Eating the New Year

On New Years day, dinner has see-sawed back and forth between the vegetarian and the beef heavy. I love good beef but don't eat it very often, I'm a carnivore but treat good beef as a rarety to cherish, and I will not eat bad beef. I'd rather eat it less often and pay the premium for the good stuff. When I was growing up, New Year's Day dinner was always prime rib of beef with yorkshire puddings (really a popover using fat from the the roast, rather than oil as in this recipe. They are utterly delicious and a great way to sop up the juices on the plate.)

If you want really good American beef (as opposed to the pricey Kobe stuff, which I've never had) you need to find a restaurant or butcher who knows how to hang a steak properly. The process is too touchy for the home cook. An aged tenderloin and one from the cooler at the grocery are two different things. The former will fall apart with your fork, even while rare. The latter will need your knife and a lot of trimming. The former also costs me more than twenty dollars a pound, so I eat it about once a year, and I'm going to have it for dinner tomorrow with Bernaise Sauce scroll down) which turns a simple steak into an occasion.

My favorite place for eating this is a hole in the wall French place owned and run by some Vietnamese people in nearby Arlington. From the outside, you wouldn't know it's a restaurant, once you get inside you are treated like visiting royalty. It isn't cheap, but I'm willing to pay a premium for good food, well prepared and well presented, and the bernaise sauce in this place is so perfectly prepared that it deserves the hung tenderloin filet mignon they always serve. I haven't been able to afford to go there for a lot of years, but it is a neighborhood favorite (and only the neighborhood knows about it, and I'm certainly not going to tell you how to find it) and I will dine the New Year in. The first course will be CLASSIC ESCARGOTS A LA BOURGUIGNONNE, which I haven't had in a dozen years, prepared in the classic fashion, in the shells, with toast points. If they have fresh oysters on the half shell, I'll have those, too. I once made an entire birthday dinner out of oysters on the half-shell at a very good raw bar in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I've learned to vary my palette since that particular tummy-ache.

2005 has to be better than 2004. We've already fallen farther than I ever thought we could. And I'm going to dine us in with a new copy of Maximum PC as a companion. PC tyros, you actually can learn to be your own technologist, and it isn't that hard.

Ah, a copy of Maximum PC with bernaise spots on it. That's the way to begin the new year.

Simple Joys

This was a traditional New Year's Day dinner for my table for many years. In China, noodles are for good luck. This simple and elegant dish comes by way of one of my favorite cookbooks, La Cucina de Lidia.

Pappardelle in Salsa di Porcini Freschi
(Pappardelle with Fresh Porcini Mushrooms)
Serves 4 as a first course

1/4 c. olive oil
1 lb. fresh porcini mushroons, trimmed and sliced (morels are an expensive and delightful substitution)
4 cloves garlic, barely crushed
Salt and pepper to taste
3 tbsp. chopped fresh parsely (Italian flat-leaf if you can find it)
3/4 c. chicken stock
1 lb. fresh pappardelle (any broad noodle works well)
1/2 c. grated parmesan cheese

While bringing 6 quarts pasta water to a boil, begin the sauce.

In a large skillet, heat 2 tblsp of the oil. Add half the mushrooms and garlic, season to taste and saute until mushrooms are lightly browned on both sides. Do not stir the porcini, they will break, turn them gently with a spurtle or wooden spoon. Transfer to a plate and do the same with the remaining mushrooms and garlic. Clear excess oil from skillet and return all the mushrooms to the pan with the parsley, adjust the seasonings and add the stock and simmer one minute, meanwhile adding the pappardelle to the boiling water. Fresh pasta will cook in about a minute and a half, so adjust the start times for the sauce and pasta based on whether you are using fresh or dried pasta. When the pappardelle are done, drain quickly, add to the sauce over low heat and toss gently adding 4 tbsp. of the cheese. Serve immediately with the remaining cheese at the table.
Use vegetable stock instead of chicken, and your ovo-lacto vegetarian friends will be pleased to join you at the table.

If you've never made your own fresh pasta, this is a recipe that will reward that labor, as it showcases simple ingredients. I made fresh pasta for the first time a dozen years ago when I was caught by a snowstorm with no pasta in the house. I had nothing but a rolling pin for equipment, and that works just fine, thanks very much. I have a pasta roller now, but those first hand-cut fettucine were a revelation. Make it at home and dry it to store, you'll never tolerate the store bought dried stuff again. Fresh pasta turns a simple dish like Linguine Aglio e Oglio into a feast.

Bloggy New Year's Eve

Got plans for the evening? I'll be here blogging the New Year in. I can't think of a better way to spend my time, nor better people to spend it with. Whatever your plans tonight, remember that the amateurs are out tonight, so be careful.

People cannot exist without hope, so add your hopes for the New Year in the comments below. Mine are for a year in which peace is given a plot of ground to sprout in, in which we dodge the pandemic bullet, and in which the criminal maladministration of George W. Bush is brought to justice.

And I'm in the mood for some recipes. If you have a New Year's food tradition, I'd love to know about it.

I just checked the stats: at some point during the day tomorrow, we'll be starting the New Year with 300K hits since the sitemeter was installed back in February, and a total of 450K page views.

Shamed into It

U.S. Pledges $350 Million to Help Tsunami Victims
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 31, 2004

Filed at 2:01 p.m. ET

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- The United States is pledging $350 million to help tsunami victims, a tenfold increase over its first wave of aid, President Bush announced Friday.

``Initial findings of American assessment teams on the ground indicate that the need for financial and other assistance will steadily increase in the days and weeks ahead,'' Bush said Friday in a statement released in Crawford, Texas, where he is staying at his ranch.

``Our contributions will continue to be revised as the full effects of this terrible tragedy become clearer,'' he said. ``Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by this epic disaster.''

Bush also is sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to Indian Ocean coastal areas ravaged by earthquake and tsunami to assess what more the United States needs to do. The president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, will travel with him.

The newly announced aid came after some critics claimed that the initial U.S. contribution of $35 million was meager considering the vast wealth of the nation.

France has promised $57 million, Britain has pledged $95 million, Sweden is sending $75.5 million and Spain is offering $68 million, although that pledge is partly in loans.

Bush said disaster response officials are on the ground and the United States has established a support center in Thailand that is in operation. More than 20 patrol and cargo aircraft have been made available to assess the disaster and deliver relief supplies, he said.

The LAT has an interesting chart which compares per-capita giving for the industrial nations, both by governments and individuals. Colin Powell can parse this however he wants, but the track record is there and it isn't all that hot.

In the LAT article, Center for Global Development's David Roodman makes the most salient point:

David Roodman, one of the architects of the Center for Global Development study, argued that no wealthy country was giving enough to the poor.

"Stingy, of course, is a relative term," Roodman said. "I wouldn't say the entire world is stingy. But helping the rest of the world is clearly a low priority in making our policies, and that's true in every country to a greater or lesser extent."

While that is true, look at the chart. We are at the bottom of a list of cheapskates.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

E.J. Dionne has some excellent advice for Democrats:

Lessons for Democrats

MIDDLETOWN, R.I. -- Except for the glorious victories of the Red Sox and the Patriots, 2004 was a disappointing year. But bad years offer useful lessons. Here are a few:
....
• Cultural hypocrisy should be exposed. I cannot understand why liberals who regularly criticize the excesses of the economic market let conservatives get away with being the advocates of "traditional values."

When television networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, why aren't liberals asking why the free market so revered by the right wing promotes values the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?

• Class matters. Bush and the Republicans condemn "class warfare" -- and then play the class card with a vengeance. Bush has pushed through policies that, by any impartial reckoning, have transferred massive amounts of money to the wealthiest people in our country. Yet it is conservatives, Bush supporters, who trash the "elites," especially when it comes to culture. Class warfare is evil -- unless a conservative is playing the class card.

Somebody has to call this bluff. Why is it taboo to talk about a Wall Street "elite" that has benefited from Bush's tax cuts and would win big-time from Social Security privatization? Why is it just terrible to point out that pharmaceutical industry and HMO "elites" were paid off handsomely in the Medicare drug bill? Why is it so dreadfully radical to denounce corporate "elites" when conservatives can denounce "the Hollywood elite" with impunity? Why does the right wing get away, year after year, with this double standard on elitism and class warfare?

• Stand for something. Bush won this year because of those attacks on Kerry. But he also won because swing voters who didn't like him very much were nonetheless quite certain that he knew what he wanted to do and would try to get it done.

One line of attack against Bush is to say that his certainties are mistaken and that he never, ever questions them. That's true. It's also inadequate. Those who oppose the direction in which Bush is leading us need to propose an alternative.

They need to demonstrate that we could be much safer -- and fight a more effective war on terrorism -- if so much of the world did not mistrust us. They must create a realistic narrative about a more just and prosperous society. Policies on jobs, health insurance, child care, education and taxes should be more than a list. They ought to form a coherent picture of how things could be better, for everyone.

The long-term need for alternatives should not stop the loyal opposition from being tough. But the short-term need to be tough should not stop the opposition's search for alternatives. For Bush's adversaries, 2005 will be a difficult year. It also could be exhilarating.

It will only be exhilirating, E.J., if the Democrats grow some stones. I heard some commentary during the week from those who know Nevada politics, and the word is that Harry Reid is as mean a gutter fighter as they come. We'll see.

Toy Soldiers

Bang, bang you're dead
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 31/12/2004)

British soldiers training for Iraq are saying "bang bang" instead of firing their grenade launchers because the Ministry of Defence did not buy enough, defence sources said yesterday.

The MoD did not have the money to order sufficient Under-Barrel Grenade Launchers for the SA80 rifle, so all those available have had to be sent to Iraq.

British soldiers take position behind an armoured vehicle
British soldiers stationed in Basra

They also failed to buy any training rounds so soldiers cannot be trained on the weapon until they reach Iraq.

They are having similar problems with the Minimi Light Machinegun because there are no blank attachments, which allow blank rounds to be fired safely, or cleaning kits. Those for other weapons are not suitable.

"The Under-Barrel Grenade Launcher is a success and the boys love it," one source said. "But all that's been bought is the high-explosive ammunition. There has been no buy for any training ammunition." Troops from 12 Mechanised Brigade, who are scheduled to go to Iraq in April, will spend the next three months carrying out training for the deployment.

But they will be unable to use either the Minimi machinegun or the grenade launcher because the attempts to cut costs mean that they will not be able to train properly on either equipment until they get to Iraq.

The lack of grenade launchers means that most members of the brigade will not even have fired one until they deploy on operations in Iraq.

During recently held training for Iraq, held in pouring rain at the Castlemartin ranges in South Wales, members of the Staffordshire Regiment, one of the brigade's two armoured infantry regiments, had to shout "bang bang" to simulate the firing of the grenade launchers.

Although they did have the Minimi, they could not fire it because there were no blank attachments and no way of cleaning it even if they fired live rounds. "It's ridiculous," the source said. "Everybody understands the need to save money but what was the point of buying the Minimi if they don't get the cleaning kits?

"What makes it worse is they know that most of the problems they had with the new SA80 were down to the fact it wasn't being cleaned properly."

We aren't the only ones screwing up by the numbers.

Sleeping with the Enemy

Violence Against Iraq Troops Takes Toll
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 30, 2004

Filed at 10:56 p.m. ET

Pentagon statistics show that for all of 2004, at least 838 U.S. troops died in Iraq. Of that total, more than 700 were killed in action, by far the highest number of American battlefield deaths since at least 1980, the first year the Pentagon compiled all-service casualty statistics.

It almost certainly is the highest KIA total for any year since the Vietnam War.

U.S. deaths averaged 62 per month through the first half of the year. But since June 28, when U.S. officials restored Iraqi sovereignty and dissolved the U.S. civilian occupation authority, that average has jumped to about 78.

Deaths among U.S. National Guard and Reserve troops are rising, reaching a single-month peak of 27 in November. At least 17 were killed in December. Nearly 200 Guard and Reserve troops have died since the war began, and more than one-third of those deaths happened in the past four months.

Bush administration and U.S. military officials had predicted that the insurgents would intensify their efforts to create chaos before the Jan. 30 elections for an Iraqi National Assembly. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said during a visit last week to U.S. troops in Iraq that he saw no reason to think the violence would abate even after the elections.

``All along the way it's bumpy,'' Rumsfeld told a group of Marines over lunch at their base outside of Fallujah, the city west of Baghdad where nearly 100 Marines have been killed over the past two months. ``It's tough, and there are setbacks. It's not a smooth, easy, steady path to success.''

Since the Marines regained control of Fallujah after fierce battles in November -- by far the bloodiest month of the war for the Corps -- the focus of insurgent violence has shifted to the northern city of Mosul.

A Dec. 21 attack on a military mess hall in Mosul killed 22, including 13 U.S. soldiers and a sailor -- the deadliest single attack on a U.S. installation in the war. At least six other U.S. troops died in other attacks in Mosul during December.

Even as U.S. losses mount, the brunt of insurgent violence is hitting the Iraqi security forces being trained by U.S. troops, as well as Iraqi political figures and Iraqis seen as supporting the Americans.

On Tuesday, for example, insurgents lured Iraqi police to a house in Baghdad with an anonymous tip about an insurgent hideout. Then they set off explosives, killing at least 29 people, including seven Iraqi policemen, and wounding 18.

Across the restive area north and west of Baghdad, known as the Sunni Triangle, car bombs, ambushes and assassinations killed at least 54 people on Tuesday, including 31 policemen and a deputy provincial governor.

Terrorist threat to Iraq voters
By Jim Muir in Baghdad
(Filed: 31/12/2004)

Three Iraqi insurgent groups gave warning yesterday that anyone taking part in the "dirty farce" of next month's elections would be exposing themselves to attack.

Their statement, posted on the internet, told Muslims that democracy was tantamount to apostasy and said: "God willing, the hands of the holy warriors will reach those who take part in the elections, the polling stations and those running them".

The statement from the Sunni-dominated insurgents contrasted with edicts from Shia leaders, who say voting is every Muslim's duty.

One of the groups signing the statement was Ansar al-Sunna, which has been behind many attacks in the Mosul area, now the centre of insurgent activity after US forces captured Fallujah.

15 killed in Iraq violence

BAGHDAD, Dec 30: Fifteen Iraqis were killed in attacks across the country on Thursday as plans were unveiled to deploy 100,000 Iraqi soldiers to stave off a bloodbath on election day exactly a month from now.

The deadly violence came one day after battles between US troops and guerillas in the northern city of Mosul left at least 26 dead, including a US soldier, and 30 people were killed when a booby-trapped house in Baghdad exploded.

The grim business of hostage-taking again surfaced, with two Lebanese businessmen kidnapped in an upmarket neighbourhood of Baghdad late on Wednesday. And the Iraqi government announced that a senior aide to the country's most wanted man, Abu Musab al Zarqawi - whose militants are behind many deadly attacks and killings of hostages - was captured recently in Baghdad.

A similar arrest was made in Mosul. On Wednesday guerillas detonated car bombs against a US patrol and attacked a combat outpost in Mosul, triggering air strikes and clashes that left at least 25 guerillas dead, the US military said.

A US soldier died of wounds suffered in one of the car bombings, the military announced. Across the country, at least 15 Iraqis have been killed in various attacks by guerillas since Wednesday night, security officials said.

This is some DoD PR person's wet dream. I seem to recall reading in the last couple of weeks that we have something like 3,500 Iraqi Army troops trained (and underequipped) as of now and somehow we're going to magic up 100K in the next month?

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

CATASTROPHE IN SOUTHERN ASIA
Sumatra's West Coast Devastated
# Deaths in Remote Areas Push Toll to 125,000; Powell to Tour Region

By Richard C. Paddock, Times Staff Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — The first survivors from an isolated area of the Sumatran coast were airlifted Thursday to the provincial capital, where they described a horrendous scene in which floodwaters covered a vast swath of land and probably killed more than half of one city's 100,000 people.

Survivors from the city of Meulaboh arrived with stories of being at sea for days and surviving by hanging naked to the minaret of a mosque. It was another grim detail of one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. The death toll Thursday stood at 125,000 from Sunday's earthquake and tsunami that struck nations lining the Indian Ocean. At least 80,000 of the dead were from Indonesia.

There was still no clear picture of conditions in some remote villages or on islands off India and Indonesia, raising the specter that the disaster's toll could yet eclipse the 138,000 killed by a cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1991.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that more than 30 countries and organizations had pledged $500 million in aid, half of that from the World Bank.

"I would like to assure the people of the region that the entire United Nations family stands ready to assist, and we stand behind them," Annan said. "We will work with them in every way we can to rebuild their lives, livelihoods and communities devastated by this catastrophe."

President Bush, still smarting from charges that the United States was doing too little to assist in relief operations, announced that he was sending Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the region, along with the president's brother, Jeb, the governor of Florida.

The United States has pledged $35 million. Britain, France and Sweden have pledged considerably more.

"To coordinate this massive relief effort, firsthand assessments are needed by individuals on the ground," President Bush said in a written statement delivered at his ranch outside Crawford, Texas. The delegation, he said, would "meet with regional leaders and international organizations to assess what additional aid can be provided by the United States."

Bush said he was sending his brother because of his experience in recent months dealing with hurricane damage in Florida. White House Deputy Press Secretary Trent Duffy said that sending Gov. Bush underscored the importance of the mission.

"He's also the president's brother," Duffy noted. "I think it signifies the high level of importance that the president puts on this delegation."

This year the governor won accolades for his attention to recovery efforts after four hurricanes pummeled Florida in a six-week period. Details of the upcoming trip were not immediately available.

In India, Thailand and Sri Lanka, thousands of people fled inland Thursday after unfounded rumors that another tsunami was approaching.

David Nabarro, head of the World Health Organization's crisis team, said that as many as 5 million people in the region lacked essentials needed to survive.

An estimated 6,000 foreigners, many of them Europeans, were still missing. Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said that as many as 1,000 of his countrymen may have died, almost all of them on holiday at the beaches of southern Asia. More than 1,000 others from Scandinavian countries also were listed as missing.

The U.S. death toll was officially raised from 12 to 14, with seven dead in Thailand and seven more in Sri Lanka. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said an estimated 600 Americans who were listed as missing in the disaster zone had been found. But he said several thousand others had not been located. He said that in Sri Lanka, Americans had been showing up at U.S. consular offices wearing bathing suits, with no money or other clothing.

"Everything else was lost, and we're taking care of them," he said. "We're getting them places to stay, money to buy clothes, new passports, putting them in touch with their relatives."

As Charles told us last night (by way of CNN and NPR), the State Department isn't doing such a hot job of getting Americans up and running, demanding cash for replacement passport photos.

Unlike Charles, I'm not feeling the need for dueling pistols at 50 meters. I would prefer to take the offending undersecretary and humiliate them in front of a couple of thousand people. This kind of idiocy needs some accountability.

You don't have to be a frickin' genius to get this kind of stuff right.

We Are the World

When my words fail, as they so often do, the world is filled with wonderful writers who can stand in. As usual, the NYT's Bob Herbert keeps his pen filled:

Our Planet, and Our Duty
By BOB HERBERT

Published: December 31, 2004

On Tuesday The Times ran a big front-page picture taken in a makeshift morgue in southern India. It certainly captured the horror. It looked for all the world like a sandy playground covered with dead children.

Imagination pales beside the overwhelming reality of the tragedy. There were, for example, the grief-stricken throngs, clawing through mud and rubble, peering into the faces of the severely injured, wandering through piles of decaying corpses, in search of loved ones.

The Boston Globe quoted a young man whose college sweetheart was among the more than 800 people killed when a train carrying beachgoers in Sri Lanka was slammed by a 30-foot wall of water that lifted it from the tracks and hurled it into a marsh. "Is this the fate that we had planned for?" cried the young man. "My darling, you were the only hope for me."

Perhaps a third of those killed were children. Many were swept away before the eyes of horrified, helpless parents. "My children! My children!" screamed a woman in Sri Lanka. "Why didn't the water take me?"

The killer waves that moved with ferocious speed across an unprecedented expanse of global landscape flung their victims about with a randomness that was all but impossible to comprehend. People in beachfront dwellings ended up in trees, or entangled in electrical power lines, or embedded in the mud of hillsides. People died in buses, cars and trucks that were swept along by the waves like leaves in a strong wind. Sunbathers were swept out to sea.

In that environment, Einstein must stand aside for Shakespeare, whose Gloucester said: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."

Any tragedy is awful for the relatives of those who perished. But this is a catastrophe of a different magnitude. "This," as one observer noted, "is like confronting the apocalypse."

"What makes it especially frightening is that whole communities have been annihilated," said Dr. John Clizbe, a psychologist in Alexandria, Va., who, until his retirement a couple of years ago, had served as vice president for disaster services at the American Red Cross. He said, "We've known for years now that the emotional devastation that survivors feel and experience is often greater than the physical devastation."

The recovery process is easier, he said, when there is a supportive community to bolster those in need. But in some of the most devastated regions of southern Asia, the regions most in need of support, those communities have vanished.

It's a peculiarity of modern technology that people anywhere in the world can sit back and watch in real time, like voyeurs, the life-and-death struggles of their fellow humans. The planet is growing smaller and its residents more interdependent by the day. We're fully aware that our planetary neighbors in southern Asia are desperately drawing upon the deepest reservoirs of fortitude and resilience that our troubled species has at its disposal.

What this means is that we're the supportive community. All of us. This catastrophe would at least have a silver lining if it moved the people of the United States and other nations toward a wiser, more genuinely cooperative international posture.

William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

That's what Faulkner believed. We'll see.

Tragedy on this scale requires an entire world for healing. We are that world.

Help for You

Reader John Hart brings us to his Bug Blog, which is keeping its eyes peeled for Avian flu and the like. It's nice not to be alone, but the Bugblogger brings us some discomfitting advice:

the N95 respirator doesn't do the job. Here is the respirator that can defeat H5N1, and I'm searching for ordering and pricing info. More news here when I find it. John, can you tell us where to find the five customizable colors of the NanoMask?

Bug Blog has been enstalled over on the right on the permanent blogroll.

You Can Help

Here are the relief agencies. I'll keep repeating this over the weekend. Give what you can.

If you can't give them anything, give blood to your local Red Cross, the need remains great in your own community. You CAN help. Help where you can.

Google has a list, too.

Lady Wisdom

Charles and I had an interchange earlier about N95 respirators, and we both think that this is going to be a useful tool if a bad influenza breaks out. This puppy is neither pretty nor disguisable, but if the Avian flu breaks out, none of those things will be important. Here is a link to what the thing does and what it doesn't do. It's probably the best last line of defense for those of us who aren't in the healthcare industry. If you are a nurse or doctor, you'll probably want a PAPR mask.

I haven't yet located a good source for N95 masks, but I'm now home for three days after a couple of weeks from hell at work, and can search and blog at will. I'm just home this weekend and intend to be the quintessential blogger in my jammies and bathrobe. It is good to return to the roots.

Check back here for more information as I learn it. We are a community of wisdom. And that is why your thoughts are necessary, wisdom isn't a solo project. It builds in community.

I'm taking my sneezles (wracking attacks of sneezes) to bed. The clean, flannel sheets beckon and I'd be a fool to miss their call.

Sleep knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.

Grief Actual

Rising Death Toll Tops 117,000

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 30, 2004; 5:48 PM

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Dec. 30--The formal count of those who perished in Sunday's earthquake and tsunami topped 117,000 Thursday as Indonesian officials issued a new death toll of nearly 80,000 for that country alone.

News services reported that pilots in Sumatra had discovered about 28,000 more dead while dropping food to remote villages still unreachable by rescue workers.

Sri Lanka also upped its total by about 5,000 Thursday. In Thailand, the toll increased by about 600.

Rescue flights from throughout the world delivered supplies for millions of survivors around South Asia, but disorganization blocked the lifesaving food, water and medicine from reaching many of those stricken and in need.

Cartons of food and water were stacked in an airplane hangar in the devastated Aceh region of northwestern Indonesia on Wednesday after military transports delivered tons of supplies to the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, which was mostly destroyed in the Sunday earthquake and tsunami that hit minutes later.

Some officials said there was dismal coordination among the Indonesian military, civilians and foreign governments. "We haven't gotten any help at all, nothing," said Yasin, 42, a displaced father who was camped out five miles from the airport. "I don't have anything left."

Rescuers in Indonesia have found scenes of calamity and destruction in remote western Sumatra. On Wednesday, the Indonesian military finally reached the Sumatra town of Meulaboh, closest to the epicenter of the massive earthquake. Images of tragedy in Aceh province were horrific: A weeping father with a limp child in his arms waded through water past shattered buildings; houses were flattened in the mud; battered survivors lay exhausted and hungry in tents; a bulldozer dug a mass grave the size of a swimming pool in which to pile corpses covered only by plastic sheets.

Tom at Information Clearing House has put up a story from a source with which I'm completely unfamiliar, so take with salt, but the bare facts comport well with what I'm reading in other sources: the people of Indonesia's Aceh province may have lost 25% percent of their population. That is unimaginable (I keep using that word, I know. This entire catastrophe beggars the imagination of this poet.) As Charles noted in comments on an earlier thread, this level of social dislocation and grief is literally off the scale of human experience. Here is what Tom has: just because the numbers are staggering doesn't mean they are wrong.

Indonesia Needs Help, Death Toll Expected To Exceed 400,000

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 30 (Bernama) -- The death toll in Acheh, the region worst hit by last Sunday's tsunami, may exceed 400,000 as many affected areas could still not be reached for search and rescue operations, Indonesia's Ambassador to Malaysia Drs H. Rusdihardjo said Thursday.

He said the estimate was based on air surveillance by Indonesian authorities who found no signs of life in places like Meulaboh, Pulau Simeulue and Tapak Tuan while several islands off the west coast of Sumatera had "disappeared".

He said the latest death toll of more than 40,000 in Acheh and northern Sumatera did not take into account the figures from the other areas, especially in the west of the region.

"Aerial surveillance found the town of Meulaboh completely destroyed with only one buiding standing. The building, which belonged to the military, happens to be on a hill," he told reporters after receiving RM1 million in aid for Indonesia's Tsunami Disaster Relief Fund here Thursday.

Rusdihardjo said there were about 150,000 residents in Meulaboh, which was located 150km from the epicentre of the earthquake while Pulau Simeuleu had a population of 76,000.

The contributions were from several corporate giants.

Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB), represented by Chairman Tan Sri Ahmad Sarji Abdul Hamid, gave RM200,000; Guthrie, represented by Chief Executive Officer Datuk Abdul Wahab Maskan, gave RM200,000; Golden Hope Plantations Berhad, represented by Group Director for Corporate, Legal and Public Affairs Norlin Abdul Samad, gave RM200,000; Maybank, represented by Head of Public Affairs Wan Norhiyati Ibrahim, gave RM200,000 and Sime Darby Group's Motor Division, represented by Director Yip Jon Khiam, also gave RM200,000.

Ahmad Sarji also handed over a PNB contribution to Utusan's Tsunami Disaster Relief Fund, which was received by Utusan Melayu (Malaysia) Executive Chairman Tan Sri Hashim Makarudin to help Malaysian tsunami victims.

Ambassador Rusdihardjo said a combination of earthquake and tsunami had left 80 to 100 per cent of infrastructure in Acheh province, such as hospitals, health centres, transport and communication networks and homes, destroyed.

"Looking at the scale of destruction, it's difficult to say when the search and rescue operations can be mounted in all affected areas," he said.

He said rescue efforts were hampered by transportation difficulties and lack of fuel.

The scale of human tragedy here isn't really describable and it will take not just years but generations to recover from it.

The part of me that thinks like a sociologist and anthropologist would like to be around in a hundred years to hear how the story of this time is told in the future by the children of the perished and of the survivors. Experiences like this have to be processed in community, and I wonder how the community will remember the story a couple of generations hence.

The State Department Reaches out to Americans in Need ...

This lovely little item was actually permitted to be shown at CNN.com. Quite amazing, really, when you think about it, that CNN printed this! Emphasis will be mine.

American diver underwater during catastrophe

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 Posted: 7:12 AM EST (1212 GMT)

(CNN) -- An American woman who was scuba diving with her husband in Thailand as one of Sunday's tsunamis roared overhead said she was oblivious to the disaster until after they surfaced, her mother told CNN on Tuesday.

