Saddam--911, lather, rinse, repeat. We mean what we say. Resolute, strong leadership, the world is better for it.

Kerry still isn't coherent on this one--if Saddam Hussein was not a threat, John, should W have known that? Should you?

Lehrer isn't doing a horrible job, but the "pre-emptive" war just came up and it is the wrong question. There is a difference between "pre-emptive" and "preventative" war, and W has us bogged in the latter.

The Atriosians are noticing all of Bush's rapid eye blinks. Over at Kos, Tom Schaller has has the dope on the social and anthropological significance of winks and blinks, it is interesting reading. All of Bush's facial tics are out in force tonight, the smirk is being surpressed but still lurks and an odd echo of it shows up occasionally.

The Kossacks are celebrating, but I call this one a tie right now. Bush didn't have a meltdown, his verbal skills were actually adequate. O' course, all of his facts were wrong. I still want to know where his Texas twang came from, the rest of the family doesn't have it. One of the things I've noticed is that Texans who move elsewhere and want to eradicate the beast have a couple of words that they can never disguise in places like Ohio. Dan Rather and Jim Lehrer are two such Texans, so was my last ex-husband. The give away words are "school" and "I'm." I recommend that you read Molly Ivins for the Texas transliteration of those words, native Texans cannot get them right in TV news diction school. Bush pronounces them like a graduate of Phillips Andover.

He's a Crawford Homeboy Fraud.

Discussing Russia, he'll have "effective disagreement" with Vladumur Putin. WTF? What's "effective disagreement." Vladumur. What a man of the world.

I doubt that any souls were saved this evening, it was dueling stump speeches and I don't think John Kerry wins with this tactic.

Those of you in Toronto are free to circulate my resume to interested emploiyers. I haven't added the geek stuff yet. Let me know if I need to get on it.

The history tone-deaf American electorate won the debate tonight.

FUBAR

While you are watching the debate (the "foreign policy" event of the group of three) tonight, keep the following in the back of your mind:

Via Will Bunch's Campaign Extra,From: [Wall Street Journal reporter] Farnaz Fassihi
Subject: From Baghdad

America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard
units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being
murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

An Historian has Questions

Of God and War
By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER Jr.

Published: September 30, 2004

Do you really believe that there are fewer terrorists plotting against America today than there were before you began the invasion of Iraq?

Your version of Christianity supports and blesses preventive war. What relation is this to the Christianity preached by the pope and by mainstream Protestants who oppose preventive war?

Since you obviously did not anticipate the troubles in Iraq, what do you plan to do to the incompetent advisers who misled you and are responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 American G.I.'s and 20,000 Iraqi civilians? Or do you not see an accountability problem? President John F. Kennedy fired the people who led him into the Bay of Pigs. Why do you not do likewise?

I'll be blogging the debate live tonight. See Froomkin's blogger survey in tomorrow's washintonpost.com.

As American As....

Blogger Big Tino nails the Peter Angelos deal that will allow DC to get a MLB team (after more than 30 years of no baseball in the nation's capitol.) Big T says:

Here’s the next hustle. Teach Black kids to idolize the sports team owners instead of the players. You know, “Shaq studied free throws to become a better player, but Peter Angelos studied tax law and municipal finance to become a better owner.” I’m serious. This needs to be the next big thing!

Here's the deal (and it is ingenious): if he can demonstrate that the DC team is costing him any gate or season ticket sales, the other owners will make up the difference. Only OPEC (outside of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group) has managed to create such a self-protective coterie of "entrepreneurs" (thieves by any other name.) Here's a link to the WaPo headline.

I'm a fan of the game so I'll be glad to see its return. I learned my baseball in the cheap seats at Fenway, falling in love with the game's perennial heartbreakers, the Red Sox, in baseball's holiest temple ("Thwpwpwpt," Bronx Bombers...) from some of the most knowledgable fans of the game. One of my co-workers is already lobbying our office to pick up a pair of season tickets, which is just good business sense, and means that the staff can pick up a couple of games a year each. Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium will be the home of the new team until the new stadium can be built (and this in a city which already has three professional sports venues) and RFK is old fashioned, no club suites until the new thing comes around.

Angelos in Baltimore has driven his team into the ground--a technique that works in a game which has a draft, but doesn't work so well in the baseball monopoly. Given that the O's have stunk for a few seasons, Angelos's coup is that he's guaranteed himself an income with a team that stinks and will continue to stink for as long as he wants to second guess his GM and scouts. I understand that as a labor lawyer, he's a genius. As an owner, he's a business man first and a lover of the game someplace way down the list.

Here's just a guess: this post will generate more heat than anything I've written on politics.

The Truly Frightening DOJ

Operation American Repression?
An Army [ed. :non-commissioned] officer in Iraq who wrote a highly critical article on the administration's conduct of the war is being investigated for disloyalty -- if charged and convicted, he could get 20 years.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert

Sept. 29, 2004 | An Army Reserve staff sergeant who last week wrote a critical analysis of the United States' prospects in Iraq now faces possible disciplinary action for disloyalty and insubordination. If charges are bought and the officer is found guilty, he could face 20 years in prison. It would be the first such disloyalty prosecution since the Vietnam War.

The essay prompted a swift response from Lorentz's commanders. In an e-mail this week to Salon, Lorentz, declining to comment further on his piece, noted, "Because of my article, I am under investigation at this time for very serious charges which carry up to a 20-year prison sentence." According to Lorentz, the investigation is looking into whether his writing constituted a disloyalty crime under both federal statute (Title 18, Section 2388, of the U.S. Code) and Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
....
Prosecutions are rare, however, says Grant Lattin, a military lawyer and retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, because members of the military "have the constitutional right to express their opinions pertaining to the issues before the public. Short of there being classified material and security issues, people can write letters about military subjects. If you look at the Army Times, you'll see letters from people on active duty complaining about this and that."
....
As for Lorentz's case, Lattin, who served as a Marine judge advocate, says it's not uncommon for commanders to threaten soldiers with legal action in order to make a point: "If they know there's an offense for a disloyal statement, I wouldn't be surprised if he said, 'Knock it off.'" Lattin doubts that in the end Lorentz will face prosecution for his writings. "After this gets to lawyers and prosecutors who think about the consequences and the First Amendment, I don't think this will go anywhere."

Lessee: the Ashcroft DOJ has prosecuted 5,000 "terrorism" cases under the Patriot Act and been unable to win one conviction, but they are ready to prosecute this soldier for telling the truth? Truly, we are ruled by idiots.

War Rooms

Digby notices something I've been talking about for a year: Bushco is at war with the CIA, always a dangerous thing for a president to do. Digby quotes Novakula:

A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as ''just guessing,'' the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.)

For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking. George Tenet's retirement as director of Central Intelligence removed the buffer between president and agency. As the new DCI, Porter Goss inherits an extraordinarily sensitive situation.

Pillar's Tuesday night presentation was conducted under what used to be called the Lindley Rule (devised by Newsweek's Ernest K. Lindley): The identity of the speaker, to whom he spoke, and the fact that he spoke at all are secret, but the substance of what he said can be reported. This dinner, however, knocks the Lindley Rule on its head. The substance was less significant than the forbidden background details.

The Bush-CIA tension escalated Sept. 15 when the New York Times reported a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was circulated in August (not July, as the newspaper reported), spelling out ''a dark assessment of Iraq'' with civil war as the ''worst case'' outcome. The NIE was prepared by Pillar, and well-placed sources believe Pillar leaked it, though he denied that at Tuesday night's dinner.

The immediate White House reaction to the NIE, from spokesman Scott McClellan, was to associate it with ''pessimists'' and ''hand-wringers.'' With Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side at the United Nations, Bush said of the CIA: ''They were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.''

A few hours later, Pillar discussed the Iraqi war in a context of increased aversion to the United States -- an attitude he said his East Asia section at the CIA was aware of three years ago and feared would be exacerbated by U.S. military intervention. When Pillar was asked why this was not made clear to the president and other higher authorities, his answer was that nobody asked -- not even Tenet.

The CIA official spokesman said Pillar's West Coast appearance was approved by his ''management team'' at Langley as part of an ongoing ''outreach'' program. However, the spokesman said, Pillar told him that the fact I knew his name meant somebody had violated the off-the-record nature of his remarks. In other words, the CIA bureaucracy wants a license to criticize the president and the former DCI without being held accountable.

I always take Novak with a huge helping of salt because of his need to celebrate himself (all these "private dinners" that he goes to, for example, are a way of saying "I'm special and you aren't," something you hear out of narcissistic personality disorder cases all the time) rather than let the news value of his reporting speak for itself, but this column stands the "stink" test. I've been hearing for a while that Bushco is at war with both CIA and the State Department (which are at war with each other, and that's probably a good thing.) This is a dangerously dysfunctional government, not a good thing with a nuclear threat growing in North Korea and Iran. This government cannot walk and chew gum. Whatever happened to W's "axis of evil," anyway?

The Madness of Crowds

With Oil Near $50 a Barrel, Gas Prices Start to Inch Up
By SIMON ROMERO

Published: September 29, 2004

HOUSTON, Sept. 28 - As the price of crude oil flirts with $50 a barrel, gasoline prices are heading up again, ending an unusual period in which gasoline prices were falling even as oil prices rose.

Crude oil and gasoline prices began moving in opposite directions in June, a conundrum that was a pleasant surprise for motorists in the peak summer holiday season.

Last week, however, gasoline prices jumped 5.1 cents a gallon, to a national average of $1.917 a gallon, still below the record average of $2.06 a gallon in May but 33 cents higher than a year ago, the Energy Department said. If crude oil prices keep going up, as many oil industry officials predict, gasoline prices are expected to keep climbing as well, as is the price of home heating fuel.

The end to the divergence between crude oil and gasoline prices was inevitable, industry analysts say, for a simple reason: supply and demand were behind the abnormal movement this summer, and are behind it now.

When adjusted for inflation, gasoline remains cheaper than during the oil shocks of the late 1970's and early 1980's; gasoline reached a record national average of about $2.80 a gallon in 1981 when the impact of inflation is taken into account.

Still, the odd price movement in the summer struck many as suspicious. Some suggested the possible political motivation of oil companies trying to influence the presidential election. "Take a look at what has been going on since about mid-June 2004,'' said a posting on one Web site, www.abovetopsecret.com. "Crude has made a steep upward turn, yet months later gas prices are still decreasing. Well, there is an election year coming up."

Iraq is a mess, gas is going up and the economy, a fragile flower is nosing south as we enter those last weeks before the election. Let's see how Karl Rove puts lipstick on this pig. Even the vast unwashed are beginning to notice that something is wrong:

Confidence of Consumers Shows a Drop

Published: September 29, 2004

By Reuters

Consumer confidence edged lower again in September after falling in August, as persistent worries about the job market weighed on sentiment, a report released yesterday said.

The Conference Board, a private forecasting group, said its index of the mood of consumers fell to 96.8, from a revised 98.7 in August. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a rise to 99.

Consumer worries about the labor market have clouded the outlook for consumer spending, which powers two-thirds of the nation's economy. Soaring oil prices, which crimped spending in the second quarter, pose another threat to economic growth.

"Confidence in the state of the economy is diminished and within that, confidence on job prospects is the biggest factor," said Richard J. DeKaser, chief economist at the National City Corporation. "I would guess that the impact of higher oil prices is feeding through as well. The problem with energy prices is that when they rise, there's nowhere to run."

The percentage of consumers surveyed who said jobs were hard to get rose to 28.3 percent, from 26 percent, while those who viewed jobs as plentiful fell to 16.8 percent, from 18.4 percent.

"The recent declines in the index were caused primarily by a deterioration in consumers' assessment of employment conditions," said Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center. "Soft labor market conditions have clearly taken a toll on consumer confidence."

I read the lay-off numbers yesterday. Major manufacturors and the airlines are taking a hosing.

The Scripps-Howard piece I gave you yesterday said that 25% of the voters make up their mind at the last minute (and that this is not a rational decision.) My income has been flat to negative since 1999. I'm guessing I'm not alone.

When "Optimism" Is A Lie

Growing Pessimism on Iraq
Doubts Increase Within U.S. Security Agencies

By Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page A01

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."

"Things are definitely not improving," said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq.

"It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."

This weekend, in a rare departure from the positive talking points used by administration spokesmen, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the insurgency is strengthening and that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is increasing. "Yes, it's getting worse," he said of the insurgency on ABC's "This Week." At the same time, the U.S. commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that "we will fight our way through the elections." Abizaid said he believes Iraq is still winnable once a new political order and the Iraqi security force is in place.

Actually, things have been sliding downhill for months, but the media hasn't told you that. The security situation in Iraq began deteriorating well over a year ago. We told you that here.

This is reason enough to turn out the incompetants who are running things. Rummy lives in W's world of spin, not the real world. And none of them have a plan to rescue the situation.

Abizaid is a political creature, not a military one. He does not reflect the views of the military professionals at the Pentagon. He's one of W's useful idiots, and I guess he doesn't have the strength of mind to understand that he will be W's Westmoreland. History will not be kind to him.

Oh, WaPo, where have you been while Iraq was sliding down hill? You've been one hell of a cheer leader for this unnecessary war from the beginning. You are not going to be held harmless from your sins.

Covert Actions and Wet Work

The Bush Administration takes heat for a CIA plan to influence Iraq's elections
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER; DOUGLAS WALLER

President Bush and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi insisted last week that Iraq would go ahead with elections scheduled for January, despite continuing violence. But U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving those elections — a secret "finding" written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates — whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran — but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections. But lawmakers from both parties raised questions about the idea when it was sent to Capitol Hill. In particular, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi "came unglued" when she learned about what a source described as a plan for "the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections." Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue.

Rice spokesman Sean McCormack says, "I cannot in any way comment on classified matters, the existence or nonexistence of findings." But, McCormack says, "there have been and continue to be concerns about efforts by outsiders to influence the outcome of the Iraqi elections, including money flowing from Iran. This raises concerns about whether there will be a level playing field for the election. This situation has posed difficult dilemmas about what action, if any, the U.S. should take in response. In the final analysis, we have adopted a policy that we will not try to influence the outcome of the upcoming Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office." A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans. "This was a tough call. We went back and forth on it in the U.S. government. We consulted the Hill on this question ... Our embassy in Baghdad will run a number of overt programs to support the democratic electoral process," as the U.S. does elsewhere in the world.

I wish I could say that the Bush admin is unique on this, but the fact is that we've been doing it for years. If we don't use the CIA to outright install dictators, we manipulate elections. This is old news, although Bushco is more blatant about it than most (Venezuala, Equitorial Guinea, Argentina, most recently.) What IS unusual is that it got leaked, and this looks like a pretty high level leak.

Now, I have to go change out of these wet clothes and into something cozy. The remnents of Jeanne visited us this afternoon, just in time for the commute home. I know a whole lot more about tropical air masses than I want to, and the rain on the walk to the subway and home from the bus was flooding and wind-driven. This might be a hot bath kind of night. Why does reading the news like this make me feel like I need soap and hot water.

Cat Speaks

Something Bad Has Begun
* The former Cat Stevens says he hasn't changed but the U.S. has.

By Yusuf Islam, Yusuf Islam, the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, was deported to Britain last week after being refused entry into the United States.

God almighty! Is this the same planet I'd taken off from? I was devastated. The unbelievable thing is that only two months earlier, I had been having meetings in Washington with top officials from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to talk about my charity work. Even further back, one month after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was in New York meeting Peter Gabriel and Hillary Rodham Clinton at the World Economic Forum!

Had I changed that much? No. Actually, it's the indiscriminate procedure of profiling that's changed. I am a victim of an unjust and arbitrary system, hastily imposed, that serves only to belittle America's image as a defender of the civil liberties that so many dearly struggled and died for over the centuries.

Need I say that any form of terrorism or violence is the antithesis of everything I love and stand for? Anyone who knows me will attest to this. I have spent my life in the search for peace and understanding, and that was mirrored clearly in my music. Since becoming a Muslim, I have devoted my life to education, charity and helping children around the world.

Consistently I have condemned the attacks of 9/11, stating that the slaughter of innocents, the taking of hostages and coldblooded killing of women and children have nothing do with the teachings of Islam. I've openly and publicly repudiated the actions of groups that resort to such acts of inhumanity — whatever their names. Any allegations to the contrary are fabricated. The Koran equates the murder of one innocent person with the murder of all of humanity.

Ever since I embraced Islam in 1977, people have regularly tried to link me with things I have nothing to do with. Take the Salman Rushdie case as an example, or the regurgitating of the accusation that I support groups like Hamas.

I am a man of peace, and I denounce all forms of terrorism and injustice; it is simply outrageous for anyone to suggest otherwise. The fact that I have sympathy for ordinary people in the world who are suffering from occupation, tyranny, poverty or war is human and has nothing to do with politics or terrorism.

Thank God my daughter and I were relieved of our ordeal and delivered home safely. I also thank all those who prayed for me and supported me through this dark episode; I have never harbored any ill will toward people of God's great Earth anywhere — and wish the reverse was also true.

Where is the outrage? Are Americans so freaking stupid that they really think that the "everything is different" after 9-11 is that human rights and civil liberties have gone by the board? We are living in a country governed by an administration which came to power in an illegal coup, in which the routine abrogation of the rights of the innocent are not just tolerated but encouraged by the legislature (here comes Patriot II) while the media and the citizens profess no interest what so ever. I find my countrymen's indifference to all of this abhorent.

Joining the Shrill

How Dare Kerry Speak Up

The suggestion that terrorists support Sen. John F. Kerry for president is ugly, but basically silly. The suggestion that Kerry supports the terrorists is flat-out disgusting. President Bush has allowed surrogates to spread the former idea, but he himself has helped to promote the latter. Last week, Bush declared that Kerry's criticism of him and his Iraq policy "can embolden an enemy" and called Kerry "destructive" to the war on terror.

Since election day 2000 and through his first term, Bush has talked a better game of democratic values than he has played. And he is not one for nuances in any event. But the point here is not subtle: The right to criticize the policies of those in power is not just one of democracy's fringe benefits; it is essential to making the democratic machinery work. And questions of war and peace — dead young Americans, dead Iraqis, a radicalized Middle East, billions of dollars: Was it worth all this? — are the ones that need democracy the most. Why would any president even wish to plunge this country into war and keep it there without a level of support from the citizenry that is strong enough to survive the obvious counterarguments?

Bush's own campaign strategy has put the events of 9/11 and their aftermath at the center of this election. The president asks to be reelected based on the claim that his response to that event has been a success. It would be convenient for him if any challenge to this notion were considered beyond the pale. Increasingly convenient, in fact, as the word "success" seems less and less applicable. But Bush's convenience is not what this election is about.

This attempt to delegitimize criticism rather than rebut it comes as part three of a three-part Republican strategy. (At least we hope there are only three parts.) Part one was the first wave of Swift boat ads (and the ridiculous hoo-ha around them), raising questions about Kerry's Vietnam service. From there it was an easy leap to part two, the second Swift boat wave and the accompanying fuss about Kerry's leadership of the Vietnam antiwar movement. Part three drives it all home: As during Vietnam, so during Iraq. The guy is still at it, disloyally attacking his own country in wartime and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

I invite those of you who are unfamiliar with the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950's to go back and take a gander at them. If this means I've joined the ranks of the shrill, so be it.

Nuremburg Tactics

Supporters Get Incentive Plans at Bush Rallies
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Want to see the president when he comes to your town? Get in line - to make phone calls for his campaign.

....
Campaign rallies may be as old as politics itself, but in this year of earliests, firsts and most-expensive-evers, the Bush campaign has taken this most basic form of communication to a new state of the art, by pressing audiences to work as foot soldiers, before, during and immediately after Bush events.

The tactic points up a stark difference between the presidential campaigns: while Senator John Kerry is using his rallies and forums to try to reach undecided voters and to close the deal with standoffish Democrats, Mr. Bush is packing his audiences with supporters who must identify themselves as such in questionnaires and whipping them into brigades ready to blitz crucial districts to get every last voter to the polls.

Kerry aides scoff at the invitation-only audiences and what they say is the shanghai-ing of volunteers. "We don't require oaths of allegiance, and we don't take people captive," said Tom Shea, director of the Kerry campaign in Florida, after turning out close to 10,000 people for a rally in Orlando last Tuesday where, he said, 700 people signed up to help.

But Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Yale and the author of "Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout," said Mr. Bush's strategy was inspired. "There's a basic principle in experimental psychology, that the hand teaches the heart," Professor Green said. "You've now made phone calls for George Bush; that helps solidify your commitment to the campaign. If you weren't enthusiastic and committed already, you might be now."

At a rally in Bangor, Me., last Thursday, Katrina Waite had driven nearly two hours and then waited seven more under a sweltering sun to see the president. The reward for her early arrival? A spot way in back, atop a flatbed truck, where she downed cups of water fetched by her two children to stave off the heat.

Ms. Waite said her mother had earned a spot up front. "She did three hours of phone calling to get it," she said, peering to try to pick her mother out in the crowd.

This tactic pulls the Calvinist "doctrine of the the elect" up to a whole new level. Bushco left 'way behind the idea of "mainstream" a great long while ago. These are fanatics.

That Ought to Keep the Little Bastards

Umm, I just spent an hour with dead soldiers and NBC wants me to care about if it is Leno or Conan?

Excuse me. The fact that an illegitimate Bush administration is fighting a war in a country with which we had no beef (and his father supported), soldiers are dying, and I'm supposed to give a rat's ass about this? None of these guys are funny and I could use a little funny right now.

To distract me from the fact that Bush turned Iraq into a meat grinder. Oh, yeah. That. Television is the IED for the American viewer and it trumps facts.

Meteorology--The Sequel

I look at a lot of models when I look at hurricane forecasting, and this is why I told you, after Hurricane Isabel devestated the urban east coast last year, that we were heading into a bad patch. I'm waiting on the remnents of Jeanne this evening, and it probably won't be a real bad event here, but friends in Florida are dealing with hurricane exhaustion. Ask the folks in Richmond, Virginia, what a tropical storm can look like.

We are headed for a lot more of this: the decadal models point to greater activity in the coming years. The beaches are built up like they never were before and the exposure by the insurance industry is likely to become unbearable, if the models bear out. Add to that the RISK reports by major re-insurers predicting greater meteorological chaos caused by global warming and I think I'd get a little alarmed.

2004 might be the year in which we noticed that something new is going on. We'll see.

Busy Bumper

Sorry about the dearth of posting today. I suspect the rest of the week will be like this: I'm in a crunch time at work, trying to come up to speed with the new data base, making marketing calls to publicize our annual event, getting reports off the new data base (thank God for Ibuprofen,) going to the bookstore to look for aftermarket manuals on the new data base and so forth. I think I squeezed lunch in between meetings. Meetingsmeetingsmeetings. But I had new clothes.

The bookstore didn't provide much help, and it is the best IT bookstore in Washington. I'm going to appeal, as I so often do, to you remarkable readers for help. I know about the O'Reilly books and picked up a frequent buyer card today. Here is what I need: an overview/guide for Visual FoxPro and a quickie cheat sheet. The query language in GT Pro (the data base) is NOT intuitive and I need to reconfigure some of the fields in the data entry side and on the query side to make them more user friendly. The Implementation folks at KTS, the vendor for the application, are remarkably helpful, but at $150 an hour by phone, I need to get independent as soon as possible.

Yes, I have a pretty decent, if broad, understanding of data bases and how they retrieve information. I need to deal with the quircks of this application and I need it now. There is a users' group, but it is still pretty sparse. The query language gets closer to the machine than most users want to go, and I need to make it friendly. Readers? Any help?

Tribalism and its Discontents

Watch out for those voters

By PAUL CAMPOS
Scripps Howard News Service
21-SEP-04

When it comes to politics, the average person is an idiot. Depressing evidence for this claim can be found in a recent New Yorker essay by Louis Menand, which surveys the political-science literature regarding why people vote the way they do.

The conclusions from this literature include:

_ No more than 10 percent of the population can be said to have a coherent political belief system, using even a loose definition of that term. Most people's political beliefs, to the extent they have any at all, suffer from a lack of what political scientists call "constraint" _ i.e., little or no logical connection exists between the positions they hold. For example, a large proportion of voters see no contradiction between being in favor of both lower taxes and increased government services.

_ Perhaps a quarter of all voters vote on the basis of factors that have no "issue content" whatever. They vote for candidates who seem likable, or optimistic, or for those whose campaign posters are particularly eye-catching. According to Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, millions of voters in the 2000 presidential election based their votes on what the weather had been like lately.

_ Voters are remarkably bad at calculating their own self-interest, even when their self-interest and their political beliefs coincide. Bartels gives the following example. Only the richest 2 percent of Americans pay estate taxes. Yet among people who believe that the rich ought to pay more taxes, and who also believe that growing income inequality is a bad thing, two-thirds also favor repeal of the estate tax. Menand observes that this sort of data helps explain the otherwise puzzling fact "that the world's greatest democracy has an electorate that continually 'chooses' to transfer more and more wealth to a smaller and smaller fraction of itself."

Even if we ignore how many people have no coherent political beliefs, or base their voting on irrational factors, the sheer ignorance of the average American should take us aback. Seventy percent of Americans can't identify their senators or their congressman. Around 30 million can't find the United States on a map.

Now consider that the upcoming presidential election will almost certainly be decided by voters who have not yet decided for whom they are going to vote (in 2000, 18 percent of voters made their decision in the final two weeks of the campaign, and 5 percent _ far more than the decisive margin _ made their decision on Election Day itself). It's safe to say that almost everyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to national politics, and who has anything resembling coherent political beliefs, has already decided what he or she is going to do on Nov. 2, at least in regard to the presidential election.

But the cold fact is that tens of millions of Americans don't fit that description. They normally pay no attention to politics; whatever political beliefs they do have tend to be wildly inconsistent; and they base their votes on frankly irrational factors.

These are the crucial swing voters in the crucial swing states, who will decide who should occupy the world's most powerful political office for the next four years.

I found this last night (at The Agonist) but didn't blog because I wanted to think about it some more. Intuitively, this MSNBC poll feels right: most of my family hold political views which are incoherent and not in their best economic interest. I've been thinking about this particularly in regard to the things I heard from Canadians on my recent trip north: admittedly, most of my friends are classical social democrats, but Canada is a majority social democratic nation, so my views are held by the Canadian majority if not the American one. The "industrialized west" are social democrats of one stripe or another and Americans stick out for the strong conservative streak which has grown since Goldwater re-made the Republican party. I'm going to view this for the moment as an artifact of the rise of Evangelical Christianity over the last 30 years, an Evangelicalism of a particularly moralistic stripe, which has always appealed to some of the darker corners of the American psyche.

There is something in the human spirit which means that we each want to be seen as "special," and one of the cheap ways we do that is by joining an in group and then demonizing every other group. The Bush campaign has elevated appealing to this tendency to an art form. It is one of the basest parts of our anthropology and that is only one of the reasons I despise it so. Our solidarity in our common humanity, and appeals to that, are some of the best parts parts to which we can appeal.

A Very Public woman

At last, a public woman comes along who lets a woman's life be complicated, funny and ironic. I could do a lot with that and a billion dollars. I'd also give my eyeteeth to sit down with a Dubonnet with her, the idea of a beer with Bush being profoundly uninteresting to me.

It's long and worth it: THE CANDIDATE’S WIFE
by JUDITH THURMAN
Teresa Heinz Kerry is an uncharted element on the road to the White House.
Issue of 2004-09-27
Posted 2004-09-20

Late in August, while the Republicans convened in New York, the Kerrys vacationed on Nantucket. They resumed campaigning on Labor Day weekend, and Heinz Kerry spent the holiday in her home state, marching with thousands of citizens in a Pittsburgh parade and speaking at a sparsely attended union picnic and rally in Philadelphia. It took place on a pier near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, across the Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey. The audience of steamfitters, longshoremen, and janitors had come with their children and wore the T-shirts of their locals.

Heinz Kerry’s hair was windblown and her cheeks rosy. Her acid-green suit was the color of an immense tanker, the Chemical Pioneer, slowly steaming up the river behind the stage. “No war is worth fighting if the people in our country aren’t defended by good schools, jobs, and health care,” she told the audience. It was a new speech: lean of detail, punchy, brief, and delivered with the ease of a seasoned candidate. The shy whisper and distracting tics were gone. At one point, she leaned over to joke with an elderly black woman sitting on a folding chair in the front row who said that she was ninety and had plenty of opinions. There was laughter and applause. “I’m a woman of a certain age and I deserve my opinions,” Heinz Kerry said to the audience. “I’ve earned them the old-fashioned way.”

