heard from God, it has to be plausible.

How a failed baseball exec, failed oil exec and apparently failed Air Guardsman could be considered plausible or appropriate for the job of president stretches my concept of God a little further than I can live with. Sure, miracles happen, but we don't seem to be seeing one, unless budget deficits as far as the eye can see, an unemployment crisis the likes of which we haven't seen in 30 years and a couple of losing wars are a gift from God. Maybe they are just human free will gone horribly wrong.

Mercy, Justice, Humility

I mentioned a couple of days ago that most of the arguments made by the Christian Right against equal rights for our GLBT citizens are scripturally based (the Catholic Church's objections are based in the "natural law" tradition, and have to do with a religious anthropology of sexuality as being licit only when it is open to procreation--I'll deal with the weaknesses of that argument at another time) and, as such, are open to opposition on scriptural basis.

Derrick Jackson writing in today's Boston Globe articulates some of the main themes of the Christian progressives' scriptural argument in favor of equal rights:

To date, the ministers and politicians have offered no serious evidence to show how loving gay or lesbian couples exchanging rings before an altar will level the republic. O'Malley warns, "We cannot afford to be asleep at the switch." Romney says marriage between men and women is defended by "3,000 years or recorded history." The Rev. Gregory Groover of Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church says "the voice of God" tells him that gay marriage is wrong.

This is as wrongheaded as using the Bible to justify slavery (odd how the African-American ministers could forget that argument). Such clergy play a game of pick and choose. Conservative Christians rush to Paul's letter to the Romans for proof that homosexuality is a wicked, "degrading" passion. Paul complained, "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men . . . They know God's decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die."

It is just as easy to find chapters of the Bible that are way out of step on the march toward equality. Ephesians says, "Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church. . . . Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands."
That went out with the Flintstones.

Ephesians also says: "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ. . . . Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord."

That went out with the Emancipation Proclamation.

One would think these ministers have more important things to do. The Catholic Church has a nerve talking about the sanctity of marriage when it allowed untold numbers of children to be abused by priests. In their tortured thinking, black ministers who fret about gay marriage say it is because of the epidemic of fatherlessness. If they care about fatherlessness, they ought to fight harder for jobs, child support, mentoring programs, public education, and a change in the drug laws that punish young urban black men far more harshly than young suburban white men. While they're at it, they could also call for a boycott of Black Entertainment Television and its pimp videos.

The best guess is that these clergy are so loud in their condemnation of gay marriage because they need a scapegoat to obscure their failures or powerlessness in protecting their flocks. Gay marriage of two loving people cannot possibly be equated with the abuse of children and the Catholic Church's coverup. Gay marriage of loving people does not belittle the civil rights struggle. It gives it full blossom.

Funny, these ministers have conveniently forgotten the passage from Numbers, which says: "As for the assembly, there shall be for both you and the resident alien a single statute, a perpetual statute throughout your generations; you and the alien who resides with you shall be alike before the Lord. You and the alien who reside with you shall have the same law and the same ordinance." The Christian ministers have forgotten the words from Galatians that among the baptized, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female."

Quagmire

Iraq caucus plan questioned
US report hints at move toward direct elections
By Anne Barnard, Globe Staff, 2/11/2004

BAGHDAD -- Some US officials in Iraq have begun to push for alternatives to the complex caucus system the United States has devised to form a new government, arguing that only a far more open selection process will satisfy Iraqis' growing desire to participate directly in choosing their leaders.

An American diplomat involved in carrying out the plan's early stages said in a report that the current caucus system is "fast becoming impossible to defend." Iraqis have criticized the plan, in which caucuses would select provincial councils that would in turn help choose delegates to a national assembly.

The diplomat described his concerns in a recent memo to the head of the US-led occupation authority. The report was made available to the Globe.

The memo, written three weeks before the arrival in Iraq of a United Nations team examining the possibility of holding direct elections, was one of the first indications that some US officials implementing the handover of power to Iraqis are questioning the American plan. The planned caucuses have come under fire from Iraq's most senior Shi'ite Muslim cleric, who has demanded direct elections instead.

There are some questions about who is in charge of this whole mess:

In one recent high-level meeting, Rumsfeld looked at Secretary of State Colin Powell and said, "Jerry (Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq) works for you, right?"

Powell looked as if he'd been struck by lightning. Bremer and every other U.S. official in Iraq reports directly to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld demanded and got complete authority over the military, over the civilian authority in charge of rebuilding the country, over the administration's $87 billion Iraq budget, over every line of every contract let. And suddenly he forgot that Bremer works for him?

That same week, Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage were summoned to a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss how the U.S. contracting system is working in Iraq.

When Wolfowitz was asked a tough question about the controversies surrounding the U.S. contracting efforts in Iraq, he turned to Armitage and said: "You can answer that one, right, Rich?" Armitage answered by noting that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense control every American contract let in Iraq, and that the State Department has authority over none of those contracts.

"Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's."

The only question is whether Rumsfeld and Company can keep the lid on all the boiling pots until they can pass the CPA and the whole nation-rebuilding buck to the State Department.

The investigations and audits of Halliburton's and Halliburton subsidiaries' alleged contract overcharges, with their uncomfortable proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton's former chief, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The real action, knowledgeable American officials say, is in local contracts that are being let under authority of the ruling Iraqi Governing Council. U.S. officials say some less savory Council members are demanding kickbacks on some contracts in hopes of investing the ill-gotten gains in buying or bending the selection of local and regional councils who will help choose a new government and bolstering their own distant hopes of holding onto power.

Other contracts, other issues:

Because many of the contracts awarded — and another multibillion-dollar round of contracts up for bid — are administered by the CPA, a small army of lawyers is scrambling to protect the contractors, prevent legal chaos and continue the reconstruction process after the hand-over.

The issue came up repeatedly during a two-day conference in Washington on reconstruction, leaving Pentagon officials to acknowledge that there were no guarantees that the contracts would remain in place.

Officials said they expected the new government to continue the rebuilding effort without major changes because the Iraqis now participating in the planning would presumably have a role in the new government.

Iraq will still need new bridges, roads and water systems, the Pentagon officials said, making it unlikely that the new government will want drastic changes.

"That's not saying that a new Iraqi government couldn't take a new course of action," said James Crum, an engineer who runs the coalition's rebuilding effort in Washington. "In that situation, we'd have to try to accommodate, and in the worst case, the contracts could be terminated."

International law experts, however, said legal mechanisms would kick in to allow contractors to seek reimbursement for their losses — at least on contracts funded by U.S. taxpayers.

The quagmire extends to every aspect of this occupation.

Civil Sacraments or Civil Rights?

Bush Plans To Back Marriage Amendment
Constitution Would Specify Man, Woman
By Mike Allen and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A01

President Bush plans to endorse a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman in response to a Massachusetts court decision requiring legal recognition of gay marriages in that state, key advisers said yesterday.

Bush plans to endorse language introduced by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) that backers contend would ban gay marriage but not prevent state legislatures from allowing the kind of civil unions and same-sex partnership arrangements that exist in Vermont and California.

Bush has moved incrementally over six months toward embracing a ban on gay marriage, and the advisers said he will clarify his position with a public statement shortly.
....
Bush signaled the direction of his thinking in last month's State of the Union address, where he stopped just short of endorsing an amendment but said the nation "must defend the sacrament of marriage."

Musgrave's proposal, called the Federal Marriage Amendment, states: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."

Since the president is not a member of a church with a sacramental tradition, I find it passing strange that he wants to defend marriage as a sacrament. I also find it more than a little troubling that he thinks the Constitution ought to be in the business of defining sacraments. Are we going to get amendments defending the Eucharist? Extreme Unction?

At any rate, since the time of Martin Luther, Protestant reformers of Christianity have pointedly denied the sacramental character of marriage and placed it within the realm of laws defined by humankind.

"No one indeed can deny that marriage is an external worldly thing, like clothes and food, house and home, subject to worldly authority, as shown by so many imperial laws governing it." Martin Luther wrote this in his treatise "On the Sacraments."

In our law, and that of most of the world, marriage is a civil contract, which makes the rights and responsibilities enforceable by the government. As a contract right, the fifth and fourteenth amendments come into play.

Were the president to understand the sacramental nature of matrimony, as both Catholics and Quakers understand it, he might be even more troubled to discover that the ministers of this sacrament are the couple themselves. The church and the state can only confirm that which the couple understands as their relationship. That ought to scare the crap out of the fundies.

Anyway, in answer to a question in comments, the putative language of the amendment is confusing and it is not at all clear that it would allow states to confirm marriage or civil unions for anyone other than the traditional heterosexual couple.

In the final analysis, I think the question is moot. It ain't gonna happen, and what happens next in Massachussetts is what is going to move the ball forward.

Budget Supplemental

Officials: Mideast military funding to run out
By DREW BROWN
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military will run out of money for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of September unless President Bush asks for additional funds, top military officials acknowledged Tuesday.

Because the Bush administration's $401.7 billion fiscal 2005 defense budget contains no money for Iraq and Afghanistan, the armed services will be forced to pay for operations in the two countries with money that's supposed to be used for modernization and other items.

"I am concerned ... how we bridge the gap between the end of this fiscal year and whenever we could get a supplemental (spending bill) in the next year," Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "And I don't have an answer for exactly how we would do that."

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael W. Hagee and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper echoed Schoomaker's concerns. Only Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, said he didn't anticipate the need for additional funds. Since the end of the war, the Navy has had fewer personnel committed to Iraq than other services.
The cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq has been controversial. Before the war, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted that Iraq's vast oil wealth would finance its reconstruction soon after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

Last year, however, Congress approved two administration requests totaling nearly $166 billion to finance the war and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Several lawmakers have accused the administration of trying to hide the true costs of the Iraq war by not including operational money for Iraq in the fiscal 2005 budget. Last week, Joshua Bolten, the White House budget director, told reporters that a supplemental spending bill for Iraq could run as high as $50 billion.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to send a request to Congress "as soon as possible." "The United States military faces a severe funding problem," Reed said.

Pop goes the budget.

President Plainspoken has a nasty habit of forgeting to say things.

I Pronounce You Spouse and Spouse

Massachusetts Weighs a Deal on Marriages Between Gays
By PAM BELLUCK

Published: February 11, 2004

BOSTON, Feb. 10 — Seeking to counteract last week's court decision allowing gay couples to marry in Massachusetts, state lawmakers on Tuesday fashioned what they called a compromise: a proposed amendment to the state's Constitution that would define marriage as a heterosexual institution but allow same-sex couples to join in civil unions.

The compromise was developed as legislators prepared for what is likely to be a divisive constitutional convention that begins on Wednesday and is expected to be dominated by the gay-marriage question.

Lawmakers had been scheduled to consider a different amendment, one that defined marriage solely as a relationship between a man and a woman and made no mention of same-sex couples. But some legislators worried that such a measure would be interpreted to preclude civil unions.

"There were many members of the Senate who felt that amendment was punitive as opposed to being inclusive," said Ann Dufresne, a spokeswoman for Robert E. Travaglini, the Senate president.

Mr. Travaglini, a Democrat who is the presiding officer of the convention, supports civil unions. "We think the new amendment is a great bipartisan alternative that really seeks consensus," Ms. Dufresne said.

The convention has been on the calendar for months, but the push for a marriage amendment received new momentum last week with a ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court, essentially ordering that Massachusetts begin granting marriage licenses to gay couples on May 17.

The gay-marriage issue could figure prominently in the presidential election, especially since the Democratic front-runner, Senator John Kerry, who supports civil unions, is from Massachusetts. President Bush has condemned the court ruling, and conservative groups said the White House had informed them that he will soon endorse a federal constitutional amendment limiting marriage to unions joining a man and a woman.

I wouldn't have picked this year to have this fight, but, as we Catholics say, the Holy Spirit moves as the Holy Spirit wills, so it is going to be this year. As a reader noted in comments earlier, faith is about openness and questioning, not certainty.

I'm having a little trouble with seeing the Mass. SJC as an instrument of the Holy Spirit, but what do I know? Mass. politics makes the Book of Numbers look transparent.

The Last Man

Rifts Increase Iraqis' Fear for the Future
By NEELA BANERJEE

Published: February 10, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 9 — The closer Iraqis get to sovereignty, the more they voice fears that ethnic and religious differences could fracture their nation.

Generations of colonialism followed by Saddam Hussein's rule drove fissures through Iraqi society that are now widening as politicians and clerics appeal to religion and ethnicity in advancing their demands. In the angry clamoring of Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and of Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds in the north, many Iraqis, foreign diplomats and allied military officers say they discern the first smoke of broad communal strife.
"Wherever we see a spark, we have to dampen it quickly," said a senior allied military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Neither the allied official, nor the Iraqi clerics, tribal sheiks, politicians, foreign diplomats and ordinary people interviewed over two weeks said civil clashes were imminent. But they said the potential was there, as politicians and allied forces try to forge one country out of ethnic and religious groups with conflicting grievances.
One flash point is the demand now being heard from the Shiite majority for swift elections. Sunnis, who provided the power base for Mr. Hussein, now worry that the discrimination they practiced against Shiites could be turned against them.

In the central town of Ramadi, Sheik Majid al-Dulaimi, a Sunni, summed up the feared outcome of elections: "Destruction — political, economic, social — even civil war."
Deadly riots between Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds have already shaken Kirkuk, the oil city in the north, as the groups battle for property and primacy.

The unease is amplified by the widespread belief that neighboring countries want to destabilize Iraq, with Iranian groups supporting the Shiites, for example, and Saudis buoying Sunni militants. That was underscored this week when American officials here confirmed that they had obtained a document asking Al Qaeda's leaders for help in waging "sectarian war" in Iraq.

Iraqis and foreign diplomats say the Americans have not proved themselves able to calm the tensions and contend that it will take a home-grown force to prevent a dangerous splintering.

At the end of last summer, indigenous newspapers, most of them weekly, sprang up all over Iraq. Iraq Today began putting its content up on the web almost immediately and I began to follow it as soon as I found it in the fall. In the beginning, it was little more than a CPA propaganda outlet, but it has become increasingly more critical in recent months. In a story posted yesterday, they amplify the points made by Banerjee in her NYT story:

Meanwhile in Baghdad, a draft interim constitution scheduled to go into effect this month has sharpened political debate on issues critical to Iraq’s future, particularly the relative roles of Arabism, Kurdish federalism and Islam in the future Iraqi state.

As would be expected the debate has exacerbated sectarian and ethnic differences and pitted Sunni, Shia and Kurdish politicians against each other.

The Kurds continue to demand an expansion of their autonomous zone, which they have run since 1991 in the face of Arab opposition to the plan, while Kurdish leader Massoud Barazani proves increasingly unbending, saying “Kurds will not be distracted from ethnic federalism within Iraq” in one recent speech.

The issue of Kurdistan will have to be dealt with in the interim constitution as well as issues such as freedom of speech, equality for all, the creation of an independent judiciary and ensuring civilian control over the army, all of which are part of Washington’s grand ambitions for Iraq.

Kurdish council members argue that the draft constitution should clear up questions over how much independence Kurdistan should enjoy, and that postponing discussions of Kurdish autonomy is a US attempt to sell out the Kurds to Turkey, and Iraq’s Arabs.