Faye Wachs, 34, was diving with her husband, Eugene Kim, Sunday morning off Ko Phi Phi Island in Thailand when they noticed the water visibility worsened and felt as though they were being sucked downward, Helen Wachs said.

Their dive master signaled to them to surface, "but we still didn't know what happened," Faye wrote in an e-mail to her mother Tuesday.

The enormity of what was happening while they were scuba diving was not immediately apparent after they surfaced, Helen Wachs said her daughter told her.

"She said she saw a lot of trash in the water. The dive master said it was really rude for people to throw trash. Then they saw large bits of debris and thought there might have been a boat crash," Helen Wachs said.

She said her daughter didn't know what had happened until the dive master got a text message from his wife telling him about the catastrophe.

Soon they saw bodies floating past them, Wachs' mother said in an interview from Oakland, California, where she lives.

Once they returned to shore, the couple did what they could to help, Helen Wachs said.

"I can't describe carrying a moaning person who just saw his girlfriend killed down a hill in the middle of the night," the e-mail said. "I saw more bodies than I care to report. The hotel where we were staying is mostly gone. We lost everything, but our lives."

Faye Wachs said she was impressed by the efforts of the Thai government and the International Committee for the Red Cross, but "she was appalled at the treatment they got" from the U.S. government, her mother said.

At the airport in Bangkok, other governments had set up booths to greet nationals who had been affected and to help repatriate them, she said.

That was not the case with the U.S. government, Wachs told her mother.It took the couple three hours, she said, to find the officials from the American consulate, who were in the VIP lounge.

Because they had lost all their possessions, including their documentation, they had to have new passports issued.

But the U.S. officials demanded payment to take the passport pictures, Helen Wachs said.

The couple had managed to hold on to their ATM card, so they paid for the photos and helped other Americans who did not have any money get their pictures taken and buy food, Helen Wachs said.

"She was really very surprised" that the government did so little to ease their ordeal, she said.

Helen Wachs said her daughter told her they would need "some serious counseling" upon their return to Los Angeles.

Once aboard the plane, Wachs told her mother, the biggest thing they noticed was the absence of the stench of raw sewage that had permeated the air.

"She said the clean smell was amazing."

Wachs, who described herself as "shell-shocked but happy to be coming home," is scheduled to arrive Wednesday morning in Los Angeles, her mother said.

She returns acutely aware that many thousands of others don't have that option.

"The tourists are able to get out, but those there are left with utter destruction," Helen Wachs said.

Sweeeet. Our State Department at work, tirelessly and selflessly defending Americans at need.

You know, when I read something like this, I get so angry I get literally bloody-minded. I regret soooo much that death-duels are illegal these days. Sad. Because taunting one of those Consulate creatures, who were fucking off in the bloody VIP lounge instead of minding the store, into calling me out would afford me a deep spiritual joy. I wonder how good they are with single-action .45 autopistols? Which would, indeed, be my weapon of choice. Ahh, such sweet dreams.

Trusting the Military

When the civilians get out of line, we have a constitutional problem. Think about the implications of this editorial.

Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

Published: December 30, 2004

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the initial list of interrogation methods for Guantánamo Bay in late 2002 - methods that clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture statutes - there were no protests from the legal counsels for the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the president, the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the civilian secretaries of the armed services. That's not surprising, because some of those very officials were instrumental in devising the Strangelovian logic that lay behind Mr. Rumsfeld's order. Their legal briefs dutifully argued that the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions when he chose, that he could even sanction torture and that torture could be redefined so narrowly that it could seem legal.

It took an internal protest by uniformed lawyers from the Navy to force the Pentagon to review the Guantánamo rules and restrict them a bit. But the military lawyers' concerns were largely shoved aside by a team of civilian lawyers, led by Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel. The group reaffirmed the notion that Mr. Bush could choose when to apply the Geneva Conventions.

That principle was originally aimed at the supposed members of Al Qaeda held at Guantánamo Bay, but it was quickly exported to Iraq and led, inexorably, to the horrors at Abu Ghraib and other recently disclosed crimes by American soldiers against Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.

If it had not been for a group of uniformed lawyers, the nation might never have learned of the torture and detention memos. In May 2003, soon after Ms. Walker's group produced its rationalization for prisoner abuse, a half-dozen military lawyers went to Scott Horton, who was chairman of the human rights committee of the City Bar Association in New York.

That led to a bar report on the administration's policies, a report that was published around the same time the Abu Ghraib atrocities came into public view. Those lawyers had to do their duty anonymously to avoid having their careers savaged. Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who signed the memo on torturing prisoners, Jay Bybee, was elevated by Mr. Bush to the federal bench.

This month, several former high-ranking military lawyers came out publicly against the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. They noted that it was Mr. Gonzales who had supervised the legal assault on the Geneva Conventions.

Jeh Johnson, a New York lawyer who was general counsel for the secretary of the Air Force under President Clinton, calls this shift "a revolution."

"One view of the law and government," Mr. Johnson said, "is that good things can actually come out of the legal system and that there is broad benefit in the rule of law. The other is a more cynical approach that says that lawyers are simply an instrument of policy - get me a legal opinion that permits me to do X. Sometimes a lawyer has to say, 'You just can't do this.' "

Normally, the civilian policy makers would have asked the military lawyers to draft the rules for a military prison in wartime. The lawyers for the service secretaries are supposed to focus on issues like contracts, environmental impact statements and base closings. They're not supposed to meddle in rules of engagement or military justice.

But the civilian policy makers knew that the military lawyers would never sanction tossing the Geneva Conventions aside in the war against terrorists. Military lawyers, Mr. Johnson said, "tend to see things through the prism of how it will affect their people if one gets captured or prosecuted."

Some Senate Democrats have said they plan to question Mr. Gonzales about this mess during his Senate confirmation hearings. But given the feckless state of Congressional oversight on this issue, there's not a lot of hope in that news.

Meanwhile, the relationship between the civilian and the military lawyers has gotten so bad that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, pushed through legislation that elevated the military services' top lawyers to a three-star general's rank. That at least put them on a more equal footing with the civilian lawyers.

Sidney Blumenthal is an elegant writer whose elegance sometimes tends to the baroque. Today, he's playing the slasher.

A state of chaos

George Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 30, 2004
The Guardian

The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.

At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.

"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.

Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.

Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.

Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.

In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."

The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."

In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.

Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.

The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded.

I'm not fond of playing psychojargon games, but there does seem to be something dark and unsavory going on between Bush I and Bush II, something pathological, and we are all caught up in it.

Stingy?

Canada blogger James Bow notes that Canada, with a population less than a tenth of the US, has already pledged $40 million dollars to the Indian Ocean catastrophe.

All of the industrialized West will be upping their totals in the weeks to come, but Bush sure lost the ability to get out in front on this one. He could have recouped some of the goodwill we've lost with the world community with his policies, but since this has nothing to do with his next election, he can't get it on his radar screen.

IPS's James Lobe tots up some of the price American business is paying for Bushian unilateralism:

Poll: War Bad for Business
by Jim Lobe

The Bush administration's foreign policy may be costing U.S. corporations business overseas, according to a new survey of 8,000 international consumers released this week by the Seattle-based Global Market Insite (GMI) Inc.

The latest poll found that more than two-thirds of European and Canadian consumers have had a negative change in their view of the United States as a result of U.S. foreign policy over the last three years. Nearly half believed that the war in Iraq was motivated by a desire to control oil supplies, while only 15 percent believed it was related to terrorism.

No Revolution Yet

On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows

By Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01

In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.

But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.

In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.

Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.

"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said. "They were much more sophisticated in their message delivery."

The ultimate test of the two campaigns is in the success of their efforts to increase turnout from 2000. Kerry and his allies increased the Democrat's vote by about 6.8 million votes; Bush increased his by nearly 10.5 million. In the key battleground of Ohio, Bush countered Kerry's gains in the metropolitan precincts by boosting his margin in exurban and rural counties from 57 to 60 percent, eking out a 118,457-vote victory.

A supposed strategic advantage for the Democrats -- massive support from well-endowed independent groups -- turned out to have an inherent flaw: The groups' legally required independence left them with a message out of harmony with the Kerry campaign.

A large part of Bush's advantage derived from being an incumbent who did not face a challenger from his party. He also benefited from the experience and continuity of a campaign hierarchy, based on a corporate model, that had essentially stayed intact since Bush's 1998 reelection race for Texas governor.
Take Office, Plan Campaign

When Bush moved into the Oval Office in 2001, planning for his presidential reelection campaign began almost immediately. Under the direction of Karl Rove, Bush's top White House adviser who served as a kind of chairman of the board, White House political director Kenneth B. Mehlman, the chief executive officer, pollster Matthew Dowd, chief operating officer, and Mark McKinnon, the principal media consultant, the Bush political team developed a strategy for 2004, began investing in innovative techniques to target voters and prepared an early and cost-effective advertising plan. During this period, the Republican National Committee, where much of the planning was based, outspent its Democratic counterpart by $122 million.

In 2001, Dowd said that "we made some of the basic strategic assumptions about what we thought the election would look like."

One fundamental calculation was that 93 percent of the voting-age public was already committed or predisposed toward the Democratic or Republican candidate, leaving 7 percent undecided.

Another calculation was that throughout the Bush presidency, "most voters looked at Bush in very black-and-white terms. They either loved and respected him, or they didn't like him," Dowd said. Those voters were unlikely to change their views before Election Day 2004.

That prompted Republicans to jettison their practice of investing 75 to 90 percent of campaign money on undecided voters. Instead, half the money went into motivating and mobilizing people already inclined to vote for Bush, but who were either unregistered or who often failed to vote -- "soft" Republicans.

"We systematically allocated all the main resources of the campaign to the twin goals of motivation and persuasion. The media, the voter targeting, the mail -- all were based off that strategic decision," Dowd said.

This is an important article, so read the whole thing. One of the points that Edsall and Grimaldi make is that the top-down, highly disciplined and hierarchical campaign the Bushies ran didn't start in 2003, it started the day they moved into 1600 Penn. The disorganized populism of the Kerry campaign didn't really have a chance against such a well-identified "brand," even with near-equity in fund raising.

The relatively tiny Swift Boat ad buy was never properly countered by Kerry (spending constraints moving into the general election) or the 527s, and was probably the wound from which the campaign never really recovered.

I haven't read Joe Trippi's book yet, and I'm certain that the rise of the netroots and the coming of Internet community will have some significance down the road, but I don't think any of the campaign pros, including Trippi, have yet learned how to use this new phenomenon as anything other than a cash cow. As this campaign demonstrated, that's not nearly enough when faced with a disciplined and well-established foe.

What Elections?

Falloujans Get an Unsettling Look at Their City
# Refugees eager to return change their minds after seeing the ruin. Will balloting be feasible?

By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — Yasser Abbas Atiya swore he'd sooner sleep on the streets of his beloved hometown of Fallouja than spend another night in the squalid Baghdad shelter where his family had been squatting.

Thirty minutes after he returned home this week, however, Atiya had seen enough. He left in disgust and had no plans to go back.

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"I couldn't stand it," the grocer said. "I was born in that town. I know every inch of it. But when I got there, I didn't recognize it."

Lakes of sewage in the streets. The smell of corpses inside charred buildings. No water or electricity. Long waits and thorough searches by U.S. troops at checkpoints. Warnings to watch out for land mines and booby traps. Occasional gunfire between troops and insurgents.

"I thought, 'This is not my town,' " Atiya said Tuesday after going back to the abandoned Baghdad clinic his family shares with nearly 100 other displaced Falloujans. "How can I take my family to live there?"

The initial clamor by an estimated 200,000 refugees to return to the homes they had fled last month is being replaced by a bitter resignation that the city remains largely uninhabitable and unsafe. Hopes of quickly restoring normality to the restive Sunni Muslim city are fading, raising questions about whether Fallouja will be ready to participate in the Jan. 30 national election.
....
U.S. Marines say they are working to make the city livable again but are grappling with decades of neglect and decay, as well as the results of last month's bombardment.

More than 700 workers have been hired for the rebuilding effort. Aid centers distribute bottled water, food and blankets. On Wednesday, a hospital reopened.

Military leaders are mindful that drawing Falloujans back into Iraqi society and into the election would send a powerful signal that the country was headed in a positive direction.

"We are attacking reconstruction efforts with the same grit, sweat and determination used to eliminate the malicious threat posed by the terrorists and insurgents," said Lt. Col. Dan Wilson, deputy operations officer of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Fallouja. "We want to help the residents, so they will be able to live in peace and enjoy the privilege of voting in the upcoming elections."

But the effort to win the hearts and minds of the local population has fallen flat as soon as returning homeowners see the burned buildings, piles of rubble and heavy troop presence. The residents say voting is the last thing on their minds.

"What election?" Atiya, 35, asked. "I'm a refugee. How can a refugee take part in an election? Let me get back home and then I'll talk about elections."

After enduring three hours of military checkpoints and searches, Atiya and two brothers anxiously reentered the city Monday, uncertain what to expect.

U.S. troops handed them leaflets warning against a myriad of dangers and advising them that the U.S. military could not guarantee their safety. Don't drink the water, the leaflets warned, or eat food left behind.

Every resident is required to carry a small card outlining special new rules for the city. There's a 6 p.m. curfew. No weapons are allowed. Graffiti and public gatherings are illegal. Cars and visitors are banned.

Males between the ages of 15 and 55 must carry special identification cards. U.S. military officials have announced plans to use fingerprinting and retina scans to prevent insurgents from returning.

As Atiya and his brothers traveled through the city and saw the destruction, they braced for the worst. When he caught a glimpse of his roof, Atiya's first emotion was relief. The house was still there.

As they drew closer, however, Atiya and his brothers began to curse. A gaping hole in the two-story house appeared to have been caused by a tank, whose tracks were visible in the mud, he said. Most of the furniture was smashed. "Half my house was demolished," Atiya said.

In the kitchen, cabinets had been ripped from the walls, he said. Others were emptied of their contents, which lay in heaps on the floor.

"Every dish was broken, every cup, every plate, as if someone had just stood there breaking one dish after another," said Atiya's brother Raaid Abbas, 37. "Why?"

The brothers don't know who ransacked the house, but they blame American troops, who they say left muddy boot prints.

Tank treadmarks and muddy bootprints don't equate to "decades of neglect and decay" and the lakes of sewage in the street weren't there before.

"Our forces never intentionally damage structures or homes," said Wilson, the deputy operations officer. "After all, we, in partnership with the [interim Iraqi government], will be at the forefront of assisting in the restoration and cleanup of Fallouja."

And here is the problem with the "interim Iraqi government." It's partnership with the people who destroyed Fallouja has given it a smidge of a credibility problem.

What to Do

Are We Stingy? Yes

President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed," the president said.

We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.

The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we've now pledged "is only the beginning" of the United States' recovery effort. Let's hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises.

Bush's spokescritter handed out a back-handed criticism of Bill Clinton (who got out in front of this issue in an interview in Britain) by saying that actions speak louder than words. Bush has so far been more talk than action on the international development front, Powell's posturing to the contrary.

If you want to help here and here are the channels, if you are in the USA.

Coming Through the Wry

I'm fighting the scratchy throat, ruined lungs, coughing it up syndrome right now. The doc says it's an upper respiratory nasty combined with sinusitus. He sent me home with some decongestants, a cough thinner and the advice to drink a whole lot of water.

I'm so tired, and tired of coughing, that I want to send off serious rants in the direction of, oh, say....instapundit...but I'm too tired and feeling too poorly.

I'm going to call tonight in early. This is it for me, unless I wake up with another case of the wracking coughs at midnight. I tried brandy with honey last night and when THAT doesn't work, I know I'm in deep yoghurt.

I'm taking the cough medicine every four hours, as specified, and yet I ain't well yet. Give me a day or two to start feeling like an ordinary human.

your obedient correspondent,
Melanie

The Healthcare Agenda, W Version

This is a press release rather than a news story. I get press releases all the time, but this is the first time I've printed one, because I think the stories it highlights are right on. I know zip about Kurt Salmon Associates, but I know a lot about the news and healthcare. This stuff is true:

Kurt Salmon Associates Highlights 2004's Eight Significant Issues in the Health Care Industry

NEW YORK, Dec. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- From the re-election of George W. Bush to the closure of key emergency rooms, significant moments in 2004 health care provider history will significantly shape the future of the U.S. health care industry, says Kurt Salmon Associates (KSA) Health Care Consulting Group.

* National health information superhighway provides uneven ride. The
Federal government's drive toward a comprehensive electronic health
record paves the way for a much-needed health information superhighway.
But the failure to fund the Office of the Health Information Technology
Coordinator is a huge pothole along that path. Despite clarification of
kickback rules for hospitals' provision of information technology to
physicians, significant roadblocks remain.

I think that sums things up rather neatly. Healthcare professionals, your comments are invited.

What Civilization Means

This is unbelievable. The link comes via Tom at Information Clearing House:

Swedish paper reports tsunami warning halted out of concern for tourist industry

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Think they are still going to get along without lawsuits?

CNN is reporting (as DavidByron noted in a comments thread below) that the likely total of the dead from the earthquake and tsunami--the immediate event--will likely hit 100,000. I'm watching a WHO doctor on the Newshour, who is predicting at least another 50,000 dead from disease, contaminated water and the like.

To the extent that any of these countries have functional economies (certainly India, Sri Lanka and Thailand do, and the Maldives were almost completely dependent on tourism) this is going to be an economic disaster as well as a human tragedy.

I urge you to pay attention to this story for several reasons: for the human tragedy and our called-for response as empathic humans, and for what it presages in human, economic and social costs if the avian flu breaks out of the bird population. Indonesia's Aceh province was already one of the poorest places on earth. Some of the estimates I've read say that fully a quarter of the population is dead. Some areas in India and Sri Lanka have lost half of their children. That is unimaginable. And it is already malaria season in this part of the world.

It is far too easy to dismiss this because it is happening in a poor, brown part of the world (I've commented earlier on the US press's focus on tourists, rather than the indigenous population, as if it isn't real if it doesn't affect white people) but pay attention: a flu pandemic which is only as lethal as the "Spanish" flu of 1918 (2-5% mortality) would devestate the economies of the so-called industrialized west. Watch what happens to the social fabric and economic underpinnings of the Indian Ocean states in the going out months of this catastrophe to get a lesson we will need to learn, and I hope we do it sooner rather than later. If the H5N1 bug isn't the break-out nasty this flu season, we are still overdue for a flu pandemic. If this isn't the year, the year isn't far off.

House of Bush, House of Saud

Two Explosions Disrupt Saudi Capital
Police Kill 7 Militants in Shootout in Riyadh

By ABDULLAH Al-SHIHRI
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, December 29, 2004; 4:36 PM

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Militants launched coordinated car bombings and battled security forces in the Saudi capital Wednesday night in attacks that killed eight people, caused oil prices to jump and signaled that Islamic extremists are keeping up their fight despite the kingdom's crackdown on al Qaeda.

A car bomb detonated near the Interior Ministry in central Riyadh -- killing a bystander, according to Saudi TV -- followed soon after by an explosion when suicide attackers tried to bomb a troop recruitment center.

At around the same time, militants and police clashed in northern Riyadh in fighting that Al-Arabiyah television said left seven militants dead.

The attacks came two weeks after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on his followers to focus attacks on his homeland. While damage to the Interior Ministry was minor, it was a bold assault on the government body at the center of the kingdom's war on al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.

The violence sparked a jump in oil prices in afternoon trading in New York, helping push the price of a barrel of light crude up nearly two dollars to $43.64.

I wonder how the members of the House of Saud are feeling about their historical connections to the Bush family today?

Busy Blogger

Light posting today because of extreme busy-ness at work. I'll give you a few more things when I get home tonight. Tomorrow morning is also likely to be light, but it is a half-day, so things will pick up in the afternoon.

Got any plans for New Years Eve?

Unimaginable

At 10 AM EST, CNN is reporting 80,000 dead in all of the countries affected by the tsunami and earthquake on Sunday. washingtonpost.com is carrying a Reuters report from earlier this morning in which the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Indonesia, Michael Elmquist, says that the death toll in Aceh province alone may reach 50-80,000. The scale of this tragedy beggars the imagination.

The World Health Organization warned on Tuesday that tens of thousands of people could face death from cholera, typhoid and other diseases.

"The initial terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer-term suffering of the affected communities," said David Nabarro, a physician in charge of crisis operations for WHO. "There is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami."

The Pottery Barn Rule

William Pfaff: An army's morale on the downswing

William Pfaff International Herald Tribune

The new President Bush, in 2001, was another draft-dodger, in fact if not form, but he walked and talked in a way the military liked. However, his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was not such a likable fellow, and he set out to reform the Pentagon and re-establish civilian authority.
.
He has in considerable measure imposed himself on the uniformed military, but in a way they now hate. Following his ideas about a small, light and "agile" force, he has made one bad tactical and organizational choice after another, with particularly devastating consequences for the army, its reserve forces, the national guard, and the marines. Their manpower resources are being exploited and wasted in a manner that could leave the services damaged and their officers alienated for a generation.
.
This has been the result of the Bush government's total misjudgment of the Iraq situation; its refusal to enlarge the regular army; its reliance on mobilized reserve forces on extended service in what amounts to the draft of specialist veterans from civilian life; and, since the Iraq occupation turned very unpleasant, "stop-loss" refusal to let people go at the end of their contracts.
.
Recruiting for the reserves and the guard is now badly off, as are regular army re-enlistments and quality recruits. A 20-year-old man, a regular in the army, on his way back for a second tour in Iraq, says, "What everybody is starting to know now is that this is what's going on for the foreseeable future."
.
This probably is true, since nobody in the Bush administration seems capable of changing course, and it is increasingly evident that American policy for the so-called greater Middle East will fail.
.
If the failure is a traumatic one, the result is likely to resemble the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Vietnam destroyed the American citizen army: product of a 200-year tradition that rejected standing armies and held temporary and egalitarian military service to be a duty and experience of citizenship. In Vietnam, the conscript army eventually staged a mute mutiny against the folly of its government.
.
However, you must not abuse even a professional army. It too can rebel, and as in the citizen army, disaffection starts at the bottom, where the most pain is felt.
.
Iraq is now destroying the professional army the United States recruited to take the place of its citizen army. The new army was intended to serve as the unquestioning instrument of the policies of the elected administration. This administration's refusal to supply the manpower and means necessary for its vast military and political ambitions is now having its effect on that army. Its politically inspired fear of conscription, the merciless combat rotation policy and systematic use of involuntary extensions of duty its policies impose, are devastating to troops.
.
The incoherence of its policy in the Middle East, and lack of clearly defined objectives, is deeply disquieting to the military leadership. America's military leaders once again find themselves victims of the policies of appointed ideologues and elected amateurs. As in Vietnam, they have no alternative to propose, except Dresden.

We tried Dresden in Fallujah. The result was predictable:

At Least 29 People Killed by Explosion in West Baghdad

Associated Press
Wednesday, December 29, 2004; 2:38 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A powerful explosion in a house in west Baghdad killed at least 29 people and wounded 18, police said Wednesday. They described the blast as an ambush staged by insurgents.

Police were en route to a raid in Baghdad's Ghazaliya neighborhood late Tuesday after an anonymous call tipped them about a suspected militant hideout in the neighborhood, an official in Ghazaliya police station said.

As they were about to enter the house, an explosion erupted from inside, he added.

At least 29 people were killed, including 7 policemen, and 18 others were injured. Six houses collapsed in the blast and several people are believed to be still trapped underneath the rubble.

The police official said the attack was "evidently an ambush" and that "massive amounts of explosives" were used.

As Naomi Klein noted in Monday's Guardian:

Let's start with the idea that the US is helping to provide security. On the contrary, the presence of US troops is provoking violence on a daily basis. The truth is that as long as the troops remain, the country's entire security apparatus - occupation forces as well as Iraqi soldiers and police - will be exclusively dedicated to fending off resistance attacks, leaving a security vacuum when it comes to protecting regular Iraqis. If the troops pulled out, Iraqis would still face insecurity, but they would be able to devote their local security resources to regaining control over their cities and neighbourhoods.

As for preventing "anarchy", the US plan to bring elections to Iraq seems designed to spark a civil war - the civil war needed to justify an ongoing presence for US troops no matter who wins the elections. It was always clear that the Shia majority, which has been calling for immediate elections for more than a year, was never going to accept any delay in the election timetable. And it was equally clear that by destroying Falluja in the name of preparing the city for elections, much of the Sunni leadership would be forced to call for an election boycott.

When [NYTmes Op-Ed columnist Nicholas] Kristof asserts that US forces should stay in Iraq to save hundreds of thousands of children from starvation, it's hard to imagine what he has in mind. Hunger in Iraq is not merely the humanitarian fallout of a war - it is the direct result of the US decision to impose brutal "shock therapy" policies on a country that was already sickened and weakened by 12 years of sanctions. Paul Bremer's first act on the job was to lay off close to 500,000 Iraqis, and his primary accomplishment - for which he has just been awarded the presidential medal of freedom - was to oversee a "reconstruction" process that systematically stole jobs from needy Iraqis and handed them to foreign firms, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 67%.

And the worst of the shocks are yet to come. On November 21, the group of industrialised countries known as the Paris Club finally unveiled its plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving it outright, the Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80%, contingent on Iraq's governments adhering to a strict International Monetary Fund austerity programme. According to early drafts, that programme includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (read: privatisation), a plan that Iraq's ministry of industry predicts will require laying off an additional 145,000 workers. In the name of "free-market reforms", the IMF also wants to eliminate the programme that provides each Iraqi family with a basket of food - the only barrier to starvation for millions of citizens. There is additional pressure to eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade Organisation, which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a member - provided it adopts certain "reforms".

So let's be absolutely clear: the US, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions, followed by elections designed to transfer as little power to Iraqis as possible. This is what Argentinian writer Rodolfo Walsh, writing before his assassination in 1977 by the military junta, described as "planned misery". And the longer the US stays in Iraq, the more misery it will plan.

Clearing Bush

Aid Grows Amid Remarks About President's Absence

By John F. Harris and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page A01

Some foreign policy specialists said Bush's actions and words both communicated a lack of urgency about an event that will loom as large in the collective memories of several countries as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do in the United States. "When that many human beings die -- at the hands of terrorists or nature -- you've got to show that this matters to you, that you care," said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

There was an international outpouring of support after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some administration officials familiar with relief efforts said they were surprised that Bush had not appeared personally to comment on the tsunami tragedy. "It's kind of freaky," a senior career official said.

The president of Bread for the World, a leading advocacy group lobbying for more U.S. assistance to suffering people abroad, did not criticize the Bush administration, but did urge the United States to play a central role in the relief effort. "This is a disaster of biblical proportions and one that calls for a global response, with the United States playing a key role," David Beckmann said.

Some of those lost in the carnage were Americans. The State Department, which is in the early stages of estimating both relief needs and the U.S. death toll, has received more than 4,000 inquiries about relatives not yet accounted for, although many may be calls searching for the same people, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials denied that the overnight aid increase was a response to the U.N. complaint Monday that some countries were "stingy" with aid. Usually only about 10 percent of the final aid tally is given in the initial response to a natural disaster, with the bulk of aid provided after an assessment of long-term needs, according to the State Department.

"We know the needs will be greater. This was a disaster of almost unimaginable dimension, and it's going to require massive support for some time," State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli said.

Gelb said what appears to be a grudging increase in effort sends the wrong message, at a time when dollar totals matter less than a clear statement about U.S. intentions. Noting that the disaster occurred at a time when large numbers of people in many nations -- especially Muslim ones such as Indonesia -- object to U.S. policies in Iraq, he said Bush was missing an opportunity to demonstrate American benevolence.

"People do watch and see what we do," he said. "Here's an opportunity to remind people of the good we do, and he [Bush] can do it without changing his policy on Iraq or terrorism."

"My initial reaction is that it does not seem to be very aggressive," said Morton Abramowitz, a former ambassador to Thailand who has been active in humanitarian relief efforts, of the administration's response to the tsunami.

Besides USAID assistance, the Pentagon dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln from Hong Kong to the region, and three Navy P-3 Orion surveillance planes and six Air Force C-130 cargo planes with humanitarian goods are being sent to Thailand.