A week later, when Heinz Kerry was on her way to Pittsburgh with Wren Wirth (her close women friends take turns keeping her company on the road), I asked her what she thought about the increasingly vicious campaign, and the cheap caricatures of her personal eccentricities. “It’s sad that in America people have to put up with that kind of thing,” she said. “It’s sadder still that people like it.” Her voice on the phone sounded serene—neither embattled nor tinny with false optimism. Her syntax was baroque and elegiac, perhaps with fatigue, and her sentences were curiously wonkish and poetic at the same time. “I am grateful that, being as old as I am”—she mentioned her age twice in the course of a five-minute conversation—“I have developed an interesting way to deal with it that I didn’t know I had in me, which is contextualizing what is said, not reading either the puffy things which would give me an oversized head or the things which would give me a shrivelled heart.” She spoke of Bush’s promise to reduce health-care costs, pointing out that he had just raised Medicare premiums for the elderly by seventeen per cent. “I never thought there would be so many lies,” she said. “It’s been quite amazing. But I don’t dwell there, I dwell in a better house, a house of hope.”

The Kossaks have been going nuts over Liz Edwards' appearance in the diaries. Me, I want to spend a little time picking THK's brain. If any of you readers have any pull with the Kerry campaign, let them know that Teresa gets interview space here, if she wants it.

The Shabby WaPo

A New Tax Cut

Sunday, September 26, 2004; Page B06

This latest cut, which ended up with a price tag of $146 billion, most of it to be paid in the next five years, is the outgrowth of lawmakers' bogus bid to look as if they had a modicum of fiscal responsibility on the last go-round. Then, they insisted that the tax package couldn't cost more than $350 billion over 10 years. They achieved that illusion by jury-rigging the bill to have its most popular tax breaks expire this year -- limiting the ostensible cost while knowing full well that their weak-kneed colleagues wouldn't dare risk looking like tax-hikers with an election looming.

The inevitable extension came about in a particularly cynical and anti-democratic way. Leaders dispensed with bothersome rituals such as hearings, committee markups, floor debate and amendments. They hijacked a tax bill that was supposed to help the working poor and that therefore had been languishing in conference for months. They recalibrated it so that the working poor got the tiniest slice of the benefits, and then they took it directly to the floor, where it could not be amended -- no requirement, for example, that the cuts be paid for. In the Senate, just three brave souls dared withstand the pressure: retiring Democrat and deficit hawk Ernest F. Hollings (S.C.) and two moderate Republicans, Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) and Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.). John F. Kerry wasn't so courageous; he supported the tax-cut extensions.

And was it, as advertised, a middle-class tax bill? Certainly, middle-class families get help. According to an analysis by the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, taxpayers earning between $50,000 and $75,000 will receive an average tax benefit of $353 next year as a result of the bill. Taxpayers earning between $200,000 and $500,000 will see their average tax burden fall by nearly $2,400. More than half of the bill's benefits go to taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year, although they account for fewer than 13 percent of all taxpayers. If all of this were without cost, it wouldn't much matter. But the tab will come due down the road. And those who will end up having to pay are, more likely than not, the children of the middle class that is the supposed beneficiary of this election-year pandering.

The WaPo ed board follows the Bush administration through the looking glass. Excuse me, in what form of arithmetic is a tax cut "without cost?" The thousandaires working for the Post think that it doesn't matter that the majority of the cuts go to the 13 percent of the richest Americans and that this has no significance in and of itself? The Post doesn't think, apparently, that there is any moral dimension to tax policy and economics. If that's what they are teaching in the J schools these days, God help us all. On the page facing the Post eds is a Broder column taking the media to task for shoddy, cheer-leaderish coverage of Iraq and the Bush admin in general. I guess the ed board doesn't read their own columnists.

Partisanship in the Pew

GOP urges Catholics to shun Kerry

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | September 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party is attempting to convince Roman Catholics that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry is "wrong for Catholics" and at odds with his church.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee launched a website called "KerryWrongForCatholics.com" that takes the Massachusetts senator to task for voting against the Defense of Marriage Act, favoring civil unions for gays and lesbians, opposing vouchers for private schools, and taking stands on abortion and other issues that are contrary to church teachings.

The GOP site points out where Kerry, a Catholic, is at variance with the Vatican. A section on Kerry's stance on same-sex unions, for example, is headlined: "Kerry Said Vatican Should Not Instruct Catholic Politicians, Calling It 'Inappropriate.' "

The site suggests that Bush, a Methodist, has a stronger record on Catholic values.

Private groups also have been urging Catholics to oppose candidates who favor abortion and other issues the church condemns. Earlier this month, a nonprofit organization called Priests for Life announced a $1 million campaign, including television commercials, aimed at persuading voters to support candidates who oppose abortion. Another nonprofit, Catholic Answers, is issuing millions of voter guides that list five "nonnegotiable" issues for Catholic voters: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and "homosexual marriage."

The combined effect of the party and private efforts could be as significant politically as the swift boat veterans attack on Kerry, the difference being that this one is occurring without blistering television commercials and is mostly "below the radar screen," according to John Green, who studies religion and politics at the University of Akron.

The Bush campaign's enthusiasm for bending religion to partisan aims is one of the most despicable faetures of this year's ugliest ever presidential race. Bushco hasn't come right out and said that "God is a Republican," but they sure would like both evangelical and Catholic voters to go there.

Here's a Catholic with a slightly different perspective, one endorsed at some pretty high levels:

A dove in good company

September 24, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

''War,'' the pope said on Jan. 13, 2003, ''cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring common good except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after military operations.''

The teaching on the Iraq war is not ''authoritative.'' Yet, ought not Catholic conservatives, who virtually worship the pope, at least listen to him respectfully on this subject?

Why don't American Catholics react to the pope's warning about the war? Mostly, I suspect, because they don't know about it. The national media pay little attention to the pope save when they bash him for something. The rhetoric of the Vatican is often so complicated that it is not entirely clear what is being said. The Catholic media (official diocesan papers), with some exceptions, are afraid to offend their super patriotic leadership. Some parish priests may be reluctant to quote the pope on the Iraq war for fear that their people will be angry.

A constant concern in the pope's comments is fear of the death of innocent civilians. Iraqi deaths don't count, quite literally. The Defense Department refuses to count them. Some estimate that Iraqi casualties are as high as 30,000. If the war goes on long enough, Americans may kill as many Iraqis as did Saddam Hussein. Today, every time someone dies in Iraq, Americans are blamed because if they had not come, these people would still be alive.

Yet, most Americans are unconcerned about the death of Iraqi civilians. They wear towels on their heads and walk around in their pajamas. They speak a funny language and believe in a funny religion. They scream at us with hate. Why should Americans worry about them? They're barely human.

Bottom line? The Catholic vote is a whole lot more complex than black-and-white Bushco understands.

A Little Extrospection

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel's as others see us!--Rabbie Burns

You Scare Us
Bush is giving Latin America the willies

By Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes is the author, most recently, of "Contra Bush," which will be translated into seven languages.

U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the name of anti-communism caused great suffering. The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile. The Central American wars in the 1980s and their high body counts. These Latin American grievances were balanced by a perception that the U.S. never formally renounced the principles of international law and the hope that it would reaffirm them again.

What is alarming about the Bush administration is its formal denunciation of the basic rules of international intercourse. With us or against us, President Bush declares starkly and simplistically. The U.S. acts according to its own interests, "not those of an illusory international community," asserts national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Is it strange that many Latin Americans should see in these statements an aggressive denial of the only leverage we have in dealing with Washington: the rule of law, the balance obtained through diplomatic negotiation?

Not only out of self-interest, but also as participants in the global society, many Latin Americans worry that U.S. unilateralism is incompatible with the multilateralist nature of globalization. This was the warning issued by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo at last year's Harvard commencement. Add Chilean President Ricardo Lagos' perception that the world community is postponing the urgent global agenda of creating an adequate social-program fund, strengthening human rights and overcoming the chasms between haves and have-nots. And top it with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's plea to the French National Assembly: Fight vigorously against terror but also against the underlying causes of terror: hunger, ignorance, inequality and distorted perceptions of other cultures.

Fortunately, these composite voices of Latin American statesmen found a powerful echo in North America, when former President Clinton warned that you do not defeat terror if you do not figure out how to work with an interdependent world.

These voices, these warnings, these hopes have been disowned by the Bush administration. "With us or against us," Bush has said. It hardly matters. Offensive as these words are to the international community, I believe that Latin America, in particular, will not forget the outright deceptions of the Bush era: the shifting rationales for an unnecessary war and a disastrous postwar occupation; the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the targeting of one tyrant (Saddam Hussein) among many (Kim Jong II, Robert Mugabe, Moammar Kadafi); the utter lack of foresight that an occupied Iraq would rise against the foreign occupiers and try to fashion its own political future out of its complex religious, tribal and cultural realities, all of them ignored by the neoconservatives in Washington.

But while not forgetting these mistakes and deceptions, we would put the accent on the restoration of the rule of law, the thrust of cooperation and the attention due to 3 billion human beings living in poverty, ignorance and illness. When Bush and his bellicose minions are gone, these problems will still be around. We in Latin America should try to bring them forward as the real agenda for this troubling century.

Fuentes is correct in addressing "this troubling century," but he is blind if he thinks that the end of Bushco will end American blindness to Latin America. There is a substantial fraction of the American electorate which doesn't much like foreign aid or foreigners, particularly those of an hispanic stripe.

As much as I hate to say it, and I do, Bushco and the 50/50 nation aren't the problem but the symptom of a rich and divided nation being hauled unwilling into the 21st century. We are the biggest kid on the block, and we are still a mere teenager, unwilling to look at adult responsibilities and adult risks. We aren't cool headed, we are easy to provoke and we tend to overlook what we don't want to see.

The world would be well served by a wealthy, powerful and realistic America, but I don't see that happening in the next four years or the next 20. What I hear at the hair stylist, the watercooler and family gathering is American myopia. If you asked the person sitting next to you in church this morning to point to Iraq on a world map, I'm pretty sure I'd know the response you'd get.

On the Ground

Violence in Iraq Belies Claims of Calm, Data Show

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 26, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 25 -- Less than four months before planned national elections in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by a private security firm working for the U.S. government.

Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital's Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.

In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.

Speaking with President Bush at the White House on Thursday, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said the security situation in Iraq was "good for elections to be held tomorrow" in 15 of the country's 18 provinces. Elections for a national assembly are scheduled for January.

Allawi told Washington Post reporters and editors on Friday that "for now the only place which is not really that safe is Fallujah, downtown Fallujah. The rest, there are varying degrees. Some -- most -- of the provinces are really quite safe."

Um, Rajiv, I think you aren't getting out of the hotel a lot and are acting as the credible shill for the Bushies.

Here is what I hear elsewhere:

Human Dignity, Crazy Mike, and Indian Country
by Jim Lobe

The reason why Washington is having such a difficult time persuading others of its good faith and its good works in the "war on terror" was best illustrated Tuesday this week.

While President George W. Bush told the UN General Assembly that the U.S. belief in "human dignity" – a phrase he used no less than 10 times – was the main U.S. motivation for pursuing the war, two articles that appeared in two major U.S. newspapers the same morning offered an altogether different subtext.

The first piece, titled "Indian Country," was written by one of the administration's geo-strategic gurus, Robert D. Kaplan, and published on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Kaplan, who is writing a series of books about the U.S. military, extolled the wonders of U.S. Special Forces operating in small units from "forward operating bases" (FOBs) without direction from any "Washington bureaucracy" and outside the scrutiny of the global media.

Just like "in the days of fighting the Indians," wrote Kaplan, "the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that can be accomplished."

Unbeknownst to Kaplan and, presumably, to Bush, as well, the Los Angeles Times that morning was publishing a front-page article that gave one example of precisely what such a unit could do.

Based on reports by a UN team, the Washington-based Crimes of War Project, and the office of the Afghan Armed Forces attorney general, the Times described how U.S. Special Forces at one FOB in southeastern Afghanistan last year beat and tortured eight Afghan soldiers over no less than 17 days, until one of their victims, 18-year-old Jamal Naseer, died.

The eight were taken to the Special Forces FOB near Gardez on March 1, 2003, after they were seized while manning a security checkpoint amid suspicions, apparently planted by local faction leaders competing for US support, that Afghan army units in the area were selling arms to the Taliban.

According to the consistent testimony of the men, they were "pummeled, kicked, karate-chopped, hung upside down and struck repeatedly with sticks, rubber hoses and plastic-covered cables," the Times reported. "Some said they were immersed in cold water, then made to lie in the snow. Some said they were kept blindfolded for long periods and subjected to electric shocks to their toes."

During their ordeal, they were never given medical help or even provided with a change of clothes.

No wonder the Iraqis are sometimes having difficulty remembering that we are the good guys. It would be easier to remember if we actually WERE the good guys, but we are acting just like the next boot on the neck of your ordinary Iraqi, the new boss is the same as the old boss.

The New Boss

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

I was raised by the rules of my Scandanavian ancestors: pillage first, then burn. These chaps are incompetant.

New Experience

Well, gang, I did something today I haven't done in six years: I went shopping. It isn't an activity I particularly enjoy, but I haven't had new clothes or shoes in more than six years. It wasn't a particularly big splurge, Target isn't expensive, but I have some new tops and slacks that don't look like they go back to graduate school.

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions for the "business casual" shopping experience. I have new chinos in a couple of colors and a pair of sweater sets. Shoes I'll tackle tomorrow at the Off Broadway shoe outlet.

It's been so long since I've been in a department store that I found myself somewhat overwhelmed: there is so much stuff that it is quite confusing if you aren't used to it. Time to hit the Lands End catalog

Through the Looking Glass

Bush rejects Saddam 9/11 link
Bush maintains Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda are connected

US President George Bush has said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks.

As recently as last Sunday, Vice-President Dick Cheney, refused to rule out a link between Iraq and 11 September, saying "'we don't know".

Actually, Dick, we do know. No thanks to you.

Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.

Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.

The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.

President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.

Veteran pollsters say the persistent belief of a link between the attacks and Saddam could help explain why public support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has been so resilient despite problems establishing a peaceful country.

The president frequently has called the Iraq war an important centerpiece in the United States' war on terror. But some members of the administration have said recently they don't believe there is a direct link.

The Post poll of 1,003 adults was taken Aug. 7-11 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A Time magazine/CNN poll released Saturday said most Americans — 71% — believe the United States has done a good job in Iraq since the end of major fighting, while 26% said it has done a poor job.

Bush Denounces Kerry for His Remark on Allawi
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: September 25, 2004

RACINE, Wis., Sept. 24 - President Bush hit back hard at Senator John Kerry on Friday for what he called Mr. Kerry's attacks on Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq, who stood by the president's side this week as steadfastly as a member of the Bush campaign.

"This great man came to our country to talk about how he's risking his life for a free Iraq, which helps America, and Senator Kerry held a press conference and questioned Prime Minister Allawi's credibility,'' Mr. Bush said at a speech in the southern Wisconsin town of Janesville. "You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility. The message ought to be to the Iraqi people: 'We support you.' The message ought to be loud and clear: 'We'll stand with you if you do the hard work.' ''

The president was referring to Mr. Kerry's remarks on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, where the senator said Dr. Allawi was contradicting himself by asserting that terrorists in Iraq were on the defensive, after saying foreign fighters were coming into his country from across the border.

In what has become a furious daily exchange over Iraq by the two presidential candidates, the Bush campaign seized on Mr. Kerry's comment as a slur unworthy of a man seeking to occupy the White House.

"For a man who has made his centerpiece for being president the ability to magically bring allies to the table, you don't accomplish that by insulting and denigrating one of our most important allies in the war on terror,'' said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director.

Mr. Kerry's campaign replied that he had not insulted Dr. Allawi but was just questioning his outlook. Campaign officials added that the Bush administration had no credibility on Iraq and that in recent days the president, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had contradicted one another on Iraqi elections scheduled for January.

Mr. Bush has said America will keep its word to have elections in January; Mr. Cheney has said the Iraqis will decide. Mr. Rumsfeld said Thursday and again Friday that elections could be held in three-fourths or four-fifths of Iraq if insurgents prevented them elsewhere, but Mr. Armitage told a House committee on Friday that voting should go on in all of Iraq.

"The administration's credibility on Iraq collapsed today,'' Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Mr. Kerry's running mate, said in a statement on Friday. Mr. Edwards added that "for a president who is fond of saying we should not send mixed messages, you need a scorecard today to keep up with all the different and contradictory statements from the White House.''

Mr. Bush's campaign billed his event, at a Janesville conference center, as a forum to promote his education policies. But the education issues he sought to advance - expanding Pell grants, strengthening community colleges, providing loans for workers who return to school for job retraining - were overshadowed by his sharp words against his challenger on Iraq.

"Earlier this week, my opponent said he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today,'' Mr. Bush said of Mr. Kerry's recent remarks that the American-led invasion had made the United States less safe. "You know, I just strongly disagree. It's tough work, no question about it. We've done tough work before. But if Saddam Hussein were in power, our security would be threatened.''

Exactly HOW did Saddam Hussein threaten our security? I seem to recall that Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11, 2001, attacks. Where is he?

Bush is campaigning on the stupidity of Americans, and he may very well win because the media and the public ignore objective facts. Iyad Allawi is a CIA-supported thug, appointed by Bush. What does this have to do with freedom and democracy?

Kerry questions the legitimacy of Bush's actions and Bush responds with bluster rather than answers. If we put up with this, shame on us.

Even the Rats Leave

via yankee doodle:

German TV Set to Pull Iraq Reporters After Warning
Fri Sep 24, 2004 01:49 PM ET

German TV Set to Pull Iraq Reporters After Warning
Fri Sep 24, 2004 01:49 PM ET
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BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's biggest television network, ARD, said on Friday it planned to pull out its two correspondents in Iraq after a foreign ministry warning that German journalists could be singled out for kidnappings.

Separately, the Spanish government has recommended to media that they withdraw their correspondents from Iraq following the increase in attacks and kidnappings there, the newspaper El Mundo said on its Web site on Friday.

The Spanish news agency EFE has withdrawn its only Spanish correspondent, Jose Manuel Seage, from Baghdad, a senior journalist at the agency said.

More than 100 foreigners have been abducted in Iraq since April in a deepening campaign, among them two French journalists who are still being held. Most hostages have been released, but around 30 have been killed.

The German foreign ministry last week strengthened a warning originally issued in March 2003 that mentioned journalists and the "very high risk" of kidnapping. But it declined to comment specifically on the issue on Friday.

A spokeswoman for Suedwestrundfunk, the regional broadcaster in the ARD network in charge of television coverage from Iraq, said: "The temporary withdrawal of our correspondent is being prepared."

A spokesman for another ARD broadcaster said the network's radio correspondent would return to the Jordanian capital Amman on Saturday and report from there until further notice.

Until this month, almost all the kidnapped foreigners were snatched on Iraq's perilous roads. But the capture of foreigners in Baghdad in operations that seem carefully planned is an escalation that has alarmed foreign embassies and firms.

Ya think the "insurgents" (i.e. ordinary Iraqis who don't like being shot at) might have planned this?

God Almighty and the Almighty Dollar

Defense and the National Interest, Chuck Finley's amazing site, is one of the places I go to further my education in military strategy and logistics. He has two articles up right now which ought to cause everyone some pause.

BTW, I think that Steve Gilliard and I both told you that Iraq was lost a long time ago.

From D-N-I.net:

Destroying The National Guard

The fact of the matter is that Versailles on the Potomac does not care about the rest of the country in any respect, so long as the tax dollars keep coming in. My old friend King Louis XVI might be able to tell Rumsfeld & Co. where that road eventually ends up.

Under "Fair Use" of Title 17 USC S107-8, I'm excerpting some of Elaine Grossman's work from the same site. The news is not good and it is not clear that W. understands this:

Inside The Pentagon
by Elaine M. Grossman
September 23, 2004

The defense panel’s third alternative is perhaps the most controversial: to “scale back the number and/or objectives of stabilization missions.” Bush has repeatedly said he intends to “stay the course” in Afghanistan and Iraq, noting the importance of following through on U.S. commitments abroad. Kerry maintains a similar stance on this question.

I'm hoping that Kerry "gets it" but just can't say it yet. I don't think that American voters are prepared to hear how bad the quagmire is just yet. One has to have "optimistic" language to speak with Americans, no matter how bad the situation is, and, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to craft such a message just now. So I'll give it to you straight: we are in a world of hurt, we can't pay for it and I don't know how it will end. Some pundits who have a philosophical model more broad than mine say that this is the end of the illusion of empire and Pax Americana. I think that both empire and Pax Americana were illusions in the first place and never very well fixed in the facts of history. We'll throw another couple of hundreds of billions of dollars down another shithole war and still wonder why we are on the bottom of the list of "industrialized" countries with the worst healthcare, education and lifespan statistics.

The theocrats would have you believe that the USA is a miracle. It ain't. When you give a buck to the Pentagon, the same buck doesn't miraculously pop up someplace else (W's "tax break.") Believing in God doesn't cancel simple arithmetic.

Coffee and tired feet

Thank you.

An anonymous reader sent a gift certificate via Amazon, and because of it (and him or her) I will shortly be the proud owner of a new coffee system (we can't call them "coffee pots" anymore, and this one is amazing,) along with a new pair of shoes, my first pair in six years. My tired dogs stuffed themselves into some old pumps this week and I remembered why I hate heels so much, these things ain't shaped to human feet.

Coffee and shoes are the critical elements for the urban commuter. Thank you, anonyreader. I hope you'll get it back in better, more pain-free blogging (my dogs hurt, and I start the day EARLY with a caffeine boost) and a few words for the wise.

I'll begin blogging at The American Street on Sunday. I'll be e cross posted here, but I urge you to read AmStreet's supply of authors. It is a great privilege to be invited to join. I've got an Gadflyer article coming up shortly (tomorrow will be a writing day) so you can pick your poison.

Thanks, readers, for all you've done for me. I hope I can continue to provide content that matters to you. I learned today that PayPal is a scam and I'm going to move my buttons elsewhere. And get my checking account the hell off of their system. This should be completed by the end of the weekend. I don't want to have your data get hosed if you choose to contribute. I'm moving to the Amazon Honor System. If you need help to move, let me know. I'm a sysadmin now and I can do global changes.

[She snores when she gets this tired. It ain't pretty.]

Laundry, I need to do laundry; Let the carpers have their turm, you are more than up to it.

It Depends on What the Meaning of the Word "IS" IS

Pop singer is forced to leave US
US aides say he has terrorist ties

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff | September 23, 2004

The artist formerly known as Cat Stevens was forced to leave the country yesterday on a flight out of Logan International Airport because he was recently placed on several watch lists for possible links to terrorists, federal officials said.

The 56-year-old pop singer, who changed his name to Yusuf Islam after becoming a Muslim, was aboard a London-to-Washington flight that was abruptly diverted to Bangor Tuesday afternoon, after federal officials learned that he was among the passengers.

He was flagged "because of concerns about activities that could potentially be related to terrorism," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

"Also, more recently, the intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further heightens the concerns [about] Islam," the statement said.

Federal officials would not provide details of what activities had raised concerns about the man who became a pop star in the 1960s and 1970s with hits such as "Wild World," "Morning Has Broken," and "Peace Train," only to abandon his career after converting to Islam in the late 1970s.

But Muslim groups in the United States and Britain criticized federal authorities for their treatment of Islam, a high-profile peace activist who has used profits from his famous songs to form charities, establish four Islamic schools in London, and give money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as well as to children in Iraq.

Islam had been in the United States twice in the last year without incident, first in February to speak at a United Nations conference and then in May to promote his new DVD of his last North American tour in 1976.

The Council of American-Islamic Relations, the largest Islamic civil liberties group in the United States, called on the Bush administration yesterday to give more explanation for why Islam was deported.

The group compared his case to that of Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar who was supposed to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame this fall, but was denied entry to the United States. The council suggested that the policy is "not the way to win the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide."

"When internationally respected Islamic personalities like Yusuf Islam and Professor Tariq Ramadan are denied entry to the United States, it sends the disturbing message that even moderate and mainstream Muslims will now be treated like terrorists," Nihad Awad, the council's executive director, said in a statement.

Anas Altikriti, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said in an interview, "It does seem more and more that those voicing dissenting views on US foreign policy will be forbidden from entering the country."

Note how our competant Homeland Security types allowed this threat to get on a plane in the first place. We are governed by idiots who think that a peace activist with an Islamic name is a threat...

I got pulled out of line for two extra security searches on the way home from Canada yesterday morning, which seems of a piece with this bit of hysteria. I wonder when the Blair administration is going to come screaming about this outrage against one of its most harmless citizens. Is there anyone besides France which is going to stick up for the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights?

France pours cold water on Bush's sunny vision of Iraq

UNITED NATIONS : France, one of the harshest critics of the war that brought down Saddam Hussein, stressed it would not commit troops for Iraq despite appeals from the United States and United Nations.

As Iraq Prime Minister Iyad Allawi met in Washington with US President George W. Bush and hailed the war as a success, France poured cold water on any slim hope it might send forces to help ease the post-war chaos.

"As everyone knows, France did not approve of the conditions in which the conflict was unleashed. Neither today nor tomorrow will it commit itself militarily in Iraq," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said.

"In Iraq, violence is exploding. Only when the Iraqis themselves take control of their future ... will the country be able to escape the chaos which could destabilise the entire region," Barnier told the UN General Assembly.

The bitter divisions over the war have re-emerged in the opening days of the two-week annual debate of world leaders at the United Nations, especially after a pointed exchange Tuesday between Bush and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Annan has asked for nations to contribute troops to help protect UN staff who are working to help prepare for elections in Iraq before the end of January -- but no nations have yet committed any forces.

Whether or not the international community is going to be moved to help get President Kerry out of Bush's quagmire remains to be seen, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Meaningful elections in Iraq in January? Don't bet your butt on it:

Rumsfeld Raises Prospect of Limited Iraq Elections

Reuters
Thursday, September 23, 2004; 5:05 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday raised the possibility that some areas of Iraq night be excluded from elections scheduled for January if security could not be guaranteed.

"Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," Rumsfeld said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

"Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," he said.

By damn, if Florida in 2000 was good enough for the US, it's good enough for the rest of the planet. I don't read Rumsfeld's statement as a judgement on Afghanistan or Iraq as much as I read it as a cautionary statement on November: imperfect democracy is good enough for Bush. That's what put him in office in the first place.

Once More Down the Rabbit Hole

The guy is a CIA shill, a strongman we put in to replace the other strongman we put in. Let's do a little reality testing, shall we? The WaPo doesn't seem up to it, but we are.

Iraq's Dynamo
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi Generates a Can-Do Aura

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 24, 2004; Page C01

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi leans on a lectern in the Rose Garden, a swagger in his pose. He's side by side with President George W. Bush, a man who knows something about swaggering. Allawi doesn't look out of place -- not here, perhaps not anywhere.

His eyebrows arc upward. His glasses ride low on his nose. He looks stern and focused and intense, even as he looks charmed and amused, kind of avuncular, like an Iraqi Tony Soprano, but in a fine charcoal gray suit.

None of this is to suggest a thug. That's not quite right. By training, Allawi's a neurologist. But there is the temper to consider, as when he got angry with some aides not too long ago and slammed his hand on a table -- hard -- and broke his right wrist. And there's the unfounded but popular Baghdad street rumor of his recent gunplay against some bad guys. Not to mention his work in the 1990s with the CIA, including a bungled coup plot.

He is a man on a mission that has consumed his life, a man of single-minded focus born, perhaps, that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axes. His leg was almost severed. His chest suffered a cleaving blow. The hospital had him for nearly a year, and the quest to recover Iraq from Hussein has had him for nearly three decades more.

So at yesterday's Rose Garden ceremony, at this time of beheadings, body counts and car bombs, he is telling of his efforts to tamp down the uprisings, to make sure elections can go forward in January, to sway tribal leaders in places like Fallujah to get with the program, with democracy and development.

He has zero popular support, but those good suits just make the WaPo go all Noonan over how manly he is. The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, but the WaPo gets dizzy over a good suit. Tell me how nuts this is? Here is the real story, via Juan Cole:

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani continues to be concerned as to whether elections will be held in January in Iraq, and whether the outcome will reflect the Shiite majority in Iraq. He is worried that the system adopted, of nation-wide party lists, favors a small set of parties, mainly expatriate. Since the six major parties listed include the two (Sunni) Kurdish parties and the largely Sunni Iraqi National Accord (primarily ex-Baathists) led by Iyad Allawi, as well as the mixed Iraqi National Congress, I think Sistani is afraid that the al-Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq--the two main Shiite parties-- could end up with a minority in parliament.

Odysseus had to steer between the two monsters of Scylla and Charybdis. So to does the US in Iraq.

Is it not interesting that the American public is willing to buy the lies that the Iraqis are unwilling to swallow?

Once in a Blue Moon

Once upon a time, I belonged to some BBs, some prodigy boards, and some list-servs. We lived all over the world, but we got to know each other through our online passions and presences. And then we arranged some parties and real magic happened.

In the last few weeks, I've had a chance to get to know a couple of my favorite bloggers and I've come out of it thinking that my taste is pretty good, some of the finest evenings of my life have come out of these interactions.