However far from being the straightforward power-grab as it is presented by Kurds, Arab reservations over Kurdish autonomy are founded on a fear of future ethnic conflict.

"I say 'yes' to federalism, but only on geographical basis," said Sunni council member Samir Shakir al-Sumaidi in a Baghdad Town Hall forum. "Federalism based on ethnicity takes us down a slippery road."

Blogger Arkhangel, a soldier stationed in Iraq (and someone I will be following carefully in weeks to come,) adds:

Some of you have mentioned to me that it seems I don't think Iraq's better off for our having been there. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think that our presence there has improved the life of Iraq, if only because we removed a monstrous tyrant from power. It's impossible not to look into some of those mass graves, or look at some of the taped footage of Saddam's mass executions, and not feel utterly disgusted; not just with him, but with us for allowing such evil to run unchecked.

So, it's a good thing that Saddam was removed from power.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

I report, you decide.

Wizard of Oz

Robert Scheer:
War as an Excuse for Everything
Is it just me, or is President Bush's demeanor a bit Napoleonic these days?

"It's important for people who watch the expenditure side of the equation to understand that we are at war," Bush responded when Russert questioned him about the deficit. That was presumably a reference to the war on terror, the president's handy explanation for every untoward event. But how can he justify spending much of the $400-billion military budget on things like Cold War-era high-tech aircraft and other defense boondoggles to counter the $1.89 box cutters used by the 9/11 terrorists?

And if the war is against Al Qaeda, why haven't we moved decisively against that shadowy movement's sponsors in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia? Although Osama bin Laden, 15 of the hijackers and most of the money for the religious schools that fed recruits to Al Qaeda and the Taliban came from Saudi Arabia, the president again insisted perversely on linking Iraq with the attack on this nation — despite having previously admitted that there is no evidence of such a connection.

There is, however, much evidence that Pakistan helped arm and train the Taliban. Yet Bush inexplicably rewarded Pakistan after Sept. 11, 2001, by lifting the sanctions that were in place to punish Pakistan for its nuclear program and sales. Only last week, Pakistan's dictator admitted that his nation was responsible for nurturing the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, Iran and Libya — conveniently blaming the country's leading scientist, whom he then quickly pardoned.

Furthermore, in apparent deference to Pakistan's admitted role in supplying North Korea with the wherewithal for nuclear weapons, Bush has suddenly warmed to that member of his "axis of evil." Whereas the president had referred to Saddam Hussein as a "madman" and a theoretical nuclear threat who could be dealt with only through preemptive invasion, Bush says North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and his actual nuclear threat haven't earned a military response because "the diplomacy is only beginning."

So, if we are not at war with North Korea, Libya or Iran now that we know they got their WMD know-how from our friends in Pakistan, then whom are we at war with? Certainly not Iraq, which the president pronounced as vanquished some nine months ago from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, as the transcript of the Russert interview with our 43rd president shows, it is not entirely clear that even he knows for sure what is what anymore.

Here is the thing that is bothering me behind all of the economic, war and felony news that's received so much coverage in the blogospher in the last 72 hours: it doesn't seem to me that Bush and his minions take anything seriously. There is no sense that the things that they do and say have consequences for people's actual live.

I just listened to back-to-back press gaggles on C-Span, first Scotty McLellen, then Rummy. Reality to these folks is whatever they say it is. I'm listening to the House reading out the narrative to the president's economic report to Congress, brilliantly deconstructed by Brad DeLong over the last two days. It is a work of fantasy.

While truth is a difficult thing to find, and often must be approached obliquely, we are often able to get close to it, if we are willing to work hard for it. I sit here and listen to this stuff day after day and what I'm hearing is a mockery of anything approaching truth.

Throw the Bums Out

Mark Kleiman and Laura Rozen have a close reading and backstory on the WaPo and NYT stories on the Plame investigation.

Mark notes:

Apparently "Scooter" Libby was keeping "copious" notes, which he and several other people, including the President, may have cause to bitterly regret.
The prosecutors are asking interviewees to agree to keep the questions secret -- which would help prevent coordination of stories -- but their lawyers mostly aren't willing to play.

Having the Times and the Post seriously competing to cover this story (after long somnolence at the Times is both a sign that the papers think there's gold here and an incentive for both papers to keep digging hard.

Laura Rozen has done a little Googling and comes up with some detail which may explain the timing of John Ashcroft's recusal:

The White House press aide interviewed this week by FBI officials in relation to the Plame leak investigation, Adam Levine, apparently left the White House in December. Which is when John Aschroft refused himself from the investigation. Now several news organizations report that Levine's job was to serve as a link between the White House press office and television networks. In fact, an old Knight Ridder story refers to in a 2002 story to "Adam Levine, the assistant press secretary at the White House who coordinates the Sunday appearances." A more recent Washington Post story writes that "Adam Levine, a former White House aide who portrayed Russert in mock sessions with administration officials," referring to White House prep of the President in advance of his appearance on Meet the Press this past weekend, so seems he is playing some sort of White House consulting role even though he left the job in December. [which is apparently when Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the Plame investigation].

In reviewing some of the facts, it seems like we are really close to knowing what happened.

It seems to me that there is any easy argument to make for "regime change" in Washington based on the fact that the administration has a penchent for felonious behavior. Last time I checked, lying to Congress was also against the law. As Atrios revealed this morning, SOTU 2003 wasn't the only exercise in creative writing to come from the White House speech writing shop.

Iraqgate 2004

"I'm a war president."

On those words, President Bush will stand or fall.
....

The president and Karl Rove, his top political adviser, see Bush 41's problem as his estrangement from the Republicans' conservative political base. The first Bush raised taxes, so this Bush will cut them once, twice, many times. The social conservatives didn't trust the elder Bush. So this Bush will make sure that they keep faith with him as a man who keeps the faith.

Here's what's missing from this analysis: The first Bush didn't lose because of defections from the right. He lost because mainstream, middle-class Americans decided, fairly or not, that their president just didn't understand much of anything about their lives. They were worried about their jobs, their health care, their pensions, their housing and sending their kids to college. Voters freely conceded that the first President Bush was first-rate when it came to foreign policy. That just didn't happen to be what they voted on in November 1992.

The current President Bush is putting himself in exactly the same place. If Americans want a war president, he's their man. But in light of the failure to find those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, many voters now wonder whether that was a war that needed to be fought.

Sure, everybody is happy that Saddam Hussein is gone. But a great many Americans share a concern that Russert raised with Bush: "There are lots of madmen in the world. Fidel Castro; in Iran, in North Korea, in Burma, and yet we don't go in and take down those governments."

Bush's answer that "every situation requires a different response" did not dispose of the question.

In the meantime, Bush is so focused on being our "war president" that he seems to lack passion when he talks about health care or any other domestic issue except tax cuts.
Do not for an instant underestimate the capacity of Bush and Rove to find ingenious ways of focusing our minds on terrorism by the last three weeks of the campaign. They played Democrats for chumps on security issues in 2002. They're certain they can do it again.
But in the past month, Bush reached a tipping point. His credibility -- a huge asset since the days after Sept. 11 -- is in jeopardy. Three years of job losses and wage stagnation are taking a toll on middle-class confidence. I think Bush really does see himself as a war president.

If that's what he's betting the election on, he risks repeating the very experience he has devoted his administration to avoiding -- his father's.

"I'm a war president."

Those words chilled me when I heard them, not so much for the content--which is horrifying enough--but for the tone in which they were delivered. He clearly has no understanding of war at all. As long as he is not paying any price, there is no price to pay. The only way he will understand that there is a price is on November 2.

For As Long As We Both Shall Live

Congressman Says Bush Is Open to States' Bolstering Gay Rights
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Published: February 9, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — President Bush believes states can use contract law to ensure some of the rights that gay partners are seeking through marriage or civil union, a South Carolina congressman said Sunday.
The subject of contracts and gay marriage came up while the lawmaker, Representative Jim DeMint, was traveling with the president and the rest of the South Carolina Republican delegation on Air Force One last week. He described the conversation, first reported in the new issue of Time magazine, as politicians "shooting the breeze" rather than an in-depth policy discussion.

Paraphrasing the president's remarks, Mr. DeMint said: "He said he was not going to condemn anyone, that the need to have various types of agreement does not mean we need to redefine marriage. `If people want to have contracts on hospital visitation and benefits, that's O.K.' "

Responding to questions on Sunday about the Time article, Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said:
"States, through their contract law, have the ability to address some of the issues that advocates of gay marriage are raising, such as hospital visitation rights and insurance benefits and the ability to pass on one's estates to another. What the president has said is that he strongly believes in the sanctity of marriage, so that's what he is saying."

Ms. Buchan noted that civil contracts were available to heterosexual couples as well.

That's a teeny bit disengenuous: the way that heterosexual couples obtain those contract rights is typically through matrimony.

This won't be the last time we hash this out, but Bush is trying to play both sides by giving lip service to a federal Marriage Amendment, which he describes as an attempt to enshrine the sanctity of marriage in law. That's an impossibility under the first amendment, but it does tell you that Bush has a business degree rather than the law degree favored by his predecessors.

This is an issue which is going to make everybody crazy this year, so, please, let's not get into parsing scriptural theology on sexuality just yet. Bush is going to try to play to his base and the Log Cabin Republicans at the same time, and it is the base that's going to be sold out.

Here's the conversation that needs to be happening and isn't: what does it mean to be human? For religious people, what is the nature of the relationships between us and between us and the Sacred? What is the role of sexuality in spirituality? In my eyes, there's a lot of bad sex going on out there, from a spiritual perspective, and a lot of it is straight. Like a lot of human behavior, sex itself is morally neutral, it's what you do with it that makes you the kind of person you become.

The same is true of marriage. I'm all for people trying to make permanent partnerships for themselves that are recognized in law. Marriage is hard. Gay marriages, or whatever you want to call them, aren't going to threaten anybody else's marriage. What threatens marriages is adultery, abuse and people who refuse to grow up and accept themselves and their partners as full and flawed adults.

I'm not going to go the full scriptural route and say that divorce and remarriage ought to be forbidden by the churches (I notice the Christian Right has pretty much caved on this one, although it actually WAS proscribed by Jesus, unlike homosexuality, which gets some glancing treatment in Paul's letters--and, my, don't you contradict yourselves, all you churches, in the way you interpret Paul! but was never mentioned by Jesus) but that would be an easier case to make if you were really interested in the Defence of Marriage.

No, the more important question is what constitutes a human life, a good one? Do love, loyalty and hard work only matter if they are expressed heterosexually? Is tenderness the province of only one orientation? We already understand that the desire for, love of and need to nurture offspring is hardly limited to those who are able to physically reproduce or even those able to marry (in the historic sense.) If you frame what it means "to be human" in these terms, you come to some very different answers about what it means to love, to form families, to make commitments.

Is this a slippery slope to polygamy, polyandry or polygyny? Nope. While polygamy is sanctioned by the New Testament (calling Pat Robertson) we've moved away from it for a variety of reasons as a society. Many of them are economic, some of them have to do with human rights. We don't stone adultresses any more, either.

Are we going to create a perfect and just society which gets all of this stuff RIGHT, in perfect harmony with some sort of eternal norm which we just have to uncover? Nope. Not this century. You may have noticed that in our Western culture we have at various times in our history listened to various religious and/or political figures who told us that they did have it all figured out, and that the culture had moved on a hundred years or 50 years or a dozen years later, and that the certainty of yesterday was a disregarded bad experiment on the dustbin of history.

This isn't moral relativism on my part. I do believe that there are some things which are always and forever good, and that they are hard to find and even harder to live. They are things like loyalty, accountability, humility, hope and courage and they are very hard to quantify, but I think most of us know them when we see them. And most of us know when we've failed them. Working ourselves back from those failures is one of the things which makes us people with a moral compass and critters of conscience. I'm a big fan of conscience.

People of good conscience who want to promise each other that they are going to do the absolute best they can, with the help of community, family and friends, to be true, honest and loving with each other for as long as they both shall live are admirable in my book. To make that promise with full knowledge of the difficulties takes courage and humility. I salute those of you who take up the challenge.

Chickens : Roost II

Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe
Grand Jury Called McClellan, Matalin
By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A01

A federal grand jury has questioned one current and one former aide to President Bush, and investigators have interviewed six others in an effort to discover who revealed the name of an undercover CIA officer to a newspaper columnist, sources involved in the case said yesterday.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he talked to the grand jury last week. Mary Matalin, former counselor to Vice President Cheney, testified Jan. 23, the sources said. Neither is suspected by prosecutors of having exposed undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame, but both were questioned about White House public relations strategy, the sources said.

FBI agents have interviewed at least eight current and former Bush aides -- including Matalin and McClellan -- and have questioned them about thousands of e-mails that the White House surrendered in October, along with stacks of call logs and calendars, the sources said.

The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to columnist Robert D. Novak shortly before July 14, when he published a column quoting "two senior administration officials" saying that Plame, "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," had suggested her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to acquire uranium there as part of an effort to develop nuclear weapons.

I told you this wasn't going to go away. The world of covert operations and black ops is a morally murky place, but the loyalty the dark brotherhood feels for each other may be the only thing that stands between life and death sometimes, and they know it.

It is a measure of the character of George Bush, the son of a DCI, that the name of Valerie Plame could be leaked for really minimal and mean political payback and it tells me that the much vaunted Bush loyalty is not a principle but a matter for immediate advantage and extends only to those who are of one's class. It is the solidarity of the country club rather than any real sense of mutual accountability.

God and Us

Reader Dale in comments asks me to be more explicit about connecting the dots between the news stories I put up for commentary and their ramifications for progressive religion. I've been a little hesitant to get too theological too quickly for a number of reasons:

--I believe that the stories I choose to highlight are of interest to secular progressives for fairly obvious reasons, and most of the time no religious gloss on the story is needed.

--I don't want to have us get bogged down in sectarian religious issues; there are real and legitimate social, foreign policy and economic differences between progressive Christians and those differences need to be respected.

--There are also liberal Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Baha'i and whatever else perspectives, and I want to make it clear that I don't speak for those faiths, but want to be sure that they feel free to comment from their own perspective.

With your encouragement and help, I will try to make more explicit the connections between what we read in the news and why it matters for the faith, values and religious practice of progressives/liberals. My perspective is that of a theologically and politically liberal Catholic, which means that I am sometimes out of step with the teaching of my chosen faith.

As all of you know (you've had these uncomfortable conversations with family and friends, I know you have) doing this without stepping on toes is not easy. There are some toes I intend to step on, others I will hit inadvertantly. I know that. The Christian readers of this site range from liberal Catholics like myself all the way to Unitarians, and there is no way that I can stay within the orthodoxies of all of the broad swath of those theologies. However, like Rev. Pennybacker at the Clergy Leadership Network, I think there is broad enough agreement between all of us on a wide range of social/religious issues that we can respectfully explore even the areas where we disagree.