A regional support center will be established at a military base in Utapao, Thailand, as a staging area for relief flights and for emergency and medical personnel providing assistance throughout the region, the Pentagon announced yesterday. The U.S. Pacific Command will deploy personnel mainly from the III Marine Expeditionary Force to set up the command, control and communication structure.

Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who as the military's top European commander helped supervise NATO's efforts to respond to a 1999 earthquake in Turkey, said the United States has unique military capabilities in reconnaissance and logistics management that can be useful in the current crisis. He urged Bush to take a higher profile. "Natural disasters happen," Clark said. "One of the things people look for is a strong response that illustrates America's humanitarian values."

Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who is frequently outspoken in favor of U.S. humanitarian ventures, said he believes the initial U.S. response has been appropriate, even without a public role for Bush. "I think the world knows we're a very generous people," he said.

Still, the United Nations' Egeland complained on Monday that each of the richest nations gives less than 1 percent of its gross national product for foreign assistance, and many give 0.1 percent. "It is beyond me why we are so stingy, really," he told reporters.

Among the world's two dozen wealthiest countries, the United States often is among the lowest in donors per capita for official development assistance worldwide, even though the totals are larger. According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of 30 wealthy nations, the United States gives the least -- at 0.14 percent of its gross national product, compared with Norway, which gives the most at 0.92 percent.

Can we please get over the idea that Bush is "clearing brush?" This isn't a working farm, and working farmers have help to do that kind of dirty work.

And can we please get over the "CNN response?" This is a crisis of biblical proportions, not because some American tourists were lost. Tens of thousands of Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians, Maldivians, Somalians and others lost their lives in a few seconds. Isn't that enough to demand some compassion out of us? Do we have to put some Caucasian faces on this tragedy before we can begin to respond to it? I was so offended by CNN's coverage that I had to turn it off.

Spook Shortage

Director of Analysis Branch at the C.I.A. Is Being Removed
By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: December 29, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 - The head of the Central Intelligence Agency's analytical branch is being forced to step down, former intelligence officials say, opening a major new chapter in a shakeup under Porter J. Goss, the agency's chief.

The official, Jami Miscik, the agency's deputy director for intelligence, told her subordinates on Tuesday afternoon of her plan to step down on Feb. 4. A former intelligence official said that Ms. Miscik was told before Christmas that Mr. Goss wanted to make a change and that "the decision to depart was not hers."

Ms. Miscik has headed analysis at the agency since 2002, a period in which prewar assessments of Iraq and its illicit weapons, which drew heavily on C.I.A. analysis, proved to be mistaken. Even before taking charge of the C.I.A., Mr. Goss, who was a congressman, and his closest associates had been openly critical of the directorate of intelligence, saying it suffered from poor leadership and was devoting too much effort to monitoring day-to-day developments rather than broad trends.

Ms. Miscik's departure is the latest in a series of high-level ousters that have prompted unease within the C.I.A. since Mr. Goss took over as director of central intelligence in September. Of the officials who worked as top deputies to Mr. Goss's predecessor, George J. Tenet, at least a half-dozen have been fired or have retired abruptly, including the agency's No. 2 and No. 3 officials. Much of the top tier of the agency's clandestine service is also gone.

The departure of Ms. Miscik will be the first major change within the directorate of intelligence, which is responsible for making important judgments about events around the world and whose products include the President's Daily Brief, the highly classified document prepared for the president each morning.

The C.I.A. declined to comment on the move, and Ms. Miscik did not reply to written questions provided to her on Monday evening.

But in her message to subordinates, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Miscik described her departure as part of a "natural evolution," saying every intelligence chief "has a desire to have his own team in place to implement his vision and to offer him counsel."

Current and former intelligence officials said the move seemed to signal that Mr. Goss's overhaul, which has focused on human spying operations, would be widened to include the analytical unit.

The former intelligence officials who agreed to discuss Ms. Miscik's plans did so on condition of anonymity. They defended her performance, saying that in 2003 she was quick to acknowledge the shortcomings of the agency's work on Iraq and adopted new safeguards intended to prevent future breakdowns.

The changes at the C.I.A. come as the agency is bracing for a wider reorganization endorsed by Congress and the White House that will strip it of its leading status among the country's intelligence agencies. Under legislation signed into law this month, the chief of the C.I.A. will no longer oversee all 15 of the country's intelligence organizations, which include operations in the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency.

Instead, that power will be transferred to the new post of director of national intelligence, for which the White House has yet to choose a nominee. Administration officials say aides to President Bush are trying to narrow their search, with a decision expected in early January. It is not clear whether Mr. Goss, whose early personnel moves have been sharply criticized inside and outside the C.I.A., will be a candidate for the new job.

Under the new law, the post of director of central intelligence will no longer exist. Among the questions not yet resolved, according to Congressional officials, is whether Senate confirmation would be required for the C.I.A. director.

Ms. Miscik, an economist who rose through the ranks of the intelligence directorate over a 21-year career at the agency, suggested to associates as early as November that she did not expect to stay at the agency under Mr. Goss. But a former intelligence official who worked closely with her said she would have been happy to stay, despite the intensity of the criticism voiced by Mr. Goss and his top aides.

That's right, throw out the old wood, even if the new shoots haven't yet been found. Meanwhile, the various intel agencies poach from each other as they try to fill their shortfall of analysts:

Counterterrorism agencies are shopping for talent at job fairs, dangling generous scholarships and luring staff from each other in a race to overcome a shortage of analysts that may only get worse in the new intelligence overhaul.

"You don't have a limitless pool to draw from," Black said.

The Agency and the other spy departments will have a hard time competing with the Beltway Bandits, who can pay those with security clearances double what the GSA schedule allows. Third rate pay buys third rate talent.

The Power of Soul

The local news says that Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital is swamped with gifts, phone card minutes and all the rest. As always, ordinary Americans came through when the VA and the DoD didn't have a clue.

As we stand on the brink of a new year, send your goodies, minutes, phone cards and ordinary toiletries, cookies and magezine subscriptions to
anysoldier.com, the site will guide you to the real needs of our men and women who didn't ask to be where they are right now.

Alternatively, serve the cold and hungry in your own community through America's Second Harvest. Need doesn't begin and end on December 25. The weather is getting colder, and ASH can help you find the clothing banks where you can donate warm clothes for cold children and adults, as well as food. During the W administration, these needs are only going to get worse. If you gave Toys for Tots for Christmas, think about Gloves for Tots in January. Those post-Christmas sales are a great place to stock up for the needs of the homeless: 50% off doesn't mean much when you don't have a place to live or a warm meal, but it just increased your buying power. Even I can afford a couple of pairs of half-price gloves for the poor.

The poor we shall always have with us: the Gospel warned us.

Other sites have the places you can donate for the disaster in the Indian Ocean, the list I like starts with Medecins sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, who have stripped their website down to nothing to accept the additional traffic. They already have some teams on the ground, and have 60 tons of supplies ready to go when they can get flights into the area. The need is so huge that these are tears in the ocean, but MSF has a track record, they get the job done. Diarrhea and cholera are going to be hitting the children before Friday. Water purification is something they specialize in. Give them a check, let the experts do what they do best.

Can't do any of the above? When was the last time you gave blood? Your community can't possibly repay you for that, but as you slap the band-aid over your arm and accept a cookie from the volunteer, you'll wonder why you waited so long. Blood supplies are always very low at this time of the year. This beats the crap out of going to the movies in order to feel good.

Give what you can, not because you have to, but because you can. Exercise your free will to make the world a little better than it was this morning. It is your choice.

You can save a life, and you don't have to be a hero to do it. It only takes a couple of minutes.

Links are the currency of the Interdependent web. Spend them freely.

DNA

This was on the PRO-med update page earlier today. You have to read the foreign papers in order to keep up with this story, it is still off the US media's radar screen. It's out of the US Centers for Disease Control, but only the Canadians have picked it up.

CDC to conduct avian flu pandemic experiments

Canadian Press

TORONTO — The alarm now sounds with increasing frequency and urgency: the world could be on the brink of an influenza pandemic sparked by the highly virulent avian flu strain ravaging poultry stocks in Southeast Asia, experts fear.

The Geneva-based agency would like to be able to put some kind of odds on how likely H5N1 is to become a pandemic strain and how deadly -- or not -- H5N1 reassortment viruses might be in humans.

This is a good news/bad news kind of story. The good news is that if the scientists can force the recombination in the laboratory ahead of the wild strain's mutation, we've got a chance of putting up some kind of defense and growing a vaccine, and at least a chance at understanding what kind of risk this virus represents. The bad news, of course, is that the experiments themselves run the risk of letting this bug loose on the world.

The fact that an influenza specialist of the order of magnitude of Robert Webster is using the kind of vocabulary he is using above tells me that my own alarm at the appearance of this strain of influenza is completely justified.

There is a big wild card in all of this: the disaster in Southern and Southeast Asia. The breeding ground of H5N1 is the far east and the earliest cases came out of Thailand and Viet Nam, territory where we now have large populations of refugees, little in the way of public health infrastructure and next to nothing in communications infrastructure. This is a very frightening scenario, as various kinds of digestive and respiratory ailments will begin surfacing as soon as this weekend in stressed populations with very little in the way of fresh water. Aid workers themselves are likely to be among the first line of a variety of infections. In addition to the predictable sequellae of disease in the face of a natural disaster of this scale (typhus, cholera, TB) we've got these three emergent strains of influenza about which little is known lurking in animal populations

Bookmark PRO-med and check on it regularly. Charles, if you are around, could you comment on the efficacy of an N95 respirator against this virus? I haven't had time to do the research on the bug's dimensions or the granularity of the filter on this respirator. Anyone with familiarity with the issue, chime in. Some of our Canadian readers may have had experience with this respirator during the SARS scare last year.

If this scenario (wide-spread displaced persons, public health and governement services in collapse) reminds you at all of the way the stage was set for the 1918 influenza pandemic...

There weren't jet airplanes in 1918.

Stingy

I knew somebody would come up with the numbers. This is via PSoTD:

America, the Niggardly

It was with great fanfare that the United States and 188 other countries signed the United Nations Millennium Declaration, a manifesto to eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and disease among the one billion people in the world who subsist on barely anything. The project set a deadline of 2015 to achieve its goals. Chief among them was the goal for developed countries, like America, Britain and France, to work toward giving 0.7 percent of their national incomes for development aid for poor countries.

The government spends $450 billion annually on the military, and $15 billion on development help for poor countries, a 30-to-1 ratio that, as Mr. Sachs puts it, shows how the nation has become “all war and no peace in our foreign policy.” Next month, he will present his report on how America and the world can actually cut global poverty in half by 2015. He says that if the Millennium Project has any chance of success, America must lead the donors.

(Emphasis mine.) Yes, we write the biggest check, in absolute terms. But as a percentage of budget, GDP or per capita, the Dutch have us beat.

The Mind Boggles

Asia Struggles As Death Toll Hits 44,000

By ANDI DJATMIKO
Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) -- Mourners in Sri Lanka used their bare hands to dig graves Tuesday while hungry islanders in Indonesia turned to looting in the aftermath of Asia's devastating tsunamis. Thousands more bodies were found in Indonesia, dramatically increasing the death toll across 11 nations to around 44,000.

Emergency workers found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, in Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra island, the hardest hit region in Indonesia, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry.

Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said. Along Aceh's hard-hit western coastline, villages were swamped up to the roofs, still unexplored by soldiers combing the area for survivors and dead. Refugees fleeing the area described surviving for days on little more than coconuts before reaching Banda Aceh.

"The sea was full of bodies," said Sukardi Kasdi, who reached the capital from his town of Surang.

With aid not arriving quick enough, desperate residents in Meulaboh and other towns in Aceh - a region that was unique in that it was struck both by Sunday's massive quake and the killer waves that followed - began to loot.

"It is every person for themselves here," district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio station from the area.

In Sri Lanka, the toll also mounted significantly. Around 1,000 people were dead or missing from a train that was flung off its tracks when the gigantic waves hit. Rescuers pulled 204 bodies from the train's eight carriages - reduced to twisted metal - and cremated or buried them Tuesday next to the railroad track that runs along the coast.

"Is this the fate that we had planned for? My darling, you were the only hope for me," cried one man for his dead girlfriend - his university sweetheart - as Buddhist monks held prayer nearby.

More than 18,700 people died in Sri Lanka, more than 4,400 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand, with numbers expected to rise. Scores were also killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The giant waves raced nearly 3,000 miles to east Africa, causing deaths in Somalia, Tanzania and Seychelles.

And the toll was expected to continue to mount. A police official said 8,000 people were missing and possibly dead in India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located just north of Sumatra. So far, only 90 people were confirmed dead in the archipelago of 30 inhabited islands. The Indonesian vice president estimated that up to 25,000 could be dead on Aceh's western coastlines, bringing the country's potential toll up to 50,000.

If the speculation in the last paragraph is correct, the toll directly attributable to the tidal wave and earthquake may top 100,000. How many more may succumb to water-borne illness, starvation and the other sequellae of massive natural disaster is impossible to know.

U.S. Relief Package to More Than Double

By BARRY SCHWEID
AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. Agency for International Development prepared Tuesday to add $20 million to an initial $15 million contribution for Asian earthquake relief as Secretary of State Colin Powell bristled at a United Nations official's suggestion that the United States has been "stingy."

A senior U.S. official told The Associated Press the increased aid figure was bound to be pushed even higher as assessments of the damage from the biggest earthquake in 40 years are received.

The Pentagon is preparing a supplemental relief operation and pre-stocked supplies of shelter, food and water bags are on their way to Indonesia from Dubai, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Powell, irritated by the U.N. official's criticism, toured morning television talk shows to say the Bush administration will follow up its contributions with large additional sums.

"The United States has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world," Powell said when asked about the comments Monday by Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian aid chief.

Initially, the U.S. government pledged $15 million and dispatched disaster specialists to help the Asian nations devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunamis that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

I don't think there is much point in playing the numbers game (although as Duncan points out, the total committed today is less than the cost of W's coro--er, inauguration next month) as the scale of this disaster is beyond anything experienced in modern times. All of that money tied up in the sands of Mesopotamia now seems kind of pointless, doesn't it?

Beauty and Truth

4 Ways to Find Out What’s Really Happening in Iraq
by Doug Ireland

Coverage of Iraq made this an annus horribilis for America’s major media. If you want to know why public opinion in Western Europe has been so overwhelmingly against the U.S. war in and occupation of Iraq, there’s one obvious answer: the difference in television news between theirs and ours. You can easily determine this for yourself: Spend a week watching the news broadcasts and TV magazines of the BBC, France2 and Deutsche Welle, all available on many U.S. cable systems. The footage of dead Iraqi babies and children — victims of U.S. attacks on "terrorists" — that you will regularly see on European public television is rarely aired on U.S. networks. The regular interviews in Iraqi hospitals with doctors recounting the slaughter of the innocents that show up on European news broadcasts aren’t often seen on the all-news cable networks here, let alone on the Big Three broadcast nets’ newscasts. Iraqis, of course, know this daily reality all too well — which explains their overwhelming hostility to the U.S. occupation.

An on-the-ground study of Iraqi casualties between April and September by Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder newspapers demonstrated that "Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents." But you’re not told this by U.S. TV’s "embedded" reporters, who’ve traded their reportorial independence for access to the boom-boom footage that drives what Time magazine has labeled the "militainment" proffered by American television. In fact, embedded reporters are enrolled in what the Pentagon calls "information operations" — a counterpart to military operations designed to exact the rosiest possible picture of the U.S. occupation from accredited reporters. Those who don’t toe the Pentagon line, and who report negatively on the occupation of Iraq and the indiscriminate effects of U.S. forces’ combat there, are simply blacklisted.

The demagogic nationalism of Fox News, the ratings king, has dragged the other networks down to its level as they seek to win back lost viewers. In a must-read article on "Iraq, the Press and the Election" in the December 16 issue of The New York Review of Books (available online at www.nybooks.com), the Columbia Journalism Review’s Michael Massing dissects U.S. media coverage of Iraq with devastating effect. CNN, for example, he portrays as "careening wildly between an adherence to traditional news values on the one hand and a surrender to the titillating, overheated, nationalistic fare of contemporary cable on the other. In the end, CNN . . . offered the superficiality of Fox without any of its conviction."

The degree to which coverage of Iraq reflects the structural corruption of U.S. major media is even more damningly portrayed in Weapons of Mass Deception, the superb new film by Danny Schechter. Schechter, a TV veteran of three decades, is an Emmy-winning former investigative producer for ABC and CNN (he calls himself a "network refugee"), and the founder of the independent TV production company Globalvision and also of MediaChannel.org, the Web site where his sharp-eyed, acid-tongued media criticism punches gaping holes in official newsdom’s coverage of Iraq. In this film — which is much more meticulously documented and more accurate than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and therefore infinitely more devastating — Schechter shows with precision how U.S. mass media have been recruited as part and parcel of the Pentagon’s war-propaganda machine.

There is no end in sight in Iraq. Senator Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, reported recently from Iraq that he hasn’t talked to a single U.S. military commander who doesn’t believe the U.S. occupation will last "three, or five, or seven years more" at least. So, to penetrate the fog of propaganda relayed by our major media, you’ll need to be well-armed. Here, then, are a few suggestions of how to get your head around the reality of what’s truly happening in Iraq from online sources, in addition to the previously mentioned MediaChannel.org:

Undernews (http://prorev.com/indexa.htm), the daily press review by veteran Washington journalist Sam Smith, is in the I.F. Stone tradition: He culls open sources in the English language from which to construct an alternative version of reality. It’s the perfect solution for the average news consumer too busy to wade through all of the English-language press — including the fine coverage of Iraq from British and Australian newspapers — from which Undernews provides brief extracts and links to complete articles.

Truthout (www.truthout.org/) is edited by William Rivers Pitt, the author of the best-selling War on Iraq — What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know. Truthout’s daily e-bulletins bring you a selection of the latest news and analysis that counters official Washington’s worldview — augmented by Rivers’ scintillating commentaries and contributions from Truthout’s own foreign correspondents.

Informed Comment (www.juancole.com/) is the Web site of University of Michigan history professor and Middle East specialist Juan Cole, whose analysis has become a must-read for anyone seriously interested in Iraq.

Allow me to add some of the sources on my blogroll. I start my day every day with Paul Woodward's The War in Context (on vacation until 12/30) and the other "Brilliant Aggregators" listed over on the right because they include the world press. The American media are so parochial as to be myopic, the rest of the world is less interested in American media cheerleading. The Agonist is a community-mediated summary of world news.

Soon to be added to the blogroll: Tom's Information Clearinghouse ("There is a war going on for the minds of America, those waging this war are determined to control the American people by taking possession of our minds and by controlling our sources of information....
Truth is indefinable. Information is unlimited. ") and The Randolph Bourne Institute's www.antiwar.com ("With every war, America has made a "great leap" into statism, and as Bourne emphasizes: " . . . it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution [the State]." At its core, that "nature" includes the ever-increasing threat to individual liberty and the centralization of political power. ")

I present each of these sites with the understanding that you are well-informed, thoughtful and able to find your way through the announced or unannounced political viewpoints of each of them to the kernel of truth which fuels your own activism.

I urge you to read widely. I print the material which speaks to my own head, heart and gut. You are as likely to find material from liberal sites and The American Conservative Review at this URL. As John Keatstold us:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Read these and the other aggregators. I have placed them over there for a reason.

Support the Troops

CIA makes no disclosures on abuse
By Charlie Savage The Boston Globe
Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Agency refusal cites precedent from '70s

WASHINGTON The CIA is refusing to disclose any information about abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, invoking a legal precedent that involved a secret project by the billionaire Howard Hughes to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the 1970s.

The CIA allegedly oversaw interrogations of top-level detainees, and some investigators think the agency's tactics are at the heart of the question of whether the Bush administration has authorized torture.

But nearly all the disclosures concerning abuses have come from other agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI.

The CIA traditionally has invoked special protections aimed at shielding its intelligence-gathering operations, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing to obtain the records, and some independent observers think the agency's insistence on secrecy is inappropriate in this instance.

Megan Lewis, a lawyer for the civil rights group, said she would file an objection in early January to the CIA's efforts to avoid scrutiny.

The CIA asserts that it is protected according to the submarine case, in which a judge allowed the agency to neither confirm nor deny that it possessed records of a deep-sea mining project thought to be a front to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. The CIA has refused to acknowledge whether it has documents and photographs related to abuse of detainees.

Among the records sought in the ongoing Freedom of Information Act case pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union are a Justice Department legal opinion about interrogation techniques and pictures of John Walker Lindh, an American with Taliban forces who was detained in Afghanistan.

In the same suit, the FBI chose to turn over troves of e-mails regarding accusations of prisoner abuse that were made public last week.

But the CIA "asserts that it is not able to confirm or deny whether it has any records relating to its purported involvement in these specific activities related to the treatment, death, or rendition of detainees in U.S. custody because to do so would tend to reveal classified information and intelligence sources and methods that are protected from disclosure," the agency said in a court filing on Oct. 15.

The lawsuit has met stiff resistance from some other government agencies, most notably the Pentagon. Legal wrangling continues over Pentagon assertions that certain documents are exempt from disclosure on the grounds of national security. Still, all agencies involved other than the CIA have said whether sought-after documents exist.

In seeking to keep its role in the detainee-abuse scandal from public view, the CIA has invoked the so-called "Glomar response," named for the Glomar Explorer, a deep-sea mining ship built by a Hughes-owned company for the CIA. The operation was exposed in 1975, leading to a Freedom of Information Act suit that established the precedent.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has extensive experience in Freedom of Information Act cases, said the use of the Glomar response was relatively rare and was particularly questionable in the context of records of detainee abuse. A more typical use, he suggested, would be a request for information about a secret technology or installation.

In litigation under the Freedom of Information Act, "the Glomar response has its place," Aftergood said.

"But it doesn't follow that every time it's invoked, it is legitimate," he said.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is representing the CIA in the lawsuit filed in June, declined to comment.

(This article contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of democracy, economic, environmental, human rights, political, scientific, and social justice issues, among others. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material in this article is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes.)

If The Agency was so successful at all of those "interrogations," how come we're still being blindsided in Iraq, and by the way, in Afghanistan?

AFGHANISTAN: IDPs willing to settle in south

27 Dec 2004 15:36:09 GMT
Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks

ZHARE DASHT, 27 December (IRIN) - Tens of thousands of internally displaced persons [IDPs] in the southern border camp of Zhare Dasht are seeking assistance to help them settle in an area they have lived in temporarily over the last two years.

With drought conditions continuing in the areas these IDPs came from, the destitute families prefer to stay in Zhare Dasht rather than return to their places of origin. Although the desert area is cold during the winter and isolated from southern Kandahar city, people say they can manage to earn a living or receive some aid assistance in the troubled IDP camp.

"We cannot live forever as IDPs, nor can we return to our lost lands, pasture and cattle. We want to settle here," Abdul Quam, the chief of the IDPs, told IRIN in Zhare Dasht, 45 km west of Kandahar.

The IDP camp hosts nearly 45,000 people who took refuge in the desert in early 2002 after harassment by local commanders and incidents of systematic ethnic discrimination in the country's northern provinces.

According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 45 percent of the IDPs are Kochee nomads from the south. The Kochees, whose livelihood depends on livestock breeding, were displaced after losing their cattle and pastures following years of prolonged drought.

Nearly three years after the fall of the Taliban, conditions in Afghanistan still do not allow for the return of all IDPs.

According to the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation (MORR), after another year of drought and crop failures, more than a third of the Afghan population remains dependent on food aid. Among them are at least 167,000 IDPs, most of them living in camps in the south and west of the country. Persistent drought, a lack of infrastructure and slow reconstruction has considerably slowed the pace of return in 2004.

Only 17,000 IDPs have made the journey home since the beginning of the year. Unable or unwilling to return to their homes, the remaining IDPs, most of them drought-affected nomadic Kochees, are now in need of long-term solutions that go beyond humanitarian assistance.

The Coalition forces in Afghanistan call this struggle forgotten, and so it is treated by the American media. The international aid organizations have pulled out of Afghanistan because the security situation is still too dire. Sound familiar?

Representation

Sunni Party Pulls Out of Iraq Vote As Doubts Grow

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 28, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 27 -- The largest political party representing Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority announced Monday that it would drop out of the Jan. 30 election, dealing a fresh blow to the vote's credibility on the same day the top Shiite Muslim candidate survived a car bombing.

The withdrawal of the Iraqi Islamic Party, combined with the assassination attempt on cleric Abdul Aziz Hakim, heightened concerns that the parliamentary election may produce a lopsided result, further alienating Sunni areas where the armed insurgency is growing.
Iraq Casualties

The need for adequate Sunni participation has become a central issue a month before the election, seen by the United States and Iraq's interim leadership as pivotal to creating a stable government. On Monday, Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, added his voice to those of Sunni clerics urging Iraqis to boycott the ballot, saying "anyone who takes part in this election consciously and willingly is an infidel."

Bin Laden issued the warning in an audiotape aired on the al-Jazeera satellite television network. In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell encouraged "all Sunnis and all Sunni leaders to join in this effort, to say no to terrorism, no to murder and yes to democracy."

But voter registration in Sunni areas has lagged far behind registration in other parts of Iraq, according to Iraq's top election official, Hussain Hindawi. Voters have not been able to register at all in Anbar province, home to the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. Candidates have proved scarce as well: The 41 openings on Anbar's proposed provincial council have drawn only 50 candidates.

In another troubling sign, Western diplomats noted that preliminary indicators of voter participation nationwide are markedly lower than expected, judging by the sluggish early rate at which Iraqis have offered corrections to voter rolls.

Officials blame the problems on poor security and a late start in public information campaigns intended to explain the election to a population ruled by dictatorship for three decades. Leaders of the Iraqi Islamic Party also cited security as a reason for withdrawing the Sunni party's slate of 275 candidates.

"We asked to postpone the election long ago because we believe the security situation in the country is not suitable to hold elections," Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the party, told reporters in Baghdad.

"The Iraqis don't understand the elections yet," he said. "We need enough time, at least six months, to prepare ourselves. . . . The security issue is very complicated."

It doesn't take a rocket science degree to figure out that getting shot at is going to keep the vote total down.

The Retail Result

Retail in Review: More Bah Than Sis-Boom
By TRACIE ROZHON

As customers crammed stores the day after Christmas, waving their gift cards and seeking the latest markdowns, analysts were there, too - watching. They offered their latest judgment of the Christmas shopping season yesterday: good, but not great.

The analysts, however, were talking mainly about the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail companies. Amazon.com said yesterday that it had set a one-day record during the holiday season of 2.8 million orders (although it did not say which day), adding strength to the strategies of many retailers to beef up or start online stores.

Shares of Amazon rose $3.32, or 8.5 percent yesterday, to $42.25, as the online retailer said its two top-selling categories were books (not surprising) and electronics like DVD players and digital cameras (more surprising).

The other big news yesterday was from Wal-Mart Stores, which reaffirmed predictions that its sales would fall in the middle of its revised holiday numbers, that is, 1 percent to 3 percent. Wal-Mart originally predicted a bigger increase, but the $256 billion chain stumbled over the post-Thanksgiving shopping period, and analysts said they were worried. Yesterday, some breathed a sigh of relief.

"For all the hand-wringing over Wal-Mart's soft results, the world's largest retailer may be right on plan after all," Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, retail consultants, wrote in a report. Wal-Mart, Mr. Johnson speculated, "may be shifting strategies - at least for its domestic business, which is approaching saturation - from maximizing sales to maximizing profits."

Shares of Wal-Mart rose 24 cents yesterday, to $52.79. Target, its hottest competitor, gained 81 cents, to $51.31, after forecasting that sales in December may increase as much as 5 percent.

Yet over all, most analysts took a less-than-cheery approach to this holiday season, and some wondered about the future.

Last night, Brian J. Tunick, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Chase, issued a report expressing concern that a handful of retailers - from Chico's to Tiffany to T. J. Maxx - might soon lower their projections for the fourth quarter.