I note that Bumpers have a pretty substantial presence in the DC metro area and along the east coast. Would you lot like to get together? I can do event planning in my sleep and would be happy to provide us with a venue (and probably conference rates, if you'd need to stay over in a motel/hotel.) Would you like to be part of a shin-dig? I can suggest some dates. Would you all like to meet each other? I'd like to meet you, if you want to make it happen. There are enough of you now that such an idea is not outlandish. This could be an evening at a pub for the locals, or something more elaborate if you far-flung want to make a weekend in DC out of it. Either would be easy for me to do as a conference planner, a larger gathering will take a bit more starch out of me, but only a bit, and a bit more cash out of you, not for me but for a venue. You decide.

Tell me what you'd like and I'll see what I can do. I have this cozy idea that you'd all rather fancy each other and I'd give my left....something or other (I broke that nail this evening, so I can't give it to you) to make it happen, if you want to do it. I'm your humble servant to the community here. Tell me what you'd like, I'll tell you what's possible. :>}

Just asking....

Back home, to my own computer. Mmmm. More later this weekend, the week was both sweet and hard, like the old fashioned candy my grampa used to give me, and I may need to sleep for a full 12 hours. Tired like this only comes around long enough to throw out a really crazy idea, but I promise you that I'll remember this one in the morning.

You've been very good to me, and I want to be very good to you as we come up on the blogiversary of this site in November. I want to give something back and I now have a tiny bit of the wherewhithall. Your suggestions are welcome.

Falls the Shadow

The hollow world of George Bush

The power of positive thinking is the president's shield from reality

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 23, 2004
The Guardian

Bush explained that, for him, intelligence is not to inform decision-making, but to be used or rejected to advance an ideological and political agenda. His dismissal is an affirmation of the politicisation and corruption of intelligence that rationalised the war.

In his stump speech, which he repeats word for word across the country, Bush explains that he invaded Iraq because of "the lesson of September the 11th". WMD goes unmentioned; the only reason Bush offers is Saddam Hussein as an agent of terrorism. "He was a sworn enemy of the United States of America; he had ties to terrorist networks. Do you remember Abu Nidal? He's the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his organisation."

The period of Leon Klinghoffer's murder in 1985 on the liner Achille Lauro (by Abu Abbas, in fact) coincided with the US courtship of Saddam, marked by the celebrated visits of then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld. The US collaborated in intelligence exchanges and materially supported Saddam in his war with Iran, authorising the sale of biological agents for Saddam's laboratories, a diversification of his WMD capability.

The reason was not born of idealism, but necessity: the threat of an expansive Iran-controlled Shia fundamentalism to the entire Gulf.

The policy of courting Saddam continued until he invaded Kuwait. But realpolitik prevailed when US forces held back from capturing Baghdad for larger, geostrategic reasons. The first Bush grasped that in wars to come, the US would need ad hoc coalitions to share the military burden and financial cost. Taking Baghdad would have violated the UN resolution that gave legitimacy to the first Gulf war, as well as creating a nightmare of "Lebanonisation", as secretary of state James Baker called it. Realism prevailed; Saddam's power was subdued and drastically reduced. It was the greatest accomplishment of the first President Bush.

When he honoured the UN resolution, the credibility of the US in the region was enormously enhanced, enabling serious movement on the Middle East peace process. Now this President Bush has undone the foundation of his father's work, which was built upon by President Clinton.

Bush's campaign depends on the containment of any contrary perception of reality. He must evade, deny and suppress it. His true opponent is not his Democratic foe - called unpatriotic and the candidate of al-Qaida by the vice-president - but events. Bush's latest vision is his shield against them. He invokes the power of positive thinking, as taught by Emile Coue, guru of autosuggestion in the giddy 1920s, who urged mental improvement through constant repetition: "Every day in every way I am getting better and better."

It was during this era of illusion that TS Eliot wrote The Hollow Men: Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow."

Truthtelling in American politics has always been, at best, a sometime thing, but the stakes of Bush's lies, "faith-based" or otherwise, has gotten all out of proportion with what should even be self-interest for him. When a psychopath embarks on a course which is self-destructive and liable to take a lot of others with him, even the most conservative court in the land would issue an order to have such a person placed in psychiatric custody.

I was reminded of the "occasional" nature of American truthtelling while at a lecture in Toronto last night. Do you Americans, those of you educated in our public schools, ever remember being taught that the War of 1812 was begun by us and lost by us? You don't remember learning that? Funny, neither do I and I was an honors student in American History.

Anywho, I'm looking forward to the day when we once again have a government in which senior presidential aides not only have heard of T.S. Eliot, but can also quote him. I have a hard time imagining, say, Karl Rove doing such a thing.

NOT MAROONED IN TORONTO

I overstated the case: I may have extremely limited access to the 'Net during my training days, but "marooned in Toronto" I am not. While the hotel I'm staying at is beached in an office park (dead after 5 PM) and I am carless, the Torontonians I know have stepped up to the challenge and I will not have spent one night on this trip in my hotel room for the entire evening. I have been wined and dined and entertained. Those of you who have read this blog for a while know that I'm quite mad for this beautiful country and the warm and hospitable people who inhabit it.

Last night I had dinner with pogge, one of the Canadian polibloggers whose work I have read and admired since he went live last October. In person, one finds the gentle, self-deprecating and wry humor and intelligence which are so much the hallmark of his written style. pogge writes from his authentic self, a quality I much prize in a medium which is so flooded with poseurs of both the left and right.

I will get to see Fr. Judy again this evening at a history lecture at the church where she is completing the second year of her curracy in the Anglican Church of Canada. She and I met four years ago in a discernment program for women examining career change at midlife. We both landed in the seminary a few months later, she to pursue ordained ministry and I to fine-tune my pastoral and theological skills for spiritual direction, retreat leadership and teaching. This is one of those friendships in which the conversation has never had a beginning and a pause of a year or so can be picked up exactly where we left off.

I'll be on a plane back to DC in the wee, small hours of tomorrow morning to put in a full day at the office with all of the new things I've learned, but I'm never again going to let a space of four years pass before I return to Canada. I'll be back again to Toronto next summer (for the first paid vacation of my life, I believe) and wander for the first time in the parklands of "cottage country" north of Toronto, the amazing lakes and forrests of Northern Ontario.

If there is a flaw in the Canadian national character, it is in what happens when they get behind the wheel of a car: either Canadians are optimists who have stared down their fear of death, or they have a death wish. The highways here are not for the timid or the impatient, but the beauty of the place and the warmth of the (otherwise) sane Canadians are ample pay-off for the stout of heart and stick shift.

Toronto is worth a week on its own, one of the most diverse cities in North America with a rich cultural life and one of the most attractive city centers in the eastern part of the continent. I look forward to my return. Farewell, but not goodbye, Toronto.

Words from the Wise

Plenty of US news all over the A section of the Globe and Mail this morning, but this is the story that caught my eye:

A wiser Internet?

By JACK KAPICA
Globe and Mail Update

The Internet, which was once limited to colleges and was largely the preserve of young people, is now attracting greyer users, a new survey says.

And not only are older Canadians going on-line, they are going on-line with better technology and spending more time in cyberspace.

The report, called Canadian Interactive Reid Report and released Monday by Ipsos-Reid, says that currently 60 per cent of people 55 years of ago and older have Internet access. Last year, only 48 per cent of that age group used the Internet.

Older Canadians are also embracing high-speed access. Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of those 55 years of age and older with Internet access have high-speed Internet access.

Older Canadians are also spending more time on-line. The mean number of hours spent on-line per week is 9.6 hours, a substantial increase over the 6.8 hours per week reported at this time a year ago.

But if older people are thronging to the Net, they still trail younger users, whose mean time on-line is 12.5 hours per week. But they are closing the gap — at this time last year, older users spent 5.7 fewer hours per week on-line than their younger counterparts, but now the gap is at 2.9 hours per week.

"Compared to younger adults, it took older adults a lot of time to embrace the Internet," Ipsos-Reid vice-president Chris Ferneyhough said in a release. "But it appears that they've finally accepted it as a means to communicate, entertain, and educate."

But older Canadians still trail younger Canadians in taking part in different activities on-line. Only 41 per cent of those 55 years of age an older have done on-line banking, while 55 per cent of younger users have. Also, 41 per cent of those aged 55 and over purchased a product or service on-line, compared to 51 per cent of those under 55 years of age.

Older Canadians are also less likely than younger Canadians to use the Internet for shopping. Only 39 per cent said they tried comparison-shopping for a product on-line, while 55 per cent of those under 55 years of age said they did.
Older Canadians are embracing one activity as enthusiastically as their younger counterparts: on-line investing. In that area, 13 per cent of both older and younger Canadians have bought or sold investments on-line.

Mr. Ferneyhough interpreted the results of the survey as a signal to marketing people to adjust their demographics.

"Marketers need to pay attention to this group of on-line users, because they represent the fastest growing and wealthiest contingent of on-line Canadians," he said.

We may not be as fast, but we do catch on eventually.

My mom's fledgling steps on the Internet are being repeated all over North America. Welcome aboard, Mom.

Marooned in Toronto

Hi, all.

The office laptop has no ethernet capability, so I'm basically nearly internet free until I return to DC. I have a little free time on the lunch hour between training sessions, and I'll try to update then, but it will be light posting until Thursday.

I'm visiting an old friend and using her machine this evening, my first experience with an iBook. Sweet machine.

Press Poodles

This Time Bill O'Reilly Got It Right

CNN is hemorrhaging in quality and viewers so fast — for reasons that have more to do with its lugubriousness and identity crisis than politics — that this dust-up may prove but a footnote to its travails. But its casual abandonment of even a fig leaf of impartiality ratifies a larger shift in the news landscape that reached its historical watershed at the Republican convention. That was when Fox News for the first time scored a ratings victory over every other network, the Big Three broadcast networks included.

Fox's feat has since been trivialized by most of its rivals as the inevitable triumph of a partisan channel speaking to its faithful. But there's something else at work here. It's not just that Fox is so good at pandering to its core constituency but that its competition is so weak at providing the hard-hitting, trustworthy news that might draw an alternative crowd. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes aren't stupid. They have seized upon that news vacuum in the marketplace and filled it with fast-paced, news-like bloviation that can be more entertaining (and often no less informative) to watch than its rivals even if its bias gives you heartburn.

What much of the other news media have offered as an alternative has not been an alternative at all. At some point after 9/11, the news business jumped the shark and started relaying unchallenged administration propaganda — though with less zeal and showbiz pizazz than Fox. The notorious March 2003 presidential news conference at which not a single probing question was asked by the entire White House press corps heralded the broader Foxification to come. As Michael Massing, a frequent critic of this newspaper and others, put it on PBS's NewsHour, the failure of the American news media to apply proper skepticism to the administration's stated rationale for war in Iraq is "one of the most serious institutional failures of the press" since our slide into Vietnam. Mr. Massing attributes some of this to the fear of challenging a president then at the height of his popularity. Whatever the explanation — and there are many, depending on the news organization — the net effect was that the entire press came off as Fox Lite. The motive to parrot the administration line may not have been ideological, as it was at Fox, but since the misinformation was the same, news consumers can't be blamed for finding that a distinction without a difference.

The W.M.D. flimflam was hardly the last time that government propaganda supplanted journalism. Though the chagrined major newspapers have since worked hard to compensate for their prewar lapses, the electronic media that give most Americans their news have often lagged behind, especially cable. From Jessica Lynch to "Mission Accomplished" to, most recently, the bogus charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, there is a tendency to give administration-favored fiction credibility first, often cementing the spin into fact well before the tough questions are asked (if they're ever asked). It's a damning measure of the news media's failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality as an antidote to Washington fairy tales that so many Americans came to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, not Saudis. A Newsweek poll just two weeks ago shows that 42 percent of Americans (among them, 32 percent of Democrats) still believe that Saddam was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks.

I'm listening to Tweety and wondering when the press is going to wake up to the fact that they've been played. It doesn't seem to bother them one bit.

Okay. I'm out of here. Next post from Toronto.

Ignorance=Death

Abduction, murder, mayhem in the week the peace was lost
As the spread and severity of violence increases, Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad finds the Iraqi government's position more hopeless than ever

19 September 2004

The US public is just as ignorant of the surging violence in Iraq because, ironically, it is now too dangerous for American television crews and print journalists to cover it. In the battle for Najaf in August, US correspondents with the dateline "Najaf" on their copy, or reports to camera, were often "embedded" with US forces several miles away from the fighting. The result? Network news in the US gives the quite false impression that Iraq is a crisis under control.

Security for foreigners - including the foreign media - has got even worse since Najaf. Kidnappers are better organised and more brazen, as the expert seizure of the British hostage, Kenneth Bigley, and his two US colleagues demonstrates. They were snatched from their villa in the affluent al-Mansur district of Baghdad, while two Italian women aid workers, who are still missing, were kidnapped by a large gang in their office in the centre of Baghdad in the middle of the day. Even Iraqi journalists with local contacts travel with trepidation down the main road south from Baghdad through the resistance bastion of Mahmoudiyah, or west through Fallujah and Ramadi.

Mr Allawi, an avuncular-looking man resident in London for 30 years, always had a difficult task. He has almost no political base in Iraq and is therefore reliant on the 138,000-strong US military. His first concern should have been to make friends and try to expand the constituencies supporting him, but his dilemma is that the one of the few things that unites Iraqis outside Kurdistan is dislike of the US military occupation - polls in June showed it had the support of 2 per cent of the Arab population. Mr Allawi needs to distance himself from the Americans, but he cannot, because he depends on them.

To his credit, he did try at first to chart a more independent course. In early July he mooted an amnesty for insurgents who had not launched suicide bombs against Iraqis, but had killed American troops. US officials were aghast, since this was a tacit admission that attacks on American soldiers are popular.

Mr Allawi also tried at first to conciliate the Shia militant Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers, but by August he was locked into a battle in Najaf with Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army. The Prime Minister wanted to show that he was not going to be pushed around, but some 400 Iraqis were killed and 2,500 wounded, according to the Health Ministry in Baghdad. Worse, the fighting was almost all done by the US army and air force, and although the Mehdi Army finally withdrew, the battle failed to eliminate Mr Sadr or his militiamen as a powerful force in Iraqi politics.

Mr Allawi has made conciliatory statements in recent weeks, but as he speaks the US launches air strikes against "terrorist" targets in Fallujah, Ramadi and Sadr City. Against American claims that these are carried out with pinpoint accuracy, Iraqis see television footage of children, swathed in bandages, being carried into hospitals by weeping parents. In Haifa Street last week, US helicopters fired twice into a crowd, killing 13 people, while claiming that they had come under anti-aircraft fire. But footage of the moments before the rockets struck, killing the al-Arabiyah satellite television correspondent, proved that there was no gunfire.

The police and the Iraqi army are being rapidly built up - its would-be recruits are frequently slaughtered as they queue for jobs - but these are not combat troops. Mr Allawi needs some kind of accommodation with Iraqi militants, but he cannot do so, because Washington wants to persuade US voters before the presidential election in November that it has the crisis in Iraq under control. This rules out compromising or negotiating with what the White House claims are a tiny minority of militants - the battered remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime or foreign fighters linked to al-Qa'ida.

Given such oversimplification, the US and the interim government cannot avoid alienating a country fragmented by ethnic, religious, social and political divisions. The most important communities are the Shia Arabs (60 per cent of the population), the Sunni Arabs (18 per cent) and the Kurds (18 per cent). But Iraqis also live in a world of strong family, clan, tribal and regional loyalties, providing a multitude of friction points.
....
Iraqis are desperate for security, but the country is getting more dangerous by the day, and Mr Allawi is blamed. American officials, however, are more interested in putting an optimistic gloss on what is happening in the run-up to the presidential election. "We never thought it would be easy," said US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage last week. "We do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January elections."

Mr Armitage could hardly have missed the point more comprehensively. Not only would Mr Allawi lose any kind of vote today, elections acceptable to most Iraqis cannot be held in a country so divided and racked by violence. The struggle for power in Iraq is only beginning - and it will be fought with guns, not at the ballot box.

I read the US press this morning and note that they have completely missed the point: Iraq is lost, and has been since the end of the invasion. This hopeless enterprise should cost Bush the election, but neither Kerry nor the somnolent American press are ready to call him on it. How many more billions, how many more lives, are we going to spend on this fecklessness?

Fantasyland

The WaPo ed board reveals itself to be the knaves and fools I always thought they were:

Mr. Bush and Iraq

Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page B06

Whatever his rhetoric, Mr. Bush deserves to be judged by this record. In our view, it is one of courage in setting goals and steadfastness in sticking to them but also one of extraordinary recklessness and incompetence in execution. It may be that the current disorder in Iraq was inevitable following a U.S. invasion and that a wiser approach could not have prevented it. Yet we believe Mr. Bush could have achieved much more. Now he tells voters he will stay the course; the way to make that promise convincing is to be honest with Americans about the challenge he now faces -- and to lay out a realistic response to it.

Courage and steadfastness? Where the hell did that come from? The fratboy coward has never displayed anything close. He likes tax cuts that cause historic budget deficits, off-shoring of American jobs and unnecessary wars. I don't see anything here that screams courage and steadfastness. The WaPo ed board must be shooting Afghan smack.

Psychodrama

'Failure is not an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it'
By Michael Smith
(Filed: 18/09/2004)

The Prime Minister knew the US President was determined to complete what one senior British official had already described as the unfinished business from his father's war against Saddam Hussein.

There was no way of stopping the Americans invading Iraq and they would expect Britain, their most loyal ally, to join them. If they didn't, the transatlantic relationship would be in tatters. But there were serious problems.

A Secret UK Eyes Only briefing paper was warning that there was no legal justification for war. So Mr Blair was advised that a strategy would have to be put in place which would provide a legal basis for war. It was also vital that the Prime Minister should be able to persuade the public that war was justified and, just as importantly, convince those among his backbench MPs who were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to another US-led war.

Sir David Manning had briefed Sir Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, and outlined the strategy to Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

He had been stranded in Washington on September 11 and he and Ms Rice had forged a good working relationship dealing together with the immediate aftermath of the al-Qa'eda attacks.

If he could persuade her that the British plan would work, then the Prime Minister would have a much less difficult task in getting Mr Bush to hold off until they could make it legal, until they could persuade the UN Security Council to give them the mandate for war.

The memo arrived in Downing St late on the evening of Wednesday, March 14, and was immediately sent by secure fax to Barcelona where Mr Blair and his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were preparing for a two-day EU summit on economic reform.

Mr Straw clearly had grave reservations about the whole idea of toppling Saddam.

Any British action had to be "narrated with reference to the international rule of law", Mr Straw insisted. He warned that his legal advisers were telling him that it would almost certainly need a fresh UN mandate to make it legal, a mandate the Americans didn't feel was necessary and the rest of the Security Council was unlikely to give. He questioned the rationale behind the whole enterprise. Whatever the allies put in Saddam's place, it was unlikely to be much better. But the problem for Mr Blair was that he knew there was no stopping the Americans. That much was clear from the Secret UK Eyes Only "options paper" on Iraq given to him on Friday, March 8, 2002.

The Prime Minister was at Chequers when he sat down to read it and in need of some good news. He and other ministers had repeatedly told MPs and television interviewers that no decision had been made to go to war but the increasingly belligerent talk coming out of Washington was making even members of his Cabinet jittery.

Mr Bush had reportedly told one aide: "F*** Saddam. We're taking him out". It no longer seemed to be a question of if; all the discussion was of how soon, with increasing talk of an invasion that autumn when conditions on the ground in Iraq would be ideal.

Don't you just love the way W's little familial psychodrama has already cost more than a 1,000 US lives and over 17,000 wounded, along with someplace north of 20,000 Iraqi civilians? HW and Bar must be so proud.

And still half of the country wants to re-elect this miscreant in November?

UPDATE: A little more from the Torygraph.

Secret papers show Blair was warned of Iraq chaos
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 18/09/2004)

Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for "many years", secret government papers reveal.

The documents, seen by The Telegraph, show more clearly than ever the grave reservations expressed by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, over the consequences of a second Gulf war and how prescient his Foreign Office officials were in predicting the ensuing chaos.

They told the Prime Minister that there was a risk of the Iraqi system "reverting to type" after a war, with a future government acquiring the very weapons of mass destruction that an attack would be designed to remove.

The documents further show that the Prime Minister was advised that he would have to "wrong foot" Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, and that British officials believed that President George W Bush merely wanted to complete his father's "unfinished business" in a "grudge match" against Saddam.

But it is the warning of the likely aftermath - more than a year in advance, as Mr Blair was deciding to commit Britain to joining a US-led invasion - that is likely to cause most controversy and embarrassment in both London and Washington.

More than 900 allied troops have been killed in Iraq since the end of the war, 33 of them British. More than 10,000 civilians are believed to have been killed.

At least 13 civilians died yesterday in a suicide bomb attack on a police checkpoint in Baghdad. The Iraqi health ministry said a further 45 civilians had died in US air attacks on Fallujah overnight.

Straw resigned on the eve of war, knowing that this was going to be a cock-up.

Strain and that Rhymes with Pain

A Familiar Strain Is Felt In Stateside Guard Unit

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01

FORT DIX, N.J. -- The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for the last two weeks.

The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene.

That prompted a barracks inspection that uncovered alcohol, resulting in the lockdown that kept soldiers in their rooms except for drills, barred even from stepping outside for a smoke, a restriction that continued with some exceptions until Sunday's scheduled deployment.

The battalion's rough-and-tumble experience at a base just off the New Jersey Turnpike reflects many of the biggest challenges, strains and stresses confronting the Guard and Reserve soldiers increasingly relied on to fight a war 7,000 miles away.

This Guard unit was put on an accelerated training schedule -- giving the soldiers about 36 hours of leave over the past two months -- because the Army needs to get fresh troops to Iraq, and there are not enough active-duty or "regular" troops to go around. Preparation has been especially intense because the Army is short-handed on military police units, so these artillerymen are being quickly re-trained to provide desperately needed security for convoys. And to fully man the unit, scores of soldiers were pulled in from different Guard outfits, some voluntarily, some on orders.

As members of the unit looked toward their tour, some said they were angry, or reluctant to go, or both. Many more are bone-tired. Overall, some of them fear, the unit lacks strong cohesion -- the glue that holds units together in combat.

"Our morale isn't high enough for us to be away for 18 months," said Pfc. Joshua Garman, 20, who, in civilian life, works in a National Guard recruiting office. "I think a lot of guys will break down in Iraq." Asked if he is happy that he volunteered for the deployment, Garman said, "Negative. No time off? I definitely would not have volunteered."

A series of high-level decisions at the Pentagon has come together to make life tough for soldiers and commanders in this battalion and others. The decisions include the Bush administration's reluctance to sharply increase the size of the U.S. Army. Instead, the Pentagon is relying on the National Guard and Reserves, which provide 40 percent of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Also, the top brass has concluded that more military police are needed as security deteriorates and the violent insurgency flares in ways that were not predicted by Pentagon planners.

These soldiers will be based in northern Kuwait and will escort supply convoys into Iraq. That is some of the toughest duty on this mission, with every trip through the hot desert bringing the possibility of being hit by roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire.

The drilling to prepare this artillery unit for that new role has been intense. Except for a brief spell during Labor Day weekend, soldiers have been confined to post and prevented from wearing civilian clothes when off duty. The lockdown was loosened to allow soldiers out of the barracks in off hours to go to the PX, the gym and a few other places, if they sign out and move in groups.

"There's a federal prison at Fort Dix, and a lot of us feel the people in there have more rights than we do," said Spec. Michael Chapman, 31, a construction worker from near Greenville, S.C.

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

Holy Scare Tactics, Batman

Chuck Currie sent this along last night:

GOP Mailing Warns Liberals Will Ban Bibles

Fri Sep 17, 7:22 PM ET

By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee (news - web sites) warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.

The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."

Chuck remarks:

No liberal is going to take your Bible away. The worst thing we will do is insist enough funding is put in place in our schools so that everyone is literate enough to read the Bible when they get home. Bush won’t make that promise. He just wants to scare you.

I spent last evening with friends I haven't seen in a long time. They are older than I and they admit that they have never experienced a political campaign so grounded in lies and scare tactics as the Bush project. They are Jewish and spent the day yesterday touring the National Holocaust Museum here in DC and found the parallels pretty frightening. I do, too.

Labor News

Tourism Industry Losing Sleep as Hotel Strike Looms
Just recovering after 9/1l, the area's travel and convention business could suffer a new blow

By Debora Vrana, Times Staff Writer

From his office just outside the nation's capital, Steve Schultz is planning a trade show that would fill the Los Angeles Convention Center with electrical contractors for several days in November.

However, with a strike or lockout threatening to idle thousands of Los Angeles hotel workers, Schultz may be looking for a new venue or, at the very least, other places for his conventioneers to spend the night. His group, the National Electrical Contractors Assn., is made up primarily of business owners who employ union members — and are sensitive about labor issues.

"I don't know if they will cross picket lines or not," said Schultz, head of convention planning for the Bethesda, Md.-based NECA. One option: moving his event and its 6,000 attendees to another city.

"I don't want to say yes or no yet," Schultz said this week. "We don't know what is going to happen."

But one thing is clear. The possibility of a hotel workers strike has many analysts concerned that it would be another blow to L.A. County's $11-billion tourism and convention industry, now in the early stages of recovery from a dramatic downturn after 9/11.

"It's bound to be a problem," said Patrick Ford, president of Lodging Econometrics, a hotel industry data firm in Portsmouth, N.H. "If we're going to end up in a strike, we're just hoping it will work out quickly."

Nearly 2,000 waiters, housekeepers and other union workers at nine Los Angeles County hotels voted this week to authorize their leadership to call a strike if contract talks collapse. The hotels' 5,600 rooms represent nearly 10% of the upscale lodging in the area. Four of the hotels are just blocks from the convention center and make up about 53% of the upper-end lodging in downtown L.A., said Bruce Baltin, a senior vice president at PKF Consulting.

Negotiations are on hold, and federal mediators have been called in to try to settle the dispute, which centers on healthcare benefits and the length of the new contract. In the meantime, the situation remains volatile. On Thursday, 17 laundry workers at downtown's Wilshire Grand were locked out and their jobs quickly filled by replacement workers. The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, contending that the lockout was illegal.

Hotel owners have vowed to operate with replacement workers during a strike or a lockout, but labor strife at some local hotels could persuade some travelers from outside California to avoid Los Angeles altogether.

Nine graphs into this story and we have yet to hear what the issues are or anything from the labor side of the dispute. Read to the end of the piece, there is nothing from the Union, and tying this strike to 9/11 (which, as I recall, didn't happen in LA) just seems bogus. If this is reporting, then I'm an effing brain surgeon.

The WaPo, hardly labor's friend, does a better job:

Optimism Scarce for Avoiding Hotel Strike
Employers Claim Lack Of Good Faith in Talks

By Dana Hedgpeth and Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 18, 2004; Page E01

Yesterday afternoon in the spacious lobby of the Marriott Wardman Park, the biggest hotel in Washington, doormen rarely needed to open the door. The cocktail lounge was empty, and bartenders passed the time wiping down a counter that was already clean.

It reflected a sense of quiet unease that characterized both the city's largest hotels and their 3,800 unionized employees as both sides braced for a strike.

Officials of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union said yesterday that a strike at 14 large hotels, whose union contract expired Wednesday, is imminent. The hotels filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that the Local 25 has not bargained in good faith by refusing to engage in meaningful negotiations. The hotels are seeking an investigation and finding in their favor by the NLRB.

Local 25, the complaint says, has been "spending large portions of the negotiating sessions attacking the Employers' spokesmen, making personal insults and falsely accusing the Employers and their spokesmen of lying rather than engaging in bargaining."

John A. Boardman, executive secretary-treasurer of Local 25, said the accusations are unfounded. "They're the ones that walked out of negotiations; they're the ones that canceled sessions," he said. "I'm sort of amazed they can come out and say we're the ones not bargaining."

The union is demanding a two-year contract instead of the traditional three-year agreement. Union officials argue that such a contract would give them more leverage against national hotel chains because it would expire in 2006, the same year as those in New York and other major cities. The employers want a three-year contract.

The Post actually tells you what the major sticking point is, but fails to repeat a point it made in a front page story on the dispute from yesterday: the Union is also filing an Unfair Labor Practice Act complaint, claiming "surface bargaining" on the part of management, that is, showing up for the meetings but not bargaining on substance. The Post also hosted an on-line chat with Boardman of Local 25, UNITE-HERE, yesterday. The Post was never so labor-friendly back in the day when I was in the trenches, routinely holding ed board luncheons with management, while we couldn't even get a reporter with any knowledge of labor law to cover us.

In the third city which could be effected by a job action, the local paper of record is silent on its front page. It is strangely silent inside, too. If you don't look at it, maybe it will go away. The New York Times continues its long, slow collapse into the third rank of American journalism.