I am going to need your help. My theological education is pretty good, and I've been a social activist for a long time, but I'm aware that there are holes in my knowledge. The theological ins and outs of Presbyterian or Methodist history and teaching are not my long suits. I'll need to be educated by you to the finer points of those traditions' religious approach to the issues where it differs from my own.

I am a systematic theologian rather than a Scripture scholar--my theology profs warning me that almost anything can be proven by proof-texting Scripture--but many of the social positions taken by the Christian Right rely on just such a reading of Scripture, and we have to know how to talk about the Bible in a fairly nuanced way. Fortunately, there are a lot of scholarly resources on the web to which I can provide links. Thank God for Google, the poor theologian's Lexis-Nexis.

I want your suggestions, I want your corrections, I want you to tell me what helps you and what gets in your way. I have a sneaky feeling that this is going to be an exercise in humility for me, but as a Lay Cistercian, genuine humility is the thing we are supposed to be heading for, so the blog will become an explicit part of my spiritual formation.

Bump has been "on the air" for fewer than 90 days, and you've already contributed more than 1500 comments. I'm struck by how well read, thoughtful, passionate and committed you are as a community. I will need your help to create the kind of resource which Dale is asking for.

God and George

The Nation's Matt Bivens has some questions that he wished Tim Russert had asked yesterday. Come to think of it, I wish he'd asked those questions, too.

Me, I want to hear the President explain his exact relationship with his God. He has been talking more and more about God lately; he seems quite sincere, and yet no Washington journalists are interested -- they automatically assume it's a calculated pose.

But as Ira Chernus has observed, "In a democracy, it is the people, not God, who make the decisions." And, "If he truly believes that he hears the voice of God, there is no telling what God might say tomorrow."

Look, secular reporters don't ask these questions because they don't know how, and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to judge the answer. One of the reasons religion/politics/culture reporting is so awful as that reporters are literally clueless.

That said, there are genuine religion reporters, like Peter Steinfels at the NYT, for example, who are competent to ask those questions and understand their answers, and, like Matt Bivens, I'd like answers to these questions about the assumptions George Bush makes about his relationship with God.

Speaking of religion reporting, a joint project of the Department of Journalism and Center for Religion and the Media at NYU (with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts) is fact-checking the religion reporters on a daily weblog called The Revealer. I've caught writer/editor Jeff Sharlet in a couple of violations himself, but he owns up quickly and makes corrections fast. It is not an easy field for non-specialists to cover.

Democrats in Church

In the 2000 presidential election, 60 percent of the 42 million adult Americans who told pollsters they attend church weekly supported George W. Bush over Al Gore. Today, even higher numbers of weekly churchgoers say they're likely to vote Republican in 2004.

By contrast, those who attend church less regularly tend to favor Democrats, with that party capturing nearly two-thirds of the relatively small number of voters who say they never enter a church. It wasn't always the case. The correlation between church attendance and partisanship is a relatively new political phenomenon in the United States.

"We're in a religion fad now," said Alan Wolfe, director of Boston College's Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. "Nobody really remembers FDR's religion, or George H.W. Bush's for that matter, which is different from his son's. The only time John Kennedy mentioned his religion was when he distanced himself from it."
Today, said Wolfe, "People want to believe in the character of their leaders and they see faith as some clue to that person's character." As recently as 1988, according to Pew Research Center polling, "white evangelical Protestants were split fairly evenly along partisan lines." Today, said Pew, "there is a nearly two-to-one Republican advantage among white evangelicals" while "the partisanship of non-evangelical white Protestants and black Protestants... has been relatively stable."
....
From their small offices across the street from Democratic Party national headquarters, the Clergy Leadership Network aims "to educate and activate clergy on issues of faith surrounding the 2004 election."

The Rev. Albert Pennybacker, former director of the National Council of Churches Washington Office, serves as the new group's unpaid CEO. Among its National Committee members: the Revs. Jesse Jackson and William Sloan Coffin; the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former General secretary of the National Council of Churches; and Benedictine Sr. (and NCR contributor) Joan Chittister.

Don't look for the group to wade in on the religious right's litmus test issue: abortion. "One reason the moderate-to-left religious community has been silent is that we are so diverse that we don't often speak with one voice," said Peterson. Divisive issues such as abortion would interfere with the group's "reason for existence," said Peterson.

The group's initial focus is on economic issues, the "uses of power being pursued by the current administration," civil liberties, church-state relations, and the environment.

"We feel that this administration has disenfranchised those of us who are Christian, Jews, Muslims—all people of all faiths—who care about issues relating to education, health, poverty, and corporate greed," said Peterson. "We feel as people of faith that we need to speak out in a political way."

Is it too late for the religious left to have a greater impact? Groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Clergy Leadership Network represent "a worthwhile effort," said Wolfe. But it won't be easy. "The Democrats and liberals are playing catch-up. They're way behind on this."

The diversity of religious progressives is our greatest strength, but also our greatest weakness--we don't have that talking point discipline of the right because of the pluralism of our theologies. What we do have is broad agreement on issues of economic justice, human rights and just war doctrine.

This seems like a good place to put in a reminder of the first The Right Christians Meetup on February 19. I'll be hosting the DC meeting, if we register enough participants for the Meetup to happen this month.

Also, check out Amy Sullivan's analysis of last week's House floor fight on "faith-based" social service funding, and the way the rhetoric of discrimination is going to figure into the campaign this year:

The issue is not going to go away this year and it's worth familiarizing yourself with the arguments on both sides to understand what's being contested. Bush/Cheney Inc. has developed a brilliant rhetorical strategy of appealing to religious voters by telling them they've been discriminated against. Instead of admitting that they're trying to give religious communities special rights that other organizations don't have -- the ability to discriminate in hiring, for example -- the GOP spin machine says that they're trying to correct a wrong, that for too long religious organizations have been locked out of social service provision.

In order to believe that, you need to believe that Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services and dozens of other organizations currently receiving federal money to provide social services are not in the slightest bit religious. It's absurd. There's currently nothing stopping a faith-based organization from applying for and receiving government funds. Provided they keep separate their religious and their service ministries and provided that they use those funds to hire the most qualified applicants, not just those who agree with their religious tenets.

Amy also tells you something the "traditional media" won't: social and economic issues don't get covered well by the Big Boys because they are "women's issues." Tell that to an unemployed father of three.

Here's something to bookmark: the TomPaine article that begins this post was originally printed in the National Catholic Reporter, a prize-winning bi-weekly which is predictably progressive in both theology and politics. While it is a Catholic publication, and uses Catholic reasoning to arrive at the positions it takes, I think you will find it to generally be in a cordial conversation with the social justice agenda of Sojourners, the progressive evangelical monthly.

Bumpy Beginning

Lost in Credibility Gulch
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 9, 2004

The question: What can we believe?

The president is genial enough, but it might be time for a bipartisan truth squad to follow him around, sorting out the facts from his musings, speculations, fantasies and mis-rememberings.

Iraq has shown us the trouble that can lurk in the gaps between reality and whatever it is that George W. Bush believes or says. Tim Russert, during his hourlong interview with Mr. Bush on NBC's "Meet the Press," displayed a quote from the president's address to the nation last March 17:

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

More than 500 American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war that was launched on that faulty data. And the war goes on.

"I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons," Mr. Bush told Mr. Russert.

Here at home, the president has been as wrong about jobs as he was about weapons of mass destruction. More than two million jobs have vanished on Mr. Bush's watch and the recent uptick in job creation has, by all accounts, been meager.

The tax cuts signed into law by Mr. Bush in May 2003 were euphemistically dubbed the Jobs and Growth Act. Workers are still waiting for the jobs. Despite a surge in the economy, we've actually been going backward with regard to employment. There are 700,000 fewer jobs now than when the recovery from the recession began back in November 2001.

Bush went to Russert yesterday to try to shore up sagging poll numbers, numbers which had remained artificially high owing to the public's willingness to give the president a pass on WMD until David Kay went public with his report. Negative reactions to the SOTU and the budget also play a role in the fall in the polls.

I regard Team Rove's need to resort to one of the Sunday shows this early in the electoral year as a mark of absolute panic. While I am hardly an objective observer, I have to call Bush's performance yesterday as "lackluster" at best. He deflected most of Russert's questions on substance and lied at least once (on the release of his Air Force Reserve records in 2000--didn't happen.) The NYT Editorial board opines thusly:

Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.

Right now, the questions average Americans are asking about Iraq seem much clearer than the ones Mr. Bush is willing to confront. People want to know why American intelligence was so wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Bush didn't have a consistent position on this pivotal issue. At some points during his Oval Office interview, he seemed to be admitting that he had been completely wrong when he told the public just before the war started that the intelligence left "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." At other moments he suggested the weapons might still be hidden somewhere, or that they may have been transported to another country. At times he depicted himself as having been misled by intelligence reports. But he insisted that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was doing a good job and deserved to keep his job.

Average Americans are also asking themselves whether invading Iraq would have seemed like the right decision if we knew then what we know now. Mr. Bush doesn't seem willing to even take on this critical question. He repeatedly referred to Saddam Hussein as a dangerous madman, without defining the threat that even a madman, without any weapons of mass destruction, posed to the United States. At one point, his reasoning seemed to be that even if the dictator did not have the feared weapons, he could have started manufacturing them on a moment's notice. To bolster his position, he cited David Kay, the American weapons inspector, as reporting that "Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons." In fact, Mr. Kay said that Iraq's weapons program seemed to have ground to a halt under the pressure of the United Nations inspections and sanctions that Mr. Bush and his staff disdained last year. Mr. Kay said Saddam Hussein retained only the basic ability to restart weapons programs if that pressure were removed.
....
The president was doing far more yesterday than rolling out the administration's spin for the next campaign. He was demonstrating how he is likely to think if confronted with a similar crisis in the future. The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later. Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he said. "It's too late if they become imminent."
....
Some of Mr. Bush's comments yesterday raise questions even more disturbing than the idea that senior administration members might have misled the nation about the intelligence on Iraq. The nation obviously needs a leader who is always alert to the threat of terrorism from abroad. But it cannot afford to have one who responds to the trauma of 9/11 by overreacting to the possibility of danger. In the coming campaign, Mr. Bush, who described himself as a "war president," is going to have to show the country that he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms, and has the courage to tell the nation the truth about something as profound as war. Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction.

This is about as critical an editorial as we have seen so far from the TIMES ed board, so I guess that's worth something.

What I was struck by in the Russert interview yesterday was how detached Bush seemed from Russert's questions and from reality. Yes, part of that is in the desire to stay on script, but as in his other appearances lately, Bush wants whatever image points that go with being a "war president" without paying any of the price.

Back during the 2000 campaign, I heard over and over again about Bush's "regular guy" image. I didn't get it then, and I don't get it now: most of it was media spin, but people bought it. I always thought he came off as insufferably imperious. The lecturing tone he adopted for his interview yesterday revealed that.

If this is the roll-out of Bush-Cheney 04, it's not auspicious.

Hand Me The Broom

Chris Walton, writer, editor of the UU World and proprietor of Philocrites posted a difficult essay today. I read it with my own set of tears in my eyes: Chris has been a thoughtful and committed Clark supporter since early last fall, and today performed the "fall back" of the intellectually honest. He's looking at John Edwards.

I have to go through a similar exercise this week: I have a primary to vote in on Tuesday. While I have tried consciously to stay away from the intra-nicine Dem struggles on this blog in the primary season, those of you who followed me here from Daily Kos know that I've been a Dean supporter since I met him on the Sleepless Summer tour last August. Here is my Kos Diary on my evolution as a Dean voter. Cynic and Washingtonian that I am, I haven't been "over the moon" for a political candidate in many decades, so the last couple of weeks have been hard. Some of my fellow Deanies are still playing delegate math, but I'm aware that this particular party is over and it's time to call it a night. I want this blog to be one of the information centers that contributes to a Democratic victory in November, so the politics of bitterness won't show up here. We have too damn much damn work to do.

I fell for Dean because I heard him articulate a genuinely new vision for the Democrats, one that is inclusive, expansive and responsible. Holy shti, responsibility hasn't been part of the Democratic message since, well, since I've been a Democrat. Howard Dean and I are of the same generation, and have gone through that mid-life maturation together. To meet him and look him in the eyes was to see the fire of genuine conviction rather than political expediency. Let's face it, no one runs for president because they think it is going to be a blast, it isn't, but Dean found a way to kindle his own fires from the hopes and dreams of the people he met. I've never met a politician like that before, and I meet plenty of them here. Even Bill Clinton was one of those politicians who always looked over your shoulder when he shook your hand, in spite of his famous political instincts.

In two days, I have to make a decision. I'm leaning Kerry at the moment. All of our Democratic candidates would make far more impressive presidents than the incumbent, but it looks like the weight of the Democratic party is leaning Kerry. My bottom line is getting Bush out of the White House, and if Kerry is the broom, I'll sweep. The ABB movement which is driving the caucuses and primaries seem to be solidifying around him. I don't know what I'm going to do, but these are my thoughts tonight. I'm impressed and heartened by the turnouts in the primary/caucus states. I think the American voters are making their statement with their feet. Mine will be there on Tuesday morning. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Real WMD and Drug Cash

$7b effort to disarm ex-Soviet WMDs slows
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004

WASHINGTON -- Twelve years after the collapse of the Soviet Union left weapons of mass destruction scattered throughout Russia and its breakaway republics, most of the fallen empire's vast arsenal remains intact and dangerously underprotected, according to new military data compiled over the past year.

While the United States has spent more than $7 billion to remove all nuclear warheads from three former Soviet republics -- Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus -- and has destroyed hundreds of missiles, the task remains less than half done. Defense Department figures show that fewer than half of the 13,300 warheads slated for deactivation had been destroyed by the end of 2003, with prospects for finishing the task stretching out more than a decade.

On Jan. 27, Matthew Bunn of Harvard's Managing the Atom Project told the Senate that less than half of 600 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium is even minimally secure. The rest is protected by as little as a rusting fence and a guard, and it will take 13 years to secure it at the current pace, he said.

Almost none of the Soviet 40,000-ton chemical weapons stockpile, much in shells that could fit inside a suitcase, has been destroyed.

Security specialists say disposing of these weapons is the best chance to prevent a more catastrophic follow-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They are calling on the Bush administration to resolve serious bureaucratic delays in the United States and Russia that are hampering efforts to secure dangerous materials.

With Al Qaeda seeking nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, intelligence specialists believe that the risk that stray Soviet material could be used against US citizens has increased since the end of the Cold War -- yet political will to reduce the threat has stagnated.

Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who co-sponsored the first program to bring the materials under control with then-Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, said President Bush was initially skeptical about keeping the program but has since "indicated his enthusiasm and commitment." Still, Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would welcome a more urgent push from the White House.

How many more hundreds of billions and thousands of lives are we willing to spill into the sands of Iraq while the REAL WMDs languish unprotected in the "stans" of central Asia? How many of those countries are run by tin horn dictrators who are little more than fronts for crime syndicates? You know, there is a whole lot of money kicking around the world to scoop up some of this stuff:

Record Afghan opium output forecast
Sun 8 February, 2004 21:04
By Scott McDonald

KABUL (Reuters) - Opium output has hit a record high in Afghanistan in 2003, with another increase expected this year in the war-torn country that does not have any other real exports, a conference has been told.