Despite an acceleration in sales last week and the current strength in luxury goods, Merrill Lynch still projected that holiday retail comparisons for stores open more than a year - the yardstick retailers prefer - would increase only 2 percent, down from a 3.3 percent gain in November and December of 2003. Elizabeth O. Pierce, an analyst at Sanders Morris Harris, called her report on holiday shopping, "A Less Than Stellar Finish."

Todd D. Slater, an analyst with Lazard, stuck to his earlier prediction: a 3.2 percent gain this holiday season over last.

Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group, retail consultants, also stuck to his group's prediction of 3.4 percent.

And, the National Retail Federation, whose president called the season "decent" last week, maintained its prediction for 4.5 percent growth.

I was in a mid-low-end retail department store on the morning after. The lines were manageable. The express lines at my local grocery are longer at 6 in the evening. I was able to find everything I was looking for in my size, which means that stocking levels were still decent.

The boutique merchants I talked to had a better than average season, and I'm sure Nordstrom did, too. My own gift shopping was down more than a third from the last year I was able to buy gifts and I doubt that I'm alone, judging from the comments you've left here about your own employment situations.

A 3.2 percent over last year, in aggregate, is barely above the rate of inflation.

Don't go looking for this shopping season to find a "tell" on the economy.

I retain my dour outlook and look forward to correction (and a whole lot more in my pay envelope) when I'm proven wrong.

Science Monday

As I got ready to leave work this evening the AP was reporting that the number of dead in Indonesia alone was over 20,000. The totals we are likely to see in coming days beggar my imagination.

The Pacific Ring already has tsunami warning system which, while not perfect, has saved thousands of lives. Something similar needs to be installed in every major ocean/plate tectonic system. Indonesia's trench situation with regard to plate tectonics was well known.

Tsunamis' Toll Might Have Been Lessened
Experts Cite Lack of Warning System

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A20

The real tragedy, many experts acknowledged yesterday, is that thousands of lives in countries such as Sri Lanka, India and Thailand could have been saved if an early warning system similar to one that exists for the Pacific Ocean had been in place. U.S. officials said that they wanted to warn the countries but that there was no mechanism to do so.

The tsunamis' impact in the hardest-hit countries occurred about two hours after the underwater earthquake: If authorities had had the opportunity to move people even a few hundred yards inland, many people would have been saved, Bernard said.

"The idea is to get yourself high enough or far enough inland that the water is not strong enough to take you back to sea. About waist-deep water is where you lose control," he said.

One reason experts had not pushed hard for a warning system is that the risk along the shores of the Indian Ocean had long been underestimated. Most of the devastating tsunamis in the last century or more have occurred elsewhere.

"We have believed as a community that the Indian Ocean is fairly immune to tsunamis of the kind that took place," said Costas Synolakis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California. "The last tsunami that affected the Indian Ocean was in 1883. . . . The hazard was underestimated by a factor of 10."

Synolakis said he had opened discussions two weeks ago with officials in Hawaii at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center about expanding the warning system to the Indian Ocean.

The geological cause of the earthquake is plain: Indonesia has long been plagued by earthquakes and the volcanoes that usually attend such massive fissures in the earth. Giant plates bearing India and Australia have been moving north for millenniums, colliding with the Eurasian landmass near Indonesia. As a result of the immense pressure that was built up, the southern plate is dug like a bulldozer blade under the northern plate.

"Most of the time, the plates are stuck together and nothing happens," said Lori Dengler, professor of geology at Humboldt State University in California. "But every several hundred years, we have a rupture that causes one side to move."

When that happened about 8 p.m. Eastern time Saturday, pressure that had accumulated for years or decades was released in an instant. As the earth convulsed, the ocean floor probably fell rapidly in some places and rose elsewhere along a fissure hundreds of miles in length, several experts said. Areas that collapsed saw tons of water plunge in, causing what is known as a depression wave. Elsewhere, the ocean floor reared up, causing water to be displaced -- an elevation wave. It is likely that both effects fed the tsunamis, experts said.

"Think of a kid's plastic swimming pool and sliding your hand underneath -- pushing up on the plastic," said John Ebel, a professor of geophysics at Boston College. "It would cause a wave to spread throughout the pool. That's what happens on the ocean floor after an earthquake."

Unlike wind-whipped waves on the ocean, which rarely cause much disturbance below the surface, a tsunami's energy is contained underwater. A ship in the deep ocean is unlikely to be affected by a tsunami.

But the effects become shockingly clear as a tsunami approaches shore and the waves rear up, said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. Depending on where the earthquake occurred, people often encounter the depression and elevation waves in the same sequence in which they were created.

"In many cases, people report the sea withdrew first and then the seafloor was exposed, and then the elevation wave comes in and hits the land," Synolakis said.

The energy released by a tsunami is enormous, and geologists said that measuring instruments would likely continue to pick up signals for about 24 hours all over the world. Although earthquake aftershocks are common, new tsunamis are likely to be much smaller and localized, and might well not be noticed without sensitive measuring instruments.

Even without a sophisticated early warning system, experts said, just knowing about the nature of tsunamis could have saved lives. A rapidly receding shoreline is a warning that the elevation wave is about to strike -- people may have as long as 10 minutes to flee the ocean's edge, Synolakis said. Even fleeing when the sound of the approaching wave can be heard might save lives, Bernard said.

Fishing boats or sailboats in the ocean are likely to find greater safety by heading farther out to sea, Bernard added. A tsunami has less effect in deeper water.

"You can't stop these once they get going," he said. "The only thing that could have been done is evacuate the coastline."

Ten minutes warning would have saved thousands of lives. Just saying the word "thousands" sends a terrible dead weight into my shoulders.

The Best Offense

The Best Defense Is a Good Offense
By ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN

Published: December 27, 2004

War is not about eliminating risks; it is about managing them. America should do everything it can to manage its risks in Iraq, and the military is constantly learning and adapting. So, however, are America's enemies - and they understand they can only win politically, not militarily. This in part explains the attacks earlier this month on Shiites in Karbala and Najaf, which killed 68 Iraqis and wounded about 175. It also helps explains last week's attack in Mosul; the insurgents knew the bombing would receive extensive news coverage in the United States, and they no doubt are aware of the results of recent polls that show rising opposition to the war among Americans. Why not try to divide Americans and Iraqis the way they are trying to divide Sunnis and Shiites?

The brutal reality is that the United States is fighting a "war after the war" that has already killed and wounded far more Americans and Iraqis than the war that drove Saddam Hussein from power. It is an intense war, with some 1,600 to 3,000 incidents and attack attempts a month. Troops are dispersed and sometimes vulnerable. All of this means more attacks are likely before Iraqi elections next month and constant fighting well into 2006. For months and years to come, insurgents and terrorists will continue to try to exploit every fault line in Iraqi society, in American politics, and in regional and international affairs as well.

There is no certainty that the United States will win in Iraq. The war after the war is a far more difficult one than the war against Saddam Hussein. If America overreacts to attacks and lets the enemy drive its agenda, losing the war in Iraq will become not just possible but almost certain.

Here I think Cordesman in simply wrong: insurgencies are classicly defensive wars, and the defense is always a stronger position than the offense, as Von Clausawitz noticed. This is the reason that the history of insurgencies against colonial or imperial invaders in the last 200 years has favored the home team. Cordesman has failed to learn the lessons of history.

Wage Depression

Paycheck has yet to make recovery
Salary increases no longer keeping up with inflation

By Barbara Rose, Tribune staff reporter. Freelance writer Ann Therese Palmer contributed to this story
Published December 26, 2004

More than three years into the economic recovery, U.S. workers' hourly wages continue to decline when adjusted for inflation with little hope of a dramatic turnaround anytime soon.

The long, lean times for salary increases have led some experts to wonder if a fundamental shift is under way even as productivity levels remain high and corporate profits continue to soar.

Beyond the temporary factors contributing to a sluggish recovery from the recession of 2001, some believe that globalization, the movement of jobs offshore and the declining influence of trade unions could be putting pay envelopes on a permanent diet. Some companies have concluded that the past practice of hiking wages faster than inflation is no longer needed to keep employees from leaving. It may never, in fact, be needed again.

Naturally, not many human-resource managers are trumpeting their commitment to holding the line. But in a recent issue of Workforce Management, a leading trade journal for human resources executives, the latest advice is plenty blunt:

"Annual pay increases designed for optimal hiring and retention are no longer needed," the magazine declares. "If your salary increase budget for 2005 is much higher than 3 percent, you're probably overspending," the article advised.

Even though real wages are falling for many workers, consumers continue digging deep into their pockets to keep the economy growing. Consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of all economic activity, has remained relatively high during the recovery while savings levels have declined.

Meanwhile, average growth in wages and salaries fell below 3 percent for the 12 months through September for U.S. sector employees, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pay grew at 2.4 percent--the lowest increase on record, partly because soaring health benefit expenses raised overall compensation costs for employers, some economists say.

Hourly wages for production and service workers--representing four-fifths of the nation's workforce--declined or remained flat year over year, when accounting for inflation, every month since May, according to the bureau's reports.

"Real wages are falling for a lot of workers," said economist Jared Bernstein of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. "It's surprising and disheartening, three years into the recovery with strong productivity growth, we're still looking at declining wages."

Employees like Cheryl Ruthrauff are feeling the pinch.

An administrative assistant who earns in the mid-$50,000 area, the 48-year-old mother of two has put her Lake Bluff townhome on the market and plans to move into an apartment to cut expenses.

Her budget is strained by the cost of putting her youngest daughter through Northern Arizona University on a single parent's salary.

Even without college costs, "it still probably would be tight," she said. "To me, you're not really receiving a raise because of inflation and the higher [health care] insurance."

Her raises at a midsize manufacturing company averaged between 2 and 3 percent in recent years compared with 7 to 8 percent during the 1990s.

"It's a drastic difference," she said. "You just live paycheck to paycheck. There's always something."

Thomas Foss, 51, chief technical officer at Mt. Prospect National Bank, is typical of the highly skilled workers who were forced to take jobs at steep discounts to their previous salaries during the recession to stay employed.

"You take a job for less with the hope that it works out later when you prove yourself in the position and demonstrate your contribution," said the former Lucent project manager. "It's driven by the market. People are doing that readily just to get in."
.....

At the same time, companies are paying more for employee health care, which boosts the costs of total compensation even while salaries lag.

"Compensation has been rising at a pretty rapid clip," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for Waltham, Mass.-based research firm Global Insight Inc. "That's a trade-off a lot of companies have made."

Benefit costs at U.S. employers grew at a brisk 6.8 percent for the 12 months ended in September--the same period when pay grew by 2.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists predict wages will rise when hiring picks up.

Despite the fact that the economy is adding jobs, 1.2 million fewer people are employed than in March 2001, when the recession started. Meanwhile, the number of available workers has increased due to population growth.

That sink of the 1.2 million excess workers is going to make a jobs recovery of any kind a long and painful process. During the period Mar. 2001 to the present, and additional 7 million people have been added to the workforce, many of them underemployed in part-time or temporary positions. This will assure that a downward pressure on wages will continue.

Electoral Legitimacy

Suicide bomber kills 15, wounds dozens in attack on top Iraqi Shiite political leader
posted by: Dan Viens (Web Producer)
Created: 12/27/2004 6:34 AM MST - Updated: 12/27/2004 6:34 AM MST

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide bomber detonated his car Monday at the gate of the home of the leader of Iraq's biggest political party, killing 15 people and injuring dozens, police said. The cleric was unharmed.

In another blow to Washington's plans for the upcoming elections, the largest Sunni Muslim political party that had planned to take part in the Jan. 30 ballot announced Monday it was pulling out of the race because of the rapidly deteriorating security situation and the lack of public awareness about the vote.

raq Rejects U.S. Talk of Adjusting Vote Result
Sun Dec 26, 2004 01:07 PM ET

By Luke Baker

The New York Times said Shi'ite leaders had been approached about the idea. Shi'ites would be reluctant to see the minority shut out of power if that means more violence, like the twin suicide car bombs that rocked their holy cities a week ago.

The chance that this "election" is going to have any legitimacy or significance for the "insurgency" is now down to zero.

Justice and Mercy

Why Some Politicians Need Their Prisons to Stay Full
By BRENT STAPLES

Published: December 27, 2004

Seldom has a public policy done so much damage so quickly. But changes in the draconian sentencing laws have come very slowly. That is partly because the public thinks keeping a large chunk of the population behind bars is responsible for the reduced crime rates of recent years. Studies cast doubt on that theory, since they show drops in crime almost everywhere - even in states that did not embrace mandatory minimum sentences or mass imprisonment. In addition, these damaging policies have done nothing to curb the drug trade.

Changing prison policy, however, is no longer a simple matter. The business of building and running the jailhouse has become a mammoth industry with powerful constituencies that favor the status quo. Prison-based money and political power have distorted the legislative landscape in ways that will be difficult to undo.

These problems are on vivid display in New York, which started mass imprisonment when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller persuaded the Legislature to pass the toughest drug laws in the nation at the start of an ill-starred "war on drugs" 30 years ago. The Rockefeller laws introduced the country to mandatory sentencing policies that barred judges from deciding who goes to jail and for how long. Instead, the laws required lengthy sentences - 15 years to life - for nonviolent, first-time offenders, many of whom would have received brief sentences, drug treatment or community service under previous laws.

Nearly all of the prisoners ended up in upstate New York, where failing farms and hollowed-out cities offered a lot of room for building. Politicians in these sparsely populated districts caught on quickly and began to lobby to have the new prisons located in their communities. As a result, nearly 30 percent of the people who were counted as moving into upstate New York during the 1990's were prison inmates.

The influx of inmates has brought desperately needed jobs to the region and resulted in districts whose economies revolve around prison payrolls and whose politics are dominated by the union that represents corrections officers. The inmates also helped to save political careers in areas where legislative districts were in danger of having to be merged because of shrinking populations. Inmates, as it turned out, were magically transformed into "residents," thanks to a quirk in the census rules that counts them as living at their prisons. Although people sentenced under the drug laws frequently serve long sentences, many prisoners remain behind bars only briefly before returning to homes that are often hundreds of miles away.

Felons are barred from voting in 48 of 50 states - including New York. Yet in New York, as in the rest of the country, disenfranchised prisoners are included in the population counts that become the basis for drawing legislative districts.

An eye-opening analysis by Prison Policy Initiative's Peter Wagner found seven upstate New York Senate districts that meet minimal population requirements only because prison inmates are included in the count. New York is not alone. The group's researchers have found 21 counties nationally where at least 21 percent of the "residents' were inmates.

The New York Republican Party uses its majority in the State Senate to maintain political power through fat years and lean. The Senate Republicans, in turn, rely on their large upstate delegation to keep that majority. Whether those legislators have consciously made the connection or not, it's hard to escape the fact that bulging prisons are good for their districts. The advantages extend beyond jobs and political gerrymandering. By counting unemployed inmates as residents, the prison counties lower their per capita incomes - and increase the portion they get of federal funds for the poor. This results in a transfer of federal cash from places that can't afford to lose it to places that don't deserve it.

Lately, polls have shown growing support for drug law reform. In November, prominent New York Republicans ran into trouble when they faced candidates who made Rockefeller reform an issue. In response, the State Senate endorsed a plan that cut sentences for drug possession crimes, which was the easy part. But it stonewalled on the crucial change, which would have returned to judges the discretion to sentence at least some offenders to drug treatment instead of prison.

While other political forces support the mandatory sentences - most notably the powerful local prosecutors - prison rights advocates have recently begun to argue that prison district politicians are more concerned about keeping the prisons full than about crime. The idea of counting inmates as voters in the counties that imprison them is particularly repulsive given that inmates are nearly always stripped of the right to vote. The practice recalls the early United States under slavery, when slaves were barred from voting but counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.

I might add that treating the prison industry as a for-profit business creates a powerful lobby in favor of the Rockefeller laws. These laws also make a joke of the Judeo-Christian idea that justice and mercy should be tempered together, but that idea was long ago abandoned by the Christian right.

Make 'em Sing

Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A01

The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers.

The plane's owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper. And each one of those directors and officers has a recently issued Social Security number and an address consisting only of a post office box, according to an extensive search of state, federal and commercial records.

Bryan P. Dyess, Steven E. Kent, Timothy R. Sperling and Audrey M. Tailor are names without residential, work, telephone or corporate histories -- just the kind of "sterile identities," said current and former intelligence officials, that the CIA uses to conceal involvement in clandestine operations. In this case, the agency is flying captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and interrogation.

The CIA calls this activity "rendition." Premier Executive's Gulfstream helps make it possible. According to civilian aircraft landing permits, the jet has permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, secret renditions have become a principal weapon in the CIA's arsenal against suspected al Qaeda terrorists, according to congressional testimony by CIA officials. But as the practice has grown, the agency has had significantly more difficulty keeping it secret.

According to airport officials, public documents and hobbyist plane spotters, the Gulfstream V, with tail number N379P, has been used to whisk detainees into or out of Jakarta, Indonesia; Pakistan; Egypt; and Sweden, usually at night, and has landed at well-known U.S. government refueling stops.

As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism of the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their purposes is to transfer captives to countries that use harsh interrogation methods outlawed in the United States. That, he said, is prohibited by the U.N. Convention on Torture.

The CIA has the authority to carry out renditions under a presidential directive dating to the Clinton administration, which the Bush administration has reviewed and renewed. The CIA declined to comment for this article.

"Our policymakers would never confront the issue," said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who has been involved with renditions and supports the practice. "We would say, 'Where do you want us to take these people?' The mind-set of the bureaucracy was, 'Let someone else do the dirty work.' "

The story of the Gulfstream V offers a rare glimpse into the CIA's secret operations, a world that current and former CIA officers said should not have been so easy to document.

Not only have the plane's movements been tracked around the world, but the on-paper officers of Premier Executive Transport Services are also connected to a larger roster of false identities.

Each of the officers of Premier Executive is linked in public records to one of five post office box numbers in Arlington, Oakton, Chevy Chase and the District. A total of 325 names are registered to the five post office boxes.

An extensive database search of a sample of 44 of those names turned up none of the information that usually emerges in such a search: no previous addresses, no past or current telephone numbers, no business or corporate records. In addition, although most names were attached to dates of birth in the 1940s, '50s or '60s, all were given Social Security numbers between 1998 and 2003.

"Extraordinary rendition" is a way to use proxy countries for torture. We've been doing it for decades, in spite of the fact that every intelligence service on earth knows that torture doesn't work. The psy-ops folks have known this since at least WWII. Yet we continue to play at it, as if we have something to learn from the convserso experience of the Spanish Inquisition. Our imaginations haven't progressed much from the 13th Century.

US disclosures signal wider detainee abuse

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | December 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- A trove of government disclosures forced by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has signaled that the abuse of detainees in Iraq and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was much broader than the Bush administration has portrayed it since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public this spring.

A heavily redacted internal e-mail from an FBI agent in June, for example, reported hearing of ''numerous serious physical abuse incidents of Iraqi civilian detainees . . . strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings, and unauthorized interrogations" and refers to ''coverup efforts."

Another FBI agent wrote in an e-mail in August of witnessing an interrogation in Guantanamo:

''The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees," the report said. ''The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

Thousands of pages of documents, including two sets of FBI reports made public in the past week, have been released since October in response to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups.

The documents suggest that severe mistreatment was far more widespread than previously known and that there may have been higher-level authorization by Bush administration officials for a policy of aggressive interrogation tactics. The White House last week again denied that anyone authorized torture and pledged to investigate the new allegations.

Because the e-mails and memos recounting scenes of abuse were written by government officials -- largely FBI agents appalled by interrogation practices they found unprofessional and counterproductive -- the disclosures lend greater credibility to prior claims of abuse by former detainees, according to an advocate for the detainees.

''This is really disturbing and frightening," Khalid al-Odah, father of a Guantanamo detainee, said in a phone interview from Kuwait City. He says his son went to Pakistan to teach the Koran just before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and was later sold into detention under false pretenses by villagers seeking a bounty for Al Qaeda members.

''Before the FBI reports, we did not take these stories from the [human rights] organizations and released detainees as full fact," Odah said. ''We thought maybe there was some exaggerating, or they are not sure about what is happening exactly. Now we don't have any doubt."

The disclosures also fill in details of what occurred at critical moments in the story of how the administration's detention and interrogation policies adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks led to a downward spiral in how detainees were treated.

Faced with a need to gain greater human intelligence about Al Qaeda plans but stymied by provisions in the Geneva Conventions that prohibit coercive interrogations of prisoners of war, the administration announced in February 2002 that the conventions would not cover treatment of Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees captured in Afghanistan.

At Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller established a positive-rewards system for detainees who cooperated. But by fall 2002, questions arose about what pressures could be brought against those who did not. In April 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on techniques including loud music, temperature changes, stress positions, and isolation.

The FBI memos have done two things to broaden public understanding of what occurred at this stage to detainees captured in Afghanistan and held at the naval base. First, they demonstrate that service members also used growling dogs to frighten detainees at Guantanamo, something the military had denied. Second, they have rendered vivid that, in practice, the options amounted to physical and sensory assault.

''These documents that describe particular interrogations witnessed by FBI agents are useful because in the past, when we have talked about 'stress and duress' and hooding or loud music, it's been sterile," said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU staff attorney. ''People don't understand how these things work in practice -- what it means to bombard someone with loud music for a long time."

A vivid FBI e-mail, which recounted the detainee who pulled his hair out, also describes sessions in which detainees were chained in a fetal position with no food or water for 24 hours or more, causing them to urinate and defecate on themselves.

During one prolonged period, the room temperature was set so low that a barefoot detainee shook with cold. Another time the unventilated room was made ''unbearably hot" while ''extremely loud rap music" blasted a detainee for more than a day, the agent said.

Another FBI agent reported in July 2004: ''I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing."

And two FBI reports from Guantanamo also present possible new evidence of higher responsibility for authorizing abuses. A e-mail from last December protests about Defense Department interrogators impersonating FBI officers at Guantanamo.

''If this detainee is . . . released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators," the FBI agent wrote in December 2003.

If you beat them harder, you will get better information. Fsck human rights.

The Prophets

Shopping for War
By BOB HERBERT

Published: December 27, 2004

So, as detailed in an article in The Times on Dec. 19, Mr. Rumsfeld's minions are concocting yet another grandiose and potentially disastrous scheme. Pentagon officials are putting together a plan that would give the military a more prominent role in intelligence gathering operations that traditionally have been handled by the Central Intelligence Agency. They envision the military doing more spying with humans, as opposed, for example, to surveillance with satellites.

Further encroachment by the military into intelligence matters better handled by civilians is bad enough. Now hold your breath. According to the article, "Among the ideas cited by Defense Department officials is the idea of 'fighting for intelligence,' or commencing combat operations chiefly to obtain intelligence."

That is utter madness. The geniuses in Washington have already launched one bogus war, which has cost tens of thousands of lives and provoked levels of suffering that are impossible to quantify. We don't need to be contemplating new forms of warfare waged for the sole purpose of gathering intelligence.

Part of this plan to further aggrandize Mr. Rumsfeld is being drafted under the direction of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a deputy under secretary of defense who has already demonstrated that he should not be allowed anywhere near the most serious matters of national security. General Boykin, who once had the job of directing the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is an evangelical Christian who believes God put President Bush in the White House. He has described the fight against Islamic militants as a struggle against Satan and declared that it can be won only "if we come at them in the name of Jesus."

General Boykin asserted his views in speeches that he delivered in his military uniform at religious functions around the country. In one speech, referring to a Muslim fighter in Somalia, the general said: "Well, you know what I knew - that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

General Boykin was forced to apologize after media accounts led to widespread criticism. But the Bush administration is still holding him tightly in its embrace. How difficult is it to come to the conclusion that this is not a fellow who should be making decisions on matters involving armed conflict with Muslims?

It's also time to rein in Mr. Rumsfeld. As The Times noted in a recent editorial, "The last time Mr. Rumsfeld tried to force himself into the intelligence collection and analysis business, he created a boutique C.I.A. in the bowels of the Pentagon under the command of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy. The office essentially fabricated a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden - a link used to justify the Iraq invasion, and one that Mr. Rumsfeld was not getting from the C.I.A."

As Mr. Rumsfeld sees it, if the professionals won't give you what you want, find someone who will. What the Bush administration wanted from its intelligence sources was a reason to go to war. Mr. Rumsfeld's shop was more than happy to oblige.

The war in Iraq was the result of powerful government figures imposing their dangerous fantasies on the world. The fantasies notably included the weapons of mass destruction, the links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the throngs of Iraqis hurling kisses and garlands at the invading Americans, and the spread of American-style democracy throughout the Middle East. All voices of caution were ignored and the fantasies were allowed to prevail.

The world is not a video game, although it must seem like it at times to the hubristic, hermetically sealed powerbrokers in Washington who manipulate the forces that affect the lives of so many millions of people in every region of the planet. That kind of power calls for humility, not arrogance, and should be wielded wisely, not thoughtlessly and impulsively.

This latest overreach by Mr. Rumsfeld is a sign that the administration, like a hardheaded adolescent, has learned little or nothing from the tragic consequences of its wrongheaded policies. The second term is coming, so buckle up. It promises to be a very dangerous four years.

And, like Boykin, it promises to be four more years of treating our troops like shoot-em-up props in the evangelical video game of war.

8.9

I have nothing to say in the face of this disaster.

May the dead be given safely home..

May my own teers speed thee to thy rest

Mela ke

Babelfish

I can't come up with a favorite present from this holiday season--that wouldn't be fair. But I can tell you which set of operating instructions caused the most hilarity. Background you need to know: I traded in a diet cola habit (a very serious habit) a number of years ago when I learned what Aspartame can do to brain chemistry. I'm an H20 head now, and I particularly love the fizzy variety and go through dozens of ounces of seltzer a day. I got a seltzer bottle (or siphon bottle, for you Brits) as a very welcome gift. The instructions to the thing kept us in stitches for hours yesterday. Yes, I read instructions, particularly when the contents are under pressure (funny, none of my colleagues come with operating instructions....)

For those of you who don't know what a seltzer bottle is or have never seen one: most are made of heavy Czech glass and armored with a steel chain sleave so that the bottle won't explode in shards in case the glass has gotten cracked or nicked before it is put under pressure. It has a cap or head on top with a screw fitting that allows for the bottled water to be infused with CO2 gas, which is what makes seltzer fizzy.

Fill the heavy bottle to the fill mark, chill and you are ready to force the compressed C02 into the water from a small gas cartridge with a screw fitting on the head of the bottle. I quote:

"Gas Admitting

Put a pressure cartidge with carbon dioxide (C02) into the wing nut. C02 cartridge or bodies or their caps are in golden or messing* yellow colour finish. Wrap the bottle in a towel. Screw the wing nut with pressure gas cylinder on the head. The origination of gas admitting into the bottle will be manifested by water bubbling. Having filled the bottle unscrew the wing nut with empty pressure gas cylindaer. Leaking out of rest of gas contents is no failure. Shake the bottle well for 8--12 second to accelerate the saturation of water by gas. Caution! Gas admitting is not allowed with more than one gas cartridge!"

*"messing" is one of the German words for yellow-gold. The original Czech instructions have some German words.

From the Important Notices on the next page:

"...By screwing the gas cylinder on the bottle keep the safe face-distance...When the wing nut tightening is difficult, put the vaseline on the thread....Do not use the bottle after falling downsplitting or cracking more longer...Avoid the sunshine places or other places where the temperature is high...Store things under pressure away from children."

Read this aloud for the full effect. Of course there are some "terms of art" for those of us on both the right and the left in this brief, and all of us got them when we read out the instructions prior to giving due consideration to spritzing the dogs and each other a good Marx Brother's dosing down.

"Leaking out of the rest of the gas contents is no failure..." will be the inside joke in our family for the next year. It is infinitely stretchable.

Later this week, I'll have a reflection for you about living in a family where I'm the family political odd sheep, and what it means to love each other across ideological lines. I learned a lot this weekend and have much to think about. My bro and s-i-l have values and aspirations and yearnings not much different from mine. We often disagree about how to get there, but we rarely argue anymore. We spent the weekend meditating on disagreement and respect. I also have some thoughts about the role of humor in building the liminal moment, the moment when walls come down and the public commons happens. Having silly dogs around helps. I'm thinking we may start Friday Dog Blogging.