MBA Presidency

Via Nathan Newman:

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS THE ALLY OF UNION-BUSTERS AND THE ENEMY OF WORKING AMERICANS

America needs a change at the top. As professors and scholars of management, we are charged with educating the next generation of leaders. As citizens in a democracy, we take seriously our responsibility to speak out on matters of public policy, especially when the common good and the long term viability of the economy are at stake. We cannot be silent while the Administration of George W. Bush attacks the gains of working people over the past hundred years. It would be bad enough if the Bush administration were merely trying to turn the clock back to the "good old days" of untrammeled managerial prerogatives and unfettered markets. In reality, however, this administration is forging an ever more noxious mix of private economic interests and covert public power. Our economic, social, health, and environmental security is threatened as never before.

University affiliations are listed for purposes of identification only.

See, it's not just me. The pros think so, too.

Clueless

Bob Herbert is a national treasure. This morning, he brings tears to my eyes.

This Is Bush's Vietnam
By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 17, 2004

Richard VandeGeer was not the last American serviceman to die in the Vietnam War, but he was close enough. He was part of the last group of Americans killed, and his name was the last of the more than 58,000 to be listed on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. As I stood at his grave, I couldn't help but wonder how long it will take us to get to the last American combat death in Iraq.

Lieutenant VandeGeer died heroically. He was the pilot of a CH-53A transport helicopter that was part of an effort to rescue crew members of the Mayaguez, an American merchant ship that was captured by the Khmer Rouge off the coast of Cambodia on May 12, 1975. The helicopter was shot down and half of the 26 men aboard, including Lieutenant VandeGeer, perished.

(It was later learned that the crew of the Mayaguez had already been released.)

The failed rescue operation, considered the last combat activity of the Vietnam War, came four years after John Kerry's famous question, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Although he died bravely, Lieutenant VandeGeer's death was as senseless as those of the 58,000 who died before him in the fool's errand known as Vietnam. His remains were not recovered for 20 years - not until a joint operation by American and Cambodian authorities located the underwater helicopter wreckage in 1995. Positive identification, using the most advanced DNA technology, took another four years. Lieutenant VandeGeer was buried at Arlington in a private ceremony in 2000.

The Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation put me in touch with the lieutenant's family. "I'm still angry that my son is gone," said Mrs. VandeGeer, who is divorced and lives alone in Cocoa Beach. "I'm his mother. I think about him every day."

She said that while she will always be proud of her son, she believes he "died for nothing."

Lieutenant VandeGeer's sister, Michelle, told me she can't think about her brother without recalling that the last time she saw him was on her wedding day, in May 1974. "He looked so handsome and confident," she said. "He wanted to change the world."

Wars are all about chaos and catastrophes, death and suffering, and lifelong grief, which is why you should go to war only when it's absolutely unavoidable. Wars tear families apart as surely as they tear apart the flesh of those killed and wounded. Since we learned nothing from Vietnam, we are doomed to repeat its agony, this time in horrifying slow-motion in Iraq.

Three more marines were killed yesterday in Iraq. Kidnappings are commonplace. The insurgency is growing and becoming more sophisticated, which means more deadly. Ordinary Iraqis are becoming ever more enraged at the U.S.

When the newscaster David Brinkley, appalled by the carnage in Vietnam, asked Lyndon Johnson why he didn't just bring the troops home, Johnson replied, "I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war."

George W. Bush is now trapped as tightly in Iraq as Johnson was in Vietnam. The war is going badly. The president's own intelligence estimates are pessimistic. There is no plan to actually win the war in Iraq, and no willingness to concede defeat.

I wonder who the last man or woman will be to die for this colossal mistake.

Explain to me again why someplace in the neighborhood of half of the electorate wants to vote for President Iraq Failure?

Habeus What?

Out of the Brig
‘Enemy combatant’ Yaser Hamdi will soon be released from a military prison without facing any charges.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 4:58 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2004

Sept. 15 - The first U.S. government-declared "enemy combatant" in the war on terror will soon be released from a military prison in South Carolina under an agreement that will allow him to fly home to Saudi Arabia as a free man, administration officials tell NEWSWEEK.

The result, officials say, is a highly detailed agreement that is expected to be made public later this week. It will result in Hamdi being flown back to Saudi Arabia on a U.S. military aircraft without ever being charged with any terror-related activity—a symbolic victory for critics who have long pointed to the case as a prime example of what they see as the Bush administration's overreaching in combating the terrorist threat.

This is some sort of Constitutional victory? Hamdi is being deported without ever having been charged or allowed to answer those charges. The W administration applies the Bill of Rights selectively, at best. I guess patriotism mean winking at the Constitution.

Stretched Too Thin

General Warns of a Looming Shortage of Specialists
By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: September 17, 2004

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - The chief of the Army Reserve warned on Thursday that at the current pace of operations in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army faced a serious risk of running out of crucial specialists in the Reserves who can be involuntarily called up for active duty.

The remarks by the officer, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, throw a spotlight on the military's existing mobilization authority, under which Reserve and National Guard personnel can be summoned to active duty for no more than a total of 24 months, unless they volunteer to extend their tours.

As military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq continue with no end in sight, General Helmly said he was increasingly concerned that a growing number of soldiers with critical specialties that are contained mainly in the reservist ranks will exhaust their two-year stints, making it increasingly difficult to fill the yearlong tours of duty that have become standard. The skills include civil affairs and truck driving.

"The manning-the-force issue for me is the single most pressing function I worry about," General Helmly told reporters at a breakfast meeting.

Of the 205,000 members of the Army Reserve, about 43,500 are mobilized now; 22,600 of those are deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf.

General Helmly did not say when the Army might begin to run out of some reservists to call to active duty, but the average mobilization for members of the Reserves throughout the military has increased to 342 days this year from 156 days in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

General Helmly's cautionary comments echoed a major finding of a report issued this week by the Government Accountability Office, formerly the General Accounting Office. That report concluded that if the Department of Defense's mobilization policy restricted the time that reservists could be called to active duty, "it is possible that D.O.D. will run out of forces." General Helmly said he had not yet seen the report.

GIs claim threat by Army
Soldiers say they were told to re-enlist or face deployment to Iraq

By Dick Foster, Rocky Mountain News
September 16, 2004

COLORADO SPRINGS - Soldiers from a Fort Carson combat unit say they have been issued an ultimatum - re-enlist for three more years or be transferred to other units expected to deploy to Iraq.

Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team were presented with that message and a re-enlistment form in a series of assemblies last Thursday, said two soldiers who spoke on condition of anonymity.
....
A Fort Carson spokesman confirmed the re-enlistment drive is under way and one of the soldiers provided the form to the Rocky Mountain News. An Army spokesmen denied, however, that soldiers who don't re-enlist with the brigade were threatened.

The form, if signed, would bind the soldier to the 3rd Brigade until Dec. 31, 2007. The two soldiers said they were told that those who did not sign would be transferred out of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

"They said if you refuse to re-enlist with the 3rd Brigade, we'll send you down to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is going to Iraq for a year, and you can stay with them, or we'll send you to Korea, or to Fort Riley (in Kansas) where they're going to Iraq," said one of the soldiers, a sergeant.

The second soldier, an enlisted man who was interviewed separately, essentially echoed that view.

"They told us if we don't re-enlist, then we'd have to be reassigned. And where we're most needed is in units that are going back to Iraq in the next couple of months. So if you think you're getting out, you're not," he said.

The brigade's presentation outraged many soldiers who are close to fulfilling their obligation and are looking forward to civilian life, the sergeant said.

"We have a whole platoon who refuses to sign," he said.

A Fort Carson spokesman said Wednesday that 3rd Brigade recruitment officers denied threatening the soldiers with Iraq duty.

"I can only tell you what the retention officers told us: The soldiers were not being told they will go to Iraq, but they may go to Iraq," said the spokesman, who gave that explanation before being told later to direct all inquiries to the Pentagon.

Sending soldiers to Iraq with less than one year of their enlistment remaining "would not be taken lightly," Lt. Col. Gerard Healy said from the Pentagon Wednesday.

"We realize that we deal with people and with families, and that's got to be a factor," he said.

"There's probably a lot of places on post where they could put those folks (who don't re-enlist) until their time expires. But I don't want to rule out the possibility that they could go to a unit that might deploy," said Healy.

Under current Army practice, members of Iraq-bound units are "stop-lossed," meaning they could be retained in the unit for an entire year in Iraq, even if their active-duty enlistment expires.

A recruiter told the sergeant that the Army would keep them "as long as they needed us."

It's a good thing there are no other threats in the world that might need boots on the ground....

A Better World?

Hmmm. The LAT seems a little sceptical:

Unease Shadows Bush's Optimism
The president doesn't waver, but others do as casualties mount and security withers.

By Tyler Marshall, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A combination of escalating bloodshed, gloomy assessments and deteriorating security conditions in Iraq are challenging the Bush administration's upbeat view of the struggle to establish democracy in the beleaguered Middle East nation.

A growing sense of unease is visible among Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress as bombings and kidnappings continue to rise along with the death toll.

The new challenge to the administration's view of events comes at a crucial time for President Bush, as the interim Iraqi government struggles to prepare for elections in January and as the Iraq issue dominates his bid for reelection.

Campaigning Thursday in Minnesota and upstate New York, Bush acknowledged "ongoing acts of violence," but quickly returned to a central — and positive — message on Iraq: that U.S. policies are succeeding and Iraq is on the verge of democracy and free elections.

"It wasn't all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves, and today this country is headed toward elections," he said in St. Cloud.

To shore up that message, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will visit Washington next week and will address a joint session of Congress.

Amid the new disquiet over the administration's Iraq policy, Democratic presidential contender Sen. John F. Kerry charged during a campaign speech Thursday to the National Guard Assn. in Las Vegas that Bush was trying to hide the truth from the American people.

"Two days ago, the president stood right where I'm standing and did not even acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq," he said. "He did not tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings."

Kerry's remarks drew a sharp response from Vice President Dick Cheney a few hours later at a campaign rally in Reno, where Cheney said he was "stunned by the audacity of that statement."

Cheney, of course, will say anything as Bush's attack dog. You'd think he could bring the dead back to life.

The LAT continues:

U.S. Death Toll in Iraq at Least 52 This Month
Insurgents kill three Marines. In Baghdad, three civilians -- two Americans and one Briton -- are kidnapped from their home.

By Ashraf Khalil and Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writers

BAGHDAD — Iraqi insurgents pressed their assault on U.S. and allied forces Thursday as two Americans and a Briton were kidnapped from their Baghdad house and three Marines were killed, bringing the number of U.S. military deaths in the country this month to at least 52.

The brazen abduction of the employees of a Middle East-based construction firm continued a violent week that has left more than 200 Iraqis dead, and it followed a similar kidnapping of two Italian women from their office 10 days ago.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the abduction, but almost all of the more than 120 kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq have been carried out by militant groups seeking to drive out U.S. forces, aid workers and foreign companies involved in supporting military and reconstruction efforts.

Most kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq have occurred on the nation's lawless roads, but the spread of abductions to homes and offices has sparked new fear among an international community already feeling besieged. Some companies have pulled out of the country, despite the money to be made on reconstruction projects.

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad identified the two Americans as Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong. Their ages and hometowns were not released. The British Embassy confirmed that the third man was one of its citizens, but it did not identify him.

An Iraqi government official said the three men worked for Gulf Services Co., based in the United Arab Emirates, but it was unclear whether they were security guards or held other positions with the firm.

LA Times Iraq War Casualty Database

Click on the link and find the people we've lost. WE have lost them. Don't forget that. For the families, George W. Bush is a weapon of mass destruction.

If the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein, I would love to know how.

Fantasy v. Reality

Bush rejects bleak Iraq intelligence assessment

By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: September 16 2004 07:33 | Last updated: September 16 2004 18:55

Iraq is making broad economic and political progress, the Bush administration insisted on Thursday, responding to a leaked intelligence report setting out a bleak assessment of Iraq's prospects up to the end of next year.

The report a classified National Intelligence Estimate that represents the collective judgment of the various branches of the US intelligence community was the first known overall assessment of Iraq for two years. It was approved in July by John McLaughlin, acting head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and initiated by George Tenet, his predecessor, who stepped down on July 9.

According to the New York Times, the 50-page report sets out three scenarios, ranging from the most favourable tenuous stability in political, economic and security terms to the worst case, of civil war.

An official told the Financial Times it was also critical of the administration's failure to anticipate the insurgency and widespread looting that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The White House responded by saying that progress was being made on all fronts of the president's five-point plan for Iraq's economic and political reconstruction, and that elections would go ahead as scheduled in January 2005. President George W. Bush had been clear to the American people that challenges lay ahead, a senior official said.

If wishes were horses....

Growing Consensus That Iraq Is Hopeless
by Jim Lobe

After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over swift boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard records, Iraq is beginning to creep back onto the front pages, and the news is uniformly bad.

"Security and economic problems continue to overshadow and undermine efforts across the board," including health care, education and governance, according to a report their project released last week. Among other things, it noted that despite a massive school-building and rehabilitation program, children are increasingly dropping out to help their families survive an economy where almost half the working population remains unemployed.

I seem to recall telling you a year ago (as did Steve Gilliard) that this was going to be a disaster and it would look about like this.

W can pretend that he hasn't made a mess and that everything is going swimingly in Iraq. Facts are stubborn things, however, and the coffins coming back to Dover may be hidden, but the families who receive them know.

If half of the American electorate wants to vote on a fantasy, there isn't much I can do about it. This president is a fantasist, a delusionist, and if that is what the voters want, the rest of us can move to Canada or live with it.

His fantasies, in Iraq, on the budget, will kill this country. I'm not sure I want to be around to watch.

The Missing

Press Reports on U.S. Casualties: About 17,000 Short, UPI Says

By Mark Benjamin, UPI

Published: September 15, 2004

NEW YORK (UPI) Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. Most don't fit the definition of casualties, according to the Pentagon, but a veterans' advocate said they should all be counted.

The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq.

The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the medical evacuations. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Pentagon's public casualty reports, available at www.defenselink.mil, list only service members who died or were wounded in action. The Pentagon's own definition of a war casualty provided to UPI in December describes a casualty as, "Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status/whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured."

The casualty reports do list soldiers who died in non-combat-related incidents or died from illness. But service members injured or ailing from the same non-combat causes (the majority that appear to be "lost to the organization")are not reflected in those Pentagon reports.

In a statement Wednesday, the Pentagon gave a different definition that included casualty descriptions by severity and type and said most medical evacuations did not count. "The great majority of service members medically evacuated from Operation Iraqi Freedom are not casualties, by either Department of Defense definitions or the common understanding of the average newspaper reader."

It cited such ailments as "muscle strain, back pain, kidney stones, diarrhea and persistent fever" as non-casualty evacuations. "Casualty reports released to the public are generally confined to fatalities and those wounded in action," the statement said.

A veterans' advocate said the Pentagon should make a full reporting of the casualties, including non-combat ailments and injuries. "They are still casualties of war," said Mike Schlee, director of the National Security and Foreign Relations Division at the American Legion. "I think we have to have an honest disclosure of what the short- and long-term casualties of any conflict are."

A spokesman for the transportation command said that without orders from U.S. Central Command, his unit would not separate the medical evacuation data to show how many came from Iraq and Afghanistan. "We stay in our lane," said Lt. Col. Scott Ross. But most are clearly from Operation Iraqi Freedom where several times as many troops are deployed as in Afghanistan.

Among veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800 soldiers who became psychotic.

A military study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq might suffer major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. Around 11 percent of soldiers returning from Afghanistan may have the same problems, according to that study.

Since the Veterans' Admin health resources are already overwhelmed by the needs of vets of past wars, and Bush is trying to cut what little resources for vets we have now, I'm sure that we are all looking forward to more homeless vets living in boxes on our streets. According to HUD, most of us are about one paycheck away from the same status.

Le plus c'est change...

Bumpers,

I arrived home from work today to discover an intriguing invitation in my inbox. Kevin Hayden of The American Street wrote to invite me to join the stable at that blog. Since I'm in extremis as I try to figure out how to combine blogging and working life, why not throw another variable into the mix? I responded with a delighted (and somewhat alarmed) "yes," and you will find me posting one day a week on that site (day TBD) once I return from my Toronto trip next week. Newsblogging here at Bump is going to be hard--the next couple of weeks at work are going to be so busy that keeping myself "up" on the news will be next to impossible. Since the Bump went live last November (and particularly since I got a faster computer and moved to Mozilla as my browser) I've routinely kept two to three dozen sources active and regularly updated on the task bar. And that also meant I was reading a couple of dozen stories before each post. I can't do that anymore and continue to get the boss's work done, so I'm going to need to refine my technique and refocus the blog. I'll be experimenting and want to hear from you about what is satisfying.

For years and years, I've been a letter writer. Before email was wide-spread, I wrote pen and paper letters to friends and family. Now that everyone has email, I frequently end my day with a "summing up" of the day to one of my regular correspondents. It may be that the Bump becomes that nightly letter, along with a morning summary of what to keep your eyes open for each day. I don't know what will work best, but I'm going to be pitching change-ups for the next couple of weeks.

I don't know what the connectivity issues will be while I'm in Toronto next week--I've got the office Dell laptop and the hotel has broadband cable. I've got a Telco cable to plug the machine in: can my savvy readers tell me if I need to get a cable modem for this thing to be able to use what the hotel offers? This is new territory for me. I'm upgrading the home machine to cable broadband in a couple of weeks (the speed will increase my functionality as a blogger) and don't know squat about this technology. O' course, one of the people I'll be seeing in Toronto is one of my resident experts in this area, but I'm always open to learning new things. I'm leaving Sunday afternoon, so if I need to purchase some gee-gaw for connectivity, I need to know about it in time to do something about it.

Beyond the technology, I also plan to spend time with friends while I'm Toronto, one old and one virtual, so a couple of my evenings will be taken. While in the mountains last weekend I got to meet two of my favorite bloggers, Fr. Bojangles and his wife. On this Canadian trip, I look forward to meeting pogge and talking blogging and Canadian and American politics with another liberal. This year, we've lots to talk about.

These are some of my plans and desires. What do you think? Toronto is one of my favorite cities on earth, but the per diem the office offers means that much restaurant crawling is out of the question. It is a great book store city, so I'll probably crawl a few of those on my own dime. Anything else I shouldn't miss on my one or two free nights? Telling me to sit in the hotel and blog isn't going to cut it. ;>) This is my first trip out of DC in four years (beyond family weddings and funerals) and I'd like to actually experience the city. I've already toured the islands and the CN Tower, what's next?

Kevin credited "the perception and the serenity" of my work for his invitation, for which I thank him. I suspect that regulars here might have a different perspective. I try to be perceptive. I get to serenity about once a month, on my best days and not by my own means. And it is usually an accident.

After I return, I'll be getting geeky with SQL and CSS and your advice, as always, is welcome. I'm in new territory.

I now have two reports who know more than I do. I don't like that. I've been put in charge of the IT section. My cat knows what to do with this and the carpet won't like it.

Talk to me. Help!

Yellow

On the ride into work this morning, I was meditating on all the bogus ways that "morality" is being invoked in this year's campaigns, particularly the presidential one, though it is hardly limited to that. Duke University Divinity School's Stanley Hauerwas is considered the foremost moral theologian working in the academy today--a Methodist, he is also taught in Catholic schools. I've been quite captivated by him since I first became acquainted with his work four years ago.

One of the central themes of Hauerwas's theology is the role of suffering in accountability: a genuine moral code MUST include your willingness to suffer for what you believe to be true. Any morality which does not include this willingness is not truly moral. Hauerwas's bottom line is always accountability: moral choices which do not include accountability are meaningless. It is interesting, at least to me, to think about this idea within the context of the Bush TANG flap and the Iraq war. Here is a man who believed (in the face of what evidence, I wonder?) that the Viet Nam war was meaningful, but was not willing to suffer for his belief. The suffering of others is not transferable--others cannot do your suffering for you. Among the wealthy and powerful in this country, it is common for the sweat of others to be purchased in order to discomfit the powerholders as little as possible, but genuine suffering cannot be bought off.

Bush's habits of moral shirking have not changed in 20 years. Running his campaign on the backs of the young men and women who are killed and wounded in Iraq will not purchase him virtue. He does not know this because he doesn't understand the idea of personal worth as a result of personal action: in order to be esteemed, one must do estimable things. The other day Josh Marshall pointed to Bush's"moral cowardice. This is what the phrase means from a systematic theological point of view. Since Bush makes much of his theology, it is reasonable to criticize him on these grounds.

Steadfastness

It would be foolish of me to say that "this is the issue of our time" when our economy is teetering on a cliff. But if this is not one of the issues that turns the election, then we have truly not been paying attention. Sidney lets the generals speak for themselves, and I add in Juan Cole's summary of the facts on the ground.

Far graver than Vietnam

Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 16, 2004

The Guardian

'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."

He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

Dr. Cole reports:

*In Ramadi, running gun battles broke out between local Sunni nationalists and US Marines. Guerrillas set off a bomb, killing 1 person. Altogether the fighting killed 13 and wounded 17.

*Near the southern Shiite shrine city of Karbala, an unknown assailant assassinated Labib Mohammadi, an employee of Iran's pilgrimage commission in Iraq.

Stay the course?

Since our president and Defense secretary don't seem to take the committment of blood and treasure very seriously, it will be up to us voters to school them.

Coffee

I'll see you in the morning. I'm still negotiating the change between full-time blogging and full-time employment with a very busy job. By next week I expect to have the tools I need to blog at work successfully. Hang with me until then, I promise some surprises on the weekend for those who read deeply, if not well.

News you need this weekend.

More later,
Melanie

No-Nothingism

Since the cable news networks won't tell you, the tale will need to be told here. George W. Bush is losing Iraq and adding to the calculus of terror. Kerry is not doing a good job of telling this story and this leaves me angry, as I do not want to be on the losing side of this story. The stakes are too high.

News Analysis: Americans seem not to focus on the war

Brian Knowlton/IHT IHT

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Despite a dramatic flare-up of violence in Iraq that has produced a long list of American military casualties and even longer lists of Iraqi casualties in scores of daily bombings, reaction in the United States seems muted and the Kerry campaign appears to have derived little gain from the issue.
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In part, this may reflect the success of administration efforts, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to convince Americans that the war in Iraq is a war against terrorists, that blood spilled there will ultimately make the United States safer and that there is thus no alternative but to persist. Televised scenes from Iraq of mounting chaos could change that calculus. But in recent weeks, Americans seem not to have focused on the news from Iraq, appearing more preoccupied with reports on the wave of hurricanes that have threatened Florida.
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President George W. Bush on Tuesday addressed a National Guard group in Las Vegas, and paid tribute to those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "In these crucial times," he said, "our commitments are kept by the men and women that wear our uniform."
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He did not react directly to the latest paroxysm in Iraq or to suggestions that matters there may be seriously deteriorating. Earlier, in a rally near Denver, supporters applauded as Bush underlined the notion that action overseas could prevent attacks on the homeland. "We're staying on the offensive," he said. "We'll strike the terrorists abroad so we will not have to face them at home."
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Even Bush's Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, has not made the issue a centerpiece. He devoted the bulk of a speech Tuesday in Milwaukee to domestic issues like health care and Social Security, where polls show him with greater support than he holds on terror and national security matters.
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"Things are getting worse," Kerry said about Iraq, in a statement responding to Bush's speech. "It was wrong for America to go it alone, and now every American is paying the price."
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Earlier, in a prepared text, Kerry repeated his recent line that "of all George Bush's wrong choices, the most catastrophic choice is the mess he's made in Iraq." Kerry said again that had he been president, "I would have done almost everything differently" there.
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But Democrats have had little luck in seeking to separate, in voters' minds, the issue of the fight against terrorism, where Bush enjoys strong backing, from the traumas flowing from the war that he launched in Iraq.
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A few months ago, amid intense combat and the prisoner-abuse scandal, Bush and Kerry were running about even in opinion polls on the question of who would better handle the situation in Iraq.
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But a Gallup Poll in early September, which followed weeks of negative publicity questioning Kerry's Vietnam War record, showed Bush leading Kerry by 54 percent to 41 percent on that question.
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Bush's lead on the question, apparently lifted by the Republican convention in New York, swelled even despite extensive publicity about the 1,000-death milestone among U.S. troops in Iraq.
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Analysts, and some administration supporters, noted that the number is still small compared to previous wars. And in a country approaching 300 million people, where soldiers come disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, most Americans do not personally know anyone who has died in the war.
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Surveys show that the Al Qaeda-Iraq link has taken root in many voters' minds. Cheney still asserts such a connection, and Bush less directly suggests one, though the national commission on Sept. 11 terror attacks said it had found evidence only of isolated contacts.
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Cheney said Friday that Iraq "had provided sanctuary and support for terrorists in the past" and that "there was a relationship with Al Qaeda."
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Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, said Sunday that Cheney was irresponsibly clouding the issue of a supposed link.
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"From this day forward, this administration should never suggest that there is" a link, Edwards said. "Vice President Cheney should not say the kinds of things he said Friday, and the president should not mislead the American people by implying there is a connection between the attacks of Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein."
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Bush has, of late, emphasized U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq and to establish a stable democracy there. He has said that this will not be easy, but glossed over the complexities of how to reach that objective. "We will stay the course so that they can develop an army and police force of their own so they can defend themselves," Bush said Monday, referring to both Iraq and Afghanistan. "We're going to get - get the job done as quickly as possible, and then our troops will come home with the honor they've earned. And the world will be better off."
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Bush strategists have said for months that they do not expect U.S. military deaths to seriously undermine support for the president, so long as the public accepts the underlying rationale for war, considers it winnable and the death toll does not surge dramatically.

And the underlying rationale for war is what? Which lie is Kerry going to allow to go forward? And how many civilian deaths are tolerable (of course, our Viet Nam style toleration of inflated "enemy" dead goes on the record)?

And what happened to "Osama Bin Laden," dead or alive? Where is Al Qaeda? Where are those weapons of mass destruction? Pakistan was selling them to our enemies and now we are sending them jets? What's up with that?

We Are Family

My nose is burned, those things I used to call "sun freckles" on the back of my hands are now starting to look like what my grandmother used to call "liver spots," but it was a magical weekend with some of my favorite animals (we humans might be smarter than most, but our basal ganglia hang in the world of animals.) I say it this way because the weekend was shaped by a puppy and a kitten, and the way they interacted with each other and we with them, in about the purdiest package of earth that can be found in a three hour drive from my little patch.

Those of you who are old enough to remember Jayne Meadows will appreciate Sadie, the giant Golden Puppie. She even has the eye-bat down to an art. Her gold and platinum coat is irresistable, and she is starting to do the "settle down" from puppy to dog, but she's still a little too enthusiastic for even a Golden. She's a knock you down and lick your glasses kind of dog, if you let her. If you don't, she'll roll over on her back and let the tongue hang out of her mouth. Ho'.

The kitten is another project: bro and SIL have taken on two at once. The little orange streak is a feral rescue. She doesn't fight or anything, she just hides. But she came out this week. And even did a turn in everyone's bed every night. Both are going to be fine, but both are long term projects.

As is family. We are all still learning how to be it, and I'm glad we tried again this week.

I deeply appreciate what the bro and SIL are doing to make the earth favorable to family formation. They don't always get it all right, but they are tilling the soil and I deeply appreciate it, seeds can't grow without this work. When I get to the point where I have some new financial resources to toss into the pot, I have some further ideas. We'll let them steep in the pot on the back of the stove over time. And then see what develops when the wild child, my place in the family order, starts sprouting Ivy.

My SIL, a tiller of soil, one who
grows truly excellent green things, is spading the family earth and coming up with new soil. Earthworms and all.

I'm going to hold that in my heart for a few days while I also contemplate the utterly viscious parcheesi game that got perpetrated on me Sunday night. I must come from truly hardy stock to have survived so long amid these people.

We played this game as children and must have forgotten some of the rules or where never taught them. This is a game of chance and strategy that is every bit as withering as anything I have ever played and we never laughed so hard, games are a wonderful way to get the family cards on the table, if you are in the mood. We just laughed until the muscles between our ribs hurt, it was a gonzo moment, and I pray for one for you. At some point, giving up control in the face of absurdity becomes compelling and if you don't succumb, I think you have a little pointy face and live in the sewer.

If you play the Parcheesi rules out to their natural conclusion, you are going to be playing for a long time. If you do, you will find out things about your playing partners which aren't particularly attractive. This is much more revealing than living in "Big Brother House," which is the only excuse for having it on the air. Oh, you don't remember why that is, do you? I'll be along to explain it to you in another day.

Grow some peace and wisdom and add it here. We haven't done such a good job ourselves and we're waiting for you.

Melanie

Blog break

I'm leaving for the mountains Sunday morning, back Tuesday. I haven't taken a day off the blog since Christmas, and this feels like it might be a good time for a break. The bro has Internet access on a slow dialup, so I might write something if I get a yen, or I might just take a break to regenerate and think of new uses for the blog. The bro and his bride have a lovely alpine A-frame, heavy on the windows, a block from the water, so I'll have other priorities. They have a boat.