Two years after the ruling Taliban were ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition, opium production has skyrocketed as farmers in lawless provinces crank up output, threatening efforts to strengthen the government and establish a proper economy.

I don't think I need to draw you a picture.

Same Old Same Old

The White House: A New Fight Over Secret 9/11 Docs

By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Feb. 16 issue - The White House is facing a new battle with the federal panel investigating 9/11. To mollify the panel chair, former governor Thomas Kean, President George W. Bush last week reversed course and agreed to a two-month extension that is supposed to ensure a final 9/11 report by July. But that might not be enough. Commission sources tell NEWSWEEK that panel members are fed up with what one calls "maddening" restrictions by White House lawyers on their access to key documents. Unless the panel gets to see the docs, the report "will not withstand the laugh test," a commission official says. The panel is threatening to force a showdown soon—by voting to subpoena the White House.

The documents at the heart of the dispute are the so-called presidential daily briefs, or PDBs—the daily intelligence brief given to Bush by a senior intelligence official, usually the CIA director or his deputy. White House lawyers have guarded the documents as the "crown jewels" of executive privilege. But last year Kean and other commissioners complained they couldn't write their report without seeing exactly what Bush, and Bill Clinton before him, had been told about the threat of Al Qaeda. The White House then agreed to a complex deal that would allow four panel officials to review the PDBs and then brief the full 10-member panel. But the arrangement hasn't stopped the wrangling. The four-member team asked to look at 360 PDBs dating back to 1998; White House counsel Alberto Gonzales permitted them to see just 24, arguing that only those that specifically mentioned possible domestic attacks or airplane hijackings were relevant. (One panel member was allowed to read all 360—but couldn't share the contents with colleagues.) The team was permitted to write brief summaries of the PDBs they did read. But White House lawyers objected to some of the wording. The bickering has meant the full panel has yet to be told anything about the PDBs—even while it was conducting interviews with top officials, like last Saturday's with national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The restrictions are especially infuriating, one source notes, because at least some of the PDBs appear to have been selectively shared by the White House two years ago with author Bob Woodward for his sympathetic book "Bush at War." White House officials insist they are protecting the principle of confidential advice for the president and have given the panel "unprecedented" access to sensitive material. "We are doing everything we can to cooperate with the commission," a White House spokeswoman says. Still, some commission officials see an element of politics. [ed.: ya think?] While the commission's work has uncovered no smoking gun, sources say, the cumulative impact of the intelligence documents and other material is damning—showing far more screw-ups by both Clinton and Bush officials than the public has yet to learn.

So, after this morning's love-fest with Russert, here is what is really going on: same old @#$%. Same old say-one-thing-for-public-consumption, do-the-opposite pattern that we've come to know and love.

Paging Amazing Randi

President Revises Rationale For War
Bush, Cheney Stress Iraq's Capabilities
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2004: Page A04

President Bush and Vice President Cheney said yesterday that the war in Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein could have made weapons of mass destruction.

The new rationale offered by the president and vice president, significantly more modest than earlier statements about the deposed Iraqi president's capabilities, comes after government experts have said it is unlikely banned weapons will be found in Iraq and after Bush's naming Friday of a commission to examine faulty prewar intelligence.

"Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and I'm not just going to leave him in power and trust a madman," Bush said yesterday in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" that will be broadcast today. "He's a dangerous man. He had the ability to make weapons at the very minimum."

Cheney delivered a nearly identical message yesterday to a group of Republican donors in suburban Chicago. "We know that Saddam Hussein had the intent to arm his regime with weapons of mass destruction," he said. "And Saddam Hussein had something else -- he had a record of using weapons of mass destruction against his enemies and against his own people."

Mindreading. It all boils down to mind reading.

Wal-Marting the World

Chinese Workers Pay for Wal-Mart's Low Prices
Retailer Squeezes Its Asian Suppliers to Cut Costs
By Peter S. Goodman and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 8, 2004; Page A01

SHENZHEN, China -- Inside the factory, amid clattering machinery and clouds of sawdust, men without earplugs or protective goggles feed wood into screaming electric saws, making cabinets for stereo speakers. Women hunch over worktables, many hands bandaged and few covered by gloves, pressing transistors into circuit boards.

Most of the 2,100 workers here are poor migrants from the countryside who have come to this industrial hub in southern China for jobs that pay about $120 a month. A sign on the wall reminds them of their expendability in a nation with hundreds of millions of surplus workers: "If you don't work hard today, tomorrow you'll have to try hard to look for a job."

The calculations driving production here at Shenzhen Baoan Fenda Industrial Co. are no different from those governing global capitalism in general -- make more for less -- but it is applied with particular vigor on this shop floor. Sixty percent of the stereos coming off the line are for one customer: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., whose mastery at squeezing savings from its supply chain made it the world's largest company.

"The profit is really small," said Surely Huang, a factory engineer, speaking of the 350,000 stereos that Fenda agreed in March to supply to the retailer for $30 to $40 each. Huang said they sell for $50 in the United States. "We have to constantly cut costs to satisfy Wal-Mart."
....
Wal-Mart is such a big player in China that it does not have to go looking for suppliers; the suppliers come to them, jamming a reception area at the procurement center.

Yu Xiaoma of Guangzhou Kangaroo Leathers Co., which makes handbags and wallets for Wal-Mart and other multinationals, said: "You can't make much money from Wal-Mart. They demand the lowest, lowest price."

Amy Gu, vice manager for exports for Goodbaby Corp., which makes baby strollers near Shanghai, said the company sometimes takes orders to supply Wal-Mart at or below cost through a partnership with a Canadian distributor, Dorel Industries Inc. "Dorel will tell us, 'Well, Wal-Mart has given us this price, we need a factory cost of this much,' " Gu said. "And we have to find a way to deliver it."

Wal-Mart says such arrangements benefit both sides. Hatfield said the company has made distribution more efficient and fair by cutting out middlemen and resisting corruption. In a country where transportation remains unreliable, Wal-Mart's distribution network has given manufacturers access to customers around the country and the world.

He touted the case of a Guangdong factory that began supplying Wal-Mart stores in Shenzhen with a drink made of milk and egg yolk, delivering 25,000 units the first month.. It proved popular. By September, Wal-Mart was shipping 1 million units a month across southern China.

"They can just drop it at our distribution center and we take care of the rest," Hatfield said. "Now it's a national brand."

Yet those who run the factory that produces the drink, Weijiasi Food & Beverage Co., say they haven't yet shared in the success.

"In the beginning, we made money," said a manager reached by telephone, who gave his name as Mr. Li.

"But when Wal-Mart started to launch nationwide distribution, they pressured us for a special price at below our cost. Now, we're losing money on every box, while Wal-Mart is making more money."

This can't keep up forever. If Wal-Mart is bankrupting its suppliers, it is going to have a hard time finding suppliers.

The NYT ran a large expose on Wal-Mart personnel policies a couple of weeks ago. It is interesting that they have become a target by both of the national papers at this time.

An Interview with a Reader

A Loyal Bump Reader who is, unfortunately, blogless, wants to try the five question interview exercise. I can't do this for everyone, but I offered the same five questions that I gave to GK Nelson at stonefishspine. GK promised a response on his blog tomorrow (he usually writes in the evenings, American Eastern time) and Loyal Reader has already replied. My questions and the answers are below. As Loyal Reader notes, this is actually an interesting exercise, at least we both found it so. It is one I have also used with my email interfaith discussion group. It is something you can easily try with friends you would like to know better.

Here are my questions and Loyal Reader's responses:

1. How did you find your life's work?

Sometimes it's been me finding my life's work, and other times it's been my
life's work finding me.

As a child I always wanted to be a schoolteacher. My family were mostly
schoolteachers, and I enjoyed my time as a school student. So when I
completed school, I attended University and Teachers' College, and duly
embarked on a teaching career. And most of the time I enjoyed it.

Then I became a stay-at-home parent - and this really has become my life's
work, without me realising it. I was in the fortunate position of being
able to stay-at-home full time because the breadwinner's income was
sufficient (although some redefinition of "sufficient" was necessary).
Thereafter I have only had brief periods of full-time work, but a plethora
of part-time work, in a range of fields. I realised that I missed the adult
world, so dabbled in a variety of work to meet people, working around the
other family needs. I have worked variously as a retail store assistant, a
retail store manager, a marketing boffin, a small-business operator, a
marketing communications writer, and a teacher of both teenagers in high
school and adults in the community. These are the paid positions I've had -
the unpaid ones include teacher, neighbour, child-care helper, babysitter
(many times), cook, taxi-driver, friend, mentor, coffee-maker, provider of
shoulder to cry on, etc.

2. Do you prefer the beach or the mountains?

Hard choice. But I'd have to go for the beach. Why? Because it's an
integral part of every summer holiday I've ever had. There are some things
that become part of you, and I've always lived beside the ocean. And being
at the beach is ALWAYS a relaxing experience.

Mind you, given the mountains that are also "part of me", I can also easily
understand the concept of Omnipotent Creator.

3. What would your perfect day look like?

It would be a holiday, not a regular work day.

Wake naturally as the sun came up. Breakfast and pristine morning newspaper
already on outside table in the sunshine. Good company, all of whom are as
excited by the day's prospects as I am.

In any combination, these things would happen:
1. Reading and writing (either fiction or non-fiction; either letters,
emails, or journal)
2. Full mailboxes, both physical and virtual, all personal, handwritten,
funny and/or thought-provoking (no spam or bills of any kind)
3. Library and/or large bookshop - these are sanctuaries. I am a junkie
of printed matter.
4. Music - preferably live (rather than recorded), especially classical
or jazz.
5. A good walk - time for plenty of "clear-the-head" space, and the means
by which stress is kept in perspective
6. "Entertainment" - a good movie, a play, an opera (my favourite), the
ballet. TV once upon a time would have been on this list, but no longer.
Good company essential here.
7. A meal at some stage during the day consisting of the best bounty of
the freshest produce, cooked exceedingly simply, accompanied by a glass of
very fine wine; around the table are friends of long-standing sharing good
conversation with much laughter.
8. Some "creative" time, be it cooking, gardening, hobby/craft, etc.
9. Finishing the day with "pillow talk" with a soul mate.

I guess I need to have lots of regular routine work days in order to
appreciate days like this, when they come along (wide grin).

4. If you could fix one social problem, what would it be?

The colour of a person's skin, their preferred choice of partner, their age,
their gender, and their distinguishing features would all be absolutely
irrelevant to any discussion regarding their value, worth, and contribution
to society at large.

(If I had a second shot at this, I would break ALL media monopolies at the
stroke of a pen, with no arguments, no discussion, no second thought. Why
should we all be, unwittingly, beholden to such unscrupulous and
manipulative Machiavellis? )

5. Someone brand new to you is coming for dinner. What will you cook?

Seasonal produce, cooked very simply, and served "family style".

Probably pre-dinner nibbles involving an antipasto platter, probably a main
course involving a hot meat dish, a hot vegetable based dish, and a large
fresh green salad. Dessert is likely to be based around fresh fruit.
Drinks would include beer, wine, and non-alcoholic drinks. The whole family
would sit at the table together with the guests, the tableware etc. would be
just as it would be for a family meal, and there would be plenty of
everything - to be finished the following day as "Leftover surprise!" This
first meal together would be reasonably "bland" - e.g. Chicken "casserole",
spinach/cheese cannelloni, lasagne, etc - food I know my family will eat
without fuss. The second meal, however, I'd be much more adventurous
(grin).

Melanie here: these are very simple questions, but the answers told me a great deal about Loyal Reader, who turns out to be a lot like me, a devotee of the out-of-doors, fresh food prepared simply, life lived well "embedded" with family and friends, and the virtue of simple hospitality. If we ran into each other in the mountains (I'm a mountains person) I expect we'd join our picnics together, but since LR and I are on very different continents, I don't expect the opportunity will present itself shortly. Although I'd like it.

Hmmm. Blog as shared picnic. I can run with that metaphor...

Keystone Kops

Hold Bush to His Lie

If you believe the White House, Iraq's future government is being designed in Iraq. If you believe the Iraqi people, it is being designed at the White House. Technically, neither is true: Iraq's future government is being engineered in an anonymous research park in suburban North Carolina
.
On March 4, 2003, with the invasion just fifteen days away, the United States Agency for International Development asked three US firms to bid for a unique job: After Iraq was invaded and occupied, one company would be charged with setting up 180 local and provincial town councils in the rubble. This was newly imperial territory for firms accustomed to the friendly NGO-speak of "public-private partnerships," and two of the three decided not to apply. The "local governance" contract, worth $167.9 million in the first year and up to $466 million total, went to the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), a private nonprofit best known for its drug research. None of its employees had been to Iraq in years.

Poor RTI: The appetite for democracy among Iraqis keeps racing ahead of the plodding plans for "capacity building" it drew up before the invasion. In November the Washington Post reported that when RTI arrived in the province of Taji, armed with flowcharts and ready to set up local councils, it discovered that "the Iraqi people formed their own representative councils in this region months ago, and many of those were elected, not selected, as the occupation is proposing." The Post quoted one man telling a RTI contractor, "We feel we are going backwards."

The deeper I dig into the details, the more amazed I am by how thorough-going the incompetence is. This being Washington, I always expect the contractor to be a couple of months behind, but this is frickin' ridiculous. Nobody is this perfect...

Macchiavelli's Return

Paul Krugman reviews Kevin Phillips American Dynasty and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty in The New York Review of Books. His conclusions:

But in that case, what's it all about? If everything Bush and his officials do is political, what is that they want to do with their power?

Old-line Republicans that I know cling to the belief that the Machiavellianism is only temporary, that it's embraced in service to a higher goal. Once the 2004 election is over, they say Bush will show his true colors as an idealist, someone who genuinely believes in small government and free markets.

But if Phillips is right—and I think he is—there is no higher goal. Bush's motivations are dynastic—to secure his family's rightful place. While he may have some policy biases—like that "instinctive policy fealty" to the investment business—policy is basically there to serve the acquisition of power, and not the other way around.

According to people who observed him in Texas, Karl Rove is a devotee of Machiavelli, and particularly of The Prince. And as Phillips points out, "Twenty-first-century American readers of The Prince may feel that they have stumbled on a thinly disguised Bush White House political memo." For Machiavelli's book was all about how to gain and hold power, not about what to do with it.

So what is the state of the union? Let Phillips have the last word:

"The advent of a Machiavelli-inclined dynasty in what may be a Machiavellian Moment for the American Republic is not a happy coincidence.... National governance has, at least temporarily, moved away from the proven tradition of a leader chosen democratically, by a majority or plurality of the electorate, to the succession of a dynastic heir whose unfortunate inheritance is privileged, covert, and globally embroiling. "

Jack Balkin provided a succinct summary earlier this week:

I've said this before and I will say it again: just because someone doesn't care a hoot about public policy debates doesn't mean they lack intelligence. Thinking that way may be comforting to liberals' sense of superiority, but it will cause them to miss out on what Bush is about, which is not good policy but the exercise and maintenance of power. Yeah, maybe George don't know much about history, but he does know how to kick the left's behind and pull the wool over the country's eyes.