This week is going to be another crush at work, but I'm going to try to get back on schedule in the morning: back at the computer between 4-5 AM, 3-4 stories up before I leave for work, another couple at work over lunch, and a reflection or two in the evening. Yes, I have to start that early.

Here is what I'll be following this week: the retail picture of this shopping season, the year ahead in investments, the continuing failure of the neo-cons. A number of my sources will be on holiday hiatus and I'm on some really scary deadlines at work, so I'll have to make do with the best I can do for you. You can contribute, too, I don't have time to move every worthy contibution to the front page, but Bumpers in the know read comments. Post your stories there. If you need some basic work in HTML, the codes you need for posting, and some of you do, go here and read the instructions. Every time you mess up the side bar, I have to fix it, or other people can't read it. This is easy to learn.

Cross posted at The American Street.

Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail

Army Historian Cites Lack of Postwar Plan
Major Calls Effort in Iraq 'Mediocre'

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 25, 2004; Page A01

The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.
....
As a result of the failure to produce a plan, Wilson asserts, the U.S. military lost the dominant position in Iraq in the summer of 2003 and has been scrambling to recover ever since. "In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative . . . gained over an off-balanced enemy," he writes. "The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."

It was only in November 2003, seven months after the fall of Baghdad, that U.S. occupation authorities produced a formal "Phase IV" plan for stability operations, Wilson reports. Phase I covers preparation for combat, followed by initial operations, Phase II, and combat, Phase III. Post-combat operations are called Phase IV.

Many in the Army have blamed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilians for the unexpectedly difficult occupation of Iraq, but Wilson reserves his toughest criticism for Army commanders who, he concludes, failed to grasp the strategic situation in Iraq and so not did not plan properly for victory. He concludes that those who planned the war suffered from "stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt."

Army commanders still misunderstand the strategic problem they face and therefore are still pursuing a flawed approach, writes Wilson, who is scheduled to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point next year. "Plainly stated, the 'western coalition' failed, and continues to fail, to see Operation Iraqi Freedom in its fullness," he asserts.

"Reluctance in even defining the situation . . . is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissidence on part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it," he comments.

Because of this failure, Wilson concludes, the U.S. military remains "perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it."

Overall, he grades the U.S. military performance in Iraq as "mediocre."

Wilson's essay amounts to an indictment of the education and performance of senior U.S. officials involved in the war. "U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly" and tended to think of operations after the invasion "as someone else's mission," he says. In fact, Wilson says, those later operations were critical because they were needed to win the war rather than just decapitate Saddam Hussein's government.

Air Force Capt. Chris Karns, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which as the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East oversaw planning for the war in Iraq, said, "A formal Phase IV plan did exist." He said he could not explain how Wilson came to a different conclusion.

Look, everybody who knew much of anything at all about the planning for this misbegotten operation, from Eric Shinseki on down, knew that there was no Phase IV plan. Hell, I knew it. The State Department had crafted an elaborate one in a working group assembled by Colin Powell and Rumsfeld and the neo-cons ditched it, so convinced that they'd be welcomed by dancing in the streets. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of the wars of colonial invasion of the last 150 years knows that IEDs area lot more common than rose petals. This failure to plan is criminal.

No, I'm not yet home, in fact staying til tomorrow afternoon. Our regular blogging schedule will resume before dinner tomorrow evening, just about the time all of you return from your travels. This story screamed at me from the headlines of the WaPo and I had to say something about it.

Twas the Night Before Christmas

The bro's set-up just isn't conducive to newsblogging, and I need a break from it, anyway.

So let me just wish you all a very Merry Christmas, from my family and the Blondies, to yours. I'll be back with you on more familiar territory sometime tomorrow.

A Little Traveling Music, Maestro

I'm off to run some errands before heading to the train. Posting will be light until late tonight and will remain light until I return home tomorrow night.

Do you have the day off? What are you doing today?

Family Values

Families Pay the Price
By BOB HERBERT

Published: December 24, 2004

Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission.

It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.

Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly 900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.

The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when he grew up. "I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."

Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children. This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the U.S.

We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week.

The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.

Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their families and loved ones.

One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.

I concur with Bob (as I usually do) but let's get over the "strength and will" nonsense of the "Iraqi forces." There are no "Iraqi forces." No matter how desperate their personal situations, few are willing to be seen as collaborators with the occupiers. It's that simple.

No Place Like Home

Invited Home, 900 Evacuees Revisit Falluja
By ERIK ECKHOLM and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: December 24, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 23 - The first displaced residents were briefly allowed back into war-ravaged Falluja on Thursday, even as American marines and warplanes battled insurgents in another corner of the city, leaving three marines dead.

Thursday was the official start of the resettlement of Falluja, the former insurgent stronghold that was conquered block by bloody block last month, leaving a virtual ghost town, with many homes damaged, sewage running in the streets and electrical and water facilities demolished.

But it was a gingerly first step, at best, toward repopulating a city that once held some 250,000 people. About 900 of them, almost all men and all from the single northwestern neighborhood of Andalus, re-entered for a few hours to see the condition of their homes and decide if they want to move their families back, according to marine officers there.

Returning families will face serious privation. With water purifying plants and distribution systems largely destroyed, officials have built 24 temporary water tanks. They will give out water cans; returnees will have to fetch supplies by hand.

Residents will also receive food aid, and kerosene to fuel generators for lighting. Every returning family will be given the equivalent of $100, the interim government has said. Families whose houses were destroyed will receive $10,000 worth of Iraqi currency.

Via Juan Cole, here is what they are returning to:

The returnees were entering an apocalyptic backdrop of flattened city blocks and bullet-scarred homes, where wild dogs and cats have feasted on corpses and the sour smell of the dead filled the streets for weeks.

Funny, that's not a story being told in the US press.

There's no water, sewer or electricity in Fallujah. What are the refugees being returned to?

Tough Talk

Powell Advised Bush to Add Iraq Troops
Secretary Joined Blair And President in Talks

By Thomas E. Ricks and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 24, 2004; Page A01

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair last month that there were too few troops in Iraq, according to people familiar with official records of the meeting.

Powell made his assertion during one in a series of intense discussions on Iraq between Bush and Blair this fall. Those sessions, which have largely been kept secret, indicate that there was a tough debate behind closed doors as the Bush administration reexamined its handling of Iraq in the wake of Bush's reelection victory. Less than three weeks after the White House meeting, the Pentagon announced that it would boost the U.S. military presence in Iraq by 12,000 troops, to 150,000.

The discussions between the two leaders have gone on in recent months in a series of videoconferences that have been considered so sensitive that the transcripts of the meetings are destroyed after other senior officials read them. The disclosure of the sessions indicates that, privately, there has been more concern at the top levels of the Bush administration about the conduct of the U.S. mission there than officials have shown publicly. It also shows Powell taking an unusual role for a secretary of state, advising the president on a military issue.

Powell made his remarks on Nov. 12, just 10 days after the end of a presidential campaign in which Bush's handling of the war in Iraq and his decision to limit troop levels there had been a major issue. Powell announced his intention to resign his post three days later but submitted his letter of resignation on the day of the Blair meeting.

Accounts differ about the details of Powell's remarks. One U.S. official said that Powell flatly stated: "We don't have enough troops. We don't control the terrain."

But a senior State Department official familiar with the exchange said that Powell was less pointed, raising the issue in the context of continuing conversations that focused on the turmoil in the Sunni Triangle, the Iraqi elections scheduled for next month, and the shape and size of the U.S.-led military presence in the country. This official said Powell spoke about the size not only of the U.S. presence but also of the British and Iraqi forces.

"They were talking about the security situation," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing diplomacy. "They asked Powell his opinion."

The secretary of state, who is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded by invoking his background as an infantry officer. He said the key task in warfare is to dominate the ground and control the situation. Overall, Powell concluded, according to this official, the number of troops -- U.S., coalition and Iraqi -- was insufficient to ensure such control.

The conversation, which took place on the fifth day of a major U.S. offensive to retake Fallujah, then turned to the issue of Iraqi security forces and the troubles that have been encountered in developing local forces that have confidence and leadership. "They looked especially at the training and how they could expand the Iraqi forces -- and that the situation would be difficult until they could do that," the State Department official said. "The emphasis was on getting Iraqi forces."

Both officials who discussed the meeting noted that the president a few weeks later decided to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq in an effort to improve security before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for the end of January. It is not clear how much Powell's comments influenced that decision. Nor is it clear whether the boost in troop strength by 12,000 has fully addressed Powell's concerns.

In a White House news conference and in other public appearances that day, top officials gave no hint that they had discussed whether troop levels in Iraq were adequate.

In their public comments on Nov. 12, neither Bush nor Blair alluded to the troop levels in Iraq. At a joint news conference, Bush warned that, as the Iraqi elections draw near, "the desperation of the killers will grow, and the violence could escalate."

Blair said: "We have to complete our mission in Iraq, make sure that Iraq is a stable and democratic country." Most of the news conference focused not on Iraq but on efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The session is also revealing of Powell's peculiar role in the administration, as a longtime Washington insider who has achieved outsider status on the issue of Iraq. His qualms about going to war there have long been known, but his concerns about the conduct of the occupation are only beginning to emerge.

I doubt that the Good Soldier will write about it in his next book.

Another guard unit decries training, equipment

By SCOTT GOLD, Los Angeles Times

HOUSTON -- Members of a second National Guard unit that prepared for duty in Iraq at the Army's Fort Bliss compound have come forward with allegations that they were not adequately trained. The soldiers said in interviews, e-mails and official documents that they were sent to war earlier this year with chronic illness, broken guns and trucks with blown transmissions.

The unit's M-60 machine guns reportedly were in such bad condition when the soldiers deployed in February that one sergeant -- in a section of a post-training summary sent to his commanders that was titled "gun maintenance" -- wrote: "Perhaps we should throw stones?"

The allegations come a month after another National Guard unit alleged that its training at Fort Bliss was so poor that soldiers feared incurring needlessly high casualties when they arrive in Iraq early next year.

Although the military has defended its troop preparedness, the willingness of units to go public with allegations suggests growing concern among National Guard and reserve members.

In the summary document obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the sergeant reported that some soldiers had arrived in Iraq without ever having fired some of the weapons they would use in war. Military commanders at the Fort Bliss complex, which straddles the Texas-New Mexico line, had misread mobilization orders, costing the soldiers a month of training, the sergeant wrote.

"We have been called away from our homes and families for hostile operations. We are owed a chance to be trained properly and given the tools to obtain that objective," the sergeant wrote.

Another 12,000 badly trained troops don't really mean much, except to the people who will be missing them. 150,000 pairs of boots on the ground are what is needed and we don't have them.

Bush/Cheney04: bringing democracy at the end of a gun since 2002.

Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night

An Intelligence Gap Hinders U.S. in Iraq

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 24, 2004; Page A14

While insurgents in Iraq have placed informants inside the Iraqi government, the U.S. and Iraqi militaries, coalition contractors, and international news organizations, the United States is having serious intelligence problems in Iraq, according to sources inside and outside the U.S. government.

The CIA and the U.S. military were slow to start creating intelligence networks in Iraq and have had trouble developing informants because of death threats to Iraqis and their families should they get involved, the sources said.
spacer

"The insurgents have good sources in the Iraqi interim government and sometimes in local U.S. and coalition [military] commands," according to Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a former Pentagon official, who this week published a study titled "Strengthening Iraqi Military and Security Forces."

"As in most insurgencies," writes Cordesman, " 'sympathizers' within the Iraqi government and Iraqi forces, as well as the Iraqis working for the coalition, media and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], often provide excellent human intelligence without violently taking part in the insurgency."

Two recent events illustrate the problem. Last week, U.S. military and Iraqi forces raided the Baghdad offices of Iraqna, a mobile telephone service company, and seized the computers of two Egyptian security managers suspected of aiding the insurgents. On Wednesday, the Pentagon disclosed that the blast that killed 22 people at a U.S. military base outside Mosul on Tuesday was most likely set off by an insurgent who had penetrated the base.

In preparing his study, Cordesman, who specializes in the Middle East, visited Iraq and the Persian Gulf area repeatedly in the past two years and talked to U.S. intelligence experts, military officers and embassy officials, some in the past two weeks.

He and others note that the situation in Iraq is similar to what occurred almost 40 years ago in Vietnam, in that, as Cordesman puts it, local residents "are often pushed into providing data [to insurgents] because of family ties, a fear of being on the losing side, direct and indirect threats, etc." As in Vietnam, he says, there is in Iraq "the sense that as various insurgent factions organize, they steadily improve their intelligence and penetration of [coalition] organizations."

The same pressures hamper the U.S. effort to gain intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said to reporters on Wednesday: "The enemy's got a brain. . . . As things happen on the ground, they see what we do to respond to it. They then change their tactics. And intimidation is the kind of thing that can prevent people from providing intelligence" to coalition forces.

This is precisely where Rummy is falling down on the job. The "enemy" has a brain and isn't the "ignorant mud people" that his War Department thinks it is fighting. Oh, and by the way, most people hate being occupied. Being bombed into democracy is rarely a useful tactic.

The motives of the "insurgents" are varied. Fourth Generation Warfare isn't won at the end of a gun, it's a political struggle and RummyBush don't have the first clue about how to finish what they started.

Uh-huh

America, the Indifferent

In fact, the amount involved is a pittance within the federal budget when compared with our $412 billion deficit, which has been fueled by war and tax cuts. The administration can conjure up $87 billion for the fighting in Iraq, but can it really not come up with more than $15.6 billion - our overall spending on development assistance in 2002 - to help stop an 8-year-old AIDS orphan in Cameroon from drinking sewer water or to buy a mosquito net for an infant in Sierra Leone?

There is a very real belief abroad that the United States, which gave 2 percent of its national income to rebuild Europe after World War II, now engages with the rest of the world only when it perceives that its own immediate interests are at stake. If that is unfair, it's certainly true that American attention is mainly drawn to international hot spots. After the Sept. 11 bombings, Washington ratcheted up aid to Pakistan to help fight the war on terror. Just last week, it began talks aimed at contributing more aid to the Palestinians to encourage them to stop launching suicide bombers at Israel.

Here's a novel idea: how about giving aid before the explosion, not just after?

At the Monterey summit meeting on poverty in 2002, President Bush announced the Millennium Challenge Account, which was supposed to increase the United States' assistance to poor countries that are committed to policies promoting development. Mr. Bush said his government would donate $1.7 billion the first year, $3.3 billion the second and $5 billion the third. That $5 billion amount would have been just 0.04 percent of America's national income, but the administration still failed to match its promise with action.

Back in Washington and away from the spotlight of the summit meeting, the administration didn't even ask Congress for the full $1.7 billion the first year; it asked for $1.3 billion, which Congress cut to $1 billion. The next year, the administration asked for $2.5 billion and got $1.5 billion.

Worst of all, the account has yet to disperse a single dollar, while every year in Africa, one in 16 pregnant women still die in childbirth, 2.2 million die of AIDS, and 2 million children die from malaria.

Jeffrey Sachs, the economist appointed by Kofi Annan to direct the Millennium Project, puts the gap between what America is capable of doing and what it actually does into stark relief.

The government spends $450 billion annually on the military, and $15 billion on development help for poor countries, a 30-to-1 ratio that, as Mr. Sachs puts it, shows how the nation has become "all war and no peace in our foreign policy." Next month, he will present his report on how America and the world can actually cut global poverty in half by 2015. He says that if the Millennium Project has any chance of success, America must lead the donors.

Washington has to step up to the plate soon. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it is nowhere even near the table now, and the world knows it.

As my Black friends say, Uhh-huh.

Waxing Elephants

The American Street founder, Kevin Hayden, is waxing lyrical these days. I missed this post when it was first put up, but caught a reminder earlier today. I will have a submission or two to this poetry contest. Kev tells me that the prizes are:

First prize will be a Jesus General Republican Jesus mug and either a book
or CD.

Third prize will be lesser memorabilia from Jenny.

Kev, it's not "bric-a-brac," it's swag. Being a poet who gets published in the "little" journals and usually getting copies in return, this is a step up for me. Here are the submission instructions.

There are entries on the comments thread to that post and some of them are quite creative, the competition will be significant. You have until 12/30. Those of you who can whip out a haiku on a whim will have a leg up. Or you can email Kevin. All the dope is on the link.

Cat-Mas

Our friend RevKenn sent this by email for the Christmas Catlovers of this site:

What's Your Cat Doing for Christmas?

It was a good day.

Smiles being in somewhat short supply in the news these days, I'll pass along the ones I find.

Shedyule

We've a half day at the office today and I'm taking off at noon to trek to Union Station to make sure I've got a ticket for tomorrow and to do some Chistmas shopping, so light posting until I get everything off to FedEx this afternoon.

In all of your shopping this holiday season, which ever it is that you celebrate, has there been a gift that you felt particularly good about giving, one that was uniquely appropriate for the recipient? Have you gotten one like that?

Tony's Turnaround

Blair's peace talks take back seat

PM tones down efforts after warning not to interfere by US and Israelis shun plan

FRASER NELSON AND BEN LYNFIELD
IN JERUSALEM

TONY Blair was yesterday forced to tone down his plans for an international Middle East peace summit in London, after Israel and the United States warned him not to "interfere".

The Prime Minister yesterday declared that a "meeting" - rather than a conference - will be held in London which would be restricted to helping the new Palestinian government, due to be elected next month.

But Israeli officials have said they will not take part, and privately made clear Mr Blair had invited himself to Jerusalem. They earlier suggested the talks might be motivated by the coming UK general election.

Ending his whistle-stop tour of the Middle East, Mr Blair visited both Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister and Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian leader expected to succeed the late Yasser Arafat.

For weeks, UK officials have been trying to raise support for a peace conference in London aimed at kick-starting the stalled "road map" to peace agreed in the run-up to the Iraq war last year.

The event, expected to take place weeks before a UK general election on 5 May, has been agreed by Russia, Canada, South Africa, Egypt, Norway, Jordan and Tunisia. But, crucially, Israel has refused to participate.

Standing next to Mr Sharon, Mr Blair stressed he had no intention of suggesting that the first phase of the road map - where Palestinians renounce terrorism - should be skipped. This is what Israelis suspect.

Instead, Mr Blair said, his conference would ensure "there are plans and proposals in place to allow the Palestinian side to become a real partner for peace with Israel".

Mr Sharon, in turn, said a London conference would be "important" but said there is little point in talks while suicide bombs continue. "As long as terror exists it is very hard to expect there to be any change," he said.

Poor Tony, having to take a slap in the puss from Arik. I'm beginning to think the guy enjoys being belittled by moral midgets.

We Win

Kiss, kiss, hug, hug, Michael.

Michael Kinsley:
Let's Face It, Blogs Are Better
# Better than I thought, and maybe even better than what I do for a living.

If you're going to peddle opinions for a living, self-assurance is essential. If you don't have it, you need to bluff. People don't want to read a lot of "Oh dear, this is so terribly complicated, I just can't make up my poor little mind…. " Many's the pundit who has retired on full disability after developing a tragic tendency to see both sides of the issue.

Rarely, though, does mathematical certainty inflate even the most self-assured commentator on public affairs (i.e. George Will). It's happened to me only once, on the subject (unfortunately) of Social Security privatization. Not, perhaps, the most glamorous topic on which to waste the gift of certitude. But, to borrow philosophically from our Defense secretary, you make do with the epiphany you have, not with the epiphany you might wish or want to have.
....
Nor does it help when the president himself passes up every opportunity to accept your airtight logic, as George W. Bush did in pushing partial privatization yet again at his White House economic conference last week. The gentle explanation that the president may be unfamiliar with you and your logic is oddly uncomforting.

That conference was the last straw. To vent my frustration, I sent an e-mail to some economists and privatizing buffs saying, look, either show me my mistake or drop this issue. Refute me or salute me. Disprove it or move it. Or words to that effect. As an afterthought, I sent copies to a couple of blogs (kaus files.com and Andrew Sullivan.com). What happened next was unnerving.

A few days later, most of the big shots haven't replied. But overnight, I had dozens of responses from the blogosphere. They're still pouring in. And that's just direct e-mail to me. Within hours, there were discussions going on in a dozen blogs, all hyperlinking to one another like rabbits.

Just so I don't sound too naive: I am familiar with the blog phenomenon, and I worked at a website for eight years. Some of my best friends are bloggers. Still, it's different when you purposely drop an idea into this bubbling caldron and watch the reaction. What floored me was not just the volume and speed of the feedback, but its seriousness and sophistication. Sure, there were some simpletons and some name-calling nasties echoing rote-learned propaganda. But we get those in letters to The Times editorial page. What we don't get, nearly as much, is smart and sincere intellectual engagement — mostly from people who are not intellectuals by profession — with obscure and tedious, but important, issues.

Why the difference? Lots of space, for one. I'll be hard-put, next week, even to summarize my own argument, let alone discuss those of others, in the space available to a columnist. Letters get even less space, if they are published at all. Certainty that what you write will get posted is surely another factor. It's nice to know you're not wasting your time. Ease is important, too. You can send your views electronically to a blog in less time than it takes to find a stamp, let alone type a letter.

Most interesting, though, is how the Web enables people scattered around the globe, who share an interest in a topic as naturally uninteresting as the economic theory behind Social Security privatization, to find one another and enjoy a gabfest. Webheads like to call this phenomenon "community." I used to think that was a little grand and a little misleading. Populist electronic conversation mechanisms like blogs and Web bulletin boards are more about the opportunity to talk than about the opportunity to listen. But that may be true of physical communities as well.

At least we're talking past each other in a glamorous new medium.

Um, Michael? It's not even a "conversation" if no one is listening, so maybe it is a "community" when a whole bunch of someones are not just listening but thinking and offering thoughtful responses and being held accountable by the rest of those listening and thinking. Hmmm?

Cut and Run

I don't know anything about Martin Sieff and anything that comes out of the Moonie-owned UPI is always going to be hedged with questionmarks.

NPD cases like Bush frequently dig in their heels long past the point of good sense and then abruptly abandon the position for which they fought so hard. We'll see. And with Wolfowitz in the wings to replace Rummy, I don't know that we'd get much in the way of improvement.

Commentary: Rummy on the skids

By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst

The unease over Rumsfeld among the GOP majority in Congress is now palpable and it is already the No. 1 subject of discussion on Capitol Hill. Tellingly, even Republican congressmen and their staffers draw repeated parallels with McNamara during the Vietnam War almost 40 years ago.

In addition, Rummy's most worshipful supporters have abandoned him. Last week, Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute released a critique of Rumsfeld that read as if it has been penned by Noam Chomsky or Pat Buchanan. Other neo-conservatives are energetically circulating "Rummy must go" articles on their e-mail lists as fast as they can hit the "send" button.

Some neo-cons like Richard Perle, the godfather of the movement, still defend Rumsfeld publicly. But many others criticize the secretary of defense for not standing blindly behind their hero, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi who has made a comeback in Iraqi politics by winning a place among the top 10 on the united Shiite list for next month's Iraqi elections.

The ultimate reason why Rumsfeld is going to go, however, is not his falling poll numbers or the disenchantment on the part of his neo-con cheerleaders. It is because Rumsfeld, like McNamara, not only pulled the United States and the American army headlong into an unnecessary and avoidable morass, but he has given no indication that he has any clue how to either win the war or get out of it.

All he has been able to offer is more of the same. Pentagon planning anticipates the necessity of maintaining the current U.S. troop levels in Iraq -- at the very least -- until the end of 2006 and probably well beyond that.

The comparison with McNamara is a remarkably apt one. Rumsfeld like McNamara was arrogant and sure of his brilliance and intellectual superiority over everyone else in the Pentagon. Like McNamara he enjoyed the worshipful, even adulatory support of a Texas president who was a wizard at domestic politics but was woefully ignorant of land war and international affairs when he entered office.

Like McNamara, Rumsfeld loved high-tech gadgetry and flashy, Special Forces officers but regarded meat-and-potato units like the infantry, heavy armor and artillery with contempt. And like McNamara he reveled in treating veteran senior Army officers contemptuously.

Rumsfeld is no longer seen as the heroic, decisive, charismatic leader that Congress and public alike took him at his own estimation to be for so long. Instead, he is showing his own thin skin by his retreat from any public forum where he might have to field awkward questions. It may be a tactically prudent move, but it blows another huge hole in his macho, he-man image.

The president will never fire his "Rummy." But some outcomes can only be delayed, not averted. Count on a thoughtful, dignified letter of resignation explaining the secretary's crying need to spend more quality time with his grandchildren to be delivered to Crawford, Texas, in a month or two. It has become only a matter of time.

Note that the entire article is based in the speculation of the writer: there is not even one anonymous source. Take it for what it is worth: interesting, and noted.

Angels We Have Heard On High

Elaborate Shows of Faith
Area's Big Churches Make a Production of Christmas

By Caryle Murphy and Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A01

Joan Parks has fond childhood memories of being in the annual Christmas play at her Methodist church in College Park. A few children in towels and bathrobes re-created the Nativity scene. The choir sang carols. And aluminum foil served as the stuff of angel wings.

But church-sponsored Christmas shows have come a long way, as Parks well knows. This year, the Upper Marlboro resident helped direct "The Living Christmas Tree," a Broadway-style production at Riverdale Baptist Church that featured a 70-member choir standing in the shape of a two-story Christmas tree, a flying angel, a 46-piece orchestra and a 12-scene dramatic presentation. The actors had rehearsed for months.

"It is awesome to see the extent that the churches are going to now to bring the Christmas story to the community," said Parks, 53, who works for a fundraising company. Through such programs, she added, "we can show people the real meaning of Christmas."

Though Christians may differ on how best to convey the holiday's real meaning, large churches across the Washington area are staging ever more imaginative and elaborate Christmas productions. Sometimes competing to put on the most ambitious show, they use impressive sound, light and video equipment, creative costumes, large choirs and even live animals on stage to set their programs apart.

Propelling these productions is a desire among large, mostly evangelical churches to spread the religious message of Christmas as widely as possible through an appealing entertainment experience at a time when people are primed to hear that message.

Anyone want to take a shot at what makes me nuts about stories like this? Get out your copy of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy or C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and let's discuss how reducing faith to "a show" is an insult to both faith and entertainment.

Live Again

It's taken a while to banish the gremlins, but it is done.

I must say that Bump looks pretty spiffy on 15" of LCD screen, sort of like reading a glossy magazine.

My house is awash with cable and cords and whatnots in search of working power outlets, there were multiple failures with this one. Things are a little bit jury rigged, I need to make a date with the electrician, but this all seems to be working now.

It's good to see you.

I figured this last 24 hours out on my own and, yes, I ventured into the box with a screwdriver. If I can do it, you can do it, too. I've lost my "fear of the box."

I had lots of help to get to this point: thanks go to the bro, who fielded panicky phone calls during the busiest part of his year to calm me down to do some methodical checking by elimination, and to pogge the unflappable. This is a community of teaching and learning.

Melanie's not-so-excellent adventure continues

Dear Bumpers:

Guess who?

Melanie's modem installation went well. It just doesn't work. With the phone line plugged into the modem, not only does the little sucker not find a dial tone but all the other phones in the house go dead. Even when the computer's powered down. I believe this is the same way the old modem was behaving.

I'm no expert in telephony but I'm kinda thinkin' this problem is outside the box and Melanie may be listing another visit from Verizon on her dance card. Does anyone out there have any idea what might be going on?

Meanwhile we'd like to have a few words with Susie Madrak who told us just a few days ago that Mercury had gone direct again and all these problems would end. Hey, we have to find someone to blame.

It's difficult to predict what the posting schedule will be in the short term. The situation at the office is hard to read. If I hear anything I'll let you know but hopefully you'll hear from Melanie directly before you hear from me again.

And if this is the last time I speak to you before the end of the week, all the best to everyone during the holiday season. Be good to each other. Be good to yourselves, too.

Love,
pogge, who's only pretending that this was...

And here's another present under the tree!

What an incredible Christmas season this is turning into! It now appears, thanks to the Washington State Supreme Court, that Democrat Christine Gregoire is our new Governor. By an 8 vote margin!!