My changing responsibilities at work may make it easier to post during the day, but it won't be like the old days when I posted every hour or so. Additionally, I'm being sent to Toronto next weekend for extensive training on the office's new database, and whether or not I can blog from Toronto will depend on 'Net availability in whatever hotel I end up in (tba). If my Toronto readers can suggest something in Scarborough, I'd be grateful. Best corporate headquarters are just off the Don Valley Parkway. I'm hoping to meet up with some friends in the city while I'm there (including pogge, Fr. Judy, and The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, I consider the superior a friend of mine.

While in the mountains for the next couple of days I'll be thinking about the article The Gadflyer has asked for and the retreat workshop I'll be leading for these folks in a couple of weeks. The bro is a computer geek, so I'll be picking his brain on DB topics, SQL and other stuff he knows as I claim my incipient geekhood. He's actually done the course work, I'm going to be picking this up on the fly.

And you will be on my mind. My friend and immediately past boss, Sharon, "got it." You are my community and she understands that. It is going to take a couple more days in the office to set this up, but I will have Mozilla in the office before the end of next week. Blah, blah, blah, my boss over-rules the sysadmin, who hates downloads. The only browser on the desktop is IE. I can't believe I blogged with this thing FOR MONTHS. It is a piece of crap. Moz is light and fast and infinitely more capable, and less hackable than IE. Click on the link and download the superior browser. I'd love to check my stats and discover that most of my readers are using Mozilla. Try it. It will make you happy. Get rid of that piece of MS garbage.

I'll have more to say about Open Source technology later next week, as my consultants are urging some downloads I haven't been able to try yet.

Florida readers, my prayers are with you. Jeebus, this has been the hurricane season from hell.

I won't be watching the Sunday gasbags, I'll be on the road to a slice of paradise. I'll be back here for sure late Tuesday in time for whatever remnant of Ivan hits the mid-Atlantic. Now, that's something to look forward to, I'm glad I brought my umbrella home.

Hard Truths

The coming conflagration in Iraq
Insurgents are slowly extending their control

By Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star
Saturday, September 11, 2004

BEIRUT: Iraqi insurgents are slowly but surely extending their control over key cities in the notorious "Sunni Triangle" north and west of Baghdad, a creeping consolidation of their influence that bodes ill for the fumbling transitional government and the U.S. forces propping it up. Continued uprisings by Shiite irregulars of the Mehdi Army militia, led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, scion of a revered religious family, point to the possibility of Shiite militants seizing and holding other "no-go zones" in southern Iraq, further undermining the putative central government in Baghdad.

Whether this phenomenon deepens the rift between the Sunni minority, the pillar of Saddam Hussein's grotesque regime, and the long suppressed Shiite majority and pushes Iraq toward the long-feared fragmentation remains to be seen. The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London concluded in a briefing paper published on Sept. 1 that with the way events are unfolding in Iraq, the country will be fortunate if it manages to avoid a break-up and civil war, a development that would have dangerous ramifications for the entire Middle East.

"The fragmentation scenario goes to the very core of the identity debate within Iraq, and is related closely to the issue of 'who rules' the country in the future," the institute's assessment said. "It is, sadly, a not unlikely scenario."

Eighteen months after the U.S. invasion of March 2003, the fighting in Iraq is getting worse rather than waning, and it will get worse still as general elections scheduled for January 2005 loom closer. The U.S. military death toll passed the grim milestone of 1,000 on Sept. 7 - 988 soldiers and three civilian employees of the Defense Department - while the number of wounded exceeded 7,000 since the start of the war in March 2003.

To underline the ferocity of the largely urban fighting that has now become an everyday affair in Iraq, 1,100 U.S. soldiers and marines were wounded in August alone, by far the highest monthly combat injury total since the conflict began. Sixty-six U.S. military personnel were killed in August, the highest monthly toll since May.

All told, the U.S. military estimated that attacks on its forces were averaging nearly 90 a day in August for a final tally of 2,700, the highest monthly level since George W. Bush fancifully declared major combat at an end on May 1, 2003.

The August casualty figures reflect the growing intensity of the fighting in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Sadr's militiamen (possibly aided by the Iranians) seized much of the city before withdrawing at the urging of Shiite religious leaders, and in the labyrinthine Sadr City quarter of Baghdad, as well as the Sunni cities of Fallujah, Baquba, Ramadi and Samarra. Given the Americans' reluctance to take casualties and their track record of surrendering territory to their foes, they may soon pull out of Sadr City as well. There seems little desire to expand the conflict.

All these remain under insurgent control two months after the transfer of political authority to the transitional government headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. He has sworn to crush the insurgency and on Sept. 5 he sent units of the fledgling Iraqi National Guard and the Iraqi police into the town of Latifiyya, a Sunni bastion 30 kilometers south of Baghdad and, backed by US forces, rounded up some 500 suspected militants.

That was the first such government action against a "no-go" Sunni stronghold since the June handover, and according to the Americans, more will follow as the U.S. and Allawi's government struggles to re-establish control over the turbulent country before the elections. But, as the Americans have already found to their cost, bringing rebel no-go zones to heel is no easy undertaking despite their firepower. And killing hundreds of Iraqis, civilians as well as insurgents, in the run-up to crucial elections is not the way to win hearts and minds.

But you have to read the foreign press to find out about it.

One World

has some interesting thoughts on the meaning of this day. If George W. Bush wants to craft a foreign policy based on an us vs. them worldview, he is largely the creator of the opposition. Juan tells us:

Dr. Cole is unwarrentedly optomistic with regard to Afghanistan, where a lack of sufficent force has defaulted us into a guerrilla war that we don't have a clue how to fight. Defense and the National Interest has more. If Clueless W wants to run his presidential campaign on "making us safer," he will have to provide some evidence.

Anniversary

This is an open thread for your remembrances of 9-11-01.

I'm watching Ivan and have to get out of here around noon. Back Tuesday.

Collective Amnesia

Rewriting The Record
By E. J. Dionne Jr.Friday, September 10, 2004; Page A29

So President Bush and Vice President Cheney get us to look the other way by focusing on the vague question of which candidate is "tough" enough to handle terrorists. This leads to such elevated forms of discourse as a convention video comparing John Kerry with a beret-wearing French poodle sock puppet named Fifi, and, this week, Cheney's scabrous observation that if voters "make the wrong choice" in this election, "then the danger is that we'll get hit again."

Faced with a Bush campaign based on amnesia and demagoguery, Kerry gave his big Iraq speech Wednesday at Cincinnati's Union Terminal, the same place Bush gave an October 2002 address justifying a U.S. attack on Saddam Hussein. If Kerry is lucky, his choice of venue just might encourage a look back at Bush's record.

Bush's speech of two years ago can only be read as an effort to scare our country into war. Iraq, Bush said, "is seeking nuclear weapons. . . . The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons. . . . We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States."

And, oh, yes, Bush couldn't resist touting, through loose association, the supposed link between Hussein and Sept. 11 that the Kean-Hamilton commission has discredited. "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America," Bush said.
Why is it that what Bush told the American people before the war is no longer a live issue?

If Bush's rationale for war no longer holds up, neither does the administration's analysis of the aftermath. In his new book, "The Folly of Empire," John Judis cites a February 2003 Army War College report on Iraqi reconstruction.
Presciently, the report declared: "Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time. Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United States must implement the bulk of the occupation itself rather than turn these duties over to a postwar international force."

But the administration seemed to think it was wiser than a bunch of smart military guys. On "Meet the Press" in March 2003, Cheney blithely dismissed Tim Russert when the host asked what would happen if "we're not treated as liberators but as conquerors." Would the American people be "prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?"

Not to worry, said Cheney: "I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators." Cheney dismissed Gen. Eric Shinseki's view of how many troops an occupation would require: "To suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement." Have we forgotten this, too?

Many also forget the context of Bush's famous "bring 'em on" line of July 2, 2003. It was in direct answer to a question about whether, in light of rising casualty rates, the administration might want to get "larger powers" to join the U.S. effort in Iraq. Bush said he wasn't worried. After the "bring 'em on" line, his next sentence was: "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

In judging whether this administration has the right answers to terrorism and war, voters can rely on the images. Or they can rely on the record.

Americans are notoriously a-historical. This works to the favor of an administration of lying, traitorous crooks.

The Usual Suspects

Click on the link and print this out to give to your Bush-loving friends and relations. This is as fine an explication of Bushco's utter incompetence as I've seen anywhere.

America right or wrong
Anatol Lieven
8 - 9 - 2004
The Bush administration responded to 9/11 by exploiting a force deeply rooted in United States thinking and behaviour: American nationalism. This force, says Anatol Lieven in an extract from his new book America Right or wrong, is now deforming the country’s relationship with the world and damaging America itself.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were an atrocious assault on the American homeland. Any United States administration would have had to respond to them by seeking to destroy the perpetrators. The war to destroy the al-Qaida forces in Afghanistan and their Taliban backers was therefore a completely legitimate response to “9/11”, as are US actions against al-Qaida and its allies elsewhere.

Moreover, insofar as American nationalism has become mixed up with a chauvinist version of Israeli nationalism, it also plays an absolutely disastrous role in the US’s own relations with the Muslim world, and in fuelling terrorism. One might say, therefore, that while America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, it also keeps a family of demons in its cellar. These demons, usually kept under certain restraints, were released by 9/11.

The "demons" include American Exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism and knee-jerk reactionary isolationism, all familiar topics in these parts.

How to Do It Wrong

U.S. Targets 3 Iraqi Cities
The moves against Samarra and other insurgent strongholds are an attempt to bolster civilian control before elections in January.

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — U.S. forces rolled into the insurgent bastion of Samarra on Thursday and sought to reestablish Iraqi government control as aircraft pounded suspected guerrilla positions in two other strongholds: Fallouja in the west and Tall Afar in the north.

The show of strength — along with the stated U.S. resolve to crush a Shiite Muslim militia in a Baghdad neighborhood — underscored the military's determination to exert control over the whole country in the months leading up to elections scheduled for January.

"This is a significant step forward where the good people of Samarra are taking control of their destiny," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander of the Army's 1st Infantry Division. His troops entered the city for less than 24 hours, oversaw the selection of new civic leaders, and declared the military's intention to return to help staff checkpoints in coming days.

The U.S. moves against the three insurgent centers come after a surge in attacks this week pushed American military fatalities in Iraq to more than 1,000. The actions appeared designed to dispel the perception that growing swaths of Iraq had become "no-go" zones for U.S. troops, which commanders here forcefully deny.

"We will never give up our right to maneuver in any of our areas," said Maj. Neal O'Brien of the 1st Infantry Division, which patrols four provinces north of Baghdad.

About 150 soldiers converged on Samarra on Thursday, a spokesman said, backed by tanks, armored personnel carriers and attack aviation. They met no resistance.

But commanders acknowledge that as many as 500 insurgents remain in the city. The guerrillas' preference is to strike at smaller U.S. or Iraqi units. In classic guerrilla style, they tend to hide their weapons and blend in among residents when faced with larger forces.

U.S. troops pulled out at the end of the day for lack of a secure base at which to spend the night.

Two months ago, a suicide bomber drove a truck carrying explosives into an Iraqi national guard facility in Samarra that was guarded by U.S. troops, killing five Americans and several Iraqis. Last year, the Army moved its main base out of the city after a mortar shell killed two soldiers as they exercised in a makeshift gym at the site.

U.S. and Iraqi government troops are not in full control of several areas of the country, including Samarra to the north of Baghdad, Fallouja and Ramadi to the west, and the largely Shiite neighborhood known as Sadr City in the eastern part of the capital, where a Shiite militia holds sway. Other cities and towns, such as Tall Afar in the far northwest, have become guerrilla bastions where the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government exerts only limited control.

The lack of security has blocked tens of millions of dollars in reconstruction projects in hostile areas. U.S. officials have dangled the projects before local leaders as incentives to cooperate, with uneven results.

The Army has largely stayed out of Samarra since May, at the request of local sheiks and other leaders, a military spokesman said. Such requests are common in Iraq, where an armed U.S. presence is often viewed as an incendiary element that encourages resentment and violence.

U.S. officials have generally been willing to lower the military profile if Iraqi authorities can demonstrate an ability to maintain order and root out insurgents. But the military insists it must have freedom of movement when necessary.

In Samarra, the U.S. approach since spring had been to allow local leaders to work out a way to disarm or otherwise neutralize a stubborn insurgent force that had disrupted government and police activities in the ancient city of 200,000.

The largely Sunni Muslim population has long posed a major challenge for U.S. forces. Samarra was the site of a large-scale U.S. offensive last winter designed to flush out a guerrilla force thought to be composed of religious militants, anti-American nationalists and loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. During that offensive, a force of more than 3,000 soldiers also met little resistance as the guerrillas apparently blended into the populace to fight another day.

But in recent months, officials and residents say, Samarra had fallen back under de facto insurgent control. The Army blocked off the main bridge leading into the city in an effort to control access. A brisk boat service over the Tigris River provided an alternate access.

On Thursday, however, the Army declared "irreversible momentum" in the city, and said the bridge would be reopened as a "sign of good faith."

When politics drive military strategy, neither will go well.

???

While in the shower a couple of minutes ago, I heard NPR do an utterly uncritical piece on Doug Feith. The SCLM just don't get the neo-cons. More on this later today after I've some time to do a little digging.

Stunning Incompetence

How Many Deaths Will It Take?
By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 10, 2004

It was Vietnam all over again - the heartbreaking head shots captioned with good old American names:

Jose Casanova, Donald J. Cline Jr., Sheldon R. Hawk Eagle, Alyssa R. Peterson.

Eventually there'll be a fine memorial to honor the young Americans whose lives were sacrificed for no good reason in Iraq. Yesterday, under the headline "The Roster of the Dead," The New York Times ran photos of the first thousand or so who were killed.

They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war. They fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam, no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight a war that is unwinnable.

How many thousands more will have to die before we acknowledge that President Bush's obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the United States?

Joshua T. Byers, Matthew G. Milczark, Harvey E. Parkerson 3rd, Ivory L. Phipps.

Fewer and fewer Americans believe the war in Iraq is worth the human treasure we are losing and the staggering amounts of money it is costing. But no one can find a way out of this tragic mess, which is why that dreaded word from the Vietnam era - quagmire - has been resurrected. Most Washington insiders agree with Senator John McCain, who said he believes the U.S. will be involved militarily in Iraq for 10 or 20 more years.

To what end? You can wave goodbye to the naïve idea that democracy would take root in Iraq and then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East. That was never going to happen. So what are we there for, other than to establish a permanent military stronghold in the region and control the flow of Iraqi oil?

The insurgency in Iraq will never end as long as the U.S. is occupying the country. And our Iraqi "allies" will never fight their Iraqi brethren with the kind of intensity the U.S. would like, any more than the South Vietnamese would fight their fellow Vietnamese with the fury and effectiveness demanded by the hawks in the Johnson administration.

The Iraqi insurgents - whether one agrees with them or not - believe they are fighting for their homeland, their religion and their families. The Americans are not at all clear what they're fighting for. Saddam is gone. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The link between Saddam and the atrocities of Sept. 11 was always specious and has been proven so.

At some point, as in Vietnam, the American public will balk at the continued carnage, and this tragic misadventure will become politically unsustainable. Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.

Elia P. Fontecchio, Raheen Tyson Heighter, Sharon T. Swartworth, Ruben Valdez Jr.

One of the reasons the American effort in Iraq is unsustainable is that the American people know very little about the Iraqi people and their culture, and in most cases couldn't care less. The war in Iraq was sold as a response to Sept. 11. As it slowly dawns on a majority of Americans that the link was bogus, and that there is no benefit to the U.S. from this war, only endless grief, the political support will all but vanish.

(This could take awhile. In a poll done for Newsweek magazine this week, 42 percent of the respondents continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.)

We've put our troops in Iraq in an impossible situation. If you are not permitted to win a war, eventually you will lose it. In Vietnam, for a variety of reasons, the U.S. never waged total war, although the enemy did. After several years and more than 58,000 deaths, we quit.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of September 11, 2001. Are we going to let Bush memorialize it with a pointless war? Oh, and by the way, we still haven't caught Bin Laden, and Afghanistan is still a war zone. Is there anything this crew can do right?

Fiction and Reality

The Dishonesty Thing
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 10, 2004

It's the dishonesty, stupid. The real issue in the National Guard story isn't what George W. Bush did three decades ago. It's the recent pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't, the White House's repeated claims that it had released all of the relevant documents when it hadn't.

It's the same pattern of dishonesty, this time involving personal matters that the public can easily understand, that some of us have long seen on policy issues, from global warming to the war in Iraq. On budget matters, which is where I came in, serious analysts now take administration dishonesty for granted.

It wasn't always that way. Three years ago, those of us who accused the administration of cooking the budget books were ourselves accused, by moderates as well as by Bush loyalists, of being "shrill." These days the coalition of the shrill has widened to include almost every independent budget expert.

For example, back in February the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities accused the Bush administration of, in effect, playing three-card monte with budget forecasts. It pointed out that the administration's deficit forecast was far above those of independent analysts, and suggested that this exaggeration was deliberate.

"Overstating the 2004 deficit," the center wrote, "could allow the president to announce significant 'progress' on the deficit in late October - shortly before Election Day - when the Treasury Department announces the final figures."

Was this a wild accusation from a liberal think tank? No, it's conventional wisdom among experts. Two months ago Stanley Collender, a respected nonpartisan analyst, warned: "At some point over the next few weeks, the Office of Management and Budget will release the administration's midsession budget review and try to convince everyone the federal deficit is falling. Don't believe them."

He went on to echo the center's analysis. The administration's standard procedure, he said, is to initially issue an unrealistically high deficit forecast, which is "politically motivated or just plain bad." Then, when the actual number comes in below the forecast, officials declare that the deficit is falling, even though it's higher than the previous year's deficit.

Goldman Sachs says the same. Last month one of its analysts wrote that "the Office of Management and Budget has perfected the art of underpromising and overperforming in terms of its near-term budget deficit forecasts. This creates the impression that the deficit is narrowing when, in fact, it will be up sharply."

In other words, many reputable analysts think that the Bush administration routinely fakes even its short-term budget forecasts for the purposes of political spin. And the fakery in its long-term forecasts is much worse.

The administration claims to have a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. But even Bruce Bartlett, a longtime tax-cut advocate, points out that "projections showing deficits falling assume that Bush's tax cuts expire on schedule." But Mr. Bush wants those tax cuts made permanent. That is, the administration has a "plan" to reduce the deficit that depends on Congress's not passing its own legislation.

Sounding definitely shrill, Mr. Bartlett says that "anyone who thinks we can overcome our fiscal mess without higher taxes is in denial." Far from backing down on his tax cuts, however, Mr. Bush is proposing to push the budget much deeper into the red with privatization programs that purport to offer something for nothing.

As Newsweek's Allan Sloan writes, "The president didn't exactly burden us with details about paying for all this. It's great marketing: show your audience the goodies but not the price tag. It's like going to the supermarket, picking out your stuff and taking it home without stopping at the checkout line to pay. The bill? That will come later."

Longtime readers will remember that that's exactly what I said, shrilly, about Mr. Bush's proposals during the 2000 campaign. Once again, he's running on the claim that 2 - 1 = 4.

So what's the real plan? Some not usually shrill people think that Mr. Bush will simply refuse to face reality until it comes crashing in: Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, says there's a 75 percent chance of a financial crisis in the next five years.

Nobody knows what Mr. Bush would really do about taxes and spending in a second term. What we do know is that on this, as on many matters, he won't tell the truth.

I enjoy "magical realism" in novels and films. I don't particularly appreciate it in the budget process.

Losing

Iraq: The invisible war becomes visible
With 1,000 US service members dead in Iraq, Americans should do what the next of kin do every day -- remember and reflect

Bill Berkowitz, Working for Change

Spinning the 1000th death isn't surprising, but the appearance marked a departure from the past several months when benign neglect of the news media was the main course taken.

Be assured that you won't be alone: The next of kin of those who have died and the families of the wounded reflect on this tragedy every day.

I am not a pacifist. I DO think there are times and circumstances when American lives have to be committed and, sometimes, spent. I DO NOT think this should ever be done with the kind of casualness of the Bush/Cheney/Rummy cabal. It should cause agonising, lack of sleep. Do you want your kids and relations and neighbors sent out by simple-minded, black and white thinkers? War is a complex business and shouldn't be conducted by people who haven't gotten much further than the sandbox in their strategic thinking.

Catastrophic success? What horseshit. That's a euphamism for utter failure.

Who's Zooming Who

Greenspan: Recovery Regaining Momentum

By Warren Vieth, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Wednesday that the recovery was gaining momentum again after a spring slowdown, but he warned that Washington's burgeoning budget deficits posed a long-term threat to the economy.

Recent economic data suggest that "the expansion has regained some traction" since the second-quarter "soft patch," Greenspan told the House Budget Committee. Consumer spending and housing construction rallied in July, he said, and energy prices have eased.

Although the Fed chairman didn't mention interest rates, economists interpreted his remarks as a signal that the central bank was likely to continue raising short-term rates in quarter-point increments. The next rate hike is expected when Fed policymakers meet Sept. 21.

"He made it quite clear they intend to continue raising rates at a measured pace, including in September," said Bank of America senior economist Peter Kretzmer. "He confirmed that things have gone the way the Fed expected them to go."

Greenspan said higher energy prices were the main cause of the spring slowdown, in which economic growth fell to an annualized rate of 2.8% from 4.5% in the first quarter. Now that energy prices are subsiding, growth is picking up again, he said.

"The underlying structure of the recovery is still there, and in my judgment were it not for the very sharp rise in oil prices we would still be seeing very strong growth," he said. "We still have problems … but the economy is doing reasonably well."

Investors interpreted Greenspan's economic outlook as a bit less optimistic than expected. Bond market interest rates and major stock indexes declined modestly.

Greenspan was less sanguine about the economy's long-term prospects. He said the revival of deficit spending and the looming retirement of the baby boom generation could undermine the nation's fiscal stability.

The rest of "the economy" is voting with its feet.

Delta to Reduce Workforce by 10%
Airline Hopes Cuts Will Avert Bankruptcy

By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 9, 2004; Page E01

Delta Air Lines Inc. will cut up to 7,000 jobs, or about 10 percent of its workforce, as part of a restructuring aimed at avoiding a slide into bankruptcy, Gerald Grinstein, the airline's chief executive, said yesterday.

Under the plan, Delta will close its hub at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, thin its management ranks by 15 percent and trim employees' pay -- all in an effort to slash costs by about $5 billion a year by the end of 2006. About 2,100 Delta job losses will come at the Dallas-Fort Worth hub.

Grinstein acknowledged that bankruptcy was a "real possibility" if the airline is unable to secure $1 billion in concessions from its pilots, Delta's only unionized work group. The nation's No. 3 airline also is trying to slow the rush of early retirement requests from pilots who are seeking to avoid possible cutbacks in their pension and pay and benefits.

"We're working hard and fast to avoid [bankruptcy]," Grinstein said, "but if the pilot early retirement issue is not resolved before the end of the month, or if all of the pieces don't come together in the near term, we will have to restructure through the courts."

Delta is reeling from the same pressures faced by other traditional carriers: the growth of low-cost, low-fare airlines such as Southwest, Air Tran and JetBlue and the easy availability of low fares on the Internet. The low-cost airlines and the Internet have sparked brutal competition in the airline industry and forced the older carriers to reduce their operating expenses.

United Airlines, struggling to lower its costs under bankruptcy protection for nearly two years, plans to eliminate more jobs and seek additional concessions from its employees in a bid to emerge from Chapter 11. US Airways, based in Arlington, is close to filing for bankruptcy for the second time in two years as it seeks to cut about $1.5 billion in costs. Even Houston-based Continental Airlines, financially stronger than most of the other traditional carriers, announced recently that it will slash 425 jobs and will postpone payments into its pension fund in an effort to save about $200 million a year.

"There is a massive, fundamental structural change that is taking place in our business," Grinstein said. "There are new competitive forces at work in the market that are changing how all the carriers are looking at what they do."

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which significantly reduced air travel, Delta has cut about 16,000 jobs. It has racked up more than $5 billion in losses in the past three years. The airline has already slashed about $2.3 billion in costs since the attacks.

I'll have more news on lay-offs later in the day. The airline industry isn't the only place having a painful restructuring.

Hold Your Friends

Australian Embassy in Jakarta Shattered by Blast

By Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 9, 2004; 5:03 AM

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Sept. 9 -- A large explosion was set off early Thursday outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta's financial district, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 100, officials said. Police said the blast appeared to have been a suicide attack using a car bomb.

The explosion at about 10:30 a.m. mangled the high metal gate in front of the Australian Embassy and shattered the windows of the embassy and other office towers along the adjacent boulevard. Scores of police rushed to the scene and police helicopters circled overhead. Windows of several cars and buses were blown out by the force of the explosion. A nearby police truck was destroyed.

All of the dead and the overwhelming number of injured appeared to be Indonesian. At least one of the dead appeared to be an Indonesia security guard working at the embassy. A witness also said he saw a motorcycle rider killed in the explosion, his body dismembered.

Nearby buildings were evacuated and police set up a security perimeter about a mile away from the embassy as smoke from the explosion billowed.

John Kalangi, 45, a businessman from eastern Indonesia, said he was inside the Australian Embassy applying for a visa when the blast occurred. "I just heard a blast, a bang," he said. "It happened very fast and we just covered our heads."

National Police Chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar said during a visit to the site that the attack was similar to the August 2003 suicide bombing near the JW Marriott Hotel, in which 12 people were killed, and the 2002 bombings of two Bali nightclubs, in which 202 people were killed, including 88 Australians.

"We suspect it's the same group," Bachtiar said, referring to members of Jemaah Islamiah, a militant Islamic group linked by intelligence officials to al Qaeda. In particular, Bachtiar said police believe that the Jemaah Islamiah's chief bomb-maker, a Malaysian engineer Azahari Husin, produced the explosives used in the blast.

Bachtiar said authorities have been hunting Azahari and fellow Malaysian militant Noordin Mohammed Top for months across Indonesia's main Java island but have failed to catch them even as the two militant leaders successfully recruited new members into the militant movement.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda told reporters at the scene, "We strongly condemn this action. Together we [Indonesia and Australia] fight the war against terrorism. We both have a strong commitment. Thus we must work together."

In Melbourne, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said that "all of the Australian staff have been accounted for" but that "a handful of locally engaged staff . . . have not yet been accounted for."

Howard told reporters that "some locally base security personnel" could be among the dead but there were only minor injuries among the Australian staff, according to an official transcript of his news conference.

"I can only, of course, express my utter dismay at this event," Howard said, adding that he was dispatching Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on an urgent visit to Jakarta.

On Friday and again on Tuesday, the U.S. State Department updated its travel warnings for Indonesia, advising U.S. citizens about "security concerns regarding identifiably western hotels" and recommending that Americans "defer all non-essential travel to Indonesia." The warning also urged U.S. citizens in Indonesia "to remain aware of the continued potential for terrorist attacks against Americans, U.S.- or other Western interests in Indonesia."

Being a "friend" of the US is going to be an increasingly bad piece of work. If you think the rest of the world isn't paying attention, you'd be wrong.

In the Zone

U.S. Troops' Death Rate Rising in Iraq

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 9, 2004; Page A01

With the latest spike in violence in Baghdad, more U.S. troops have died since the turnover of power to an interim Iraqi government at the end of June than were killed during the U.S.-led invasion of the country in the spring of 2003.

A total of 148 U.S. military personnel have been killed since the partial transfer of sovereignty on June 28, compared with 138 who died in March and April of 2003, Pentagon figures show.

That trend is a grim indication that, 18 months after the invasion, the fighting appears to be intensifying rather than waning. While attention has been focused largely on standoffs in Najaf and other well-publicized hotspots, an analysis of the figures shows the U.S. military has taken more casualties elsewhere, including the deaths of about 44 troops in the western province of Anbar and 10 others in the city of Samarra.

The wide geographic dispersion of the violence reflects the strength of a resurgent opposition and also frames the challenge U.S. commanders face in the coming months as the United States seeks to hold an election to establish a new Iraqi government, said military officers and defense analysts.

"The 'peace' has been bloodier than the war," said Capt. Russell Burgos, an Army reservist who recently returned from a tour of duty with an aviation regiment in Balad, Iraq. In his view, the U.S. experience in Iraq is coming to resemble Israel's painful 18-year occupation of parts of southern Lebanon.

Before the war, predictions by even the most skeptical Bush administration critics did not include scenarios of escalating violence this long after the invasion, or of the U.S. military issuing a news release such as the one it sent out Tuesday morning, headlined "Fighting Continues in Eastern Baghdad." In addition, several cities near Baghdad have slipped from U.S. control in recent months and have become "no-go zones" for U.S. troops.

Everything is just ducky in Iraq, right? The schools are open and the hospitals are staffed so none of this military stuff matters, right? Four major cities are "no-go" zones, but none of that matters, right?