Like lots of good old boys in the South, George W. Bush wants us, as he himself says, to "misunderestimate" him. And whenever we do that, he takes advantage of us, time and time again. Ann Richards misunderestimated George W. Bush and she got booted out of the Texas governor's mansion. Al Gore misunderestimated Bush and he ended up losing the presidency not once but twice, once in November 2000 and once again in December.

Disarray

Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — It will be more than a year before the country hears the conclusions of the commission that President Bush reluctantly appointed on Friday to examine what has gone wrong with American intelligence collection.

But in recent days, it has been obvious in Washington that something has also gone awry in a White House that prides itself on never wavering from its message, especially when the subject is Iraq. At moments, Mr. Bush and his national security team — badgered for explanations about whether the country would have gone to war if it knew then what it knows now — have sounded as if these days, it is every warrior for himself.

Rather than uniform and disciplined, their answers have been ad hoc and inconsistent. And the result is that the president appears very much on the defensive just at a moment when his aides thought he would be reaping the political benefits of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.

Sanger goes on to comment on the make-up of the commission on intelligence review and its charge, noting that none of the members are specialists in the area of intel and seem to have been chosen more for political balance than for expertise.

That said, the opening paragraphs of this piece seem to articulate as well as anything the backdrop against which Bush will be sitting down for his interview with Tim Russert this afternoon.

Five Questions

Kenneth Sutton at all over the map took on the "five question interview" project on his blog last week. Those who do this then invite others to become their interview subjects. I volunteered.

Here's the deal: below are Kenneth's five questions and my answers. If you wish, you can respond in comments or by email if you want me to offer you a five question interview. You must then do what I'm doing here and publish the five questions and your answers on your blog or journal.

From Kenneth:

1. How long have you been smoking and how did you start?

From me: Thirty years ago, almost exactly to the day. I was a sophomore in college, so I guess you'd consider me a late starter, but my road to the coffin nails was a little atypical.

In early '74, I was in school and working three part-time jobs, nearly a full-time work schedule in additon to my full-time music major, one of the most demanding undergraduate majors. To say I was stressed and exhausted wouldn't put too fine a point on it. Sometime that winter, I wandered into a sheet music store in Dinkytown, the little commercial district just outside the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota, in search of some music my bassoon teacher wanted me to learn. A classmate was behind the counter and offered me some help. We found the music and as I was preparing to pay for it she showed me something I had never paid much attention to before. The store sold both music and tobacco. (and was also a head shop, but I'd never gotten into pot and had no interest.)

On the counter was a little basket of briar pipes, good ones, famous names. She pointed out one that she thought was particularly fine, a little stubby made by Dansk, the famous Danish pipe company. It was beautiful and felt terrific in my hand, just the right size and shape for the small palm of a petite woman. There was a solidness about it that seemed to be lacking in my patched-together life. The price was something like $5.00--Dansk pipes of this sort routinely sold for north of $50.00, so this was quite a deal, as my friend pointed out to me.

I said, "I'll take it, but I don't know anything about tobacco," so she gave me the cooks' tour of the fragrant glass canisters that lined the shelves behind the checkout. I sniffed, I rubbed it through my fingers, I learned about tobacco additives, blends, types of cuts and the geography of tobacco, from Virginia and North Carolina to Turkey and North Africa. I picked out three little "sample" bags of two "flavored" and one straight Virginia burly. I was back the next day, after learning that I was going to need all of those little gadgets that pipe smokers carry, along with a pouch for pipe and tobacco to carry around in my backpack. It was the age of Aquarius, the notion of a 20-year old girl smoking a pipe wasn't particularly noteworthy, although most of my colleagues found it strange that the pipe bowl didn't have a screen in the bottom of it.

When you pick up pipe smoking, you don't just get a drug, you get a hobby. I started studying pipes and hanging out with other pipe smokers to learn the lingo. I experimented with tobaccos, humidors and pipe shapes. I returned again and again to the little bargain basket at the pipe shop, looking for deals, until my collection ran to a half-dozen, all of them "good" pipes made from excellent briars by name firms. I learned how to rest a pipe between smokes to keep the briar from getting burned out, I experiemented with tobaccos and began blending my own.

Two of the jobs I had that year (youngsters won't remember the days when you could still smoke on the job) involved a lot of writing, and you could find me in the office or at home bent over a Selectric, cranking out the carbon-paper sets (something else youngsters won't remember) with a pipe clenched between my teeth. Therein came the rub. I was doing a lot of writing under heavy deadline pressure. Pipes need to be fiddled with in order to burn properly, and I didn't have the time to stop every few minutes and fiddle with the pipe. The damn thing went out all the time. This was not satisfying. I loved the aesthetic of the pipe, but it wasn't working with the demands of the job. I went back to the music/tobacco shop to seek advice from my friend. She introduced me to cigars, which have nearly all the complexity of pipe tobacco but need a lot less fussing.

Within weeks, I was a chain smoking cigar smoker, and I quickly learned what every chain smoking cigar smoker learns: you can't do this without risking your voice. Since I was already working in public radio, losing my voice meant losing my livelihood. After spending a week off work with laryngitis (and no sick pay), I didn't go back to see my friend at the tobacco shop. I stopped at the drugstore down the street from her shop and bought a pack of cigarettes. I think they were about $.20 a pack back then.

In the coming months, I would experiment with Bidis, clove, Navy Cut, Sobranies and Sherman's, on those rare days when I was relatively flush with cash. The ordinary brand of choice changed every six months or so, but by the early '80's, the mainline was Benson and Hedges menthol, to whom I was faithful until Virginia Slims started running a deal well below the premium cigarette prices 2 years ago.

2. If you could have any job at all, what would it be?

Full time writer/researcher/scholar for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Getting paid to think about what I'm going to think about anyway seems pretty close to bliss for me. I'm fascinated by the critical nexus of theology, politics and culture, and the Pew people are doing some of the most interesting work in this area.

3. If you were going to add to your blog a third topic in addition to
politics and liberal religion, what would it be?

It's already up on the blog, and I haven't been able to do much with it yet: culture, high and low. This blog went live when I detected that we are in the middle of a political emergency, so I've been swamped with political news and haven't been able to spend as much time with cultural issues as I would like. Ideally, more of the commentary would come from The Atlantic, New York Review, Tricycle, Killing the Buddha and books. Books. I used to read them and they are all over the place here, feeling unloved, I suppose. I'd also like to be writing more original material, but just submersing myself in the blogworld for a few months has given me some insight into the new communities which are forming here, which is a topic for study in its own right.

4. For how long has your life been DC-centric?

I moved to Washington in May, 1985. Is that your question, or do you mean something else?

5. Do you think light type on a dark screen is easier to read?

Kenneth, I've been studying some blogs which are highly designed--which Bump is not--and thinking about ways to improve the look. Melanie Goux, the benefactress who gave me this blog, is a graphic artist, and we talk about the "look" of Bump. Chris Walton at Philocrites has gone for a heavily texted format, which I rather like, but it is a very dense site. On the other hand, GK Nelson at stonefishspinehas blended text and design in a way that I find really admirable, but it took him years of experimenting to get where he is. I think the result is beautiful, but it is clear that he's not done.

I find white text on a black background easier on these eyes. Not every reader agrees, and every different monitor and browser will have a vote. Reader response is that 1/3 prefer the current design, 1/3 don't care, and 1/3 prefer black text on white. I can give readers some help with optimizing their browsers and monitors, but blogs tend to be a quick-hit kind of visit. I have to live with the site as we can do it at the moment. As Mel and I change, it will change, and I offer no predictions. We are here for the long haul.

Thank you for your questions, Kenneth. I hope I can do as well.

DU Depleting Troops

Returning Vilseck troops get depleted uranium questions

By Rick Scavetta, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Friday, February 6, 2004

Editor’s note: Stars and Stripes reporter Rick Scavetta is embedded with the 94th Engineer Battalion, a Vilseck, Germany-based unit that has returned from Iraq after a yearlong deployment. This is the third in a series of articles on the soldiers’ return to Germany.

VILSECK, Germany — A questionnaire on troops’ exposure to depleted uranium raised a few eyebrows this week as engineers returning from Iraq began their second day of the U.S. Army Europe reintegration program.

The survey was one part of the medical session, during which soldiers from the 94th Engineer Battalion also gave blood samples for HIV screenings and received tuberculosis skin tests.

The series of questions on depleted uranium read somewhat like this:

• Were you near an armored vehicle that was struck by depleted uranium?
• Were you in or near an Abrams tank when it was hit with depleted uranium munitions?
• Did you routinely enter vehicles with depleted uranium dust to perform maintenance, recovery or intelligence gathering?

Most of the soldiers checked blocks stating they hadn’t encountered any of that. But the survey brought questions about why the military was asking.

“They’re trying to figure out their liability so they don’t get sued down the line,” said Spc. John Wissinger, 34, of Denver. He said he was around burning vehicles in Iraq but wasn’t sure what type of munitions set them afire.

Another off-the-radar screen story: depleted Uranium munitions. From the linked Buffalo News story:

Former Maj. Douglas Rokke, who was director of the Army's depleted uranium project, spoke to 125 people at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society. The Champaign, Ill., science professor was brought here by the Western New York Peace Center.
....
"The United States used 375 tons in Gulf War I," Rokke said. "My orders were to take care of U.S. casualties and vehicles" that had been hit by "friendly fire.'
"Myself and my team members started to get sick almost immediately. It started with respiratory problems, then rashes."

But the procedures developed by his team were never implemented, Rokke said, despite a military order of June 1991 to treat these personnel. Recalling a wounded friend who suffered tumors where uranium shrapnel had been left in his body, he said the authorities found "no compelling evidence" of a connection and refused to authorize removal of the shrapnel or special treatment.

In his own case, Rokke added, his body has six times the amount of uranium that usually requires medical care but has received no help or advice from the government.

"The technology of war is out of control," Rokke concluded. "We don't have the ability to clean it up (or) treat it. I'm a warrior, but my conclusion is that war is obsolete. A U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs report says over 221,000 of our sons and daughters are on permanent disability and over 10,000 dead - one-third of our Gulf War I force. And they're coming back sick right now."

Inquiring Minds

In an act of journalistic generosity, David Corn offers Tim Russert eight lines of inquiry for his hour-long interview with President Bush this coming Sunday. Here's the one I really want to hear:

* In July 2001, US intelligence produced a warning that read, "Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Usama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

Why wouldn't your administration tell the public who saw this warning? Did you or any of your national security team see this report? If so, what did you or they do in response? If this report did not make it to you or your senior aides, wouldn't you consider that a terrible mistake and want to find out who was responsible for that?

I suppose I'm going to have to watch Little Timmy on Sunday, but I think we can pretty much lay odds on how this program will go. I don't know which hemorhage Rove thinks he is going to stanch with this ploy, but this does seem like an act of desparation to me.

Donut Hole Economy

The jobless rate reported today is a highly suspect figure. I'll be digging out the survey data as the day progresses. Here is the background data from the Job Watch site of the Economic Policy Institute.

Greatest sustained job loss since the Great Depression

Since the recession began 34 months ago in March 2001, 2.4 million jobs have disappeared, a 1.8% contraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting monthly jobs data in 1939 (at the end of the Great Depression). In every previous episode of recession and job decline since 1939, the number of jobs had fully recovered to above the pre-recession peak within 31 months of the start of the recession. Today's labor market would have an additional 3.88 million jobs if jobs had grown by the 0.7% rate that occurred in the early 1990s recession and so-called "jobless recovery," the worst record prior to this current period. The picture is bleaker for private-sector jobs, which have dropped by 2.9 million since March 2001, a 2.5% contraction. (See state data and organizations for more information on your state.)

Since the official end of the recession in November 2001, total jobs have shrunk by 0.7 million (an 0.5% contraction) and private-sector jobs have dropped by 0.9 million (or 0.8%).

Chickens : Roost

U.S. Plan to Transfer Power In Iraq May Shift Drastically
By Colum Lynch and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 6, 2004; Page A17

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 5 -- The U.S. plan to hand over power in Iraq is increasingly likely to undergo major changes rather than merely "refinements," because of increasing skepticism about the June 30 deadline for creating a provisional government and erosion of support for the proposal to use caucuses to select it, according to senior U.S. and U.N. officials.

The Bush administration still publicly clings to its transition plan, but a U.N. team scheduled to arrive in Iraq as early as Friday has been given a free hand to present its own blueprint for the country's political transition if it determines elections cannot be held by June in Iraq, U.S. and U.N. officials say.

In a sign of their growing anxiety, U.S. officials have also crafted some dramatically new ideas, in the hope of bringing a smooth conclusion to the struggling occupation. The list has been shared with the United Nations, the officials add.

One option is extending the June 30 deadline for installing an Iraqi government to allow enough time for the direct elections demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading cleric. There is already talk about a hypothetical extension to Jan. 1, 2005.

This could mean that the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority would stay longer, which could carry political costs for President Bush in an election year and anger Iraqis who want an end to foreign occupation, U.S. officials concede.
....
"We are now open to enough refinements that the transition plan is not necessarily going to look like a caucus or act like a caucus when it eventually happens," an administration official said. "But we have to have a handoff, and working out that part is tricky. And there's no consensus yet on an alternative."

A well-placed U.S. official said the issue is so sensitive that it has become a "radioactive topic."

Bush told Annan at a meeting this week in Washington that he is committed to the current deadline. But a senior State Department official said that United States is now willing to let the United Nations determine what will work.

"We [have] enough respect for the U.N. that we know it may present options that are not June 30," the official said. "We're still thinking about making June 30 -- and not not making June 30. And we've conveyed that to the U.N. . . . But we can't rule out that they may come back with something different about what we can do by June 30 or by another date."

Hmm. No news here we haven't been expecting, but let's dissect the story a little. There isn't one named source in the whole piece. The identifications are "SAO", State and UN, which is probably the UN Ambassador's office at State.

It looks to me like Powell just won the most important interior administration power struggle before the election campaign commences in ernest.

I believe I said yesterday that the wind has shifted in earnest. The bills are coming due a little sooner than Team Rove would have liked. Hubris always sows the seeds of its own demise, we've known that since the Old Testament. Humility has the grace of keeping you out of your own way.

Scoop to WaPo, by the way. Nothing up on the NYT website as I prepare to put this one to bed. But notice that it is on A17 of the Post.

If there is time on Friday, I'll try to offer a little meditation on George Tenet's speech at Georgetown University yesterday. Directors of Central Intelligence don't give speeches. This was a clap of thunder and yet another shot over the bow of the good ship W: the CIA never plays defense and it now has a hand in three investigations. If I were Karl Rove, I'd be heading out to join Karen Hughes and the family right about now.

Swimming the Memes

Yesterday in The Bloom is off the Rose, I noted that the currents in the river of meme in which I swim these days seem to have changed, but that I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Today has been the day the cold front finally blew in and Bob Kuttner puts several fingers on what has changed. While watching George Tenet's speech at Georgetown this morning, I thought, "This is it, the tipping point."