Supreme Court overturns lower court

Ruling a huge victory for voters, Democrats

The state Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling overturning the lower Pierce County Superior Court and holding that King County may count all of the 573 previously disputed ballots. The ruling is a huge victory for voters and Democrats.

An excerpt from the ruling:

"It thus follows that the superior court erred in granting a temporary restraining order, and that the King County Canvassing Board properly concluded that it had authority to recanvass the subject ballots pursuant to RCW 29A.60.210. Based on the law as declared in this opinion, respondents are not entitled to injunctive relief. Therefore, the superior court’s “Temporary Restraining Order and Order to Show Cause” is reversed and vacated, and the cause is remanded to the superior court for entry of an order of dismissal forthwith."

You can read the ruling here. The AP is also on the wire with the news. (Seattle P-I)

Clearly, the Court made a just decision. It was apparent that this error was a human mistake made by elections officials which could have been expected under such circumstances; after all, this is the closest statewide election in Washington's history, and humans are not perfect. It is unreasonable to strip away voters' rights when they did everything as they were supposed to because the county made an error.

Other counties have interpreted RCW the same way King County was going to, before the GOP obtained a temporary restraining order. Upholding the lower court's decision would have been a dramatic reversal of the earlier Supreme Court decision (which went against the Democrats) and a narrow interpretation of RCW that would have created a nightmare for the Supreme Court, with counties trying to clarify a new interpretation of the law.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court reversed the Pierce County court's decision, and the voters who were stripped of their rights will get their votes counted.

Being, in some ways, as parochial about Washington State as Steve G. is about New York City, I would also like to introduce you folks to the Permanent Defense website, dedicated to fighting against Tim Eyman. I have never managed to figure out why the local papers refer to him as an "anti-tax crusader", instead of an "embezzling scumbag who swiped 500 K$ from his own organization". Not to mention pushing the dumbest "anti-tax" measures in the history of mankind.

You do know that we have no state income tax here in Washington. The locals seem to believe that angels will swoop down from heaven and miracle them new infrastructure. You will be confronted with the consequences of this in the starkest and most unmistakable terms if you are condemned to the endless crawling Purgatory that is a southbound homeward commute on I-405 or a northbound one on I-5. No, Melanie, you don't have to die to go there. All you have to do is live in Metro Seattle.

Bye Bye, Bernie!

Something like this won't have to happen too many more times before I decide there really is a God, and I'd better start attending services.

I wonder when the Bolt From The Blue is going to zap the creature presently infesting the White House.

The incredible story ran in the New York Daily News.

Job insecurity: Kerik quits Giuliani consulting firm

By SAM DOLNICK
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former police commissioner Bernard Kerik resigned Wednesday from Rudolph Giuliani’s consulting firm, less than two weeks after his nomination as U.S. homeland security chief collapsed amid a rash of allegations of personal and professional improprieties.

At a news conference in Manhattan, Kerik said he had apologized to the former New York mayor for being a distraction because of his messy withdrawal as a Bush Cabinet candidate.

“After careful consideration, I have decided that it is in the best interests of my family, my colleagues and our clients that I resign my position with Giuliani Partners and (affiliate company) Giuliani-Kerik,” Kerik said.

Giuliani said he had not asked for Kerik’s resignation.

“He made the decision,” the former mayor said at a later news conference. “The impetus came from Bernie. I think he made the right decision for himself and his family. No one or anyone can take away from him the incredible bravery.”

Kerik, a former New York corrections commissioner, said he told Giuliani his resignation would be effective immediately. He said he would seek other unspecified business opportunities, write a book and spend time with his family.

“The events surrounding my withdrawal have become an unfair and unnecessary distraction to the firm and the important work being done there,” he said. “I am confident that I will be vindicated from any allegation of wrongdoing.”

Kerik’s scandal-tarred nomination had become a political embarrassment for Giuliani, a rising star in the GOP who had recommended his friend and business partner to President Bush. At a White House Christmas dinner with Bush nearly two weeks ago, Giuliani apologized to the president for the problems with the Kerik nomination, although he did not meet with Bush for the express purpose of apologizing, his spokeswoman said.

Kerik, 49, was tapped by Bush earlier this month to head the Department of Homeland Security. He abruptly withdrew his name Dec. 10 after revealing that he had not paid all required taxes for a family nanny-housekeeper and that the woman may have been in the country illegally.

A rash of other scandals soon followed, including allegations that he had connections with people suspected of doing business with the mob and accusations that he had simultaneous extramarital affairs with two women.

Recently, the city Department of Investigation said it had been reviewing Kerik’s tenure as police commissioner. According to DOI findings, Kerik submitted a background form when he became commissioner of the Department of Correction in 1998 but did not fill one out when he was appointed police commissioner two years later.

After leaving the police department in 2002, Kerik joined Giuliani Partners, becoming a security consultant and then signing on to help launch the Iraqi police force.

When Kerik left for Baghdad last May on a $140,000-a-year contract for the Department of Defense, he told reporters he expected to be there for six months. He departed after four.

“Everything that had to be done that I could possibly do, it was done,” he said when he returned.

Giuliani Partners LLC has advised business and government agencies on security, leadership and other issues. The consulting firm advised Trinidad in its battle against a rise in kidnappings and murders and was paid $4.3 million by Mexico City officials for advice on reducing crime there.

In a statement Wednesday, Giuliani said Giuliani-Kerik LLC, an affiliate of Giuliani Partners, would be renamed Giuliani Security & Safety. Kerik had been CEO of Giuliani-Kerik.

The managing director of Giuliani Partners, Daniel Connolly, a former special counsel to the city’s law department, will replace Kerik.

I love it. Bernie even used the utterly classic stock phrase. "He said he would seek other unspecified business opportunities, write a book and spend time with his family."

I only have one question. Did he fall or was he pushed?

Somewhere, Steve Gilliard is singing.

Obscured by War

Bush's New Problem: Iraq Could Eclipse Big Domestic Agenda
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: December 22, 2004

or a year, the administration has suggested that Iraq would move closer to stability as it reached one milestone after another: the capture of Saddam Hussein; the handover of sovereignty and the appointment of an interim government; the deployment of Iraqi security forces; the military campaign to expel the insurgents from strongholds like Falluja; and the first round of elections next month.

Yet most of those milestones have passed with little discernible improvement in the security situation. Now some analysts are concerned that the elections could make the political situation in Iraq even more unstable by producing an outcome in which the Sunni minority feels so marginalized by the Shiite majority that it fuels not just further violence against Americans and Iraqis working with them but also more intense sectarian strife or even civil war.

The elections on Jan. 30 will be sandwiched between two critically important moments for Mr. Bush: his second inaugural on Jan. 20 and the first State of the Union address of his second term, probably in the first week of February.

As a result, the degree to which the elections come off smoothly or not, and whether they move Iraq toward stability or even greater chaos, could well put an early stamp on Mr. Bush's new term. And the elections and whatever violence surrounds them could compete with or overshadow his calls for action on changing Social Security, rewriting the tax code, revising the immigration laws and stiffening educational standards, among other domestic plans the White House intends to begin rolling out in January.

Supporters of Mr. Bush dismissed the idea that his Iraq policy was proving wrongheaded or that the difficulties in Iraq would torpedo the rest of the president's agenda by sapping his political support.

"On Iraq, what we've learned is that Americans are capable of worrying about something and simultaneously supporting it," said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Frum said, Mr. Bush understands the importance of leveling with the American people about the situation and making clear why it is important to see the job through.

But polls have shown for months that majorities or near-majorities of Americans think that invading Iraq was a mistake or not worth the cost in lives, money and prestige abroad.

"The big risk for the president is that if this continues to escalate, it could overtake much of what he wants to do," said Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire, referring to the insurgency. "If this is in some way a precursor of an escalation into a more sophisticated attack by the guerilla insurgents, it would make members of Congress very uneasy and the American people very uneasy."

You break it, you own it, and with the detainee torture scandal finally breaking through the media white noise, I don't expect Bush to be able to rally much support for his hideous domestic agenda, the only silver lining in the clouds ahead.

Miserable Failure

U.S. Contractor Pulls Out of Reconstruction Effort in Iraq

By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — For the first time, a major U.S. contractor has dropped out of the multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild Iraq, raising new worries about the country's growing violence and its effect on reconstruction.

Contrack International Inc., the leader of a partnership that won one of 12 major reconstruction contracts awarded this year, cited skyrocketing security costs in reaching a decision with the U.S. government last month to terminate work in Iraq.

"We reached a point where our costs were getting to be prohibitive," said Karim Camel-Toueg, president of Arlington, Va.-based Contrack, which had won a $325-million award to rebuild Iraq's shattered transportation system. "We felt we were not serving the government, and that the dollars were not being spent smartly."

Although a few companies and nonprofit groups have pulled out of contracts in Iraq because of security concerns, Contrack's is the largest to be canceled to date, U.S. officials said. The move has led to fears that Iraq's mounting violence could prompt other firms to consider pulling out, or discourage them from seeking work in Iraq, further crippling reconstruction.
....
But reconstruction experts say Contrack's withdrawal might foretell trouble with other contractors.

""It's a very bad sign," said Michael O'Hanlon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington who has closely followed the reconstruction process. "If this is how other private companies are thinking, it's a very bad potential warning."

Coming as U.S. reconstruction officials have been touting signs of progress, Contrack's withdrawal underscores the challenges in the $18.4-billion effort to rebuild Iraq.

The effort to revamp the country is considered vital to providing Iraqis with jobs and services and to weakening the insurgency. So far, however, it has been beset with delays, violence, allegations of graft and waste, and frustration among ordinary Iraqis and top U.S. military commanders at the lack of progress.

Brookings' O'Hanlon has an article in the forthcoming Policy Review:

The post-invasion phase of the Iraq mission has been the least well-planned American military mission since Somalia in 1993, if not Lebanon in 1983, and its consequences for the nation have been far worse than any set of military mistakes since Vietnam. The U.S. armed forces simply were not prepared for the core task that the United States needed to perform when it destroyed Iraq's existing government—to provide security, always the first responsibility of any sovereign government or occupier.

The standard explanation for this lack of preparedness among most defense and foreign policy specialists, and the U.S. military as well, is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the rest of the Bush administration insisted on fighting the war with too few troops and too Polyannaish a view of what would happen inside Iraq once Saddam was overthrown. This explanation is largely right. Taken to an extreme, however, it is dangerously wrong. It blames the mistakes of one civilian leader of the Department of Defense, and one particular administration, for a debacle that was foreseeable and indeed foreseen by most experts in the field. Under these circumstances, planners and high-ranking officers of the U.S. armed forces were not fulfilling their responsibilities to the Constitution or their own brave fighting men and women by quietly and subserviently deferring to the civilian leadership. Congress might have been expected to do more as well, but in fact it did a considerable amount of work to highlight the issue of post-invasion planning—and in any case, it was not well positioned to critique or improve or even know the intricacies of war plans. On this issue, the country's primary hope for an effective system of checks and balances on the mistakes of executive branch officials was the U.S. armed forces.

The broad argument of this essay is that the tragedy of Iraq—that one of the most brilliant invasion successes in modern military history was followed almost immediately by one of the most incompetently planned occupations—holds a critical lesson for civil-military relations in the United States. The country's Constitution makes the president commander in chief and requires military leaders to follow his orders. It does not, however, require them to remain mute when poor plans are being prepared. Nor does it require them to remain in uniform when they are asked to undertake actions they know to be unwise or ill-planned.

This argument is not intended to suggest that military leaders are always right on matters of war simply because they are professionals in that arena. Often they are wrong. Eliot Cohen's book Supreme Command (Free Press, 2002), dramatizing several periods in history in which civilian leaders have usefully challenged their military establishments not just on military strategy but on operations and tactics, was convincing in its main thesis. Reportedly the book was read before the Iraq war by President Bush and received a good hearing elsewhere in the administration as well.

But if military affairs are too important to be left to the generals, they are also too important for key decisions to be left just to the civilians. In the ongoing debate over the proper roles of uniformed personnel and their constitutionally superior civilian bosses in American national security decisionmaking, it is probably now time for a correction in favor of an enhanced role for the military voice.

Policy Review is the journal of the Hoover Institution, hardly a lefty outfit. O'Hanlon, and Brookings, are centrist.

Nativity Scene

via Philocrites:

The politics of the Christmas story

By James Carroll | December 21, 2004

THE SINGLE most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome's day is over.

The Gospel of Matthew builds its nativity narrative around Herod's determination to kill the baby, whom he recognizes as a threat to his own political sway. The Romans were an occupation force in Palestine, and Herod was their puppet-king. To the people of Israel, the Roman occupation, which preceded the birth of Jesus by at least 50 years, was a defilement, and Jewish resistance was steady. (The historian Josephus says that after an uprising in Jerusalem around the time of the birth of Jesus, the Romans crucified 2,000 Jewish rebels.)

Herod was right to feel insecure on his throne. In order to preempt any challenge from the rumored newborn "king of the Jews," Herod murdered "all the male children who were 2 years old or younger." Joseph, warned in a dream, slipped out of Herod's reach with Mary and Jesus. Thus, right from his birth, the child was marked as a political fugitive.

The Gospel of Luke puts an even more political cast on the story. The narrative begins with the decree of Caesar Augustus calling for a world census -- a creation of tax rolls that will tighten the empire's grip on its subject peoples. It was Caesar Augustus who turned the Roman republic into a dictatorship, a power-grab he reinforced by proclaiming himself divine.

His census decree is what requires the journey of Joseph and the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem, but it also defines the context of their child's nativity as one of political resistance. When the angel announces to shepherds that a "savior has been born," as scholars like Richard Horsley point out, those hearing the story would immediately understand that the blasphemous claim by Caesar Augustus to be "savior of the world" was being repudiated.

When Jesus was murdered by Rome as a political criminal -- crucifixion was the way such rebels were executed -- the story's beginning was fulfilled in its end. But for contingent historical reasons (the savage Roman war against the Jews in the late first century, the gradual domination of the Jesus movement by Gentiles, the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century) the Christian memory deemphasized the anti-Roman character of the Jesus story. Eventually, Roman imperialism would be sanctified by the church, with Jews replacing Romans as the main antagonists of Jesus, as if he were not Jewish himself. (Thus, Herod is remembered more for being part-Jewish than for being a Roman puppet.)

In modern times, religion and politics began to be understood as occupying separate spheres, and the nativity story became spiritualized and sentimentalized, losing its political edge altogether. "Peace" replaced resistance as the main motif. The baby Jesus was universalized, removed from his decidedly Jewish context, and the narrative's explicit critiques of imperial dominance and of wealth were blunted.
This is how it came to be that Christmas in America has turned the nativity of Jesus on its head. No surprise there, for if the story were told today with Roman imperialism at its center, questions might arise about America's new self-understanding as an imperial power. A story of Jesus born into a land oppressed by a hated military occupation might prompt an examination of the American occupation of Iraq. A story of Jesus come decidedly to the poor might cast a pall over the festival of consumption. A story of the Jewishness of Jesus might undercut the Christian theology of replacement.

Christianity, and the Christian story, has always seesawed between radical reaction against the popular culture and complete capitulation to it. The different parts of it are always in different parts of this continuum. My Catholicism belongs to the Cistercian radical break from the culture, comfortable with the Dorothy Day/Peter Maurin wing of the faith, a deep dissent from the materialism, individualism and narcissism of the culture. The megachurches preaching the Gospel of Wealth are dramatically on the other side.

I have to make a point of paying attention to James Carroll in the BoGlo more consistently. Even when he is on the "wrong side" of an issue, he's a thoughtful, thought-provoking writer.

Torture from the Top

Torture reconsidered: Shock, awe and the human body
William Pfaff International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, December 22, 2004

PARIS A historian in the future, or a moralist, is likely to deem the Bush administration's enthusiasm for torture the most striking aspect of its war against terrorism.

This started early. Proposals to authorize torture were circulating even before there was anyone to torture. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration made it known that the United States was no longer bound by international treaties, or by American law and established U.S. military standards, concerning torture and the treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2001, the Justice Department had drafted memos on how to protect military and intelligence officers from eventual prosecution under existing U.S. law for their treatment of Afghan and other prisoners.

In January 2002, the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales (who is soon to become attorney general), advised George W. Bush that it could be done by fiat. If the president simply declared "detainees" in Afghanistan outside the protection of the Geneva conventions, the 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act - which carries a possible death penalty for Geneva violations - would not apply.

Those who protested were ignored, though the administration declared it would abide by the "spirit" of the conventions. Shortly afterward, the CIA asked for formal assurance that this pledge did not apply to its agents.

In March 2003, a Defense Department legal task force concluded that the president was not bound by any international or federal law on torture. It said that as commander in chief, he had the authority "to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security." Subsequent legal memos to civilian officials in the White House and Pentagon dwelt in morbid detail on permitted torture techniques, for practical purposes concluding that anything was permitted that did not (deliberately) kill the victim.

What is this all about? The FBI, the armed forces' own legal officers, bar associations and other civil law groups have protested, as have retired intelligence officers and civilian law enforcement officials.

The United States has never before officially practiced torture. It was not deemed necessary in order to defeat Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Its indirect costs are enormous: in their effect on the national reputation, their alienation of international opinion, and their corruption of the morale and morality of the American military and intelligence services.

Gee, I think incinerating whole cities and the residents thereof could be considered torture by other means.

The fact is that torture doesn't work. That the Bushies defaulted to torture rather than ramping up other kinds of humint tells me that they are ignorant as well as moral monsters so arrogant that it was possible for them to think that setting aside decades of carefully worked out and administered law was within their purview.

This story is breaking too late to help the election (if the media hadn't let it fall off the spring in favor of, oh, I don't know, Scott Peterson's murder trial) but it ain't going to help W's favorability ratings. If they fall far enough, I don't think impeachment is out of the question. Since the documents will probably implicate the Office of the VP, too, we may be in historic territory. I have no love of Speaker Hastert, but he can't be any more idealogical and incompetent than the Bushies.

The Next Step

Japan Has First Case of Bird Flu in Human
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 22, 2004

Filed at 9:05 a.m. ET

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan reported its first case of bird flu in a human on Wednesday -- a man who got the disease from birds. Bird flu has swept through farms across Asia this year, forcing officials to cull more than 100 million birds. The disease has also jumped to humans, killing 12 people in Thailand and 20 in Vietnam.

Although there has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission, experts worry that the virus could mutate into a version easily spread among people, setting off a global pandemic.

Advertisement

The man caught the bird flu virus while disinfecting a contaminated poultry farm in western Kyoto during an outbreak in Japan earlier this year, the Health Ministry said.

The ministry took blood samples from about 86 people who may have been exposed. One tested positive for antibodies for the disease, confirming the infection. Four others may also have been infected but the tests were inconclusive.

The more contact between the avian virus and the human being, the greater chance of mutation to human to human transmissibility.

Morning Update

I heard the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Anthony Cordesman on Morning Edition this morning discussing Iraq in the wake of yesterday's catastrophe. Tony is a conservative (not ideologically, he's just wary as a strategician) rather than an alarmist. His most recent report on the chances for Bush "success" in Iraq is here (.pdf) and he has become considerably glummer in the intervening weeks since the document was released.

His morning chat with the NPR jock tells me that the think tank community is coming around to predicting disaster rather than looking for things to celebrate.

In other news: thanks to Charles for some interesting infosec posts last night. My long continuing education in tech continues. It also continues hands-on: I arrived home last night with a glorious, used 15" LCD IBM monitor. The box is up and running with a new UPS.

In spite of all the diagnositics the bro and I ran over the last couple of days, it appears that the modem is fried, probably by the same anomoly which took out my motherboard. So, tonight, with fear and trembling, Melanie will for the first time approach the guts of the machine with a screwdriver and replace the modem. This is a boatload of hardware and software lessons in a very small space. With any amount of luck, I"ll be Bumping from home in time for the holiday. Cross your fingers for me, and if you have any advice, all you technologists, I'm up for it.

Government Infosec report cards handed out. DHS gets a "D".

Why, oh why, does this so completely fail to surprise me?

The story is at SecurityFocus.

Report: DHS cyber security lagging

By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Dec 16 2004 6:28PM

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is having some homeland cyber security issues on its systems providing remote access to telecommuters, according to a newly-released report by the DHS Inspector General's office.

Earlier this year security auditors armed with ISS's Internet Scanner, @stake's L0phtCrack and Sandstorm Enterprises' PhoneSweep 4.0 spent five months probing hosts, attacking passwords and war dialing the Department.

They found that some of the hosts designed to allow home workers and other trusted users access to DHS networks by modem or over the Internet lacked the authentication measures called for by official NIST guidelines and recommendations by the National Security Agency, like minimum password lengths and password aging.

Moreover, system patches were not kept up to date, leaving some systems open to known buffer overflows and other exploits. Meanwhile, a war dialing effort against 2,800 DHS phone lines turned up 20 modems that the Department couldn't immediately account for.

"Due to these remote access exposures, there is an increased risk that
unauthorized people could gain access to DHS networks and compromise the
confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information systems and
resources," the report concludes.

The audit examined DHS's Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate; the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services; and DHS Management. Only DHS Management proved resistant to L0phtCrack. Of the other three components, passwords were crackable with user name and dictionary attacks at a rate between 8% to 37%, with some accounts protected by no password at all.

In a written response attached to the report, Department CIO Steve Cooper said some of the auditors' concerns were overstated: The systems suffering known vulnerabilities were waiting for patches to come out of testing, and any genuine effort at password hacking would be hobbled by the Department's policy of limiting failed login attempts, wrote Cooper.

"As we complete the transition to Windows 2003 on most of our networks, it will be impossible to have a password that does not comply with DHS complexity requirements," he wrote.

These guys are running Windows desktops.

Which means they've got way more problems than just weak passwords. It's possible to secure a Windows box. It's possible to push a peanut to the summit of Pike's Peak with your nose, too. Just not very practical. A good Linux, like SuSE or Mandrake, can be hardened by the simple application of the Bastille Linux. If there's any tool like that out there for Windows, I haven't heard of it yet.

It could be worse. They could be the Interior Department, which has been ordered multiple times to disconnect from the Internet by Federal judges because their security was so bad. But then, Interior isn't charged with national security responsibilities, and DHS is so charged.

BTW, the "auditors' concerns were overstated" business is something we hear on a regular basis, since we audit bank IT infrastructure. It's complete bullshit, 999 times out 1000.

The auditors found 20 modems that DHS didn't know about??? Every one of those is a security hole just waiting to be exploited. You want to extend remote access to your people when they're out of the office? Set up encrypted VPNs and do it at least half right. That is not rocket science. It's just plain garden-variety prudence.

BTW, the auditors were going easy on the network vulnerability side. If my group had run that audit, we'd have used nessus. Nessus is arguably the best vulnerability scanner out there.

And some of the accounts were passwordless??? That's sheer insanity. Especially in a security organization!!

Tom Ridge deserves a horsewhipping for the way he's handled DHS security. This is par for the course with the Bush administration. Promote the mindlessly loyal, like Kerik. Push the competent out into the cold.

Run a web board based on phpBB?? RED ALERT!!

There is new, fast-spreading worm in the wild. It is using Google as a targeting tool. And it exploits a vunerability in phpBB that is less than a week old. It's generic name is "Santy".

I have been informed that the vulnerability this worm exploits can be patched by hand. But it is confirmed in versions of phpBB that are stock, and at version 2.0.10 or less. Upgrading to 2.0.11 will mitigate this risk. But whichever path you take, act quickly. By 11:01 Pacific time today, as many as 40,000 sites may have been hit.

Looking Up

Tech support (my brother) informs me that the new 15" monitors don't weigh a ton like my oooold 13". This means that getting the thing into the car from the store and into the house from the car isn't going to bust up my back (like the old one did.) With Christmas shopping upon us, I'm going to put off the decision about the LCD monitor: they are still too expensive. Unless I run into trouble with the cable again, I should be up and running 10 minutes after I get home from the store. I can't wait.

I also can't believe how dependent I've become on the medium, the ease of access to information, and how much I miss the regular interchange with you. It will be so good to have all of these pieces working again.

Straw Men

Blair: World must back Iraq polls
UK prime minister makes surprise Baghdad visit

Tuesday, December 21, 2004 Posted: 10:31 AM EST (1531 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- In his first trip to Baghdad, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pleaded with world leaders to come together in support of Iraq's upcoming elections, saying there is a clear choice "between democracy and terror."

"On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work and have the same democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy. And on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq."

If Blair really believes this stuff, he's as delusional as the neo-cons. Might'n't this whole "insurgency" thing be about not wanting to be invaded and occupied, not have the locals mass murdered, wanting some electricity as winter settles in and basically wanting to be left alone.

Dear UK readers: I understand this bozo has a date with the polls in the spring. I realize that Labour hasn't exactly been overrun by people with leadership skills, but dishonesty this deep really needs to be run out of Parliament. I mean, you were disappointed when we didn't do it, right?

Down, Down, Down

Housing starts tumble, but ...
November sees sharpest drop in nearly 11 years despite low rates, raising concerns over real estate.
December 16, 2004: 1:15 PM EST
By Chris Isidore, CNN/Money senior writer

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Housing starts took their biggest tumble in almost 11 years in November, raising worries about the housing market and the strength of home prices in the long run.

But while some economists said the drop bears watching, they also said it was probably too soon to say it meant the housing bubble was ready to burst.

The Commerce Department said starts on new homes and apartments slumped 13.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.77 million last month from a revised 2.04 million pace in October. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com forecast housing starts would come in at a 1.98 million pace.

The monthly drop was the biggest percentage decrease since January 1994, according to the deparment. Total starts fell to the lowest level since May 2003.

Mid- to lower-end retailers are praying for deep discounts to get some momentum going into the weekend, same store sales are off from last year. High-end retailers are doing fine. Guess who doesn't have a lot of spare cash kicking around this Christmas?

Deteriorating Situation

At Least 22 Killed in Mosul Attack
Ansar al-Sunna Claims Responsibility for Attack at U.S. Military Base

By William Branigin and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; 11:52 AM

At least 22 people were killed and more than 60 wounded at a U.S. military base in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul today when the installation came under attack by suspected insurgents.

Initial reports indicated that a dining hall at the installation, called Camp Marez, was hit by a rocket and mortar attack.

A radical Iraqi Muslim group, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, claimed responsibility for the attack, news agencies reported. The group said in a statement posted on the Internet that it had targeted a canteen used by the U.S. military at the base, which is located 240 miles north of Baghdad.

Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the U.S. commander in Mosul, said in a televised statement that the casualties, which he put at more than 20 killed and more than 60 wounded, included U.S. military personnel, American civilian contractors, foreign contractors and members of the Iraqi military.

"It is a sad day in Mosul, but as they always do, soldiers will come back from that," Ham said. He said U.S. soldiers responded to the attack "with bravery and with unselfish caring for one another," with wounded troops taking care of those who were more seriously hurt.

Well, there are at least 22 people who won't "come back from that." This guy is about as sensitive as Rumsfeld.

And the cognitive dissonance continues:

Bush Acknowledges Impact of Insurgents
But President Says He Is Confident Democracy Will Prevail in Iraq

By Michael A. Fletcher and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A01

President Bush sounded a sober tone on Iraq yesterday, acknowledging that anti-American insurgents are "having an effect" there and that U.S. efforts to train Iraqi forces to secure their country have produced only "mixed" results.

Despite the obstacles, Bush said progress has been made in Iraq in the year since Saddam Hussein was captured, and he expressed continued confidence that the oil-rich nation will be transformed into a democratic beacon in the Middle East. Still, he warned, the road to democracy in Iraq is long and difficult and will not end with elections next month of a National Assembly to draft a new constitution.

I got a chance to spend an hour on the phone last night with our friend pogge (that whole "talking on the phone" thing sort of went away when I got on the Net) and the conversation, inevitably, turned to Iraq. Pogge is of the opinion that the level of escalation of violence between now and the "elections" will be so bad that we'll be pulling out shortly afterword. I expressed some disagreement, thinking it would be later in the spring. Today's events are definitely headed in pogge's direction.

Continuing issues

Morning, everyone. Unfortunately, the tech problems continue but I hope to have the final issue resolved tonight. The monitor does need to be replaced.