Ya know, I've never heard the Bushies describe how we are going to fix this. "Long hard slog" isn't a way to peace and sounds frighteningly a lot like, oh, Viet Nam. Do we really WANT to be in Iraq in five years? In ten? Why? Yeah, yeah, SH was a bad man, one of a long list of the same all over the planet. We haven't thrown 150,000 troops at any of the rest of them.

The Future

Hi, gang,

More news and I wanted to make sure you got it here first.

Posting will be light until next Wednesday. I'm a spiritual director and have to meet with people in the evening when I'm available and they are. I've got an event for work Thursday evening. I'll post early in the morning and at lunch when I can, but Friday night I've got to do some more house cleaning prior to heading out of town for a family reunion for a few days. It's at the bro's mountain place where the only local connection is a 14.4 dial up. It'll cramp my style to miss a day or two of posting, but with a speed like that (and only IE--Lord, I miss Mozilla when I'm away from home) reading through massive amounts of material is impossible and if I post at all it will be an essay or two. Since Bump went live last November 15, I've missed only two days, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and those were conscious decisions not to post, I was with family who had a fast connection. I took those days off. I may take a couple more off in this next little period so that I can concentrate on family. We'll see. I'll make sure you have some open thread rings to swing in while I'm gone.

Thanks for your loyalty as I've begun negotiating the transition from full time blogger to full time, em, whatever it is that I'm becoming. It looks like I'm going full time in a geekier direction and I'm not unhappy about this. It means that I'll never be unemployed ever again, and the salaries at this level of tech are quite respectable.

My organization knows I blog and they are quite supportive. You won't hear much from me about specific situations at work, but maybe some general comments about work in the tech environment. I'll keep my home shop out of it (they asked nicely.) But I will blog about Sharon (Hi, Sharon) because I'm now experiencing my oldest friend as boss, the person I first met when she was 11 and I was 23. What an alert and canny manager she has become. I'm awed. I've never gotten to watch one of my former students come into their wisdom years before. I have been shortchanged. Every teacher should get a checkin on their students as they near 40. I can't claim credit for any of this, of course, it was a long time ago, but I know that there is a piece of my genes in the woman she has become. And I'm very happy to be associated with that.

After my family trip this weekend, I start The New Responsibilities. Geekier friends than I tell me that I'll be fine with this, that I have time to learn and I'm already most of the way there. Two weeks ago I didn't know "data base administrator" was a career path and now I are one.

Trainings are being arranged and friends who know this stuff more intimately than I tell me that the folks in THEIR shop who write SQL really like it. May it be thus. The learning curve is going to be very steep in the next couple of months (like you haven't been starved by Bump already, but this curve ball is really new.)

In other words, I've got some business to do this weekend, and after that my life is up for grabs by a whole bunch of new stuff, and I have no idea what this website is going to look like. I suspect it will be much the same and the posting frequency will be negotiated with the work schedule, but I can't promise that. Can I be a geek with a poli-blog? We'll find out.

Stay tuned as we head into Hurricane Ivan. I'm also an amateur meteorologist and I'm checking the storm wherever I am. As an East Coast resident who has been through four of these monsters, I'm engaged.

Thanks for reading. The next couple of weeks are likely to be a)unpredictable; b)confusing; c) headed somewhere, and it will be obvious to you. The reader is the first person I think of when I stumble toward the coffee pot and the keyboard in the morning. You need information more than you need opinion then. I try to start with information early and head toward opinion later in the day. That's the bias of this site, but most of you already know it.

Yikes, it is late. I need to head for bed. Thanks for reading. I welcome your fine tuning in comments. You make this site. Thanks.

AWOL

Bush fell short on duty at Guard
Records show pledges unmet
September 8, 2004

This article was reported by the Globe Spotlight Team -- reporters Stephen Kurkjian, Francie Latour, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes, and editor Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Robinson.

But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service -- first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.
He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge, Bush signed a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months. . . " Under Guard regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now concedes. ''I must have misspoke," Bartlett, who is now the White House communications director, said in a recent interview.

And early in his Guard service, on May 27, 1968, Bush signed a ''statement of understanding" pledging to achieve ''satisfactory participation" that included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty -- usually involving two weekend days each month -- and 15 days of annual active duty. ''I understand that I may be ordered to active duty for a period not to exceed 24 months for unsatisfactory participation," the statement reads.

Yet Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973, the records show.

Ya know, that pilot training cost the USG over a million dollars.

Here is a link to the BoGlo's complete document collection.

And here's a link to the promo for tonight's "60 Minutes" interview with Ben Barnes, who got W his TANG slot.

Drip, drip.

How Many More?

U.S. military deaths in Iraq campaign pass 1,000

By Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, 9/7/2004 21:22

The 1,003 figure includes deaths from hostile and non-hostile causes since the United States launched the Iraq campaign in March 2003 to topple Saddam's regime. The vast majority of U.S. deaths all but 138 came after Bush's May 1, 2003 declaration of an end to major combat operations. ''Mission Accomplished,'' read a banner on an aircraft carrier where Bush made the announcement.

The U.S. military has not reported overall Iraqi deaths. The Iraqi Health Ministry started counting the dead only in April when heavy fighting broke out in Fallujah and Najaf. However, conservative estimates by private groups place the Iraqi toll at at least 10,000 or 10 times the number of U.S. military deaths.

''It is difficult to establish the right number of casualties,'' said Amnesty International's Middle East spokeswoman, Nicole Choueiry. She added that ''it was the job of the occupation power to keep track of the numbers but the Americans failed to do so.''

The grim milestone of 1,000 American military deaths was surpassed after a surge in fighting, which has killed 17 U.S. service members in the past four days. A soldier was killed early Wednesday in when a roadside bomb struck a convoy near Balad, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Two soldiers died in clashes Tuesday with militiamen loyal to rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Five other Americans died Tuesday in separate attacks, mostly in the Baghdad area. Seven Marines were killed Monday in a suicide car bombing north of Fallujah. Two soldiers were killed in a mortar attack Sunday.

Juan Cole tells us:

I would wager that very few American newspapers mention the estimate of 12,000 Iraqis dead in the war so far when they report the numer of US military dead.

US forces bombed Fallujah from the air on Tuesday and Wednesday. , according to AP. Al-Jazeerah showed footage of the aftermath of the battle at Fallujah.

Adding to the Load

$2.3 Trillion in New Debt Expected by 2014
Economic Growth Will Not Ease Strain on U.S., Budget Office Director Warns

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A02

This year's federal budget deficit will reach a record $422 billion, and the government is now expected to accumulate $2.3 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office reported yesterday.

The expected deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is $56 billion less than the CBO predicted in March, as a recovering economy added to tax receipts. But it is $46 billion more than last year's record shortfall, with even more red ink possible, the nonpartisan agency reported: The expected total 10-year deficit would climb from $2.3 trillion to $3.6 trillion if President Bush is able to extend the tax cuts he enacted. They are currently set to expire in 2011.

"This is a fiscal situation in which we cannot rely on economic growth to cause deficits to disappear," warned CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economist for the Bush White House. "The budgetary outlook will be dictated by policy choices."

About half of the projected 10-year deficit is based on an assumption that conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue. The CBO policy requires that deficit projections be based on current conditions.

The budget office expects that the total federal debt held by the public -- the amount borrowed through the sale of Treasury bonds to finance overspending -- will balloon 58 percent over the next decade, from $4.3 trillion this year to nearly $6.8 trillion in 2014.

The CBO's findings may refocus some political attention on the fiscal health of a federal government that, between recession, war and tax cuts, has swung from record surpluses to record deficits since Bush took office.

Some Economists See Risk of a Downturn
The UCLA Anderson Forecast expects growth in '05 and '06 but says there's a 10% chance of a recession.

By Bill Sing, Times Staff Writer

Relatively few economists are using the R-word outright. More and more, however, are beginning to warn that a downturn can't be dismissed.

The latest to issue such an alert is the widely watched UCLA Anderson Forecast. In its latest quarterly outlook, to be formally released this morning, the group calls a recession a "distinct possibility" in the next two years.

Though the odds of such an unpleasant event still are slight — only 10% — "a recession is more likely than the economy taking off," said Michael Bazdarich, UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist and author of the national part of its outlook.

Some other economists put the odds of a recession much higher. But UCLA Anderson Forecast's mention of recession risk is notable because its less optimistic stance in recent years has proved to be prescient. It was among the first to predict the 2001 recession and to anticipate the current soft patch.

The quarterly outlook calls for the U.S. economy to grow at 3.3% inflation-adjusted rates in both 2005 and 2006. That's not much better than the 2.8% annualized growth rate posted in the second quarter and down from the first quarter's 4.5% rate.

"This is as good as it's going to get," Bazdarich said, noting that the all-important consumer and housing sectors don't have the steam to spark faster growth.

Talk of a recession comes at a politically sensitive time. The presidential election is riding partly on voters' perception of whether the economy is getting better, as President Bush contends, or worse, as Democratic challenger Sen. John F. Kerry would have Americans believe.

It's also a sensitive time for monetary policy. The Federal Reserve has been raising its benchmark short-term interest rate on the assumption that growth will pick up, or at least not slow further. The central bank is expected to raise rates again at its next meeting Sept. 21.

Perhaps most important, if consumers or businesses fear a downturn, their resulting caution could trigger one. Indeed, that often is how recessions begin.

To be sure, with a nearly 3% annualized growth rate, the economy is far from recession, often defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. (The 2001 recession started in March and ended in November, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.) Many mainstream economists, including UCLA's, call for continued annual growth of at least 3%. Some predict growth to return closer to the 4.5% pace posted in this year's first three months.

Upbeat forecasters base their view on several factors, including low interest rates, business optimism, a revival of consumer spending and a decline in gasoline prices. One optimist, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, has blamed the recent slowdown on "transitory" factors, such as the record-high gasoline prices seen a few weeks ago.

However, the potential for further energy inflation also has stoked recession concerns, said Steven A. Wood, chief economist for Danville, Calif.-based Insight Economics, which conducts weekly surveys of about 50 business economists.

They are generally putting the odds of a recession at 25% to 33% in the next one or two years, he said.

Keystone Kops

Cheney Warns of Terror Risk if Kerry Wins
By DAVID E. SANGER
and DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: September 8, 2004

COLUMBIA, Mo., Sept. 7 - Stepping up the battle over national security, Vice President Dick Cheney warned on Tuesday that the country would be at risk of a terror attack if it made "the wrong choice" in November, and President Bush accused Senator John Kerry of adopting the antiwar language of his Democratic primary rival Howard Dean.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney delivered their accusations in separate appearances as Mr. Kerry, for the second day in a row, attacked Mr. Bush's "wrong choices." The Democratic contender said that of all of them "the most catastrophic choice is the mess that he has made in Iraq."

The debate was underscored as the deaths of American military personnel and Defense Department civilians working in Iraq reached 1,000.

Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, called it a "tragic milestone" and a reminder that "we must meet our sacred obligation to all our troops to do all we can to make the right decisions in Iraq so that we can bring them home as soon as possible."

Mr. Bush never mentioned the figure on a bus tour across Missouri. But at the very moment he was criticizing Mr. Kerry as having flip-flopped on Iraq, his press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the 1,000 men and women had died "so that we defeat the ideologies of hatred and tyranny."

As the candidates tried to discuss the economy- Mr. Bush hailed the benefits of his tax cuts for small businesses and Mr. Kerry warned that the administration's tax policy encouraged jobs to move overseas - Iraq and terrorism once again fueled their increasingly bitter cross-country argument an issue that is likely to remain front and center.

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice," Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, "because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

He also said if Mr. Kerry was elected the nation risked lapsing to a "pre-9/11 mind-set'' where attacks are viewed as criminal acts, not part of a war against terrorism.

It sounds to me like B/C'04 is starting to believe its own hype. After all, this stunning batch of competence is sponsoring the following:

U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: September 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - As American military deaths in Iraq operations surpassed the 1,000 mark, top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that insurgents controlled important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas.

As of late Tuesday night, the Pentagon's accounting showed that 998 service members and three Defense Department civilians had been killed in Iraq operations.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that the American strategy in retaking rebel-held strongholds hinged on training and equipping Iraqi forces to take the lead.

Mr. Rumsfeld said Iraqi officials understood they must regain control of the insurgent safe havens. "They get it, and will find a way over time to deal with it,'' he said.

But General Myers said the Iraqi forces would probably not be ready to confront insurgents in those areas until the end of this year.

Their comments, which came after a two-day spike in violence in Iraq led to a surge in American military deaths, represented an acknowledgment that the Americans had failed to end an increasingly sophisticated insurgency in important Sunni-dominated areas and in certain Shiite enclaves. Fighting raged on Tuesday in Sadr City, in Baghdad, as Shiite militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr ended a self-declared cease-fire. [Page A14.]

The officials' assessment also underscored the difficulty of pacifying Iraq in time for elections scheduled for January. The cities of greatest rebel control are Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra, in the so-called Sunni triangle, west and north of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein remains popular and many forces loyal to him have gathered strength.

There is increasing concern in the administration over plans for the election, with some officials saying that if significant parts of the Sunni areas cannot be secured by January, it may be impossible to hold a nationwide balloting that would be seen as legitimate. Putting off the elections, though, would infuriate Iraq's Shiite majority. The elections are for an assembly that is to write a new constitution next year. Mr. Rumsfeld warned that the violence would intensify as elections approached.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi recognized that his government could not continue to allow rebel control in crucial areas of the country, but that it would take time for him to determine how to proceed.

Effing brilliant, isn't it? Invade a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, screw up the invasion and declare your political rivals to be pansies.

All of this is from the front page of the NYT. Nobody is connecting the dots yet.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

7 Marines Killed in Blast Near Fallujah
Apparent Suicide Attack Is Deadliest for Troops Since April; 3 Iraqis Slain

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 7, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 6 -- Seven U.S. Marines were killed on Monday in an apparent suicide attack when a car bomb exploded near their military convoy on the outskirts of Fallujah, the U.S. military reported. The attack, which also killed three Iraqi National Guardsmen, was the deadliest against U.S. troops in four months.

The American casualties were members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is responsible for security in Anbar province, a stronghold for Sunni insurgents west of Baghdad. The names of the dead were withheld until their relatives could be notified.

The bomb detonated as the convoy traveled down a barren stretch of road nine miles from Fallujah, U.S. officials said. Two Humvees were reduced to smoldering wreckage, video footage from the Arab satellite channel al-Arabiya showed. U.S. forces removed the bodies and military helicopters flew in.

"This desperate act of inhumanity will only serve to strengthen our commitment to the Iraqi people," the U.S. military said in a statement. "Our forces will continue to stay the course in order to ensure Iraqi security forces have everything necessary to set the conditions required to foster rule of law and revitalization in Iraq."

Marine patrols have not entered Fallujah since the end of a three-week siege in April; the city has been under the control of insurgents. The U.S. military has targeted buildings in the city with periodic airstrikes in an attempt to ferret out the insurgents. U.S. officials say they believe Jordanian guerrilla leader Abu Musab Zarqawi is using the city as his base of operations.

The killing of the seven American troops on Monday represented the highest toll in a single attack since April 29, when eight U.S. soldiers were killed in a car bombing in a southern suburb of Baghdad.

Let's see: what was the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq? There was none? So, why are we doing this, why are these troops dying? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Blood Lust

The unwinnable war

By James Carroll | September 7, 2004

War is an abstraction in the American imagination. It lives there, cloaked in glory, as an emblem of patriotism. We show our love for our country by sending our troops abroad and then "supporting" them, no matter what. When images appear that contradict the high-flown rhetoric of war -- whether of young GIs disgracefully humiliating Iraqi prisoners or of a devastated holy city where vast fields of American-created rubble surround a shrine -- we simply do not take them in as real. Thinking of ourselves as only motivated by good intentions, we cannot fathom the possibility that we have demonized an innocent people, that what we are doing is murder on a vast scale.

There is the single most troubling aspect of the war in Iraq. We launched it against the wicked Saddam Hussein, yet the majority of so-called "insurgents" against whom our forces are arrayed hated Hussein more than we did. We are killing people by the thousands who threaten absolutely nothing of ours.

The boys in the Iraqi resistance are not terrorists. They are not Ba'athists. They are not jihadists -- or they weren't until we gave them reason to be. Whatever the justifications for the invasion of Iraq were a year and a half ago, why are we in this war today? And as President Bush might ask, how in the world do we "win" it?

Obviously, something else is going on below the surface of all the stated reasons for this war. The Republican convention last week was gripped with war fever, and the fever itself was the revelation. War is answering an American need that has nothing to do with the Iraqi people.

Even though the war on terrorism is indeed, as the president said, a "crusade," it has nothing real to do with Islam either, although Islam is surely its target. Not Islam as it actually exists in dozens of different settings and cultures across the globe, but an imagined Islam that exists only in the troubled minds of a people who project "evil" outward and then attack it. Alas, it is an old Christian habit.

The war, meanwhile, answers the Bush administration's need to justify an unprecedented repressiveness in the "homeland," and simultaneously prompts widespread docile submission to the new martial law. But more deeply still, by understanding ourselves as a people at war, we Americans find exemption from the duty to face the grotesque shame of what we are doing in the world.

So the final truth about this war is that there is no real enemy (although we are creating enemies by the legion). There will be no victory. I resume this regular column by declaring, President Bush was right.

Carroll gives it all a bit more poetry than is really required, but gets the essentials: this war gives Bush both empire and throne, the divine right of kings. The somnolent press and supine public let him take it.

Speedy Recovery

If you want to send "get well" wishes to the Big Dog, go here.

End of the Dream

An Economy That Turns American Values Upside Down
By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 6, 2004

As the Economic Policy Institute tells us, in a book-length report it is releasing today: "The United States has been tracking employment statistics since 1939, and never in history has it taken this long to regain the jobs lost over a downturn."

In "The State of Working America 2004/2005," the institute shows in tremendous detail how those lost jobs and other disappointing aspects of the recovery are taking a severe economic toll on working families.

According to the institute:

"After almost three years of recovery, our job market is still too weak to broadly distribute the benefits of the growing economy. Unemployment is essentially unchanged, job growth has stalled, and real wages have started to fall behind inflation. Today's picture is a stark contrast to the full employment period before the recession, when the tight labor market ensured that the benefits of growth were broadly shared.

"Prolonged weakness in the labor market has left the nation with over a million fewer jobs than when the recession began. This is a worse position, in terms of recouping lost jobs, than any business cycle since the 1930's."

What is happening is nothing less than a deterioration in the standard of living in the United States. Despite the statistical growth in the economy, the continued slack in the labor market has resulted in declining real wages for anxious American workers and a marked deterioration in job quality.

From 2000 through 2003 the median household income fell by $1,500 (in 2003 dollars) - a significant 3.4 percent decrease. That information becomes startling when you consider that during the same period there was a strong 12 percent increase in productivity among U.S. workers. Economists will tell you that productivity increases go hand-in-hand with increases in the standard of living. But not this time. Here we have a 3.4 percent loss in real income juxtaposed with a big jump in productivity.

"So the economic pie is growing gangbusters and the typical household is falling behind," said Jared Bernstein, the institute's senior economist and a co-author of the new book.

This is the part of the story that spotlights the unfairness at the heart of the current economic setup in the U.S. While workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, they have not participated in the benefits of their own increased productivity. That doesn't sound very much like the American way.

According to the institute, "Between 1947 and 1973 productivity and real median family income both grew 104 percent, a golden age of growth for both variables." That parallel relationship began to break down in the 1970's, but it is only recently that it fell apart altogether, leaving us with the following evidence of unrestrained inequity:

"In the 2000-03 period income shifted extremely rapidly and extensively from labor compensation to capital income (profits and interest)," so that the "benefits of faster productivity growth" went overwhelmingly to capital.

American workers are in an increasingly defensive position. In a tight labor market, when jobs are plentiful, workers have leverage and can demand increased wages and benefits. But today's workers have lost power in many different ways - through the slack labor market, government policies that favor corporate interests, the weakening of unions, the growth of lower-paying service industries, global trade, capital mobility, the declining real value of the minimum wage, immigration and so on.

The end result of all this is a portrait of American families struggling just to hang on, rather than to get ahead. The benefits of productivity gains and economic growth are flowing to profits, not worker compensation. The fat cats are getting fatter, while workers, at least for the time being, are watching the curtain come down on the heralded American dream.

Angry Bear economist PGL shows why this means that the number of people gainfully employed is actually falling. Herbert is right: Bushco's economics are the end of the American dream.

Tottenkultur

Those Disappearing Numbers
William Fisher, Arab News

Is this some vast journalistic or bureaucratic conspiracy to make President Bush look better? I don’t think so. I think what’s happening may be even worse. The US media — especially television — always finds it difficult to cover more than one big story at the same time. Added to this multitasking challenge is the sense that the American public is just plain tired of reading and hearing these awful numbers. And who can blame them?

There will no doubt be a huge burst of ink and air when the KIA number reaches the “magic”1 ,000. After that, I suspect the issue will go back into hibernation as the political campaign gets even hotter — or some other high-profile rape case eats up all the media time and space.

So, just for the record, here are the numbers:

As of Sept.1 , 978 US troops have been killed since the war began on March 19,2003 , Since the president declared “Mission Accomplished”, on May 1,2003 , 839 American troops have lost their lives. KIAs since the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec.13 ,2003 , total518 . And 121 have been killed since the “handover of sovereignty” on June29 ,2004 .

There were an additional 127 deaths among non-US coalition forces, and132 American fatalities in Afghanistan. Another6 , 916US fighters have been injured.

According to Patrick McDonnell of the Washington Post, “Although attention in recent weeks has focused on Najaf, where US forces battled Shiite Muslim militiamen, most of the deadly confrontations for American troops in newly independent Iraq have occurred in the Baghdad area and the so-called Sunni Triangle to the north and west. The concentration of attacks in those areas is a reminder that the fiercest and most organized opposition to US forces and the US-backed interim government continues to be in Sunni-dominated cities, such as Fallujah. Nationwide, US forces are being attacked60 times per day on average, up 20 percent from the three-month period before the hand-over.”

President Bush now admits to a “miscalculation” in what he describes as a “catastrophic success”, and John Kerry tells us he would have voted to go to war even if he knew then what he knows now.

And neither of these gladiators appears to have a clue about how to get us out of what can no longer be denied is a major quagmire.

Earlier in our Iraqi adventure, many pundits pooh-poohed the notion that it could be compared to Vietnam. Our Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured us that all would be well, and that “democracy is messy”. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be a lot messier than Rummy imagined or that the Pentagon planned for — if it planned at all.

What we are learning from Iraq — and what we should have learned from Vietnam — is that policies have consequences. And that the doctrine of pre-emption has deadly consequences.

We need to remember that. And, even more important, we need to remember that “the numbers” we’re no longer seeing aren’t just numbers — they’re people. Young people who won’t ever get older.

And in Rummy's world, they don't matter, just some of the messiness of democracy.

If you aren't as pissed off by this casual disregard of death as I am, I wonder what the hell is the matter with you. This is W's contribution to the New American Century.

Pay It Forward

The highly beneficial Suburban Guerrilla, Susan Madrak, has gone on a brief hiatus in order to earn some coin. She's a friend of mine and I know how bleak her situation is. She has both Paypal and Amazon links up. If you are in a plummier situtation and can throw her a buck or two, she''ll be back with us all the sooner.

Susan has an eye for a story and a nose like a bird dog for chasing it down that makes her one of the best editors here in the lefty blogosphere. Follow the link and read. My hat's off to her and so are some of the $$$ in my PayPal account.

Eating Well, the Best Revenge

Thousands Missing in Revenue Records of Culinary Charity
By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: September 6, 2004

he James Beard Foundation, one of the most prestigious culinary institutions in the nation, cannot account for how it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue, one of its trustees confirmed after a New York Times review of its documents.

The disclosure is the latest in recent weeks to reveal the foundation in disarray, its finances suspect and its mission being questioned. The foundation has not filed tax returns in two years, is under review by the New York state attorney general's charities bureau, is conducting an internal audit, and has fired its accountant. Its longtime president, Leonard F. Pickell Jr., is expected to step down at a trustees' meeting on Wednesday.

A nonprofit, tax-exempt group that promotes American food and chefs, the foundation has grown considerably since being founded by Julia Child and other friends of Mr. Beard, the influential cook and writer, after he died in 1985. Started as a modest memorial in Mr. Beard's former home, it is now a highly effective public relations machine for the food establishment, allied with several major corporations.

The James Beard House, the foundation's headquarters at 167 West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, has become a sort of brownstone Carnegie Hall for chefs.

Cooking one of the 300 luxurious lunches and dinners held there each year is a badge of honor worn by chefs from across the United States. Scores of guests almost every day pay as much as $150 each to dine at those events. Hundreds of chefs, restaurateurs, journalists and authors have capped their résumés with annual awards from the foundation.

But the latest disclosures only substantiate doubts that many have expressed about the group's finances, and even its charitable work.

The group's records show it had $4.7 million in revenue last year but spent only $29,000 on what it calls "an extensive program of scholarships," one of the primary aspects of its mission.

"The foundation is supposed to have a public mission, but it has become nothing more than an expensive dining club," said Barbara Kafka, a cooking teacher and writer who worked with Mr. Beard and has been on the foundation's separate advisory board since its founding in 1986. "They are besotted with these galas."

About 81 percent of the foundation's revenues came from dinner tickets, the awards gala and other events. Most of it was spent on holding those dinners, or paying salaries and expenses to promote them.

In reviewing 15 years of foundation tax returns, The Times consulted experts in nonprofit tax law and restaurateurs and found that the records indicated hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue each year were not accounted for. On Friday, when told of that conclusion, a member of the board of trustees, George P. Sape, said that was accurate. He declined to comment when asked what could have happened to the money or how much in all was involved.

Mr. Sape also said the board was looking into why the tax returns did not reflect the fact that chefs, restaurateurs, winemakers and food producers provide almost all the food and wine for Beard dinners themselves.

Mr. Sape, a board member since 1999, said there was "consternation at the trustee level" when the board learned that the foundation had not submitted returns to the Internal Revenue Service nor met New York State filing requirements for two years. The board is negotiating with the state attorney general's office over a possible penalty for the delinquency, which was first reported by The New York Post. He said the financial problems were a result of the foundation's overwhelming pace of growth.
....
"We think of it as a kind of benevolent shakedown operation," said Anthony Bourdain, chef at Les Halles, a popular New York bistro, who is one of thousands who have donated goods and services to the Beard House since the program began in 1987.

Dozens of chefs interviewed said they accepted the system as mutually beneficial - free food and drink in exchange for publicity. "It's the cost of doing business," said Felix Acosta, the chef at Piatti in Seattle, who willingly flew local salmon, mushrooms and berries to New York for a Beard House dinner.

But according to its tax filings, part of the foundation's mission is to encourage the careers of aspiring chefs - not just chefs who can afford to close their restaurants, ship costly ingredients to New York, and pay for airfare and lodging that can cost them up to $20,000 for a single event.

Although the prestige of an invitation to the Beard House is considerable, the selection process does not appear to include rigorous screening. Ms. Amico, the program director, who selects the chefs, said that her decisions were based on publicity materials, sample menus and word of mouth and that neither she nor any member of the program committee was required to taste a chef's food before issuing an invitation.

She also said her sense of fiscal responsibility to the foundation helped guide her selection of chefs. "I have to bring in chefs who will bring in paying guests," she said.

Mr. Davis said: "We try to fill the house every night. If the house is empty, the foundation isn't making money."

When the Beard Foundation was founded, saving Mr. Beard's house - preserving everything from the master's kitchen cabinets to the fire escape where he used to shower in the nude - was its most pressing commitment. The mortgage has been paid off, and the foundation has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on maintenance. But more work is needed, and the foundation has begun a fund-raising drive to generate a $2 million endowment for renovations and repairs.

Even as the foundation's income has grown from $126,000 in 1987 to the $4.7 million reported on foundation records for 2003 and its annual awards have gained corporate sponsorships from American Express, KitchenAid, and Pellegrino, the foundation has expanded mostly by holding more dinners and giving more awards.

Mr. Bourdain said he thought the money could be better spent. "What about immigration assistance for cooks, or professional counseling?" he said. "That would actually help chefs, not just the people who eat dinner at the Beard House."

This is sort of a strange little story. The fact is that non-profits actually house all kinds of off the books little projects that ought not be shielded from the IRS. That havinging been said, now that we officially live in a corporate kleptocracy, tax evasion sponsored by the federal government has become some sort of badge to wear, like a flag pin in your lapel. Probably it isn't offered for you and me, but I bet Sam Walton gets a box to check on his tax return.

Giuliani Honor Draws Anti-Abortion Fire
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: September 5, 2004

In the view of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops, politicians who belong to the church but depart from its teachings on abortion should be denied honors from a Catholic institution.

Unless, some would say, you happen to be a national hero of Sept. 11 who has raised a lot of money for a church-affiliated hospital.

That would be the former mayor of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani, an abortion rights supporter, whose name will grace a new $25 million trauma center at St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan. Ground was broken last week.