Presidential Endgame
Bush's compassion act is wearing thin -- and the voters are beginning to notice.
By Robert Kuttner

After an excruciating delay, chickens are finally coming home to roost for George W. Bush. For over a year, critics have been pointing to the president's systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers. But the charge hasn't stuck, until very lately.

This past week, on multiple fronts, Bush hit a tipping point. Chief arms inspector David Kay testified to Congress that the Administation's intelligence reports were entirely wrong about Saddam's supposed weapons and that the much-maligned UN inspectors were right. Kay loyally blamed the failure on intelligence professionals, not Bush. But that argument didn't fool those who watched last year as Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld strong-armed the CIA, sifted through raw, unconfirmed reports and massaged the data until he got the story he wanted.

Bush initially resisted the pressure for a full-scale investigation, but soon agreed to appoint a major bi-partisan inquiry into the "intelligence failure." The real story here, however, is political manipulation of intelligence, and it isn't going away. A second investigation, of the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, will also shed embarrassing light about the true White House concern for intelligence professionals. Yet another investigation, into the lapses that occurred on Bush's watch in the events leading up to 9/11, could also unearth awkward facts.

All of the administration's mendacity comes together in the latest Bush budget. According to the White House, the deficit, now $521 billion, will be halved over the next five years. But the administration achieves this sleight of hand by excluding future costs of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, claiming large savings as yet to be identified, failing to adjust revemnue projections, and presuming program cuts so unpopular that Congress is sure to reject them.
....
Even Bush's appalling Viet Nam record -- pulling strings to get into a National Guard unit, and then neglecting to show up much of the time -- is now belatedly attacting press scrutiny. What started as a gotcha game against General Wesley Clark's refusal to disavow Michael Moore's choice of rhetoric (Moore called Bush a "deserter") has refocused press attention onto the legitimate issue of Bush's actual performance.

Before the New Hampshire primary, Bush's re-election seemed assured. Now, polls show either Kerry or Edwards beating him.

Journalists are herd animals. Conventional wisdom sometimes turns on a dime, even though the basic facts were hidden in plain view all along. I'd bet we are about a week away from newsmagazine covers pronouncing "Bush in Trouble." It's about time.

Here's the mantra until the newsmags come out on Sunday: Bush in Trouble.

Which One Has "The Precious?"

Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe
Posted Feb. 5, 2004
By Richard Sale
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative then working for the weapons of mass destruction division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press accounts.

It will be interesting to see how this story sets up. I have some questions. The source or sources for this story are clearly FBI rather than DoJ. Why did they leak to Insight Magazine, the weekly publication of the Moonie Times? If you wanted to get your story out as widely as possible, you'd go to the WaPo or the NYT (although State seems to prefer the LAT.) We'll have to see how this plays out in the coming days; as of right now, none of The Bigs have picked it up yet.

High Stakes Poker

Filchyboy prints an open letter to the American Voter, and as rousing a plea to get involved as I have ever read.

To all my friends, Many of us don’t have time to even read our mail, but please stay with me for just a few moments, because I want to write about our future. Over the past twenty-five years I’ve written fifteen books, but this one letter is the thing I’m asking you to read. In the history of our country, 2004 could truly be a turning point. I’m talking about politics. The time for quiet frustration and complaining is over; the time for real action is here. In the past four years, we have gone from seeing significant but reasonable differences in the way our country should be governed to seeing theft at the grandest scale imaginable. We have been railroaded into one of the gravest decisions a nation can make--to go to war--by an administration that used deliberately faulty justifications, selectively ignored the facts, and appealed to a sense of fear that runs rampant in America today and is fueled by people seeking personal gain. Hundreds of our young citizens have died senselessly in military service to our nation; thousands more have been severely wounded, and many thousands of innocent victims in Iraq have been killed, all as a result of deception and self-serving goals of the Bush administration. We have gone from a federal budget surplus to the largest deficit in the history of any nation. George Bush’s debt could burden us for the rest of our lives. It could impact the next generation of taxpayers, void the social security benefits that we have all paid for, create inflation, and cause the sacrifice of myriad necessary programs that would otherwise accomplish real goals of national security and stability. Oblivious to the consequences, Bush now wants to spend hundreds of billions more going to Mars and perhaps to fight additional unnecessary wars here on earth. Over $87 billion were approved for Iraq in 2004 alone while state after state here in America faces the equivalent of bankruptcy. The national treasury has been liquidated and the contents given to Bush’s friends--vice president Cheney’s company, Halliburton, being the most transparent beneficiary of the greatest and most inexcusable largess ever permitted to occur. All this debt is amassed while giving the wealthiest Americans two enormous tax cuts, the total giveaway equivalent to the sum of social security and Medicare’s now-likely default at the time the baby-boom generation reaches retirement age. Bush’s only successful war is his war on the environment. At last count, he had taken more than 200 actions undermining laws democratically passed and designed to protect our air, water, and land--in other words, designed to protect our lives. The pattern is clear: political favors are given to corporations that benefit from ravaging the environment and undermining public health in epidemic proportions. Americans have entrusted their lives, their country, and their children’s future well-being to a dolt who is blissfully eager to deliver our nation to cronies having unconscionable greed. That vice is powerfully combined with the most destructively radical beliefs of the right-wing-fringe, all topped-off with an arrogance of unfathomable proportions.

filchyboy is lending his space to Tim Palmer, who also has a dozen suggestions of things you can do to get involved.

What about you? Are you going to do anything differently this election cycle? I am. I'm working with other religious progressives to begin a national conversation which doesn't sound anything at all like the monotone we've been hearing from the Christian Right Wing. I've given time to one of the primary candidates, and I'll work for our nominee after the convention. I haven't worked on a political campaign since high school civics. I've signed up for the DNC Meetup. I intend to get involved in voter registration.

I believe that Tim Palmer is correct and that the political stakes are as high this year as at any time in my half-century. I can't sit this one out.

"Justified Paranoia"

Reader Dale sent along this link with the note "1 more for (justified) paranoia." I'll say. In a world where programs like MATRIX (Multi-state Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) , Total Information Awareness and CAPSII are already in the works, any technology which gives our government minders more information needs to be tightly controlled.

The Trouble with RFID
by Simson L. Garfinkel

[Simson L. Garfinkel was chair of the RFID Privacy Workshop, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last November 15. More information on RFID and related privacy issues can be found at www.rfidprivacy.org. }

On November 15, fifteen privacy and consumer organizations called for manufacturers to voluntarily hold off on their plans to equip consumer goods with wireless tracking devices. These devices, called Radio Frequency Identification tags, are based on the same technology that lets cars pay E-ZPASS tolls without stopping. The fear of these activists is simple: They're worried that instead of being used to track boots, bluejeans and books, these so-called RFID systems will be used to track us.

Indeed, such warnings might once have been dismissed as mere fear-mongering. But in today's post-9/11 world, in which the US government has already announced its plans to fingerprint and photograph foreign visitors to our country, RFID sounds like a technology that could easily be seized upon by the Homeland Security Department in the so-called "war on terrorism." But such a system wouldn't just track suspected Al Qaeda terrorists: it would necessarily track everybody--at least potentially.

I thank Dale for the heads-up and one more thing to worry about.

Realpolitik

Top Iraq Cleric Survives Assassination Attempt
Reuters
Thursday, February 5, 2004; 1:27 PM

NAJAF, Iraq - Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, survived an assassination attempt Thursday when gunmen opened fire on his entourage, a security official in his office said.

"At 10 o'clock (2 a.m. EDT) this morning, gunmen opened fire on Ayatollah Sistani as he greeted people in Najaf, but he was not hurt," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Sistani, revered by Iraq's Shi'ite community, which makes up about 60 percent of the population, is rarely seen in public and seldom leaves the holy city of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

In recent weeks, Sistani has spoken out against U.S. proposals for transferring power back to an Iraqi government by July 1, saying he wants direct elections to be held rather than a U.S. plan for a system of indirect regional caucuses.

Sistani's pronouncements carry enormous weight in Iraq and his opposition to the U.S. power transfer plans has thrown into question whether sovereignty will be returned by the deadline.

The attempt on the veteran cleric's life is likely to spur anger in Iraq's Shiite community, which was suppressed for more than two decades during Saddam Hussein's regime. Saddam is a Sunni Muslim.

Talk about throwing in a wild card! No speculation yet on who is responsible for this assassination attempt.

UPDATE:

I'd forgotten this report fromJuan Cole earlier this morning. There are more players involved.

Reformers implore Sistani to Intervene in Iran Crisis

They wrote, "We have followed with appreciation your courageous positions in calling for the holding of free, fair, and direct elections in Iraq, where the population did not have, until the fall of the Baath regime, the right to own a shortwave radio. That is, holding free elections that can escape foreign influence is a difficult matter if not an impossible one. Nevertheless, your excellency is insisting that the first and last word in the matter of choosing rulers and representatives belongs to the Iraqi people. How wonderful it would be if your excellency would express your opinion regarding the farce that some in your native land of Iran are attempting to impose on its people, who are wide awake, under the rubric of "elections." Najaf has always been a support for freedom lovers in Iran, for in the Constitutional Revolution [of 1905-1911], your righteous predecessors such as Mirza Na'ini, Akhund Khurasani, and Allamah Mazandarani, supported the devotees of liberty in Iran. Without their famous fatwa, the people would not have been able to bring down the tyrant Muhammad Ali Shah."

Juan concludes, "This could get very interesting indeed." In fact, it just did.

Pounding the Pavement

House Backs Extended Jobless Benefits
39 Republicans Join Democrats in Supporting Program
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 5, 2004; Page A11

The House voted yesterday to create a program extending unemployment benefits for nearly 2 million Americans.

Democrats have spent weeks trying to provide federal aid to workers whose unemployment benefits expired in late December. Blocked by Republicans on several occasions, they opted to attach the language to a popular bill providing community service grants.

While the floor debate divided strictly along party lines, 39 Republicans broke ranks to approve the measure 227 to 179.

While the vote was largely symbolic -- the Senate would have to adopt the measure, and then lawmakers would have to take a separate vote appropriating the funds -- it underscored lawmakers' concern over rising unemployment.

"This shows there's more anxiety about the economy and unemployment than the administration would like to admit," said Bill Samuel, legislative director of the AFL-CIO. "What happened today is the dam broke. The Republican leadership was caught napping."

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who wrote the language providing $6.7 billion in unemployment benefits, said the amendment offered the best shot at helping workers who are losing jobs at a rate of 90,000 a week.

"Last week the shocking neglect of the administration became all too apparent," Miller said. "They can't find work and this administration won't help them. . . . This is the only vehicle we have because you will bring us nothing to address the unemployment."

Of course, none of this will do anything for me, Jim Capazolla, Susan Madrak or any of the others who lost our benefits (paltry as they are) in the interregnum between the last two congressional resolutions.

There is an interesting fiction about unemployment. The way that the law is set up, the employer pays into an insurance fund at a rate which is determined by their "experience rating," ie, how often they fire or lay people off. It sounds like Unemployment Insurance is paid for by the employer. The reality is that your wages are reduced to take in the possible cost of unemployment down the road. If you live in a jurisdiction as cheap as mine, your "employer cost", which is taken out of your wages, whether you know it or not, is about $6,000. If you've worked for your employer for 20 years or 2, you get the same benefit. Unemployment is meant to soften the blow, but not fix it. The theory is that if the benefit is too good, you won't look for work, so it is barely enough to keep you off the street and keep you looking for work.

In any urban jurisdiction, it isn't going to pay the rent, so you are going to be looking hard and hoping you can buy catfood for the cats.

BTW, looking for work in this jobless recovery is a very interesting experience. One I wouldn't recommend.

Weasels of Mass Deception

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is having a spot of trouble over those missing weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence chief's bombshell: 'We were overruled on dossier'
By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
04 February 2004

The intelligence official whose revelations stunned the Hutton inquiry has suggested that not a single defence intelligence expert backed Tony Blair's most contentious claims on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

As Mr Blair set up an inquiry yesterday into intelligence failures before the war, Brian Jones, the former leading expert on WMD in the Ministry of Defence, declared that Downing Street's dossier, a key plank in convincing the public of the case for war, was "misleading" on Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological capability. Writing in today's Independent, Dr Jones, who was head of the nuclear, chemical and biological branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) until he retired last year, reveals that the experts failed in their efforts to have their views reflected.

Dr Jones, who is expected to be a key witness at the new inquiry, says: "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

He calls on the Prime Minister to publish the intelligence behind the Government's claims that Iraq was actively producing chemical weapons and could launch an attack within 45 minutes of an order to do so. He is "extremely doubtful" that anyone with chemical and biological weapons expertise had seen the raw intelligence reports and that they would prove just how right he and his colleagues were to be concerned about the claims.

Downing Street was triumphant last week when Lord Hutton ruled that Andrew Gilligan's claims that the dossier was "sexed up" were unfounded, but Dr Jones's comments are bound to boost the case of the BBC and others that the dossier failed to take into account the worries of intelligence officials. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said yesterday that he might not have supported military action against Baghdad if he had known that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction.

Acutely aware of the American inquiry into the war, Mr Blair said that a committee of inquiry would investigate "intelligence-gathering, evaluation and use" in the UK before the conflict in Iraq. Lord Butler of Brockwell, the former cabinet secretary, will chair the five-strong committee, which will meet in private. The Liberal Democrats refused to support the inquiry because they said that its remit was not wide enough.

Dr Jones was the man whose decision to give evidence electrified the Hutton inquiry as he disclosed that he had formally complained about the dossier. The Government attempted to dismiss his complaints as part of the normal process of "debate" within the DIS and claimed that other sections of the intelligence community were better qualified to assess the 45-minute and chemical production claims.

But today Dr Jones makes clear that he was not alone and declares that the whole of the Defence Intelligence Staff, Britain's best qualified analysts on WMD, agreed that the claims should have been "carefully caveated". Furthermore, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which allowed the contentious claims to go into the dossier, lacked the expertise to make a competent judgement on them.

The AP picks up the story:

LONDON (AP) - Interrupted by shouts and heckles, Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday defended his decision to launch an inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq but not to examine whether the war was justified.

"That is a question for the government first, then for parliament and finally for the people to decide. ... There will carry on being a debate about whether the war was justified or not. That is democracy. We don't need a committee to tell us that."

Blair spoke at the opening of a parliamentary debate on the reasons for war in Iraq and the conclusions of an investigation by Lord Hutton into the death of a government weapons scientist.

Shouts from anti-war demonstrators in the public gallery drowned out the prime minister five times during his statement, forcing the speaker to clear the gallery and adjourn the proceedings for 10 minutes.

"Murderer!" shouted one protester. "Whitewash!" yelled another.

"I somehow feel we're not being entirely persuasive in certain quarters," Blair quipped after one of the interruptions, drawing a laugh from legislators.

This feels like an argument by proxy for what is not happening in the US. Tony Blair and his critics in Parliament and the press are surrogates for George W. Bush, Congress and our lackey press.

Horse-race politics have driven this story--W. and the missing WMDs--off the front page for the time being, but this will be part of the back-drop for both the primaries and the general election.