Add to these troubles the cognitive dissonance of listening to Richard Perle praise the brilliance of Donald Rumsfeld on NPR this morning and I must say that I'm in something of a funk. What are you doing to keep yourself sane these days?

Until I get everything sorted out, if you want to email me, use [email protected]

Social Security in the Larger Scheme of Things

Trouble With Choices

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, December 20, 2004; Page A23

People want control over their lives; they value their freedom. But the first reason to wonder whether "ownership" is always good is that it can be stressful. It may be true, as promoters of ownership like to say, that nobody ever washed a rented car; but renters are very happy not to have to get the hose out. If it's up to you to choose how to invest your pension account, agonizing over health stocks vs. Asian bonds may not be such a privilege.

It's not just that financial planning is a dry topic to most folks. It's that modern life is overloaded with choices. In "The Paradox of Choice," the Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz shows how a certain measure of choice can be liberating but how too much is a treadmill -- sometimes even triggering depression. Freedom and choice are wonderful things that allow us to realize our human potential. But there's a limit to how many choices each of us has time to make, and most people in the rich world are pretty much maxed out already.

You see this truth in the behavior of the affluent, who actually pay to avoid choices. They hire home decorators so they don't have to stare glassily at 200 kinds of curtain rail. They hire marriage planners so they don't have to fret about cream napkins vs. white ones. There are said to be 10,000 wedding consultants practicing in the United States. If the rich are deliberately avoiding choice, why are we so sure that the majority want more of it?

Ownership does not merely involve choice; it involves risk also. A certain measure of risk is fine; indeed, if you want a dynamic society it's positively essential. But just as the modern economy threatens Americans with choice overload, so it also piles more risk on the shoulders of the average citizens. The risk of not being able to afford health care has risen, albeit because health care has more to offer than it used to. Fewer people have risk-free "defined benefit" pension plans that guarantee a fixed proportion of salary upon retirement. An index devised by Yale's Jacob Hacker shows that income volatility has increased sharply since the 1970s. Given that risk is already on the rise, perhaps public policy should avoid adding to it?

Maybe because they want some insulation from the uncertainty of the market, people sometimes prefer government solutions to private ones, even if they are no more efficient. In Britain, a study led by Michelle S. Mahoney of the University of Exeter found that people were satisfied with the privatized water distribution system but still thought it ought to be run by the government. In Michigan, Lyke Thompson of Wayne State University surveyed attitudes to 14 different services; a majority of respondents favored government provision of 10 of them. Jonathan Baron, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, has surveyed attitudes on government provision, private provision and various intermediate subsidy options. He finds that people tend to want government to do the things it's doing now. They don't favor more big government, but they don't favor less of it either. They are against privatizing Social Security.

When I get to the grocery store at the end of the day, the last thing I want to hear from the lips of the cashier is "Paper or plastic." I don't care and I don't have the ability to make one more choice in a day which has already been full of difficult decisions.

I also have neither the time nor the interest to learn to be an expert in yet another field, nor do I have the money to hire someone to make those choices for me: take it from one who knows, when you've been low income for many years, you learn to do a lot of things for yourself because you can't afford any other way. Most of the people I know have a hard time just finding the things they need to learn to keep up with their jobs and keep their lives running on a more-or-less okay basis.

We aren't lazy and we aren't stupid. We are tired, both from the overwork and from the stress that comes from living a paycheck or two away from financial disaster. Want to know why the savings rate is so low? It's because salaries aren't keeping up with even the modest inflation of the last few years. We're working harding for less and racking up more debt as a result.

Did you know that fully a quarter of working people are making less than $15.00 an hour? They aren't all living in the cheapest parts of the country, either. The rent for a small studio apartment in this part of the country is already beyond me.

North Comes South

Since the election, you've seen me say a number of times in this space that I've seriously thought about moving to Canada as a society more amenable to progressivism. I'm having second thoughts.

Today's the coldest day we've had in a couple of years, it was in the single digits (F) when I left the house this morning with 20-30 mile per hour winds. We haven't had sub-zero wind chills here in a while.

The temps are supposed to be in the 40's by tomorrow and ten degrees warmer on Wednesday before plunging on Thursday as we receive another Canadian airmass. I'm not enjoying this in the least and a Torontonian winter will often have conditions like this for weeks at a time.

I'm getting soft in my old age.

Product Roll-Out

December 20, 2004
Unconnected dots

President Bush is setting out to convince the nation that the danger is imminent and can be addressed only with bold action. Sound familiar?

The White House is deploying the strategy it used to sell the war in Iraq to sell its plan for partial privatization of the Social Security system.

The intelligence might not be as flawed, but the spin is equally disingenuous. If no changes are made to Social Security, according to the latest educated guesses, the program will not be able to pay out all its commitments by 2042. But it's absurd for Bush to equate this long-term actuarial shortfall — which could change dramatically over the years — with real deficits that make financial markets wary.

That didn't stop the president from doing it at a two-day economic pep rally he hosted in Washington last week.

The assembled discussion panels also offered sometimes conflicting narratives tailored to the Bush agenda.

Some said trial lawyers and their class- action suits were placing the United States at a competitive disadvantage, while others hailed the chief's tax cuts as the reason the nation was growing at a much faster rate than Europe and Japan.

The assembled cheerleaders weren't supposed to connect the dots. After all, the economic growth rates that they claim could be achieved by extending the president's tax cuts would avert that Social Security shortfall altogether.

Bush's argument is that borrowing $2 trillion now to cover the cost of allowing individuals to directly invest a portion of their own contributions is prudent because it would avoid borrowing trillions more later. If you buy that argument, there are some weapons of mass destruction in Iraq you might want to acquire as well.

Social Security's projected shortfall, though admittedly something the government needs to worry about, is not a real liability adding to Washington's already alarming mountain of debt, or pressuring interest rates. That $2-trillion IOU Bush wants Uncle Sam to sign would be such a liability.

The administration wants to have it both ways. To pursue its privatization agenda, it wants to alarm Americans into thinking that Social Security is deeply imperiled.

But Bush refuses to support the obvious remedies available if the program really were in danger, such as raising the cap of $87,900 on the amount of a person's income subject to payroll taxes.

The United States has been unable to tether its growing trade and budget deficits, which is why the dollar's value keeps tumbling on world markets.

The Bush administration is not only insisting, rather daftly, that it can cut the deficit while extending its tax cuts; now it wants to borrow trillions more to confront what it fraudulently labels an imminent threat.

Bush's intentionally confused economic policies all contribute to a different sort of shortfall — the U.S. credibility deficit on the global stage. For a spendthrift borrower, that poses a real, imminent danger.

The Sunday gas bag roll out for this product was another up-is-down moment. It was frustrating to watch and not be able to post on it here--I literally had steam coming out of my ears.

One of the things that makes me crazy is the so-called "straight" news programs who do the he said/she said with this pack of lies with no attempt made to find out what the truth of the matter is. It would be refreshing to have some one say, "this is all mirrors and blue smoke," because that's what it is.

Law of Unintended Consequences

Saudi Arabia fears attacks from insurgents battle-hardened in Iraq
By William Wallis in Cairo and Mark Huband in London
Published: December 20 2004 02:00 | Last updated: December 20 2004 02:00

Saudi officials are concerned that insurgents fighting US-led forces in Iraq are gaining military experience that could be used within the kingdom.

Suspected militants with military experience gained in Iraq have been detected in several Middle Eastern countries, and some have been found as far afield as western Europe, according to intelligence officials.

"They are coming back with security experience, ranging from skills in how to lose people who are trailing them, as well as having the qualities of guerrilla fighters. They also know how to do surveillance," a senior European intelligence officer said.

Despite some foreign fighters having been killed in clashes with US, Iraqi and other forces, evidence that others have gone to Iraq to gain skills they can use elsewhere is now of serious concern to intelligence and security officials.

"The big trend for the coming 20 years will be the Iraqi jihad veterans. They are being seen as the extreme threat for the coming period. One key challenge is to establish who they are and where they are going, in order to make sure that the same mistake is not made as was made with the Arab Afghan veterans who fought against the Soviet Union," the senior European intelligence official said.

There are now several hundred Saudi nationals fighting in Iraq out of a possible 1,000-1,500 insurgents from countries across the Muslim world, according to Arab and western diplomats in Riyadh. They are mostly entering Iraq via Syria and other countries in the region, and not through Saudi Arabia where the borders are more tightly controlled, the diplomats said.

A Saudi official with detailed knowledge of how the Saudi government is viewing the impact of the Iraqi insurgency on the country said: "Saudi Arabia has been a big failure for the jihadis. But Iraq has been a great success. So little has been achieved in Saudi, and most of the jihadis in Saudi went to Iraq. But in the coming months, the Iraqis will turn against them."

So, here is the worldwide situation created by the Bush-Rummy failure: the war in Iraq provides both the motivation for the creation of jihadis AND the place to train them to a high level of experience. Great. Is the world a safer place? Just askin'.

Really Bleak Mid-winter

Good morning, all. Over the course of the last few weeks, every one of the systems that supports Bump has failed, from server to Internet connection to, now, the cpu itself (from the diagnostics the brother and I performed after I got home last night and still couldn't power up, it appears that this issue is a seriously wonky surge suppressor, which is what probably fried my keyboard controller.)

It's amazing how fragile our systems are, and if you think of blogs as a sort of social software, it's software on a highwire.

The upside, however, is that when things have gone wrong, I've had help right here in the community from alyosha, Charles and pogge. Real-time help is an hour down the road at my brothers.

In other words, I have a lot of resources around me for help when things go wrong. Some of you commented on pogge's post below about your own computer problems. What about the rest of you? What do you do when you run into something you don't understand or can't fix? I'm not nearly as geeky as some of the techie types who hang out around here, but I'm more comfortable with computers and software than most users, so it takes a fair amount to flummox me. This weekend was definitely flummox time.

I'll post over lunch and my afternoon coffee break. Obviously, I'm behind on the news. I'll pick up a new uninteruptable power supply on the way home tonight and the system should be completely fixed this evening.

How do you handle tech trouble?

The streak continues

Hi, Bumpers. Pogge again.

By now you're probably accustomed to the idea that when I post under Melanie's name it's because Melanie can't post. She arrived home safely with a repaired computer earlier this evening to find that now her monitor is kaput. I arrived home a few minutes ago to find a message on my answering machine requesting this guest appearance. Happy to oblige. Sorry the news is bad.

We're starting to think we should be going to Susie Madrak for investment advice since she seems to have some ability to predict the future (see the post below this one).

I would imagine you'll hear from Melanie some time tomorrow if she has a chance to post from the office. And unless I miss my guess she'll get her problem at home solved pretty quickly so she won't be away from you for too long. If I hear differently, I'll let you know as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, you can always talk amongst yourselves. If you'd like a subject to discuss, how about pondering how we ever let ourselves become so dependent on these *&f;@4-%! machines. I ponder that one every time I find myself bug hunting at some ridiculous hour of the morning. How about you?

Trouble

Susie Madrak said something about some planet going retrograde this month that would cause all kinds of havoc with technology. We're having our fourth or fifth meltdown this month, from browser woes to phone service going out and now my computer has crashed. I'm typing this from my brothers house while he effects the repair.

Posting will be light until I get home with, hopefully, a good as new 'puter.

Not Just Here

Nearly 3,000 troops are flown back to the UK for treatment
By Severin Carrell

19 December 2004

Nearly 3,000 British troops have been flown back to the UK for hospital treatment after being wounded, injured or falling sick in Iraq, the Ministry of Defence has disclosed.

The figure - which dwarfs the death toll of 74 troops and aircrew who have died since the invasion in March 2003 - includes hundreds of soldiers evacuated from Iraq with serious injuries or illnesses, some critical.

The MoD has revealed that by last Wednesday, 2,862 personnel had been evacuated back to Britain - mostly because they were too ill or injured to be treated in Iraq. The evacuation rate is currently running at more than 25 soldiers a week, and includes 65 servicemen and women seriously injured in combat over the past four months.

The most critically injured casualties include one sergeant flown back to the UK for neurosurgery after he "took the full force" of a bomb in Basra which claimed the life of Black Watch Private Mark Ferns.

Two soldiers also suffered "horrific" leg wounds in a bombing last month which killed Pte Pita Tukutukuwaqa, from Fiji, and a further eight Black Watch soldiers were wounded in the suicide car bombing that killed the three troops outside Camp Dogwood last month.

But the intense heat and long hours endured by many soldiers also lead to hundreds of casualties from heat stroke and exhaustion.

One army brigade which was based in Basra during the hot summer months last year lost over 150 soldiers flown back to Britain due to "heat-related injuries" between late June and early November. Two soldiers died of natural causes after exercising and a patrol respectively.

At least a dozen soldiers are thought to have had limbs amputated, but the MoD officials admit they are unable to reveal precisely why the troops were evacuated - claiming that medical confidentiality rules bars the armed forces from disclosing even basic statistics on the injured and ill.

The MoD also admitted last week that it did not even know how many casualties were combat-related until August this year. It claims that injuries and illness information is not held centrally.

Army blames Iraq for drop in recruits

Lorna Martin, Scotland editor
Sunday December 19, 2004
The Observer

Senior army commanders have expressed fears that the increasingly vocal anti-Iraq war movement is discouraging thousands of young men from considering a career in the armed forces.

They blame high-profile campaigns against the war, often led by bereaved parents and supported by celebrities and political figures, for worsening recruitment problems, particularly into the infantry.

According to military sources the high media visibility of bereaved parents, such as Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son was killed, and the unpopularity of the war have made recruitment and retention a problem, exacerbating an already acute recruitment crisis in areas such as Scotland. The problem is now also spreading to the north of England and Wales, forces officials say.

As well as a shortfall in young men volunteering, army officers have reported a wider reluctance to support a career in the army with parents refusing to sign consent forms for junior soldiers to sign up and, in some cases, local authorities with a strong anti-war sentiment refusing permission for recruitment officers to put up stands at local venues.

According to army sources the problem is also evident in the Territorial Army which has bolstered the regular Army's ranks in Iraq.

'People join the Territorials for a hobby,' said another source. 'They don't expect to end up being sent to Iraq for six months, taking casualties and seeing a lot of killing. There is no end in sight to the war in Iraq. That is what is really putting people off.'

The impact of the anti-war movement has also made itself apparent in the United States, where there has been a sharp decline in volunteers from communities - such as the black community - that have traditionally supplied soldiers. In the US this has been tied to a sharp increase in desertions - a problem so far not seen in the UK.

One senior source confirmed: 'The anti-war movement is exacerbating our recruitment problems. The effects have been particularly noticeable in Scotland, but are spreading to the north of England and we're beginning to see it as well in the west.'

New figures reveal the number of recruits joining Scotland's six regiments has fallen sharply this year. This was one of the reasons given last week to justify the controversial decision to merge Scotland's regiments into one.

There is no relationship between these two stories, of course.

Spirit of the Season

2004: The Year of 'The Passion'
By FRANK RICH

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest — and has to be dealt with."

If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O'Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a "holiday tree" in the lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

The power of this minority within the Christian majority comes from its exaggerated claims on the Bush election victory. It is enhanced further by a news culture, especially on television, that gives the Mel Gibson wing of Christianity more say than other Christian voices and that usually ignores minority religions altogether. This is not just a Fox phenomenon. Something is off when NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," mainstream TV shows both, invite religious leaders to discuss "values" in the aftermath of the election and limit that discussion to all-male panels composed exclusively of either evangelical ministers or politicians with pseudo-spiritual credentials. Does Mr. Falwell, who after 9/11 blamed Al Qaeda's attack partly on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," speak for any sizable group of American Christians? Does the Rev. Al Sharpton, booked on TV as a "balance" to Mr. Falwell, do so either? Mr. Sharpton doesn't even have a congregation; like Mr. Falwell, he is a politician first, a religious leader second (or maybe fourth or fifth).

Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice — fundamentalist." That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers — or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves — and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has attributed to "values" crusaders since the election. "There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners," says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."

This paradigm is everywhere in our news culture. When Jon Stewart went on CNN's "Crossfire" to demand that its hosts stop "hurting America" by turning news and political debate into a form of pro wrestling, it may have sounded a bit hyperbolic. "Crossfire" is an aging show that few watch. But his broader point holds up: it's all crossfire now. In the electronic news sphere where most Americans live much of the time, anyone who refuses to engage in combat is quickly sent packing as a bore.

Toss the issue of religion into that 24/7 wrestling match, as into any conflict in human history, and the incendiary possibilities are limitless. When even phenomena as innocuous as Oscar nominations or the lighting of a Christmas tree can be inflated into divisive religious warfare, it's only a matter of time before someone uncovers an anti-Christian plot in "White Christmas." It avoids any mention of religion and it was, as William Donohue might be the first to point out, written by a secular Jew.

Gibson's "The Passion" was a gore-fest that hyped anti-Christian violence in a way that made conservative evangelicals and Catholics feel good: it vindicated their minority beliefs. It was an Old Testament kind of movie, all about suffering, as if suffering itself were redemptive. It's not. The Bible doesn't end with The Book of Job.

As we enter Christmas week, it is good to remember that the story of Christmas is about hope entering the world as God's solidarity with the human condition. The Falwells and the Roberts and the Gibsons of religion would have you believe that faith is about judgement and sin. From this Christian's perspective, I say "Feh."

In the Catholic tradition, we say that "the Glory of God is the human person fully alive." May this season bring you liveliness, then. Celebrate that.

Side note: my computer crashed last night and wiped out all my bookmarks. That will slow me down today.

In the Bleak Mid-Winter

Here is what this holiday week is going to look like (I haven't heard from Charles about his plans, yet): I will be heading to my brother and sister in law's home on Friday afternoon, to spend the holiday with The Blondies (Sadie was joined a couple of months ago by the more sedate and smaller Darby, and the kittie is the same color as the Goldens. Scroll down here to see that Leigh and Anne fit into the category as well.) I expect posting to be light to non-existent while I'm gone. Leigh builds computers so there will be a machine or two around the house. That's not the issue. This is:

I don't get to see my brother and his wife very often, even though they aren't that far away: they are small business owners, which is a license to work your butt off. I want to spend as much time enjoying their company as I can.

Readers back home in Minnesota will find this amusing: we're expecting a little snow tomorrow night and the run on the grocery has already started. We're talking 1-2 inches here, people, but that's enough around here to cause havoc. We had a mild winter last year, but this one looks to be colder and snowier, which is a pain because of the way snow completely disrupts the area. The locals don't know how to drive in the stuff, and they don't have the armament to deal with it on the highways. As a practical matter, this means a whole lot more "snow days" than in places with much more severe climates (hi, pogge!) but it does require some planning: because the locals can't drive in the snow and there isn't enough equipment to clear streets quickly, unless it melts off immediately, traffic will be disrupted for at least a day, longer if there is significant accumulation. A significant snow (more than 6 inches; yeah, I know, Minnesotans) can take the place down for days.

I'll have some Christmas thoughts for you later in the week, before I head out. I'll be happy to report to my brother that this box (his Christmas present to me last year) is still humming like a top. And it was his present to you, too, as it allows me all kinds of speed and 16 bit computing and applications, my old P1 was on it's last legs.

He also delivers furniture and can run a bobcat: that's a favorite funny family story I may give you after the first of the year. Leigh is a gifted story teller (both of my brothers have a deadpan delivery and sense of humor which usually causes rib-cracking, tear inducing hysterics,} and the best stories are the ones he tells on himself.

My sister in law, Anne, I just want to grow up to be like her. She's a strong woman with a very tender heart who would pound me if she knew I told you that. Fortunately, it's Christmas time, and small business retailers don't have time to read blogs ;>)

So, I'm not going to take a hiatus like some other bloggers, just a couple of days off to enjoy the company of my family. I'll make sure you have some open threads when I'm not around much. I'm looking forward to some time off to do some serious blogging: the news on the doorstep of Christmas is very serious, and I intend to be their for the first draft of the first draft, which is what blogging is. Connecting the dots between the news stories is what we do, and it is damn hard work.

What are your plans for Christmas? Are you traveling, or is Christmas at your house this year? Don't celebrate Christmas? Tell us about your winter holiday celebrations.

After the first of the year, I'll be anouncing some Bump gatherings around the country, there'll be one here in DC, of course, since I know I have a lot of readers locally, but I'm astonished at how far across our shrinking world you readers/bloggers are. I'll be in Fort Myers, FL, probably in February, and if there is any demand, I'll put together a party there, as well. I'll be doing more traveling this year than I have in the last few years, and will be happy to have a glass of wine with a reader anywhere. I'll let you know as things come up. I'm also hoping to put together some events with local bloggers this year. As you know, DC is hotbed of blogging, bloggers that both you and I read everyday. I want to meet these folks. And I'm planning a January trip to Philly to tour Longwood Gardens with Susie. We've been trying to get together for months, but mutual unemployment and crazy schedules have kept us apart until now. We've talked on the phone, so we know we get along.

So, that's what is in my holiday reveries as I try to finish my Christmas list. My list is small: I was astonished to talk to my hair stylist on Friday and learn that she has 58 people on her list. That would utterly defeat me. (Oh, yes, Jacqui is all that. I share her with Sandra Day O'Connor. And, yes, she's worth all that. People think I'm 35. I tell ya, it's the haircut.) Around here Christmas is all about the love: family, friends, colleagues.

The Prince of Peace needs to be reborn in us everyday. Remembering that in the bleak midwinter is a good thing.

I'll return with more of Leigh's recipes, the good stuff, for you.

New Toys!

I spent some time bopping around the Internets today, just poking around and looking at things. I found this interesting package of tools for both bloggers and blogreaders (if you are a commentor, you're a blogger) here by way of blogarama which has just been added to the Daily Reads over on the blogroll.

Bushellbasket of toys, kids, just in time for Christmas....

Variations on a Theme

Here is a wonderful compilation of hummous bi'tahini recipes. I'm snacking on the green and black olive variation with some pita bread as I'm making dinner.

A terrific accompaniment for a light lunch or picnic basket:

Per person

Open a couple of small pitas on one side
Into the cavity stuff
Spicy herb sprouts or plain alfalfa sprouts (baby spinach leaves work well, too)
Crumbled Feta cheese
Dress with vinaigrette or sub sandwich dressing

Have lots of napkins handy, this is messy but very good and very low fat.

Discrimination Redux

My Amstreet colleague, echidne of the snakes, makes a fabulous catch this afternoon.

Need A Job?

The last time this was legal was in the 1960’s. We are skipping backwards at a frightening rate, aren’t we? I mean, we still have that pesky Title VII as a law of this nation, and it happens to ban hiring discrimination by sex. Georgie Porgie hasn’t had time to stock the Supreme Court just yet to overturn that one. Don’t worry; he’ll get to it soon enough. He has a man-date, remember.

Book TV

C-Span is a national treasure. Book TV on the weekends is a real treat and I'm watching Judge Andrew Napolitano discuss the Patriot Act. This is information that will make your hair stand on end: the degredation of civil liberties by the Bush administration has largely happened beneath the radar of the poodle press. This program will be repeated tonight at 11:45 pm, and Paul Krugman's live appearance at the Miami Bookfair a couple of weeks ago will be aired tomorrow morning at 5 AM. Those of you with recording devices, consider yourself warned.

The news from Judge Napolitano is terrifying. Where you aware that the "Intelligence Reform" Act Bush signed this week is really the Patriot II Act, and removes substantially the sunset provisions of the previous act? You know how many papers I read each day, and certainly didn't see anything about it.

Book TV's schedule this weekend is here.

UPDATE: As our friend pogge pointed out Canada allowed itself to fall into the same trap, but Britain's Law Lords (roughly the equivalent of our Supreme Court) have overturned the British version.

Bread and Circuses

Freakin' CNN is devoting all of their time to the White House "Barney" video, while the destruction of Fallujah continues. It's an entertainment channel. I didn't get a chance to pay attention to Lehrer last night, I was on the phone with an old friend, a much more pleasant pursuit. If you've got remarks on news coverage, this is the place to put it. I'm off for a few hours of Christmas shopping at the local merchants.

Here's something you can make for lunch while I'm gone:

Shirred Eggs

Per serving

In an individual ramekin

2 heaping tablespoons of sour cream
2 teaspoons grated parmesan
Salt and pepper to taste

Use the sour cream and cheese to line the ramekin after you've greased it with a little olive oil. Break an egg onto the dairy lining and microwave for one minute. Check for the degree of done-ness you prefer. I have a thousand watt mic and like my yokes fairly firm, about a minute and a half.

The End of an Ancient City

America's Sinister Plan for Falluja
By Michael Schwartz

With a few notable exceptions the media has accepted the recent virtual news blackout in Falluja. The ongoing fighting in the city, especially in "cleared" neighborhoods, is proving an embarrassment and so, while military spokesmen continue to announce American casualties, they now come not from the city itself but, far more vaguely, from "al Anbar province" of which the city is a part. Fifty American soldiers died in the taking of the city; 20 more died in the following weeks -- before the reports stopped. Iraqi civilian casualties remain unknown and accounts of what's happened in the city, except from the point of view of embedded reporters (and so of American troops) remain scarce indeed. With only a few exceptions (notably Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post), American reporters have neglected to cull news from refugee camps or Baghdad hospitals, where survivors of the siege are now congregating.

In case the overarching meaning of all this has eluded you, Major Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is leading the occupation of Falluja, spelled it out for the AP's Kratovac: "Some may see this as a 'Big Brother is watching over you' experiment, but in reality it's a simple security measure to keep the insurgents from coming back." Actually, it is undoubtedly meant to be both; and since, in the end, it is likely to fail (at least, if the "success" of other American plans in Iraq is taken as precedent), it may prove less revealing of Falluja's actual future than of the failure of the American counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and of the desperation of American strategists. In this context, the most revealing element of the plan may be the banning of all cars, the enforcement of which, all by itself, would make the city unlivable; and which therefore demonstrates both the impracticality of the U.S. vision and a callous disregard for the needs and rights of the Fallujans.

Dahr's report:

7 Marines have been killed in Al-Anbar province-read Fallujah. Does the military think it helps them to not announce that there has been ongoing heavy fighting in Fallujah for the last few days? How does this help the families of the soldiers there? What is this like for the loved ones back home who are living in an information blackout? When they know that the only hard news they will truly get from the military is when they are informed that their loved one is dead?

Expect this to continue until the ‘elections’ as well as afterwards. It’s called escalation.

CNN won't tell you.

The Unserious SecDef

Supporting Our Troops?
The defense secretary we have

Lynn Woolsey

Friday, December 17, 2004

It's a question of will and priorities. It's hard to escape the conclusion that this is the Army they want -- one whose front-line personnel are forced to wait in line for lifesaving safety equipment (in some cases paying for it out of their own pockets) because a missile defense shield and no-bid Halliburton contracts had to come first.

Progressives have been unfairly badgered about how we can oppose the Iraq war and still support the troops. We have consistently pushed for better protection for our troops and their families as well as support when they return home. Now it turns out that, in the most literal way imaginable, the architects of this war have themselves failed to support the troops. "Support the troops," coming from Rumsfeld and company, appears to be nothing more than demagoguery.

Rumsfeld also defended the government's armored-vehicle negligence by arguing that it was logistically impossible to meet the need. But after the Pentagon's only armored Humvee supplier contradicted Rumsfeld by saying it was ready and prepared to increase production, the Army finally increased its order. Still, they have a lot of catching up to do. According to Time Magazine, the Army needs 35 times more of these vehicles than were written into the Iraq war plan. Young Americans are needlessly dying for this mistake.

And despite all this, Secretary Rumsfeld is one of only a handful of Cabinet members whom the President has asked to stay. It makes you wonder: How bad were the secretaries who were allowed to leave?

We can only hope that the protective-armor problem will now be adequately addressed. It remains to be seen whether a president who played flight-suit dress-up for a photo op truly grasps the serious matter of our soldiers' true outfitting needs.

It's time that the men and women risking their lives in Iraq were given the respect they deserve. Not another dollar should be spent on antiquated Cold War weapons systems until every soldier has the very best in safety gear. And we should be looking at other innovative ways to armor our troops. Eliminating the tax loophole that allows Americans to write off the purchase of a Humvee would be a good start, with the money being diverted to our soldiers in the field. On American highways, Humvees are nothing but material trophies, despoiling the environment and providing their owners with a tax break. In Iraq where Humvees are critical, the government has yet to find a way to properly outfit the vehicles. Is there a better example of bad public policy?