The hospital is a branch of St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, a system of eight hospitals, four nursing homes and a large home-health care agency, overseen by the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Sisters of Charity. Ultimate authority over the complex rests in the hands of Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and Sister Dorothy Metz, president of the Sisters of Charity.

Like all Catholic medical institutions, it does not provide abortions, contraception or other procedures that violate Catholic teaching.

"If you would name a center after somebody, certainly that would qualify as an honor," said the Rev. Frank Pavone, a priest who lives in Staten Island and runs the national anti-abortion campaign Priests for Life. Father Pavone called the naming "troublesome," saying, "It certainly isn't something I would do if I were in that position."

He said that Republicans who support abortion rights should be treated the same as Democrats who hold similar views, including some who have been denied communion. Mr. Giuliani is a Republican.

Christopher Slattery, an anti-abortion activist in the New York area, said the naming of the trauma center was "outrageous."

"I think it's a scandal that a Roman Catholic institution is prominently honoring a man who has a serious, at least one serious moral flaw, if not many," he said.

This is a mayor who carried on an infidelity in front of his voters and his children in the city's public mayor's mansion, and the Church is getting exercised over this? Sheesh.

I love the way the Repubs front adulterers and then pretend to be the "traditional morality" party.

Pre-dick-tible

Frank Rich calls out the "retch factor." I have been unable to name what it is that is making me so uncomfortable about this campaign. Rich names it: it is the old swinging dick business. Kerry is letting W frame the debate. This dickless voter would prefer other terms.

FRANK RICH:
How Kerry Became a Girlie-Man

The flaw in Mr. Kerry is not, as Washington wisdom has it, that he asked for trouble from the Swifties by bringing up Vietnam in the first place. Both his Vietnam service and Vietnam itself are entirely relevant to a campaign set against an unpopular and ineptly executed war in Iraq that was spawned by the executive branch in similarly cloudy circumstances. But having brought Vietnam up against the backdrop of our 2004 war, Mr. Kerry has nothing to say about it except that his service proves he's more manly than Mr. Bush. Well, nearly anyone is more manly than a president who didn't have the guts to visit with the 9/11 commission unaccompanied by a chaperone.

It's Mr. Kerry's behavior now, not what he did 35 years ago, that has prevented his manliness from trumping the president's. Posing against a macho landscape like the Grand Canyon, he says that he would have given Mr. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq even if he knew then what we know now. The setting may be the Old West, but the words do sound as if they've been translated from the French. His attempt to do nuance, as Mr. Bush would put it, makes him sound as if he buys the message the Republicans hammered in last week: the road from 9/11 led inevitably into Iraq.

The truth is that Mr. Kerry was a man's man not just when he volunteered to fight in a losing war but when he came home and forthrightly fought against it, on grounds that history has upheld. Unless he's man enough to stand up for that past, he's doomed to keep competing with Mr. Bush to see who can best play an action figure on TV. Mr. Kerry doesn't seem to understand that it takes a certain kind of talent to play dress-up and deliver lines like "Bring it on." In that race, it's not necessarily the best man but the best actor who will win.

Don't Look

U.S. Troops in Iraq See Highest Injury Toll Yet
U.S. Troops See Highest Toll Yet

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 5, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 4 -- About 1,100 U.S. soldiers and Marines were wounded in Iraq during August, by far the highest combat injury toll for any month since the war began and an indication of the intensity of battles flaring in urban areas.

U.S. medical commanders say the sharp rise in battlefield injuries reflects more than three weeks of fighting by two Army and one Marine battalion in the southern city of Najaf. At the same time, U.S. units frequently faced combat in a sprawling Shiite Muslim slum in Baghdad and in the Sunni cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, all of which remain under the control of insurgents two months after the transfer of political authority.

"They were doing battlefield urban operations in four places at one time," said Lt. Col. Albert Maas, operations officer for the 2nd Medical Brigade, which oversees U.S. combat hospitals in Iraq. "It's like working in downtown Detroit. You're going literally building to building."

The sharp rise in wounded was, for the first time, accompanied by a far less steep climb in battlefield fatalities. Since the start of the war in March 2003, 979 U.S. troops have died in Iraq and almost 7,000 have been wounded. Until last month, however, the monthly tallies of fatalities and wounded rose and fell roughly in proportion.

In August, 66 U.S. service personnel were killed in Iraq, according to the Defense Department. The toll was the highest since May, when 80 fatalities were recorded. But it was well below the 135 U.S. combat deaths in April, when a sporadic guerrilla war that had largely been confined to the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad spread to cities across the previously quiescent Shiite Muslim belt in southern Iraq. The U.S. military does not routinely release the reported number of Iraqi casualties and wounded.

Didja notice that CENTCOM released no casualty info during the RNC? In my world, that's called "magical thinking."

Labor Day

SICK OF WORK
Always on the Job, Employees Pay With Health
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: September 5, 2004

American workers are stressed out, and in an unforgiving economy, they are becoming more so every day.

Sixty-two percent say their workload has increased over the last six months; 53 percent say work leaves them "overtired and overwhelmed."

Even at home, in the soccer bleachers or at the Labor Day picnic, workers are never really off the clock, bound to BlackBerries, cellphones and laptops. Add iffy job security, rising health care costs, ailing pension plans and the fear that a financial setback could put mortgage payments out of reach, and the office has become, for many, an echo chamber of angst.

It is enough to make workers sick - and it does.

Decades of research have linked stress to everything from heart attacks and stroke to diabetes and a weakened immune system. Now, however, researchers are connecting the dots, finding that the growing stress and uncertainty of the office have a measurable impact on workers' health and, by extension, on companies' bottom lines.

Workplace stress costs the nation more than $300 billion each year in health care, missed work and the stress-reduction industry that has grown up to soothe workers and keep production high, according to estimates by the American Institute of Stress in New York. And workers who report that they are stressed, said Steven L. Sauter, chief of the Organizational Science and Human Factors Branch of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, incur health care costs that are 46 percent higher, or an average of $600 more per person, than other employees.

"The costs are significant," Dr. Sauter said, adding, "Those are just the costs to the organization, and not the burden to individuals and to society."

American workers are not the only ones grappling with escalating stress and ever greater job demands. European companies are changing once-generous vacation policies, and stress-related illnesses cost England 13 million working days each year, one British health official said.

"It's an issue everywhere you go in the world," said Dr. Guy Standing, the lead author of "Economic Security for a Better World," a new report from the International Labor Office, an agency of the United Nations.

White-collar workers are particularly at risk, Dr. Standing said, because "we tend to take our work home."

Most stress-related health problems are a far cry from the phenomenon known in Japan as karoshi, or "death from overwork." But downsizing, rapid business expansion, outsourcing - trends that some have credited with increasing the nation's economic health - translate into increases in sick days, hospitalization, the risk of heart attack and a host of other stress-related problems, researchers find.

The changing workplace, said Hugo Westerlund, a researcher at the National Institute for Psychosocial Medicine in Stockholm, "does pose a threat to people's health."

Growth of the Untraditional Job

The days when an employer said "if you do your job, you'll have a job" are long gone.

The traditional career, progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions, "is finished," said Dr. Richard Sennett, a sociologist at New York University. He has calculated that a young American today with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least 11 times before retirement.

Business has moved away from traditional employment, now an almost quaint concept described in a recent RAND Corporation study as "full-time jobs of indefinite duration at a facility owned or rented by the employer."

Instead, that study found, one in every four workers in the United States is "in some nontraditional employment relationship," including part-time work and self-employment. Four out of 10 Americans now work "mostly at nonstandard time," according to figures cited by Harriet Presser of the University of Maryland. The odd hours include evenings, nights, rotating shifts and weekends to meet the demands of global supply chains and customers in every time zone.

What is your worklife like? In my last life, 18 hour days were not uncommon. In my new one, my boss will be in the office today and tomorrow, on this holiday weekend which is somehow about the life of the worker. And she'll have company.

Most of the geeky types I know work very strange hours and seem to prefer that to interfacing with humanity on the terms of the 40 hour week. What about you? How long is your commute? How do you stand it? What do you do to make your work life sustainable as part of your whole life?

Widgets in the War Machine

Wounded soldiers say they languish at base for no reason

By Andrew Kramer
Associated Press

FORT LEWIS, Wash. — About a dozen Oregon National Guard soldiers say they languished for months at this military base in Washington because the Army lacked a protocol to allow them to return to Oregon to convalesce.

The soldiers also waited hours for doctor appointments, were forced to fill out confusing paperwork and faced months of delays with benefits, they told Brig. Gen. Raymond Byrne, acting adjutant general of the Oregon National Guard, on Monday.

“I feel that the system is lacking all common guidance,” said Sgt. William Harris. “I don’t have anything to fall back on. There’s nothing for me here on the inside, and nothing on the outside.”

Guard officials concede the soldiers, some of whom had only slight injuries, could have returned to their families, perhaps commuting to a base or a clinic for care.

The problem arose from an oversight in the Army’s war planning, which failed to anticipate the large number of wounded soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Col. Douglas Eliason, chief medical officer with the Oregon Guard.

He said a new program introduced in Oregon two weeks ago will send more Guard members home to heal. Under the problem, soldiers will be provided with a job suited to their injuries at a National Guard armory, and given treatment options at a Veterans Administration clinic or with private doctors.

Around the country, close to 5,000 reserve and guard soldiers are receiving medical care at active-duty bases, a consequence of the military’s reliance on reserve soldiers for the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

From Oregon, 49 National Guard soldiers are convalescing from wounds at Army bases around the country — some because they need specialized care for severe injuries, but many because the Army had no system to allow them to return home.

Of the Oregon soldiers treated at active duty bases, 39 were wounded in Iraq. Twenty-six of them are at Fort Lewis.

“Nobody really anticipated we would have a demand like this,” Eliason said.

“They’re on a remote post, with people they don’t know, and far from their support system of friends and family,” he said.

“There’s certainly some anger with these soldiers.”

The soldiers discussed their problems Monday at the meeting with Byrne. Some limped into the hospital chapel on crutches, while Byrne shook their hands and thanked them for their service.

The soldiers, in turn, loosed an angry tirade about Army red tape and, some said, inferior medical care.

“If you guys expect us to just sit here and suck it all in, I’m sorry sir,” Harris said. “With all due respect, I’ve lost my respect for the uniform."

La Etat, c'est moi

Terrorism is a tool of a greater danger
William Pfaff IHT/TMSI
Friday, September 03, 2004

Chechnya, Iraq and beyond

PARIS President Vladimir Putin of Russia is in grave difficulty because he has refused to acknowledge the real nature of the challenge to his government in Chechnya. The terrible hostage crisis in North Ossetia and the bombings of recent days are the result of his unwillingness to recognize the implications of defying nationalism - not mere "terrorism" - in the Caucasus.

Putin is making the same mistake that President George W. Bush and the U.S. government made after the Sept. 11 attacks. Like Putin, they insisted they were merely dealing with terrorists or criminals.

They were actually dealing with terrorism and crime in the service of nationalism and religion, which is entirely different. In the political circumstances of today, nationalism and radical religion have come to compete and overlap in Chechnya, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nationalism has been a driving force in the Caucasus since the 18th century. The Chechens fought Czarist imperial expansion from 1818. After 1917, they fought the Bolsheviks. They rose again when the German offensive reached Chechnya in 1942, and in revenge Stalin deported many to Central Asia.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Chechens again demanded independence, and President Boris Yeltsin sent troops against them.

Putin, too was foolish enough to think that he could crush the Chechens. He renewed the war against them to win votes. He won Bush's favor in 2001: Were the Chechens not terrorists? Were they not America's enemies, too? But now Chechen terrorism is undermining Putin. Like Bush, he has promised to "win," but he is not winning.

In invading Iraq, the Bush administration made a gift of Iraqi nationalism to the Islamic fundamentalists. Without nationalism, the fundamentalist cause is weak. The aim of its jihad is to recreate the fundamentalist intellectuals' idealized notion of medieval Islamic society. Recovering a golden age is an idea that recurs in weak societies suffering the crises of development.

A segment of society, usually young, often Western-educated and from privileged circumstances, experiences a puritan reaction against the dominant materialism, moral disorder, licentiousness and abuse of power that it sees in the West.

This is a common phenomenon. The "Maoist" terrorists of western Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s included pastors' daughters and former seminarians motivated by moral outrage against capitalism.

Young Muslims who mobilized to fight Russian aggression in Afghanistan moved on to fight corruption and heresy elsewhere - in Egypt, Algeria and Bosnia. The people in those countries, however, did not follow them. Just as in the case of Europe's "Maoists," the radicalized young had believed that ordinary people were ready for revolution, and were mistaken.

When the people won't follow, the next step for the radical, in Europe and the Islamic world, is terrorism - "terrible" acts meant to awaken Muslims to the truth, and to terrify enemies by invoking God's liberating wrath. That brings us to Al Qaeda.

Fundamentalism and nationalism were parallel forces at work in the Caucasus and the Middle East well before the new fundamentalists came home from Afghanistan. Nationalism, with terrorism a part of it, drove the Zionists' war against the British and the Palestinians before Israel was created. Palestinian terrorism has been part of the war against Israel ever since.

Whatever Washington thought it was doing - and there seems to have been little responsible thought about what it was doing - it made a basic error by declaring a "war on terror" after the Sept. 11 attacks and then attacking the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and invading Iraq.

It created the circumstances in which nationalism and "terrorism" are now at war with the United States. The Iraq insurrection's essential motivation is nationalism. Thus, sooner or later, the United States will be forced out of Iraq.

I won't speak to Putin's situation because I can't say that I've been following it. Pfaff
s read on Iraq is spot on. Bush is intellectually incapable of understanding the real claims to sovereignty of anyone other than himself or his partisans. It is the same with his domestic politics. Both arise from a sense of moral authority grounded in pernicious Calvinism which is uniquely American, and terribly cynical. These boys were born to rule, they think it is their birthright. Bush thinks he is the Sun King.

Time to throw the bastards out.

Lucky Duckies

John Aravosis digs behind the numbers in the new jobless stats at AMERICAblog. Surprise! The numbers are down because more people have given up looking for work

Trolls

If you aren't reading Juan Cole, I'm not going to take you seriously.

Be well read or be gone.

Connect the Dots

Graydon, I'll start taking you really seriously when you get Vanity Fair online. This is from The Independent.

Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards
By Graydon Carter

03 September 2004

1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.

104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.

101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned missile defence.

65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses.

73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses.

83 Number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq, or regime (as in change) in his three State of the Union addresses.

$1m Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Saudi Arabia in his three State of the Union addresses.

1,700 Percentage increase between 2001 and 2002 of Saudi Arabian spending on public relations in the United States.

79 Percentage of the 11 September hijackers who came from Saudi Arabia.

3 Number of 11 September hijackers whose entry visas came through special US-Saudi "Visa Express" programme.

140 Number of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, evacuated from United States almost immediately after 11 September.

14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa'ida is active.

$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.

$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.

$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.

$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised gambling.

7 Number of Arabic linguists fired by the US army between mid-August and mid-October 2002 for being gay.

George Bush: Military man

1972 Year that Bush walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas National Guard, Nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.

$3,500 Reward a group of veterans offered in 2000 for anyone who could confirm Bush's Alabama guard service.

600-700 Number of guardsmen who were in Bush's unit during that period.

0 Number of guardsmen from that period who came forward with information about Bush's guard service.

0 Number of minutes that President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the assistant Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the former chairman of the Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle, and the White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove ­ the main proponents of the war in Iraq ­served in combat (combined).

0 Number of principal civilian or Pentagon staff members who planned the war who have immediate family members serving in uniform in Iraq.

8 Number of members of the US Senate and House of Representatives who have a child serving in the military.

10 Number of days that the Pentagon spent investigating a soldier who had called the President "a joke" in a letter to the editor of a Newspaper.

46 Percentage increase in sales between 2001 and 2002 of GI Joe figures (children's toys).

Ambitious warrior

2 Number of Nations that George Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into office.

130 Approximate Number of countries (out of a total of 191 recognised by the United Nations) with a US military presence.

43 Percentage of the entire world's military spending that the US spends on defence. (That was in 2002, the year before the invasion of Iraq.)

$401.3bn Proposed military budget for 2004.

Saviour of Iraq

1983 The year in which Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs as a gift.

2.5 Number of hours after Rumsfeld learnt that Osama bin Laden was a suspect in the 11 September attacks that he brought up reasons to "hit" Iraq.

237 Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by top Bush administration officials between 2002 and January 2004, according to the California Representative Henry Waxman.

10m Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets on 21 February 2003, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the largest simultaneous protest in world history.

$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by the White House in April 2003.

$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according to Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.

$15m Amount of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq.

$80,000 Amount an Iraqi firm spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from starting it.

2000 Year that Cheney said his policy as CEO of Halliburton oil services company was "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq".

$4.7bn Total value of contracts awarded to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan.

$680m Estimated value of Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to Bechtel.

$2.8bnValue of Bechtel Corp contracts in Iraq.

$120bn Amount the war and its aftermath are projected to cost for the 2004 fiscal year.

35 Number of countries to which the United States suspended military assistance after they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.

92 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2002.

60 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2003.

55 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who were unemployed before the war.

80 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who are unemployed a Year after the war.

0 Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender in May 1945.

37 Death toll of US soldiers in Iraq in May 2003, the month combat operations "officially" ended.

0 Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home that the Bush administration has permitted to be photographed.

0 Number of memorial services for the returned dead that Bush has attended since the beginning of the war.

A soldier's best friend

40,000 Number of soldiers in Iraq seven months after start of the war still without Interceptor vests, designed to stop a round from an AK-47.

$60m Estimated cost of outfitting those 40,000 soldiers with Interceptor vests.

62 Percentage of gas masks that army investigators discovered did Not work properly in autumn 2002.

90 Percentage of detectors which give early warning of a biological weapons attack found to be defective.

87 Percentage of Humvees in Iraq not equipped with armour capable of stopping AK-47 rounds and protecting against roadside bombs and landmines at the end of 2003.

Making the country safer

$3.29 Average amount allocated per person Nationwide in the first round of homeland security grants.

$94.40 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in American Samoa.

$36 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming, Vice-President Cheney's home state.

$17 Amount allocated per person in New York state.

$5.87 Amount allocated per person in New York City.

$77.92 Amount allocated per person in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, Bush's alma mater.

76 Percentage of 215 cities surveyed by the US Conference of Mayors in early 2004 that had yet to receive a dime in federal homeland security assistance for their first-response units.

5 Number of major US airports at the beginning of 2004 that the Transportation Security Administration admitted were Not fully screening baggage electronically.

22,600 Number of planes carrying unscreened cargo that fly into New York each month.

5 Estimated Percentage of US air cargo that is screened, including cargo transported on passenger planes.

95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.

2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.

$5.5bnEstimated cost to secure fully US ports over the Next decade.

$0 Amount Bush allocated for port security in 2003.

$46m Amount the Bush administration has budgeted for port security in 2005.

15,000 Number of major chemical facilities in the United States.

100 Number of US chemical plants where a terrorist act could endanger the lives of more than one million people.

0 Number of new drugs or vaccines against "priority pathogens" listed by the Centres for Disease Control that have been developed and introduced since 11 September 2001.

Giving a hand up to the advantaged

$10.9m Average wealth of the members of Bush's original 16-person cabinet.

75 Percentage of Americans unaffected by Bush's sweeping 2003 cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.

$42,000 Average savings members of Bush's cabinet received in 2003 as a result of cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.

10 Number of fellow members from the Yale secret society Skull and Bones that Bush has named to important positions (including the Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. and SEC chief Bill Donaldson).

79 Number of Bush's initial 189 appointees who also served in his father's administration.

A man with a lot of friends

$113m Amount of total hard money the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign received, a record.

$11.5m Amount of hard money raised through the Pioneer programme, the controversial fund-raising process created for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. (Participants pledged to raise at least $100,000 by bundling together cheques of up to $1,000 from friends and family. Pioneers were assigned numbers, which were included on all cheques, enabling the campaign to keep track of who raised how much.)

George Bush: Money manager

4.7m Number of bankruptcies that were declared during Bush's first three years in office.

2002 The worst year for major markets since the recession of the 1970s.

$489bn The US trade deficit in 2003, the worst in history for a single year.

$5.6tr Projected national surplus forecast by the end of the decade when Bush took office in 2001.

$7.22tr US national debt by mid-2004.

George Bush: Tax cutter

87 Percentage of American families in April 2004 who say they have felt no benefit from Bush's tax cuts.

39 Percentage of tax cuts that will go to the top 1 per cent of American families when fully phased in.

49 Percentage of Americans in April 2004 who found that their taxes had actually gone up since Bush took office.

88 Percentage of American families who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.

$30,858 Amount Bush himself saved in taxes in 2003.

Employment tsar

9.3m Number of US unemployed in April 2004.

2.3m Number of Americans who lost their jobs during first three Years of the Bush administration.

22m Number of jobs gained during Clinton's eight years in office.

Friend of the poor

34.6m Number of Americans living below the poverty line (1 in 8 of the population).

6.8m Number of people in the workforce but still classified as poor.

35m Number of Americans that the government defines as "food insecure," in other words, hungry.

$300m Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes.

40 Percentage of wealth in the United States held by the richest 1 per cent of the population.

18 Percentage of wealth in Britain held by the richest 1e per cent of the population.

George Bush And his special friend

$60bn Loss to Enron stockholders, following the largest bankruptcy in US history.

$205m Amount Enron CEO Kenneth Lay earned from stock option profits over a four-year period.

$101m Amount Lay made from selling his Enron shares just before the company went bankrupt.

$59,339 Amount the Bush campaign reimbursed Enron for 14 trips on its corporate jet during the 2000 campaign.

30 Length of time in months between Enron's collapse and Lay (whom the President called "Kenny Boy") still not being charged with a crime.

George Bush: Lawman

15 Average number of minutes Bush spent reviewing capital punishment cases while governor of Texas.

46 Percentage of Republican federal judges when Bush came to office.

57 Percentage of Republican federal judges after three years of the Bush administration.

33 Percentage of the $15bn Bush pledged to fight Aids in Africa that must go to abstinence-only programmes.

The Civil libertarian

680 Number of suspected al-Qa'ida members that the United States admits are detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

42 Number of nationalities of those detainees at Guantanamo.

22 Number of hours prisoners were handcuffed, shackled, and made to wear surgical masks, earmuffs, and blindfolds during their flight to Guantanamo.

32 Number of confirmed suicide attempts by Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

24 Number of prisoners in mid-2003 being monitored by psychiatrists in Guantanamo's new mental ward.

A health-conscious president

43.6m Number of Americans without health insurance by the end of 2002 (more than 15 per cent of the population).

2.4m Number of Americans who lost their health insurance during Bush's first year in office.

Environmentalist

$44m Amount the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and the Republican National Committee received in contributions from the fossil fuel, chemical, timber, and mining industries.

200 Number of regulation rollbacks downgrading or weakening environmental laws in Bush's first three years in office.

31 Number of Bush administration appointees who are alumni of the energy industry (includes four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful White House officials, and more than 20 other high-level appointees).

50 Approximate number of policy changes and regulation rollbacks injurious to the environment that have been announced by the Bush administration on Fridays after 5pm, a time that makes it all but impossible for news organisations to relay the information to the widest possible audience.

50 Percentage decline in Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against polluters under Bush's watch.

34 Percentage decline in criminal penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.

50 Percentage decline in civil penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.

$6.1m Amount the EPA historically valued each human life when conducting economic analyses of proposed regulations.

$3.7m Amount the EPA valued each human life when conducting analyses of proposed regulations during the Bush administration.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned global warming, clean air, clean water, pollution or environment in his 2004 State of the Union speech. His father was the last president to go through an entire State of the Union address without mentioning the environment.

1 Number of paragraphs devoted to global warming in the EPA's 600-page "Draft Report on the Environment" presented in 2003.

68 Number of days after taking office that Bush decided Not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases by roughly 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States was to cut its level by 7 per cent.

1 The rank of the United States worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

25 Percentage of overall worldwide carbon dioxide emissions the United States is responsible for.

53 Number of days after taking office that Bush reneged on his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

14 Percentage carbon dioxide emissions will increase over the next 10 years under Bush's own global-warming plan (an increase of 30 per cent above their 1990 levels).

408 Number of species that could be extinct by 2050 if the global-warming trend continues.

5 Number of years the Bush administration said in 2003 that global warming must be further studied before substantive action could be taken.

62 Number of members of Cheney's 63-person Energy Task Force with ties to corporate energy interests.

0 Number of environmentalists asked to attend Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings.

6 Number of months before 11 September that Cheney's Energy Task Force investigated Iraq's oil reserves.

2 Percentage of the world's population that is British.

2 Percentage of the world's oil used by Britain.

5 Percentage of the world's population that is American.

25 Percentage of the world's oil used by America.

63 Percentage of oil the United States imported in 2003, a record high.

24,000 Estimated number of premature deaths that will occur under Bush's Clear Skies initiative.

300 Number of Clean Water Act violations by the mountaintop-mining industry in 2003.

750,000 Tons of toxic waste the US military, the world's biggest polluter, generates around the world each Year.

$3.8bn Amount in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 1995, the Year "polluter pays" fees expired.

$0m Amount of uncommitted dollars in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 2003.

270 Estimated number of court decisions citing federal Negligence in endangered-species protection that remained unheeded during the first year of the Bush administration.

100 Percentage of those decisions that Bush then decided to allow the government to ignore indefinitely.

68.4 Average Number of species added to the Endangered and Threatened Species list each year between 1991 and 2000.

0 Number of endangered species voluntarily added by the Bush administration since taking office.

50 Percentage of screened workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from long-term health problems, almost half of whom don't have health insurance.

78 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from lung ailments.

88 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who Now suffer from ear, nose, or throat problems.

22 Asbestos levels at Ground Zero were 22 times higher than the levels in Libby, Montana, where the W R Grace mine produced one of the worst Superfund disasters in US history.

Image booster for the US

2,500 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further the image of the US abroad in 1991.

1,200 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further US image abroad in 2004.

4 Rank of the United States among countries considered to be the greatest threats to world peace according to a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes study (Israel, Iran, and North Korea were considered more dangerous; Iraq was considered less dangerous).

$66bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 1949.

$23.8bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 2002.

85 Percentage of Indonesians who had an unfavourable image of the United States in 2003.

Second-party endorsements

90 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2001.

67 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2002.

54 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 30 September, 2003.

50 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 15 October 2003.

49 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president in May 2004.

More like the French than he would care to admit

28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2003, the second-longest vacation of any president in US history. (Record holder Richard Nixon.)

13 Number of vacation days the average American receives each Year.

28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2001, the month he received a 6 August Presidential Daily Briefing headed "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike US Targets."

500 Number of days Bush has spent all or part of his time away from the White House at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, his parents' retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, or Camp David as of 1 April 2004.

No fool when it comes to the press

11 Number of press conferences during his first three Years in office in which Bush referred to questions as being "trick" ones.

Factors in his favour

3 Number of companies that control the US voting technology market.

52 Percentage of votes cast during the 2002 midterm elections that were recorded by Election Systems & Software, the largest voting-technology firm, a big Republican donor.

29 Percentage of votes that will be cast via computer voting machines that don't produce a paper record.

17On 17 November 2001, The Economist printed a correction for having said George Bush was properly elected in 2000.

$113m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, the most in American electoral history.

$185m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, to the end of March 2004.

$200m Amount that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign expects to raise by November 2004.

268 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Pioneer status (by raising $100,000 each) as of March 2004.

187 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Ranger status (by raising $200,000 each) as of March 2004.

$64.2mThe Amount Pioneers and Rangers had raised for Bush-Cheney as of March 2004.

85 Percentage of Americans who can't Name the Chief Justice of the United States.

69 Percentage of Americans who believed the White House's claims in September 2003 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September attacks.

34 Percentage of Americans who believed in June 2003 that Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" had been found.

22 Percentage of Americans who believed in May 2003 that Saddam had used his WMDs on US forces.

85 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map.

30 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a map.

75 Percentage of American young adults who don't know the population of the United States.

53 Percentage of Canadian young adults who don't know the population of the United States.

11 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the United States on a map.

30 Percentage of Americans who believe that "politics and government are too complicated to understand."

Another factor in his favour

70m Estimated number of Americans who describe themselves as Evangelicals who accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour and who interpret the Bible as the direct word of God.

23m Number of Evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2000.

50m Number of voters in total who voted for Bush in 2000.

46 Percentage of voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians.

5 Number of states that do not use the word "evolution" in public school science courses.

I do believe that says it all.

Who's Doing Who?

The Pentagon and the process: the spies in our midst. A round up by Leak Probe More Than 2 Years Old
Pro-Israel Group's Possible Role at Issue

By Susan Schmidt and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 2, 2004; Page A06

For more than two years, the FBI has been investigating whether classified intelligence has been passed to Israel by the American Israel Political Action Committee, an influential U.S. lobbying group, in a probe that extends beyond the case of Pentagon employee Lawrence A. Franklin, according to senior U.S. officials and other sources.