Note to C-Span watchers: George Tenet testifies tomorrow.

This just in:

'Israel knew Iraq had no nuclear weapons'

February 04 2004 at 02:00AM
By Laurie Copans

Jerusalem - A government critic said on Tuesday that Israel was aware before the war against Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, but Israel did not inform the United States.

Israel put itself on war footing before the US invasion last year, passing out gas mask kits to its citizens and then ordering them to open the kits, a step that eventually will cost millions, since components would have to be replaced.

But lawmaker Yossi Sarid, a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said on Tuesday that Israeli intelligence knew beforehand that Iraq had no weapons stockpiles and misled US President George Bush.

'Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario'
In contrast, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud Party said Israel had shared its doubts with the Americans.
....
Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario, and it should have," Sarid said.
Israeli critics say the government of Sharon maintained the state of alert for its own political reasons, to help galvanise public opinion in favour of harsh steps against the Palestinians.
....
When [Scott] Ritter met with Israeli intelligence officials in 1998, they told him that Iraq had been reduced to the number six threat down from number one four years before, he said.

"In the end, if the Israeli intelligence knew that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, so the CIA knew it and thus British intelligence too," Ritter told Ynet. - Sapa-AP

Enough Dirt to Spread Around

Another Halliburton Probe Already under fire for its contracts in Iraq, the company now faces a Justice Department inquiry about business done during Dick Cheney’s tenure
by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenrball

Feb. 4 - The Justice Department has opened up an inquiry into whether Halliburton Co. was involved in the payment of $180 million in possible kickbacks to obtain contracts to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria during a period in the late 1990’s when Vice President Dick Cheney was chairman of the company, Newsweek has learned.

There is no evidence that Cheney was aware of the payments in question and an aide said today the vice president has not been contacted about the probe. Still, the inquiry by the Justice Department’s fraud section—which prosecutes federal anti-bribery law violations—is likely to bring new public attention to the vice president’s past at the giant oil-services firm. Halliburton has been under intense scrutiny in recent months over its handling of hundreds of millions of dollars contracts relating to the rebuilding of Iraq.

The Justice inquiry, along with a related probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission, parallels a separate investigation into the Nigerian payments that is being conducted by a French magistrate and has received widespread attention in recent months in the European press. But the Justice Department and SEC probes have not previously been reported, although they were briefly mentioned by Halliburton last week near the end of a lengthy filing with the SEC.

In the filing, the Houston-based company disclosed that the French magistrate was investigating the Nigerian payments and then added: “The U.S. Department of Justice and the SEC have asked Halliburton for a report on these matters and are reviewing the allegations in light of the US. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Halliburton has engaged outside counsel to investigate any allegations and is cooperating with the government’s inquiries… If illegal payments were made, this matter could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.”

From the Center for American Progress:

IRAQ -- CHECK PLEASE! Halliburton is at it again. The latest: The company's subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, has to repay $27.4 million to the U.S. military for overcharging for meals served to troops . The company, which is also being investigated for overcharging for fuel delivered to Iraq, already had to refund $6.3 million "after Halliburton admitted its employees took kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor." Remember what this $27.4 extra got the troops, too: AFP reported last month "the Pentagon repeatedly warned Halliburton the food it served to U.S. troops in Iraq was 'dirty,' as were as the kitchens it was served in." While Halliburton has previously promised to fix the situation, those pledges "have not been followed through," according to a Pentagon report that found "blood all over the floor," "dirty pans," "dirty grills," "dirty salad bars" and "rotting meats ... and vegetables" in four of the military messes the company operates in Iraq.

Vegan New Age Catholic

Holy Weblog! is back up and running. The proprietress ran out of gas last summer and into the fall, but Joyce is now updating nearly daily. This blog will go into the blogroll at the update. Joyce covers the slightly "unusual" corners of the religious world, from the point of view of the Christian progressive. She also has a very nice newsfeed of religion headlines.

The issue may now be moot, but Beliefnet.com's interview with Dennis Kucinich is now up. Dennis is an interesting mix of New Age and theologically orthodox Catholic:

BELIEFNET: You have supplemented or complemented your Catholic upbringing with a variety of other spiritual teachings. What was the nature of your spiritual journey in 1979 and 1980, when you left the mayoralty [in Cleveland]?

KUCINICH: I would say there's a sense of which the doctrine of substantiation is connected to the Hindu religion's concepts of shakti, yanim and vipassana.

Joyce tells us that Beliefnet.com has just launched a section on religion and politics.

Duckgate

Dahlia Lithwick digs into the Supreme Court's hazy rules on recusal:

Calls for something to be done about the Supreme Court's gauzy conflict-of-interest policy grew shriller last week, as congressional Democrats pressed Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist for clarification (and codification) of rules about when a Supreme Court justice has been too compromised to hear a case fairly. The trouble began last month when reports surfaced that, while a case in which Vice President Dick Cheney is the named party was pending in the Supreme Court, Cheney went duck hunting in Louisiana with Justice Antonin Scalia. It's bad enough that the several-day trip was sponsored by an energy company and that the case questions whether energy companies played too significant a role in developing Bush's energy policy. Matters worsened significantly with Scalia's flip statement to the Los Angeles Times that, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned" and that the only thing really wrong with the trip was that the hunting was "lousy."

Don't get me wrong. Justice Scalia should step aside in Duckgate, regardless of what's in his heart, because it's a terrible mistake—especially in a landmark case about cronyism and special influence—to allow the appearance of cronyism and special influence to taint what must be a completely fair decision. But it should remain Scalia's decision whether to do so or not. If he cannot be trusted to make it, he cannot be trusted to decide anything.

In which case, our only recourse is impeachment, and I don't see that flying under current circumstances.

The Bloom is Off the Rose

I can't put my finger on any one thing in particular, but the the tide seems to be shifting. This might be an inside the beltway phenomenon, but I'm reading it in heartland newspapers, like the Minneapolis Strib and Chicago Trib, as well. W no longer seems like a steamroller, the aura of inevitability seems to have evaporated. Josh Marshall sniffs the wind.

What has helped turn the tide is a string of crass and clumsy political gambits ranging from the president’s immigration proposal to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t plan for a trip to Mars and the new brouhaha over budgetary shenanigans with the prescription drug plan.

What did these three political plays have in common?

Not one of them was well thought-out on its own terms, and none had much to do with the president’s political agenda.

The clearest example was the plan to send men to Mars. This wasn’t a real policy proposal.

The whole thing was never even meant to happen. It was supposed to be a campaign sound bite to give a running start to the State of the Union roll-out and a bullet point for the president’s onward-and-upward-with-optimism reelection theme.

Had this been a serious proposal, it would have required a vast national effort costing, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet when it didn’t strike a chord with voters or the Sunday shows, it got tossed aside without a second thought.
It wasn’t a policy proposal. It was a political ploy.

And the White House cut it loose so unceremoniously that that unlovely reality was impossible to miss.

In isolation, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. But it fits a pattern.

Take the president’s immigration-reform proposal. It’s not that some sort of immigration reform along these lines lacks all merit.

But no one thought that this proposal was actually going to pass through this Congress. And, more to the point, it was pretty clear that the president didn’t care.

That wasn’t the point. The aim wasn’t to pass a bill but to peel some of the Hispanic vote away from the Democrats. The whole point of the proposal was simply announcing the proposal — a fact that become painfully evident as analysts began working over the plan and seeing just how sloppily it had been thrown together.

The hollowness of Team Rove's political approach is beginning to show. This one-trick pony which lost the popular vote in the last election hasn't been able to meet the Democratic primary challengers on substance. There isn't any "there" there.

Three Abide: Faith, Hope and Love

I found this interview in the current Australian. If you haven't been exposed to the figures before, they are staggering. Given the protectionist climate in the US at present, we are much more part of the problem than the solution.

How much luck would Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups have in recruiting suicide bombers if people had reasonable expections of some kind of economic and political self-determination? Terrorism is a political tool which works in a culture that lacks hope. Yes, this theological virtue is a political one, as well.

No peace without hope
By Roy Eccleston
February 04, 2004

JAMES Wolfensohn, the 70-year-old Australian who heads the World Bank in Washington, DC, sounds like a worried man. The world, says the wealthy former investment banker, is out of kilter.

The rich minority on the planet live for today and don't see the deluge of impoverished people about to descend on them during the next 30 years. The world's developed countries spend vast amounts on arms but only a fraction on aid.
....
Military spending worldwide is now probably $US1000 billion ($1315 billion), and spending on subsidies or tariffs to protect developed world farmers is about $US300 billion. Meanwhile, the rich countries offer no more than $US50-$US60 billion in aid to developing countries while blocking most of their agricultural exports -- one of the few ways these countries could pull themselves out of poverty.

"The three things are linked," Wolfensohn argues. There are 5billion people in the developing world, 3billion earning under $US2 a day, and 1.2 billion earning under $1 a day. "If you can't give them hope, which comes from getting a job or doing something productive, giving them their self-respect, these people become the basis on which terrorists or renegades or advocacy groups can flourish. It's an essentially unstable situation."

Nor is it just Arabs. Jews would be just as angry, so would Christians in poverty. "And we now have 2.8 billion people under the age of 23, 1.5 billion under the age of 15, and in the next 25 to 30 years the world grows by 2billion," Wolfensohn says, reeling off the figures.

"If you cannot deal with the question of hope or economic security, there is no way that with military expenditure you can have peace. I think you could spend $US2 trillion on military expenditure, but if you do nothing about poverty and development you're not going to have stability."

Moral Outrage

The Lies That Bind Us to Iraq
Using the ends to justify the means repeats the folly of Vietnam.

The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today.

Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his preemptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

Once again we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in preemptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana. For those requiring a refresher course in that previous folly, which so fractured our own country while devastating three others, check out the new documentary "The Fog of War," in which the Vietnam adventure's prime architect, Robert S. McNamara, tearfully concedes it was all a grand mistake.

That decadelong conflict was brought to you originally by Democrats, one of whom, John F. Kennedy, remains much admired. McNamara attempts to make the case that JFK wanted to get out but was assassinated before that could happen, but I don't buy that theory. Getting out is the hardest part, particularly once you have put abroad the lie that you invaded a country in order to save it. It is political suicide to then abandon such a crusading war when it turns sour.

Today, in Iraq, we again have been battered senseless by the argument that it is "irresponsible" to leave, even when it is clear we are no longer welcome. Those who dare suggest that our continued presence as an occupier is actually part of the problem — like presidential candidate Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) — are pilloried as unrealistic. But attempting to alter other people's history — while also serving our own economic and political needs — leads almost inevitably to quagmire, blowback and a nonsensical path of trying to make future truth of past lies: We didn't go to Iraq to save it, but now we have to save it to excuse the fact that we went.

Sean-Paul is back at The Agonist after an extended absence due to illness. His comment:

Let me see if I've got this right: the United States of America is in an uproar about JJ's tit; Investigations are being demanded and apologies are being made at a rate hitherto unseen in our history; and yet no one cares about the fact that no WMD was found in Iraq or that the Administration lied about it? Or the fact that the Bush administration is still lying about the budget deficit?

This country is f$%^king nuts.

Osama's Absentee Ballot

Will Osama Rock the Vote?

Given what is known from the strikes that continue to be mounted in other parts of the world, it seems likely that al Qaeda and its affiliates still command the resources and manpower necessary for conducting a major attack in the United States. Such a strike would require lengthy planning and preparation, but bin Laden is enough of a forward thinker to have laid the groundwork for such a terrorist demonstration many months, or even a few years, ago.

Another aircraft-based attack inside the United States would have devastating psychological effects upon us, but bin Laden knows that we are best prepared to thwart him in this area. So he may create a variation on a theme, say, by attacking our aircraft with shoulder-mounted missiles. This follows a trend begun with the attack on an Israeli jet taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, and continued more recently in attacks on commercial aircraft operating out of Baghdad International. More likely, though, bin Laden will try to strike in some area where we haven't concentrated our attention and defenses.

The main point is, if bin Laden has the capability to launch an attack on America this year, he will. It must be an irresistible temptation to know that, from his remote cave, he could possibly exert a decisive influence on the political succession in the United States.

A change in American leadership might also help to end the occupation of Iraq and reduce the shadow of U.S. power in other corners of the Muslim world. In much the same way, the election of George McClellan instead of Lincoln in 1864 would have had enormous effects, the most likely being an effort to bring about a negotiated end to the Civil War.

So, whatever drama may seem to be lacking in the grinding attrition of the Democratic primaries, they will nevertheless play an important role as a catalyst for the tense but largely hidden set piece going on at the same time. Al Qaeda operatives may be gathering to launch a pre-election attack on the United States while "hunter-killer" teams of special forces will be redoubling their efforts to capture or kill bin Laden and root out his operatives before they can strike.

Few novels or films can conjure up such powerful forces.

Perhaps this explains the bitterness of the infighting among the Democratic candidates. On some unspoken level, they must know that Osama bin Laden may yet "rock the vote," to the ultimate benefit of whoever can survive their struggles against each other.
John Arquilla is a professor of defense analysis at the United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Chilling thought.

Logistical Nightmare

Army Study of Iraq War Details a 'Morass' of Supply Shortages

By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: February 3, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — The first official Army history of the Iraq war reveals that American forces were plagued by a "morass" of supply shortages, radios that could not reach far-flung troops, disappointing psychological operations and virtually no reliable intelligence on how Saddam Hussein would defend Baghdad.

Logistics problems, which senior Army officials played down at the time, were much worse than have previously been reported. While the study serves mainly as a technical examination of how the Army performed and the problems it faced, it could also serve as a political document that could advance the Army's interests within the Pentagon.

Tank engines sat on warehouse shelves in Kuwait with no truck drivers to take them north. Broken-down trucks were scavenged for usable parts. Artillery units cannibalized parts from captured Iraqi guns to keep their howitzers operating. Army medics foraged medical supplies from combat hospitals.

In most cases, soldiers improvised solutions to keep the offensive rolling. But the study found that the Third Infantry Division, the Army's lead combat force, was within two weeks of being halted by a lack of spare parts, and Army logisticians had no effective distribution system.

"The morass of problems that confounded delivering parts and supplies — running the gamut of paper clips to tank engines — stems from the lack of a means to assign responsibility clearly," the study said.

It also found that the Pentagon's decision to send mostly combat units in the weeks before the invasion had the "unintended consequence" of holding back support troops until much later, contributing greatly to the logistics problems.

The findings are contained in a 504-page internal Army history of the war written by the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The unclassified study, a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times, was ordered last spring by the former Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who clashed with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over troop strength for postwar Iraq. It draws on interviews with 2,300 people, 68,000 photographs and nearly 120,000 documents.

Here's what that means in theater:

TIKRIT, Iraq — Black Hawk maintenance crews are feeling the stress of perilous flights by fewer birds, more flight hours and duct tape repairs.
“We’re literally flying them into the ground,” said Capt. Joe Sharrock of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Aviation Regiment.

Soldiers said they are flying three times as many missions as normal, and with only half the fleet of Black Hawks they had during the first Gulf War. Sharrock said that shortage, combined with the challenge of scrounging parts, means that if all repairs were done by the book “all our aircraft would be grounded.”