Defense Intelligence Agency who specializes in Iran, is suspected of passing the proposed directive on Iran to AIPAC, officials said, which may have forwarded it to Israel. According to friends and colleagues, Franklin spent time in Israel, including during duty in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, in which he served as a specialist in foreign political-military affairs. Franklin now works for Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

Pentagon Office in Spying Case Was Focus of Iran Debate
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - The Pentagon's policy office, where a lower-level analyst is under suspicion of passing secrets to Israel, was deeply involved in deliberations over how the United States should deal with Iran, its conservative Islamic government and its nuclear weapons ambitions - all issues of intense concern to Israel as well.

The analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, a Farsi-speaking specialist on Iran in the office, participated in a secret outreach meeting with an Iranian opposition figure, had access to classified intelligence about Iran's nuclear program and was one of many officials involved in drafting a top-secret presidential order on Iran.

The authorities say that Mr. Franklin, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, passed to lobbyists from a pro-Israel group a draft of the presidential order, known as a National Security Presidential Directive. But President Bush has not yet approved a final version because many of the policy questions themselves remain under intense debate.

"We have an ad hoc policy that we're making up as we go along," said a government official involved in the internal debate. "It is to squeeze Iran, using international pressure, to get them to rid themselves of their nuclear program."

News
Questions Raised Over Aipac's Tactics
By Ori Nir
September 3, 2004

WASHINGTON — The FBI investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has cast light on the fine line that the organization walks between advocating a strong American-Israeli alliance and acting as the representative of a foreign government.

Both activities are legal, but serving a foreign government requires registration with the Department of Justice and entails severe legal restrictions, not applied to pro-Israel groups, including Aipac.

Aipac's defenders, both in congressional and Jewish communal circles, insist that no evidence has emerged suggesting that Aipac either violated American espionage laws or even crossed the line requiring it to register as a representative of a foreign agent. Aipac enjoys the support, admiration and even awe of Jewish organizational officials, many of whom raced to Aipac's defense this week.

Still, some pro-Israel activists in Washington are privately suggesting that the current scandal provides Aipac with a chance, in the words of one communal official, for "some soul-searching and reappraisal" regarding its general modes of operation. In recent years a growing minority of pro-Israel activists have expressed criticism of the lobbying powerhouse's conduct.

Some critics in the Jewish community say that Aipac's leadership is too closely identified with Israel's ruling Likud party, an accusation that the organization's executives reject strongly, arguing that the lobbying group always has supported the democratically elected Israeli government, no matter which party is in power.

Critics also have accused Aipac of adopting an agenda that too closely mirrors the hawkish agenda of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, thereby fueling conspiratorial notions that President Bush was duped into invading Iraq in order to advance Israeli interests.

Now, critics say, with its increasing focus on Iran, Aipac risks fueling the claims of those who would accuse the Jewish community of working with Washington neoconservatives to convince the White House to pursue regime change in Tehran. "Aipac is obsessed with Iran," said a Washington executive with a major Jewish organization, suggesting that high-profile lobbying on Iran may foment anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments.

Faith in the Process

The transcript isn't up yet, but let's parse Bush 1's appearance on Lehrer this evening. It has all the talking points and we know them well.

There is one I want to take apart in particular: the idea that the world is better off with Saddam gone, which is not the argument that got us into war, but is the current excuse and Lehrer and HW trotted it out uncritically this evening. Is the world a better place without Saddam? It depends. Is Iraq a safer and more stable place? No. American, Iraqi and allied lives are being lost at an increased rate. 16 months after "mission" accomplished, the rate of death is still nuts. A world more peaceful and free appears to be a long, hard slog through increasing violence and death. An attorney I work with today said "show me some evidence. Evidence brings comfort."

The evidence brings the news that Darfur is the home of the worst genocide in ten years, that we are no safer and that we are doing nothing about either.

George Bush, show us where you are protecting chemical and nuclear plants. Let me see where you have fixed port security. You haven't done a fraction of these things much less funding Nunn-Lugar and putting the Former Soviet nu-luler out of the reach of terrorists, rogue scientists or AQ Khan, who still knows more than he tells. And how many more troops have to die before getting rid of Saddam is a better thing? And how much is that going to cost us, this was your choice war, learn to live with the choice, W, you fraud.

The world of W is a world of no-bid contracts for his friends and the alternative tax credit for thee and me to pay for it. Take those taxes, those death taxes off those millionaires, the rest of us can make it up to them!

By the way, who died and left David Brooks as an authority? What feats of scholarship has this worthy committed to our libraries that make him worth listening to? Mark Shields has covered politics as a journo for nearly 40 years, and I'll give onts for that, but what is Brooks claim to any kind of authority? Anyone? He's not a journo, does he have a law degree? An MBA? Anything which demonstrates that he actually knows how to read and write? Has a discipline into which to offer an analysis? Why the right loves him when he really isn't very good is beyond me. But, then, they are usually ready to settle for second rate thought. Matt Yglesias, no favorite of mine, can usually best him with one finger pounding on the counter while waiting for his second cup of coffee in the morning. Does balding early give a man gravitas? Perhaps he just represents the hair-jealous wing of the party, the Viagra wing.

Ugh. I had to turn it off. This is so repellent to what I think of as normal human values that I'll spend the night tossing in the sheets like a caeser salad as a raw egg and won't be able to do my job in the morning.

Preliminary conclusion (subject to revision) is that these people have jumped the shark and are outside the range of normal human experience. This is the last gasp of the last century, the tapped out Ideas of Reagan and Laffer and their harems. It has worked for the few, as long as few vote. I think the Hegelian pendulum has swung, and the Right just fractured itself the way the Left did after 1968. I think this Right mis-underestimated the times it brought us and 1,000 dead within a week.

Saddam Hussein was a bad man. We have many such people running crime syndicates, scams and dedicating themselves to stealing the savings and even lives of widows and orphans everyday, right here at home. How many lives and how much money are we willing to spend on that? I don't mean to be parochial, I'm an internatioalist, and we'd be in Darfur right now if we didn't have our forces overstretched in Iraq. But we do.

We made a bad choice, and the world is going to have to live with it because we are the biggest, baddest force on the block. While the rest of the world goes to hell in a handbasket and we can't do squat about it.

Somewhere down in comments, someone called me to task for being a too-judgemental Christian. I can only reply that a Christian without the faculty of judgement is likely to go wrong. After all, reason is a human faculty and demanded of us if we are going to make good choices. I recommend that he read The Summa Theoligica for some help on faith and judgement. As humans, St. Thomas expects that we have some,while God is our guide to Ultimate Decisions. That's not me speaking, it is Thomas.

Be reasoned or be gone.

Melanie

Uh, dude, are you channeling God? If so, I'd love to know about it. You have my email.

George W. Bush is a miserable failure. Does that make me judgemental or wise. You make the call.

Over-Zell-ous

Terry Neal digs into the WaPo archives for a reflective piece on the evolution of Zell Miller from populist Democrat to Kerry-hating Repub. Neal reprises the main points of Miller's reservations about the Iraq war which he expressed in a Post editorial in 2002. The questions he asks are good ones and remain unanswered to this day, although it is now clear that Miller has repudiated his earlier position and thinks fighting the terrorists in the sands of Mesopotamia is preferable to fighting them in the streets of Alpharetta.

Old Zell Miller, Not the Same as the New

Here are the questions Miller raised in that column:
"(1) Even if Hussein has nukes, does he have the capability to reach New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta?
"(2) The old Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missiles for decades, many of them capable of reaching our major cities, and yet we didn't get into a war with the Soviets. The president needs to explain why Iraq is different.
"(3) Who will join with us in this war and what share will they be willing to bear? (There was also some grumbling about our boys in Afghanistan 'just doing guard duty' to protect those warlords.)
"(4) What happens after we take out Hussein? How long will our soldiers be there? And, again, with whose help?
"(5) There is concern about too much deployment. We've got our soldiers stationed all over the world. Someone needs to bring us up to date on where they all are, why they are there and how long our commitment to keep them there is.
"(6) How does our plan in Iraq fit in with the whole Middle East question? How will it affect Israel? How will it affect our war on terrorism? Does taking Saddam out help or hurt that entire messy situation?
"(7) At Mary Ann's Restaurant, Tony is all right. But Putin is not. Why are we putting so much trust in him? Is he still with us in the war on terrorism, or was that just so much talk at a photo op?
"(8) The people at Mary Ann's know very well who fights our wars -- the kids from the middle-class and blue-collar homes of America. Kids like their grandchildren. They want to hear the president say that he knows and understands that.
"(9) Forgive my bluntness, but these folks also want to hear the president and the vice president say that this war is not about oil.
"(10) They also want to hear an explanation of why we didn't take care of this in the Persian Gulf War, and why it is on our doorstep again so soon."
The president's Democratic critics (and some Republican critics) say the administration's inability to sufficiently answer those questions has cost Bush some of his support. Miller, however, has drawn a different conclusion, one that he laid out forcefully in last night's speech.
- By Terry M. Neal

Did the Repubs jump the shark last night? I'd say they jumped an entire school of them.

Salon Round Robin

Salon is a must-read today:

George W. Bush's missing year
The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? "Good lord, no."

Ben Barnes to break silence on "60 Minutes"
The Republican campaign gets ready for shock waves, as the former Texas official who says he pulled strings to get George W. Bush into the Air National Guard finally goes public

And, of course, it is Thursday and that means Sidney:
Fear and narcissism in New York
In trying to transfer his heroic, powerful image to Bush, Schwarzenegger reveals the deep anxieties of the GOP.

GOP Attack Dogs Lie

via Suburban Guerrilla:

Shadegg attacks Moore, calls Kerry supporters mentally ill

NEW YORK - Arizona Rep. John Shadegg got a standing ovation from his delegation Wednesday when he announced that, partly because of their complaints, USA Today had withdrawn convention credentials for film maker Michael Moore.

Shadegg had instructed delegates to call USA Today to protest the paper's decision to hire Moore for the week. When a top executive called him to ask why he was mad at the paper, Shadegg said he responded: "You're just nuts if you think we're going to buy your paper, when you credentialed kind of the anti-Christ."

As delegates rose to their feet, Shadegg said he got a return call a few hours later saying Moore's credentials had been revoked.
.....
He also said Kerry voters "have mental health problems," adding: "I'll probably get in trouble for that."

The AP has become a stenography service for the frothing mouth class. Recovering journo Susie Madrak decided to do some digging.

I used to be a freelance copy editor for a Gannett paper, and this just didn't sound plausible. So I called Gannett headquarters in Virginia, and the woman who answered the phone told me it was "definitely" not true.

Wars - Winnable and Un

Grand Old Prevarication

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, September 2, 2004; Page A23

All of this is more or less standard stuff, a convention of any organization being a grand opportunity to lie. This is particularly true of our two great political parties, which have not, when you come to think of it, survived for so long by leveling with the American people. But the point does come -- or at least it ought to -- when the gag reflex kicks in. I reached that point when, in speech after speech, the war in Iraq was described as a defensive one in which America had no choice. This total and purposeful misreading of history came out of the mouth of almost every speaker, including the sainted John McCain.

Bush himself sets the party line. No fact changes his conviction that the war in Iraq is justified. It does not matter to him that the stated reasons for it -- those weapons of mass destruction -- did not exist. Without missing a beat, he simply changed his war aims. It is now, in retrospect, the removal of Saddam Hussein. And if you challenge him on that, he comes back with a so's-your-mother response that goes like this: Are you sorry Hussein's gone?

Of course not. But the reasons Bush gave Matt Lauer for the war are sheer nonsense: "Well, because Saddam Hussein had terrorist ties, and he had the capacity at the minimum to make weapons of mass destruction. And he could have passed that capacity on to enemies."

But every government commission under the sun, save ones concerned with inland fisheries, has concluded that Hussein had no relevant ties to al Qaeda. And while he certainly had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction, so do a plethora of countries -- some, such as Iran and North Korea, of the nuclear kind. As for passing such weapons on to our enemies, that didn't happen in Iraq and probably wouldn't have. Hussein was a selfish sort who liked to keep his weapons close. Paranoids usually do.

This war against terrorism may not really be winnable, any more than the wars against cancer or drugs have been. In fact, an argument can be made that we are now worse off than we were on Sept. 10, 2001. Osama bin Laden is still at large, and nearly 1,000 Americans have died in Iraq -- a calamitous diversion in this so-called war against terrorism.

The thinking that links unrelated events or movements into something called worldwide terrorism -- this attempt to make events conform to rhetoric -- is precisely what led the United States into the quagmire of Vietnam. Now, as then, we are being told that we were attacked or hated or whatever because we are free. Not so. Americans died on Sept. 11 because of what Americans had done: established bases in Saudi Arabia and unambiguously supported Israel. It is the right thing to do, but it comes at a cost.

The insistence that something is true does not make it true. The constant repetition of a party line is just hot air. When it comes to terrorism, Bush got it right -- momentarily and probably accidentally -- and then reverted to type. In his view, we are winning the war on terrorism and will win it outright on that great come-and-get-it day. From his mouth to God's ears, as the expression goes -- but, so far at least, the terrorists themselves are not listening.

via Juan Cole:

Molly Ivins
# Bush keeps setting (bad) records

ANOTHER RECORD. We have already lost more American soldiers (488) in Iraq in 239 days of this year than we did in 287 days last year (482), when there was a war on and before our mission was accomplished.

The grind of the numbers is so relentless. Price of oil — pressing $50 a barrel. Poverty rate — increased again, third year in a row. Number of Americans without insurance — increased again, third year. Part of the “vibrant economy” Bush touts daily now. And the news from Iraq just keeps getting worse and worse.

Is it going to be possible to pacify every political, religious or cultural group with a grievance which is willing to use violence to press its claim? Hardly. Will it be possible to reduce some of the rancor which sustains popular support for violent groups or movements? Of course, but it is a question of degrees. It is highly unlikely that President With Us Or Against us is going to be the man to do it, however.

Sinking in the Polls? I think not.

I just heard The Newshour's Terry Smith do an interview with The Pew Poll's Andy Kohut, one of the five or six most knowledgable people on polling alive in this country. Dick Cheney is one of the most unpopular vice presidents in a long time, while John Edwards is the most popular of the top pairing. Isn't that interesting?

Kohut cast it as the inexperienced newcomer against the old political hand, in spite of the fact that they poll so differently.

I don't know what format has been agreed upon for the Veep debate, but I hope John Edwards gets a format which allows him to engage Cheney directly. Edwards is one of the most successful civil litigators in the US. I want to see him cross examine one of the least competent CEOs in the country, one who ran several successful companies into the ground while amassing enormous personal wealth. Edwards worked for his shekels and made them because he is good at what he does. Cheney made his bucks in sweetheart deals with friends.

If you know any lawyers, particularly if they are litigators, ask them about their philosphies about facing a judge or a jury. You will get an education on how our adversarial system of justice works that you can't get any other way. It mostly works pretty well in a system which works on the gut of lawyers, plaintiffs and defendents. It has rotten spots, but I know the system and a good lawyer with a savvy client is in a position to get a fair deal. At least for us educated and middle class folk and further up the food chain. For the poor, badly educated, illiterate or non-English speaker, it is a nightmare. For someone like even my mother, it would be a disaster, unless she really got angry and found a lawyer who could read her basically inscrutable needs. She's smart but not articulate; if she got sued or needed to sue someone, I'd have to fly home to deal with the lawyers. I'm used to it, have been doing it for years. She isn't.

I'd trust John Edwards with her and not fly home. I'd like to trust him with America, too, and not have to move to Toronto in January. Although I really, really like Toronto, but that's not the point...

Our boys have yet to close the sale, but they've still plenty of time and plenty of ammunition. See the post below. John Kerry has always run on the theory of "don't peak too soon." When John Edwards sticks up for the little guy on the stump and in the debate, we'll win. I'd rather face the American electorate than some gimlet-eyed Republican (they elect them) judge in some rural county in North Carolina. After living there for four years, I had enough. John Edwards has a recipe for success.

The Horror

A couple of people sent this link, either in comments or email. In a day when the news has been filled with terrorism, hostage taking, executions and horror (and that's just the RNC), I hate to add this, but it is too important to ignore. Thanks to DavidByron and croten for the catches. Oh, the previous post was blogged from work. I can't do this often right now, but expect a few updates to show up during the business day from now on. What follows is horrifying.

Iraqi Prison Horrors Pervasive, Says Attorney
by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke
TheNewStandard

While the latest reports investigating the widely condemned events at Abu Ghraib prison attempt to close the book on the Pentagon's culpability with a somber critique, new evidence gathered for a class action lawsuit filed against two U.S.-based private contractors could prove that the scandal at Abu Ghraib was far from an isolated series of incidents perpetrated by a few rowdy "bad apples" working the night shift during Ramadan.

An attorney representing former detainees says his recent fact-finding mission to Baghdad uncovered dozens of cases of physical and psychological abuse, sexual humiliation, religious desecration and rape in ten U.S.-run prisons throughout occupied Iraq.

The NewStandard spoke with Michigan-based attorney Shereef Akeel, who interviewed some 50 former detainees about their time and treatment in U.S. custody. Part of the legal team behind a class action lawsuit against the firms for their employees' involvement in prison abuse at U.S.-run facilities in Iraq, the former immigration lawyer found himself traveling to meet face-to-face with the people he is representing in the American court system.

His team has documented abuse dating from July 2003 to as recently as last month, when an Iraqi boy just 15 years old says his captors at an American facility raped him. "He was told to go on all fours naked and was sodomized from behind," Akeel conveyed the 15-year-old's testimony. "He said they made him dance and he was crying."

A number of the incidents Akeel and his colleagues have recorded took place between January and July of this year. Emerging evidence that torture in U.S. facilities continues months after the Abu Ghraib and other torture cases were revealed – most of those having taken place in late 2003 and dismissed as the results of oversights corrected since – could spell major problems for the U.S. government and military.

Akeel and his colleagues are working in concert with the Center for Constitutional Rights to sue the U.S. companies CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp., which were respectively contracted to provide interrogators and translators to support the American military's efforts to obtain information from "security detainees" – those thought to be involved in resisting the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Center for Constitutional Rights is a privately funded legal center that litigates on behalf of social movements and causes.

For its part, CACI International said in a press statement issued about the case: "CACI rejects and denies the allegations of the suit as being a malicious recitation of false statements and intentional distortions." The company added in its defense, "CACI has never entered into a conspiracy with the government, or anyone else, to perpetrate abuses of any kind." CACI also called the allegations of abuse "ill-informed" and "slanderous."

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it gets worse. Place yourself in the mind of that young teen. I'm a rape survivor, it doesn't take much to make the nightmares return. The American traditional media are ignoring this right now, and they are motivated to as we move into the campain's most intense period. If this attorney is sharp, he'll make a huge deal out of this and make himself and his center impossible to ignore. It will take work and persistence. And a call to Seymour Hersh wouldn't be a bad idea.

I don't know how reliable The New Standard is. Can anyone clue me in?

Shark Attack

Tom Regan is blogging the convention and the protests for the Christian Science Monitor. A scene from last night:

Two possible scenarios crossed my mind. Either people would start falling on top of each other, with the very real likelihood of being injured, or one of us would be pushed into a police officer and his motorcycle, and all heck would break loose. Neither prospect looked promising. Finally, one of the police in the back row climbed on top of their bikes and waved their arms frantically to get the attention of the cops in the front. When they finally did, one cop from the front yelled "You OK?" The officer in the back shouted, somewhat annoyed, "Yes, we will be if you stop pushing them this way."

I just have to pause here for a moment to make an observation. How many times have I seen an interview with an arrested protester who claimed he or she had done nothing to provoke the police. Almost always my reaction has been, "Yeah, sure." Only now I was seeing this very situation unfold in front of my eyes. These protesters, while certainly noisy, had obeyed police instructions down the entire length of the street. Now they were being treated as if they had gotten wildly out of control, but they hadn't. I know, because I was there.
I saw scenes like this repeated throughout Tuesday night. There would be an uneasy equilibrium between the police and the protesters, and then for some reason, the police would start arresting people. I saw it happen at Herald Square, and near 6th Ave and 29th St. In each case, the police seemed to lose control of the situation, often in ways that they were responsible for themselves.

The result of this "uneasy equilibrium?"

At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protesters Clash With Police
By DIANE CARDWELL and MARC SANTORA

A series of demonstrations rippled across Manhattan last night when protesters tried to converge on the Republican National Convention, as a day of planned civil disobedience erupted into clashes with police officers and led to the arrest of more than 900 people.

The wave of confrontations - which included a brawl with the police at the New York Public Library, marauding crowds cursing at delegates in Midtown and the detention of hundreds of protesters near ground zero - created a day of disorder in a convention week already marked by sustained protests against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

Yesterday's incidents stood in contrast to the enormous, mostly orderly antiwar march that drew hundreds of thousands of people to Manhattan on Sunday. Many of those protesting yesterday had purposefully avoided seeking permits for their rallies but had publicized their plans well in advance, leading hordes of police officers in cars, bikes, scooters and vans to flood various parts of the city primed to pre-empt disorder before it could occur. The day's arrests brought the convention-related total to more than 1,460.

The question Regan's piece brings us is "how much of this chaos was caused by the police themselves?"

The Serf Society, Pt. XXIX

TAX CODE
by JOHN CASSIDY
Tax cuts were just the beginning: the President is signalling a far more radical agenda.
Issue of 2004-09-06
Posted 2004-08-30

A few weeks ago, George W. Bush crossed the Potomac to a community college in Annandale, Virginia, where he hosted an “Ask President Bush” town-hall-style meeting and took up a favorite campaign theme, saying that one of the things that separated him from his opponent was his intention to create a “culture of ownership.” The same day, the Bush-Cheney campaign released a new television ad that shows pictures of houses, workers, and businesses as the President announces, “One of the most important parts of a reform agenda is to encourage people to own something. Own their own home, own their own business, own their own health-care plan, or own a piece of their retirement. Because I understand if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America.”

The President’s ownership initiative hasn’t featured prominently in the media coverage of the campaign, which, strictly from a news perspective, is understandable: he hasn’t announced many specific proposals to back up his talk. But in downplaying the Bush Administration’s economic agenda the media is missing one of the biggest domestic stories of the 2004 campaign. When the President pledges to create an “era of ownership,” he is not talking merely about encouraging people to buy their own homes and start small businesses. To conservative Republicans who understand his coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.

Bush's 'Few and Rich Owners'-ship Society

by Christian E. Weller
August 27, 2004

Let's start with a basic fact. By the end of the longest economic boom – in 2001 – more than 40 percent of families did not save, according to the Federal Reserve. Wealth accumulation was much lower for low-income families. Only 30 percent of low-income households saved any money in 2001, only 41 percent of low-income households owned their home, close to a fourth of low-income households had no financial assets in 2001, and the typical low-income household had $2,000 in financial assets. But even the typical middle-class family owned only $17,100 in financial assets and 34 percent of middle-class families did not own their home. So clearly, there is room for improvement, especially since these figures were compiled before the stock market completed its plunge and the labor market saw the first "job loss" recovery since the Great Depression.

Even if middle-class families magically found the extra money to save more, the president's policies will most likely not benefit them. Under many of the administration proposals – life-time savings accounts, retirement savings accounts, health savings accounts, to name a few – households can contribute money tax free, accumulate it without paying taxes, withdraw the money without incurring taxes, or sometimes do all three at once. To take full advantage of these proposals, though, you have to be in the highest income tax bracket. However, many working families pay no or little federal income taxes because their incomes are too low, and thus, receive few benefits from this proposal. Instead, high-income families, who typically had financial assets of $364,000 in 2001, will benefit handsomely.

All that wonderful compassion we heard about last night is strictly for the haves and have-mores.

Econoblogging

Drop in Consumer Confidence Unexpectedly Steep in August
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: September 1, 2004

By The Associated Press

Consumers' renewed worries about job prospects led to a bigger-than-expected drop in confidence in August and provided more evidence of the fragility of the economic expansion.

The consumer confidence index, which had been rising since April, dropped 7.5 points, to 98.2, from a revised reading of 105.7 in July, according to a report yesterday from the Conference Board, a private research group.

The reading was well below the 103.5 that analysts had expected, and was the lowest since May, when it registered 93.1.

"The slowdown in job growth has curbed consumers' confidence," Lynn Franco, director of the group's Consumer Research Center, said in a statement. "The level of consumer optimism has fallen off and caution has returned. Until the job market and pace of hiring pick up, this cautious attitude will prevail."

Economists track consumer confidence closely because spending by consumers accounts for two-thirds of economic activity.

The report of the surprisingly large decline in consumer confidence came a day after the Commerce Department said consumers spent more freely in July, raising hopes that an economic pause in June would be only temporary. The government disclosed at the same time, however, that personal incomes in July grew more slowly than analysts had expected.

Bush's Jobs Albatross

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A19

With Republicans gathered in New York, the lackluster job market must dishearten President Bush. He had hoped that a strong economic recovery would favor his reelection, and in some ways, he's gotten his wish. Gross domestic product (the economy's output) is almost 9 percent higher than at the peak of the 1990s boom, and business investment -- which had dropped sharply -- is up 14 percent from its low point. Jobs remain an obstinate exception. Monthly increases in payroll employment improved earlier this year, averaging 242,000 from February to May, but have since slowed. They were 78,000 in June and 32,000 in July.

Soft job markets in some swing states must especially worry Bush. The unemployment rate is 5.5 percent nationally but 5.9 percent in Ohio and 6.8 percent in Michigan. Beyond that, weak job growth casts a broader pall. Consumer confidence, though well above recession levels, has retreated from recent peaks. Ditto for stocks; the Dow (as of Aug. 27) was off 5 percent from its 2004 high. Wage gains have been modest, in part because there's surplus labor. For hourly workers, wages -- after inflation -- fell about 1 percent from July 2003 to July 2004, says Jared Bernstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Greatest sustained job loss since the Great Depression

Since the recession began 40 months ago in March 2001, 1.2 million jobs have disappeared, representing a 0.9% contraction. To put this performance in historical perspective, 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 6.2 million more jobs if employment had grown by the same 3.7% average that characterized the last three recession cycles. As for who has been hurt most, private-sector jobs have fared worse than public-sector jobs. Jobs in the private sector have dropped by 1.8 million since March 2001, representing a 1.6% contraction.

Parts of Speech

False Grit

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page A19

NEW YORK -- There is apparently not much to George W. Bush's presidency except his resolve.
....
One test of Bush's putative leadership skills, you'd think, would be his ability to rally his countrymen around a shared national purpose. Both McCain and Giuliani strove manfully to recall the moment when the nation did indeed come together, in the wake of the Sept. 11 mass murders. "We were not two countries," McCain said, "we were Americans."

But this spirit of national unity didn't mysteriously slip away, nor was it sundered by the plots of fractious Democrats. Though most Democrats and liberals backed the war in Afghanistan, Bush decided to lead in a divisive manner for narrowly partisan ends. The president made no move to bring Democrats into his Cabinet to fight what some supporters have termed a new world war. On the contrary, in a spirit of downwardly shared sacrifice, Bush pushed for further tax cuts for large-scale investors; his war in Iraq would be fought by the working class and funded by its children. By forcing Congress to vote to give him a blank check to make war in Iraq before the November elections, Bush sought to use his war as a weapon against the Democrats. This was leadership all right, to exquisitely sectarian ends. And for Giuliani to have waxed nostalgic about the post-Sept. 11 period of national unity in a speech extolling George W. Bush's leadership was industrial-strength chutzpah.

The mayor's speech was plainly crafted to appeal to a number of swing voter groups, among them blue-collar white males who have borne the brunt of Bushonomics but who just might stick with the president out of some pathetic sense of tough-guy kinship. Giuliani lovingly recalled the bond between Bush and New York construction workers at Ground Zero three days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and earlier in the evening, in a film broadcast at the convention, the leader of a dissident Wisconsin firefighters local told the president, "We are willing to walk into a burning building with you." Of course, nothing in Bush's service record, or his cosseted careers in business and politics, suggests that he'd be willing to walk into a burning building with them, but that merely testifies to how effective the marketing of the president's macho-mindedness may prove to be.

The Wisconsin firefighters are precisely the demographic that the Bush campaign is wooing with its emphasis on the president's "leadership" and its avoidance of any discussion of his record. For Bush to win, he needs downscale, white, Midwestern males to bond with him nearly as strongly as downscale, white Southern males. There's a lot these guys will have to overlook to vote for Bush -- the exporting of their jobs, and the loss of their health coverage, to name just two -- but the decimation of industrial unions in the Midwest has Bush strategists hoping that white guys in Ohio will vote increasingly like their Mississippi counterparts.

It's not that Bush is resolved to help them better their lives; it's just that he's resolved.

I've listened to some of the coverage with one ear. This seems to be The Noun Convention--no policy, no history, no trackrecord, just nouns: leadership, resolve, compassion. They could just as easily be selling Kleenex. And that's what this is, pure sales rather than an attempt to convince through argument and reason.