Maj. Scot Arey, the operations officer for the battalion, said his Black Hawks would see 350 flight hours per month back home at Fort Hood, Texas. In their first month in the Middle East, they flew 1,500. That’s slowed, somewhat, to about 1,000 per month.
“They’re like rental cars,” said Sgt. 1st Class Warren Koslowski. “You’re doing three times as much work with half as many aircraft.”

So far, the battalion’s Black Hawks have flown some 10,000 hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom — with no crashes. Every time someone brought this up during a recent interview, the sergeant rapped on a table, adding, “Knock on wood.”

Hide N Seek

Bill Would Give 9/11 Panel Time
Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page A02

Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced legislation yesterday to postpone the deadline for an independent commission studying the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to complete its work, proposing to give the panel until January 2005.

By law, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States must finish its report by May 27; its members say they need at least two months more. The White House has said it will oppose any extension.

The proposal by Lieberman, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and McCain would also give the panel an extra $6 million. Supporters say a 2005 deadline would avoid the release of the controversial report in the midst of the presidential election cycle.

Dear Sen. Lieberman,

Thank you for your assistance in the Bush 9/11 coverup.

Love,
Melanie

Budget Informercial

Domestic Spending: Gains for Education but Not Much Else
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO and LYNETTE CLEMETSON

Published: February 3, 2004

The new budget recommends cuts to 38 programs, including those focused on dropout prevention, gifted and talented children, guidance counselors in elementary schools and increased parental involvement in poor communities. In addition to the extra Title I money for poor schools, the budget would provide $1.1 billion for Reading First, a program that seeks to have all children reading by the third grade, and $132 million for a similar preschoolers' program.

The $57.3 billion budget would also increase by $1 billion the money for disabled students and add $823 million for Pell grants to low-income college students. The plan disappointed representatives for college students by leaving the maximum Pell grant unchanged at $4,050

Among the domestic items drawing criticism from liberals are Child Care and Development Block Grants, which give money to states to help low- and moderate-income working families with child care. Mandatory spending for the program for 2005 will remain at $2.7 billion. Although the budget calls for a slight increase in discretionary spending, to $2.1 billion from $2.09 billion, that amount dips consistently in the next four years, to $2.06 billion. A result, the administration acknowledges, is a gradual decline in child care and development services, lowering the number of children in such programs to 2.2 million in 2009 from 2.5 million.

The government plans major changes in Section 8 Housing Vouchers, rent subsidies for low-income families. According to the Housing and Urban Development Office, financing will dip slightly, to $14.3 billion from $14.5 billion. The main revision is changing how vouchers are issued, from a system based on housing units to one based on rents. Under the old system, the government guaranteed a set number of rental units and mandated that a poor family could not be forced to spend more than 30 percent of its income on rent.

Projects related to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives receive major attention. In addition to a $200 million request for drug treatments operated by religious and community groups, the budget includes $100 million for the Compassion Capital Fund, which helps religious and neighborhood groups receive federal money.

"The president continues to show his belief in America's armies of compassion," Jim Towey, director of the White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said. "He is continuing what he said he would do when he was inaugurated."

Armies of compassion, my a**. As per usual, I went to Comrade Max in search of some explication. He intones:

I'm staring at a block of paper, roughly 9 x 12 x 4 inches thick that is the Budget of the U.S. Government for Fiscal Year 2005. I do not claim to have mastered its deceptions, which culminate in the claim to cut the deficit in half by 2009, but some of the egregious crimes of accounting are visible on the surface.

This is not a serious or honest budget. In fact, it is not a budget at all. It's a political infomercial dedicated to George Bush's reelection.

I'm glad he cleared that up.

Friends

Steve Gilliard isn't out of trouble yet, but the surgery went well. Ignore the trolls and show his friend jen some love. She's holding down the fort while Steve is in recovery, which is going to be a long term project. As a friend of someone who has gone through this recently, I know she's a whole lot scairder than we are. We can send some love from our places here, she has to look at the result everyday to see her friend. Can you see the difference?

We love and support from here, but jen and his family are on the ground. Don't forget that they are doing what we can't do. His recovery is going to take a lot of time. We can do some nice fill-in work with that. If we like to think that this is community, the time to show it will appear shortly. You can find the link over on the right. I put Steve up there because he is part of the pride. Do what you can.

Getting a Clue

For Bush, a Tactical Retreat on Iraq
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 2, 2004; Page A01

In deciding to back an independent review of the intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, President Bush is implicitly conceding what he cannot publicly say: that something appears to be seriously wrong with the allegations he used to take the nation to war in Iraq.

'Bout damn time somebody said it.

Budget Inside Baseball

Okay, so I'm a little late to the budget dissection. A friend insisted that I step away from the glowing screen for 24 hours, a couple of great meals and a movie. She didn't really give me any choice and promises to do it again in the future.

Since she is computer free, I actually looked at dead-tree media. Boy, is that different. Here's an old-media story I haven't seen blogged yet, and an analysis courtesty of Brad deLong.

What It Takes
Monday, February 2, 2004; Page A16

WITH THE BUSH administration preparing to release its 2005 budget today, consider this question: What would it take to get the federal budget back into balance over the next 10 years? Mr. Bush and his advisers, like hucksters peddling a miracle diet, pretend that an elixir combining even more tax cuts with a dollop of spending discipline will get the deficit under control. The reality, detailed in a new study from the Brookings Institution, is that there is no easy road to balance, no matter your view about the proper size and role of the federal government.

The Brookings study, "Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget," offers examples of small-government, big-government, and "better government" paths to balance. What's striking is that all three paths entail, as the authors put it, "tough choices that are sure to be unpopular." To read the study is to be reminded not only of the enormity of the deficit problem but the political land mines embedded in any serious effort to address it.

Assume, to begin, that Congress makes the Bush tax cuts permanent, as the president demands, and increases spending only enough to keep up with inflation and population growth -- that is, at a far slower rate than either Mr. Bush or Congress has advocated in recent years. The annual deficit in 2014 would be $687 billion, though even that understates the bad news, since it counts the surplus in federal retirement accounts toward the general budget. If you set that surplus aside -- remember the lockbox? -- the deficit would top $1 trillion.

The Brookings report, edited by Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill, takes the smaller deficit figure as its challenge. Balancing the budget would save about $153 billion in interest costs, leaving a $534 billion gap to be made up by cutting spending or raising taxes. How to get there? The smaller-government plan entails cuts of a magnitude unthinkable to even the most conservative members of Congress. It would wipe out all federal spending for elementary and secondary education, for housing and urban development, for environmental protection and for state and local law enforcement -- and even then would require $134 billion in new taxes to achieve balance.

The bigger-government plan considers new spending programs along the lines of those discussed by the Democratic presidential candidates for health care, preschool, special education and college tuition. It would require not only undoing all the Bush tax cuts but also collecting significant additional revenue, for a whopping $629 billion in new taxes.

Even the Brookings proposal for a "better government" plan demonstrates the daunting nature of the budget-balancing task. It provides for new spending targeted to children and the poor; cuts $175 billion in current spending, including politically entrenched programs like farm subsidies and manned space flight; and still requires some $400 billion in tax increases.

One can argue that the study misses potential savings in this category or that, but the overall point is irrefutable: Getting the budget back in balance will be painful. It can't be done through spending cuts alone. And it will require far more fiscal realism than the president will display today, and far more political fortitude than Congress has shown in recent years.

Prof. deLong brings us analysis from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Bottom line: all hat, no deficit reduction cattle.

Globalized Bugs

Bird Flu May Have Passed Between Humans
By EMMA ROSS
The Associated Press
Sunday, February 1, 2004; 1:09 PM

BANGKOK, Thailand - Two Vietnamese sisters who died from bird flu may have caught the disease from their brother, which would be the first known case involving human-to-human transmission in the outbreak now sweeping Asia, the World Health Organization said Sunday.

The source of the sisters' infection has not been identified, but investigations have failed to find a specific event, such as contact with sick poultry, or an environmental source to explain the cases, WHO spokesman Bob Dietz said in Hanoi.

"Limited human-to-human transmission from the brother to his sisters is one possible explanation," he said.

No other cases of people catching the virus from other people have been suspected anywhere else.

Bird flu has killed millions of chickens in 10 Asian countries and jumped to humans in Thailand and Vietnam, killing at least 10 people.

China closed poultry markets and processing factories in bird flu-affected areas shortly after WHO warned that Beijing's chances to contain the disease may be dwindling.

WHO called on China to share more information about the disease, step up monitoring for possible human cases and take precautions so workers slaughtering birds are not infected.

Public health problems are globalised in a world of instantaneous travel and emerging diseases. The next also comes from China and bears watching:

China Announces New Confirmed SARS Case
By AUDRA ANG
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 31, 2004; 7:23 AM

BEIJING - China's Health Ministry announced a new confirmed case of SARS on Saturday, but said the patient - the country's fourth case this season - had already been discharged from a hospital.
....
The first known case of severe acute respiratory syndrome emerged in Guangdong in November 2002. A subsequent worldwide outbreak killed 774 people last year, including 349 in mainland China, and sickened more than 8,000 before subsiding last July.

This season's three other patients in China - a businessman, a waitress and a television producer - have been released from the hospital in recent weeks. All also were from Guangzhou.

The World Health Organization said it was important for health authorities to trace how the patients got sick as soon as possible.

"Now we have four cases without a concrete source of infection," said Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health Organization's office in Beijing. "It's something we're very concerned about."

We don't know the disease vectors--the paths of transmission--for either of these outbreaks, and that is worrisome.

The Budget Request

Anti-Terrorism Efforts Key in Budget, Bush Says
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page A10

President Bush will send Congress a $2.39 trillion budget on Monday that cuts environment, agriculture and energy programs while giving large increases to military and homeland security spending, administration and congressional officials said.
....
The delivery of the budget on Monday will begin a rancorous process that will set Bush against many conservatives in an election year. Many Republicans were already upset about the pace of spending and deficits when they found out this week that the cost of adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would be one-third higher than the administration had advertised just two months ago.

"We've dealt with the war and recession, and now we should be throttling back on spending," said a Republican leadership aide who attended the session. "A couple of the members are angry, but lots of them are serious about trying to restrain spending."

Bush is limiting the increase in discretionary spending -- spending not mandated by law -- to a nearly flat 0.5 percent, when defense and homeland security are excluded. House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) pointed out at the Philadelphia retreat that the part of the budget that has been essentially frozen amounts to 17 percent of the total and will have a negligible effect on the deficit.

Bush's Pentagon request is up 7 percent from a year ago, to $401.7 billion. But that figure does not include money that may be needed for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan after the money runs out from the $87.5 billion wartime supplemental budget bill Bush signed in November. Officials said they expect tens of billions of dollars more will be needed. But the White House said Bush will not request that money until calendar year 2005, after the election.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department will be squeezed as Bush reduces his request for spending on the environment and natural resources from $32.2 billion last year to $30.3 billion this year. But a senior administration official said there would be no cuts in the EPA's enforcement budget.

Bush will trim some measures he has supported in the past. Congressional sources said the budget will cut back on tax breaks for energy production that he supported last year. An administration official said Bush will not propose extending a law that temporarily lets companies take faster tax write-offs for equipment purchases. "You want to have a deadline because if it goes on forever, there's no incentive when you're trying to jump-start the economy," the official said.

In his continuing effort to put the onus for spending restraints on Congress, Bush announced in his radio address yesterday that he wants to make "spending limits the law" so that "every additional dollar the Congress wants to spend in excess of spending limits must be matched by a dollar in spending cuts elsewhere." Aides said this would essentially reinstitute pay-as-you-go budget rules, which originated in 1990 and expired Oct. 1, but with one big change: Bush's version would not apply to tax cuts.

Bush is giving himself more kindling to fan the flames of congressional discontent with this budget submittal. Republican Reps looking to separate themselves from the White House if Bush's ratings sink further along with the chances of success in Iraq and the intelligence hearings swing into gear have just been handed another piece of ammunition.

Note the areas bolded above. Is there any serious attempt at deficit reduction here? Obviously, no. Conservative Republicans won't be happy. This is going to be a long fight, unless the Republicans decided to throw in the towel so they can hit the campaign trail.

Attack Round-up

Expanding Violence
CNN Report Major Explosions, Loss of Life in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- At least 50 people were killed, including a top Kurdish official, and many more were wounded in nearly simultaneous suicide bombings Sunday morning at the offices of two Kurdish political parties in the northern Iraq town of Erbil, officials said.

Among those killed was Sami Abdul Rahman, the de facto deputy prime minister for the Erbil region and a top Kurdish Democratic Party leader, coalition sources said.

Elsewhere in Iraq:

*An explosion overnight at an ammunition depot in southern Iraq killed several people, and Polish officials were investigating whether the victims were responsible for causing the blast, according to a Polish military spokesman in Karbala.
Initial estimates were that the explosion killed five to 20 people, the spokesman said.

*Also Saturday, a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. 4th Infantry Division convoy traveling between the northeast Iraqi towns of Tikrit and Kirkuk killed three soldiers. The deaths brought to 524 the number of U.S. forces killed in the Iraq war, including 366 from hostile fire.

Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't sound to me like the situation is coming under greater control.

UPDATE: AP reports:

TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - One American soldier was killed and 12 others injured in a rocket attack Sunday on an Army base in central Iraq, the U.S. military said.

The rocket landed inside a logistics support base of the 4th Infantry Division in Balad, 50 miles south of the division's headquarters in Tikrit, an Army statement said.

It said two of the injured soldiers are in a serious condition. Following the attack, troops detained 16 people including four women for questioning, it said without elaborating.

What's It All About?

Blair fears being hung out to dry by Bush over WMD
White House confirms possibility of independent inquiry into war. PM isolated over wait-and-see policy as weapons hunt flounders
By Andy McSmith and Raymond Whitaker
01 February 2004

Close associates of Tony Blair fear that the Prime Minister is on the point of being hung out to dry by President George Bush over the issue of whether Iraq held weapons of mass destruction when Britain and the US went to war last March.
Under pressure from the Democrats and some prominent Republicans in an election year, Mr Bush is edging towards an admission that the intelligence used by the US and Britain to justify the war was faulty. White House sources said yesterday that he may yield to demands for an independent inquiry into the failure of intelligence on Iraq.

One leading ally of the Prime Minister said: "There have been signs of a divergent strategy in Washington. This is a real problem for Blair."

Having enlisted Britain's spies in making the case for war in the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's WMD, the Prime Minister is less able than Mr Bush to distance himself. The White House, unlike No 10, never staked its entire case for war on Iraq's alleged possession of WMD, and may seek to deflect blame on to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including MI6.

The changing message from Washington comes as Downing Street advisers are still recovering from their astonishment at public reaction to last week's Hutton report into the suicide of the weapons expert David Kelly.

Instead of seeing the report as proof that Mr Blair believed in the existence of Iraq's illegal weaponry when the took the country to war, the public - according to early opinion polls - thinks that the BBC has been unfairly traduced for trying to uncover the truth behind the decision to go to war.

From the Guardian, a timeline of the whole Blair/BBC affair.