All hat, no cattle. Unfortunately, people are dying as a result of this administration's carelessness, and the American people don't seem to care. Slapping a yellow ribbon on your SUV is no substitute for holding Bushco accountable.

Dark Designs

Reflecting on the NYT story below, Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach has a few observations, and they aren't nearly as sunny as John Snow's:

Today’s global imbalances are very much an outgrowth of the world’s new uni-polar growth dynamic. Over the 1995 to 2002 period, the United States — which has a share of about 30% of world output — accounted for fully 98% of the cumulative increase in world GDP. Putting it another way, the remaining 70% of the world economy accounted for only 2% of the cumulative increase in world GDP over this same period. These results are calculated at market exchange rates. As such, they reflect both a widening of the real growth disparities between the US and the rest of the world, as well as a sharp appreciation of the dollar over this seven-year interval. Rebalancing will undoubtedly involve reversals on both counts — growth disparities and currencies. Not only will this entail a shift in the mix of global consumption away from the US, but it will also require a further decline in the dollar and a concomitant increase in US interest rates. Only then can the world get on with the heavy lifting of global rebalancing.

Proposals for improved public sector saving are equally contentious. I would add only two points to the now voluminous debate on the budget deficit: First, most forecasts place the US budget gap at around 2.5% of GDP over the next five years. While, as David Greenlaw notes, this is basically in line with the post-1969 average, today’s (and tomorrow’s) deficits matter much more than those in the past — mainly because of the extraordinary shortfall of private saving. For that reason, alone, Washington should not take false comfort in running “average” deficits. Second, tax reform is a luxury that only fiscally prudent nations can afford. America is not in that position. It is fiscally irresponsible to push a supply-side agenda —i.e., making the temporary tax cuts of 2003 permanent under the dubious premise they will be self-financing. Moreover, notwithstanding the compelling philosophy of an “ownership society,” Dick Berner and I both agree that it is equally irresponsible to embrace social security privatization and healthcare reform schemes — especially if the former involves large transitional costs of incremental Federal borrowing; in my view, any such efforts must be subjected to a saving-neutral litmus test.

Roach is of a mind that a dollar-induced global recession, perhaps depression, is the likely result of a forced rebalancing and is not sanguine about the economic outlook for this year.

So, which hits us first, economic catastrophe or Avian flu? Place your bet in the comments box below. No wonder I want to write recipes for a couple of days, all the news is too dark. Oh, and Iraq continues to go south, in case you are still interested.

Debt Doesn't Matter

The fabulist in chief sez:

Bush's Economic Vision
Debt Won't Hurt, Treasury Chief Says

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page E01

President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security probably won't raise interest rates or adversely impact financial markets, even if the program entails borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to finance it, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said yesterday.

In an interview, Snow said he is consulting closely with the White House on the issue, which has dogged the president's Social Security proposal. He said any additional debt should be accounted for "openly, transparently, above board," not hidden "off budget" for political purposes. Some Congressional budget writers have suggested in recent weeks that borrowing for Social Security should be accounted for differently and essentially ignored as part of the yearly federal deficit since it would be reducing costs over the long run.

"If we have a real fix for Social Security, if we make the system financially feasible so that its revenue in-flows support its out-flows, and we eliminate this $10.4 trillion [funding] gap, the markets will applaud the political leadership that made it possible," Snow said. "The bond markets would respond positively to that."

Bush put Washington on notice Thursday that he will push hard next year to revamp Social Security so younger workers could divert some of their payroll taxes into personal investment accounts. But that would leave less money to pay benefits already promised to current retirees. To ensure those benefits are not cut, the government will have to borrow trillions of dollars well into this century.

The expected White House plan "would drive up the federal budget deficit for several decades," economists at the investment firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. told clients yesterday.

Sen. Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.), a former Goldman Sachs chairman, told reporters Thursday that the financial markets would treat that surge of debt the way they treat any government borrowing. Interest rates would ultimately rise, raising the cost of mortgages and car loans and slowing the economy.

But Snow said the government is nowhere near reaching the international lending market's ability to absorb more federal debt, even with the annual government budget deficit near a record in dollar terms already. On the contrary, he said, bond traders will reward the administration for tackling the problem presented by a rising tide of retiring baby boomers who, by 2019, will be taking more out of Social Security than workers will be putting into it.

"They understand that it's a real cost, that it's there today, and that actions to bring that unfunded obligation down will improve the balance sheet of the United States," he said.

The Goldman Sachs memo came down in the middle, saying Treasury bond interest rates would rise with the flood of new notes. But the overall effect on the markets should be modest, since the government's rising debt would be offset by the money flowing into personal savings accounts.

Snow also gave some hints about the direction in which the Bush administration would like to push the tax code in its second term. A panel will be named before the end of this month to examine changes the administration feels could simplify the tax code, promote economic growth and spur more savings and investment.

Do you trust these morons to do "tax reform?"

Debt is debt. The credit reporting agencies check yours before they let you take on any more. Most of your creditors think it matters, but for Bushco, the government is some sort of imperial monsterpiece for whom none of the ordinary rules apply.

I wish the creditors with whom I've racked up debt in the last six years would just say, "Whatever."

W seems to think that the world works sort of like his life history: you can screw up and someone your daddy knows will bail you out. That's fine for him, but he's taking the rest of us along, and we know better.

Code Words

I retain big doubts. This law makes the spooks more intrusive into our lives and I seem to recall that prior to 9-11 Richard Clarke's "hair was on fire" but no one listened. The problem wasn't with the spooks. It has never been clear to me that the "intelligence" needed to be reformed, or why. What has been clear to me is that an ideological reading of the intel needed to be chucked.

This is a sop which makes it look like something is being done to prevent another 9-11 when the fact is that nothing is being done.

Bush Signs Intelligence Overhaul Into Law

By Edwin Chen and Greg Miller, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — President Bush signed the most sweeping overhaul of the nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus in half a century on Friday, a move that he said would bolster America's defenses against "stateless networks" of terrorists.

But officials and key lawmakers said significantly more work lay ahead for the White House and Congress. Bush still must name a new national intelligence director, define the duties of the job and establish an office.

"This is only a first step," said former Indiana Rep. Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the blue-ribbon commission that spent 20 months investigating the pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and made most of the recommendations incorporated into the bill that Bush signed.

The law's co-authors, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), agreed that more must be done. "Our legislation is the platform for the work that lies ahead," they said in a statement. "We must ensure that our intelligence agencies have the leadership, agility and resources necessary for this new structure to succeed."

Topping the to-do list is naming the national intelligence director, a post created by the law. The director Bush selects will have significant latitude to define not only the job but also the evolving roles of the 15 agencies he or she manages.

"This is a start-up, and there are 1,000 detailed questions when you have a start-up," said Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission.

"A lot of it has to do with who is in charge and the way that person asserts their authorities. The first holder of the office will do a lot to define the institution."

Bush will have some time to work through many of the issues because key aspects of the legislation do not take effect for six months, Zelikow noted.

The law, formally known as the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, creates a national counter-terrorism center to serve as the primary organization that processes terrorism-related intelligence.

"Had such information been handled more efficiently and more wisely, [the Sept. 11 attacks] might have been — might have been — interrupted," said Democratic attorney Richard Ben-Veniste, a Sept. 11 commission member.

The legislation also includes several anti-terrorism provisions, adding 2,000 additional border patrol agents each year for five years, improving baggage screening procedures, imposing new standards on information that must be contained in driver's licenses and making it easier to track suspected "lone wolf" terrorists not linked to known terrorist groups.

In all, the legislation imposes the broadest restructuring of America's intelligence-gathering infrastructure since the creation of the CIA, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council after World War II.

One of the fundamental questions is whether the director of national intelligence will assume the role of briefing the president every day. The legislation establishes the director as the principal intelligence advisor to the president, but leaves it to the White House and its chosen director to interpret that authority.

But if your dunderhead president doesn't use the intelligence, excuse me, intelligently, or reshapes it for political gain, exactly nothing has been accomplished.

Let me say that another way: exactly nothing is accomplished by this move, other than racking up a new thing to spend tax dollars on.

Axis of....

Paul Woodward at The War in Context has spied out the Bush intent on Syria. "Four More Wars" is not out of the question as an election theme. Paul has rounded up all of the week's articles.

Fortunately for Syria, all of our troops are committed to the sands of Mesopotamia for the next dance. I do believe that the generals won't let W get away with this one.

R & D

Two reporters chase down the same story and come up with very different pieces.

Both are worth reading.

Pricey Drug Trials Turn Up Few New Blockbusters
By ALEX BERENSON

Published: December 18, 2004

Three major drug companies - Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly - each disclosed serious problems with important medicines yesterday, throwing a spotlight on the fact that the $500 billion drug industry is stumbling badly in its core business of finding new medicines.

The decline in drug research and development has been an open secret among analysts and scientists for years. But drug company executives have insisted that their industry is fundamentally healthy and their expensive research efforts will pay off.

They have tried, meanwhile, to offset their weakness in creating profitable new drugs by pursuing aggressive campaigns to market existing drugs to doctors and patients, impose big price increases and make efforts to extend patents on existing medicines. Those tactics have protected their profits but irritated consumers and governments that pay for drugs, causing a political reaction in the United States and Europe.

After yesterday's news, the intensity of that reaction seems likely to increase.

In less than 12 hours, Pfizer said that it had found increased risk of heart problems for people taking Celebrex, a painkiller that is one of the world's best-selling medicines. AstraZeneca reported that a trial of Iressa, a lung cancer drug approved in the United States last year, showed that the drug did not prolong lives. And Eli Lilly warned doctors that Strattera, its drug to treat attention deficit disorder, usually in children, had caused severe liver injury in at least two patients.

Investors punished all three companies, sending Pfizer stock down 11.2 percent, AstraZeneca down 7.7 percent and Eli Lilly down 2.4 percent. Collectively, the declines reduced the market value of the three companies by more than $30 billion, worsening the industry's weak performance this year.

The sequence of events is a sign that the companies must confront their difficulties in finding new drugs, said Richard T. Evans, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, a Wall Street research firm.

"Their R.&D.; productivity is just terrible," he said.

No major drug company is exempt from the problem. The number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has declined sharply since the mid-1990's, falling from 53 in 1996 to 21 in 2003, even as the industry has nearly doubled its annual spending on drug development, to about $33 billion.

Complicating the process, many drugs already on the market do a reasonably good job, so the bar that new therapies must cross is high, especially because most are expensive.

If companies cannot reverse the trend, investors will almost certainly demand that they cut their research spending. Meanwhile, governments, faced with growing drug costs for publicly financed programs like Medicare and Medicaid, may well alter regulations on drug marketing or force the companies to cut prices, Mr. Evans said. A result in the long run may be an industry that is less profitable and less able to produce new drugs for patients.

Still, experts note that progress comes in fits and starts and the flood of newly discovered biomedical information could lead to many new drugs. But traditional drug companies have not yet had much luck with biotechnology, though they have licensed some drugs from biotechnology companies.

While they struggle with new technologies, the companies are facing a steady stream of patent expirations on their most profitable drugs. To combat that, Pfizer and some other companies have used mergers or acquisitions to grow. But those deals do nothing to increase their overall ability to produce new medicines, critics say, and may even hurt the industry as merging companies struggle to integrate their laboratories.

Dr. Jerry Avorn, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of "Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks and Costs of Prescription Drugs" (Knopf, 2004), said the absence of new drugs had caused companies to try to stoke demand for their existing medicines by marketing them directly to consumers.

"If you don't have a lot of breakthrough drugs in your pipeline, and you're a company, you need to market the hell out of the drugs that you do have," Dr. Avorn said. As a result, many people are taking drugs that have only a moderate benefit for them, or no benefit at all, he said.

Here is how it is broken. This drug clearly needs to be recalled and yet...

Celebrex Trial Halted After Finding Of Heart Risk
FDA Chief Urges Patients To Ask About Alternatives

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page A01

A clinical trial of the blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex was shut down yesterday after researchers found an increase in the risk of serious heart disease and strokes in those taking the drug, the same side effects that caused the related painkiller Vioxx to be taken off the market this fall.

The manufacturer of Celebrex, Pfizer Inc., gave no indication that it would withdraw its product, saying the new results are at odds with other ongoing and completed clinical trials.

But the Food and Drug Administration's acting commissioner, Lester Crawford, said the agency has "great concerns about this product and this class of products" -- the COX-2 inhibitors that tens of millions of Americans have taken. "We don't have a decision yet on the fate of this product, but we're leaving all regulatory options open," Crawford said.

COX-2 inhibitors were hailed in the late 1990s as a historic advance in arthritis and pain treatment, but the agency is now seriously considering regulatory action to limit their use or remove them from the market. Crawford said that patients using Celebrex should meet with their doctors to discuss possible alternate therapies, and that those continuing on the drug should use the smallest dosage possible.

The worrisome results came from a clinical trial being conducted by the National Cancer Institute into whether Celebrex might protect people at risk of colorectal cancer. Ernest Hawk, chief of gastrointestinal research for the NCI, said a team of cardiovascular specialists had been brought in to help analyze the cardiovascular risk of Celebrex for participants in the trial after Vioxx was withdrawn in late September.

Hawk said the experts, along with the safety monitoring board of the trial, found that patients on 400 milligrams of Celebrex were 2.5 times as likely to have a heart attack or stroke as the group taking a placebo. For patients taking 800 milligrams a day, the risk of serious cardiovascular events was 3.4 times as great.

National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni said that the agency is now reviewing about 40 other studies using Celebrex to determine whether they should be discontinued.

A colleague with background in the history of litigation with these drugs tells me that the Cox-2 inhibitors have been a known problem since the time they were released. They are the pricey follow-on to the Ibuprofen class of drugs but don't really work any better, but were just marketed out the wazzoo.

If you are taking Bextra, I'd be on the phone with my doctor first thing in the morning.

Refreshment

Bumpers, I'm fried and heading for bed shortly. This has been a long and difficult week, and I need rest and sustenance.

The weekend will provide some recipes for sustenance because I need to get away from the traditional newshooks for a while: I'm seeing what the papers aren't giving you, and the news is so horrifying that I'm finding it difficult to look at for long.

My colleague Big Tino promises some of his family recipes. I grew up on the whitest of white foods, scandanavian culture in Minnesota, Tino's a mixed black-Cuban-creole from Texas. Our food realities couldn't be more different, and I'm looking forward to the family heirloom recipes.

That said, we both buy our lunchtime sandwiches from the same Subway franchise, but when we go home at night or entertain friends, our kitchens look very different.

Here's a quickie I make on nights when I'm too fried for elaborate cooking. The Romans call this "pasta aglio e oglio," if you have fresh pasta, that's the best, but the store bought stuff--dried--is still satisfying.

For one

Six ounces of dried pasta, four ounces of fresh
4 cloves garlic
2 Tbs Butter
4 Tbs Really good olive oil
Fresh pepper, salt to taste (never use the stuff)

While the pasta water is coming to a boil, smash the garlic and place in the oil and melted butter on low heat. It shouldn't fry or even simmer. The preparation of the garlic makes this dish: the heat should be so low that it doesn't even brown. The garlic is there to infuse the oil, rather than be cooked. A garlic press will simplify the process, but itsn't necessary. The garlic should bubble, but never fry.

While the garlic is infusing, and the water is heating, sautee a couple of decent sized white mushrooms, sliced into 1/2" slices, in a little olive oil. Turn them out of the pan on to paper towels to drain after they've just begun to brown. Brush a paper towel over the top to soak up the rest of the oil. The recipe secret here is to dress them with the juice of a lemon slice (if you are making this for one, if you are making it for a larger crowd, use the juice of a half lemon. Lemon wakes up sauteed 'shrooms. Otherwise, they are just fried fungi.)

When the pasta is done, check with your teeth, turn into a bowl warmed with the melted butter and smashed garlic in the oven. Toss and serve with a green salad, and pears and Belaggio for dessert. You won't have eaten, you will have dined. Top with grated parmesan, and generous grated pepper. If it is summer and you have handfuls of fresh basil, chop it fine and sprinkle like confetti.

This recipe serves one as a main dish, two as a first course.

Variations can include sun-dried tomatoes, baby lettuces or spinach and pine nuts. This is a sturdy cold-weather dish that tolerates a lot of variation. I'll have Cucina de Lidia's variation on Sunday, I like the way her cooking brain works.

If They'd Gotten Guts Earlier

Courts turn journalists into criminals

Tim Crews

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

AN AMERICAN journalist today must be prepared to go to jail.

Newspapermen from the first days of this country would be saddened, but not shocked, to see 21st-century courts stampede to corral journalists, whether with the cudgel of subpoenas or fear of subpoenas.

Oddly enough, the press ought to have seen this coming and prepared for it. Even now, with reporters from Time Magazine and the New York Times held in contempt and facing 18-month prison sentences, the response from the mainstream American press has been tepid.

Few seem to know about -- or consider their legacy -- Benjamin Franklin Bache, who was beaten at the behest of President John Adams, arrested for printing news that the government did not like and for publishing documents that showed leading Federalists were lying about the "evil schemes" of France. Read: weapons of mass destruction.

Today, while more and more journalists are subpoenaed by federal investigators in connection with the alleged retaliatory "outing" of a CIA agent married to a critic of President George W. Bush, subpoenas are being used by defense attorneys and grand juries.

A few are standing tall. But the response of many in the press is predictable: Don't make waves. Death by self-censorship.

It's not just that reporters, photographers, editors and publishers have become very cautious or timid. Many have capitulated altogether and refuse to do any journalism that requires deep probing and sources to be protected. Consider that the New York Times' Judith Miller is being questioned about sources for a story she never wrote.

There is little doubt, from the acid poured upon my newspaper for publishing a send-up of the overzealous Patriot Act, that many are quite ready to silence a free press, ostensibly for reasons of security but really for reasons of having their self-deception disturbed.

It has come to a time, it seems to us, that journalists worth their salt must contemplate committing civil disobedience in nearly every issue. If we report that the county is misspending money or defrauding prisoners, we are cast as disloyal. "Get on board the bus, boy, or get run over" -- that's the message from Washington and Sacramento.

I'm a little less than sympathetic to this whining by the poodle press. It's not like Bush has ever gotten hardball or even factual coverage from the major papers. The Bushies would be a little less likely to go after reporters that were vigorous in investigation rather than being a transcription service for the White House.

I said back at the beginning of the regime that if the White House reporters had simply banded together and refused to cover the Bush White House as a group, they couldn't have been singled out for Rove's isolating maneuvers.

Beneath the Radar

Remember all the stink in the US media about the cost of the second Clinton inaugural? I don't hear a peep from them on this:

Bush's second inauguration will be the most expensive in history
By Tim Reid
The week of celebrations will cost over £20 million but Mr Bush does not want to forget US troops

PRESIDENT Bush will hold the most lavish and expensive inauguration celebration in American history when he is sworn in for his second term next month. But he hopes to temper the four-day extravaganza by holding special events to honour US troops in Iraq.

Mr Bush’s inaugural committee is hoping to raise more than $40 million (£20 million) for the event, a record. It announced yesterday that the theme for inauguration week, Washington’s equivalent of the Oscars, will be “celebrating freedom, honouring service”.

It is seen as a valiant effort amid the frenzy of black-tie balls, fireworks, corporate donors and cocktail parties to remind revellers that America is a nation at war.

Mr Bush is intimately involved in the details of his second inauguration, the traditional celebration centred on the January 20 ceremony when US presidents take the oath of office. He is anxious that US troops be constantly honoured.

Mr Bush appointed Mercer Reynolds, the man who headed the President’s record-breaking $273 million re-election fundraising effort, and perhaps the biggest beast in the Republicans’ prodigious money-raising machine, to mastermind the inauguration’s funding. The results have been spectacular.

The committee has just sent out hundreds of letters to Mr Bush’s biggest campaign contributors, offering packages of inauguration benefits and access to the President for an extraordinary amount of money.

At $250,000, the “underwriter” package being offered by the committee, will get the donor four seats to Mr Bush’s swearing-in ceremony; ten VIP seats at the inaugural parade; two tickets to an “exclusive” underwriters’ lunch featuring Mr Bush and Vice-President Cheney; and twenty seats at candlelit dinners that will take place simultaneously at three locations in Washington, with special appearances by the President, the First Lady, and Mr Cheney and his wife, Lynne.

The package also includes ten seats at the “America’s heroes: a salute to those who serve” gala; four tickets to a youth concert hosted by the Bushes’ twin daughters; ten seats to the inaugural kick-off celebration and fireworks; six passes to their home-state black-tie ball, with appearances by the President and vice-President; and four passes to any of the nine official inaugural balls.

Those who donate $100,000 will be feted at a sponsors’ reception featuring the President and Vice-President, with two tickets to the President’s swearing-in, along with tickets to the candlelit dinners, youth concert, salute to soldiers, balls and other events.

Hell, No, We Won't Go

The pattern of discontent in US ranks
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Since the fighting began in Iraq, the number of Guard and reserve troops on active duty

At this point, much of the data is scattered and anecdotal, like the doubling of desertions at the Army's Fort Bragg in North Carolina last year to about 200. It may be too early to draw exact comparisons with earlier wars, experts agree.

But they also note a growing trend for GIs to speak out and to find leverage points to protect their interests - including personal safety. "I am amazed that it is not greater," says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner. "The war continues to go badly. Their equipment is in bad shape. Supply problems continue. Tours are extended. Many are on a second or third deployment to a combat zone. I would expect a louder voice."

A key issue for war planners is whether any of this adversely effects individual morale and unit performance. That remains an open question, particularly as the war goes on and its original rationale (weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda) fades.

"Soldiers always gripe, and often with good reason," says Loren Thompson, head of security studies at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "But I don't see much evidence that the enemy in Iraq is eroding the will of US forces to fight. As long as US forces are well led, the gripes aren't likely to lead to more serious problems."

Others aren't so sure.

"When you are risking your life on the battlefield, the importance of knowing why you are doing so cannot be underestimated," says Ivan Eland, national security analyst at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "If soldiers don't know why they are fighting there or believe they've been hoodwinked, we may see the same phenomenon happen in Iraq as occurred in Vietnam."

Soldier is shot in alleged plot to avoid Iraq
Friend accused of pulling trigger

LOS ANGELES TIMES

PHILADELPHIA - A U.S. Army combat veteran on leave from a unit headed back to Iraq arranged for a friend to shoot him in the leg in an attempt to avoid returning to the war zone, Philadelphia police said yesterday.

Spec. Marquise Roberts, 23, first told police that he had been shot Tuesday afternoon as he walked past two men who were arguing on a north Philadelphia street.

But police said their investigation found that Mr. Roberts actually was shot once in the leg by a friend as part of a scheme to avoid returning to Iraq.

Mr. Roberts, who served seven months in Iraq during the U.S. invasion in 2003, was due to report back to Fort Stewart, Ga., on Wednesday, police said. He is a supply specialist with the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), according to commanders at Fort Stewart.

They said Mr. Roberts, who has been in the army since 2001, was on two-week holiday leave to his home in Philadelphia.

The division, which helped topple the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad in April, 2003, has been ordered to begin heading back to Iraq next month. He returned from Iraq in mid-summer.

Philadelphia police said Mr. Roberts was shot by his wife's cousin, Roland Fuller, 28, in north Philadelphia Tuesday afternoon. Officials at a nearby hospital called police after Mr. Roberts sought medical treatment - standard policy for gunshot wounds, police said.

Mr. Roberts told police that he heard a gunshot as he walked past a street dispute and then realized he had been shot in the leg.

But Mr. Fuller told detectives that Mr. Roberts had been shot during an attempted robbery, police said.

Detectives who searched the scene where Mr. Roberts said he was shot found no bullet casings, blood, or witnesses who recalled seeing or hearing gunshots.

"The investigation determined that he [Roberts] didn't want to go back to Iraq and staged the shooting to avoid having to return," according to a police investigator.

This really does look like Viet Nam all over again.

Mental Health

An MD responds to yesterday's NYT headline:

To the Editor:

I have only one quibble with your fine article: as an Army psychiatrist working daily with soldiers recently returned from Iraq, I assure you that the flood is not "in the offing," as your headline says; the flood is here.

William Peterson, M.D.
Chief, Mental Health Services
United States Army Health Clinic
Hanau, Germany, Dec. 16, 2004

Driving Your Guard Down

Guard Reports Serious Drop in Enlistment
By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: December 17, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.

In addition, the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, said on Thursday that he needed $20 billion to replace arms and equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan or left there for other Army and Air Guard units to use, so that returning reservists will have enough equipment to deal with emergencies at home.

The sharp decline in recruiting is significant because National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers now make up nearly 40 percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq, and are a vital source for filling the ranks, particularly those who perform essential support tasks, like truck drivers and military police.

General Blum said the main reason for the Army National Guard's recruiting shortfall was a sharp reduction in the number of recruits joining the Guard and Reserve when they leave active duty. In peacetime the commitment means maintaining their ties to the military with a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the summer.

Over the last 30 years, General Blum said, the Guard has counted on these soldiers with prior military service for about half of its recruits. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many of these soldiers have been hesitant to join the Guard because of the increasing likelihood that America's citizen-soldiers will be activated and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for up to 12 months. Indeed, many of the active-duty soldiers the Army would like to enlist in the Reserves have recently fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and some have no inclination to do so again.

In an effort to halt the slide, the Army National Guard this week approved recruiting incentives that triple the enlistment bonuses to $15,000 for soldiers with prior military experience who sign up for six years (tax-free if soldiers enlist overseas), Guard officials said. Bonuses for new enlistees will increased to $10,000 from $6,000.

The Guard has already said it intends to increase the number of recruiters to 4,100 from 2,700 over the next three months, the first large increase since 1989.

"We're in a more difficult recruiting environment, period," General Blum told reporters in disclosing the new figures and the new incentives. "There's no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult."

The solution? Make the jobs situation even worse. Watch the unemployment figures in coming months.

Living on Dogfood

Prof. Krugman is supposed to be on a textbook writing break, but the news has so alarmed him, that he has returned early.

Buying Into Failure
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 17, 2004

As the Bush administration tries to persuade America to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k), we can learn a lot from other countries that have already gone down that road.

Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find. For example, the Century Foundation, at www.tcf.org, provides a wide range of links.

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

These fees cut sharply into the returns individuals can expect on their accounts. In Britain, which has had a privatized system since the days of Margaret Thatcher, alarm over the large fees charged by some investment companies eventually led government regulators to impose a "charge cap." Even so, fees continue to take a large bite out of British retirement savings.

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry.

Advocates insist that a privatized U.S. system can keep expenses much lower. It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising.

And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned.

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.

The same thing is happening in Britain. Its Pensions Commission warns that those who think Mrs. Thatcher's privatization solved the pension problem are living in a "fool's paradise." A lot of additional government spending will be required to avoid the return of widespread poverty among the elderly - a problem that Britain, like the U.S., thought it had solved.

Britain's experience is directly relevant to the Bush administration's plans. If current hints are an indication, the final plan will probably claim to save money in the future by reducing guaranteed Social Security benefits. These savings will be an illusion: 20 years from now, an American version of Britain's commission will warn that big additional government spending is needed to avert a looming surge in poverty among retirees.

What Paul fails to understand: Bushco thinks that retirees living on dogfood and unable to afford their prescriptions are just fine: This brand of social Calvinism believes that capital collects in the hands of the worthy and everyone else can just literally go to Hell.

In this religious scheme, Catholics and communists are considered unbelievers and not worthy of space on the planet. God help you if you are a Jew. The purity tests make the McCarthyites look attractive.

The Buddies

Fiddling as Iraq Burns
By BOB HERBERT

Published: December 17, 2004

he White House seems to have slipped the bonds of simple denial and escaped into the disturbing realm of utter delusion. On Tuesday, there was President Bush hanging the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who slept through the run-up to Sept. 11 and then did the president and the nation the great disservice of declaring that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a fatal misjudgment.

Another Medal of Freedom was given to Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator of the American occupation, who made the heavily criticized decision to disband the defeated Iraqi Army and presided over an ever-worsening security situation. Thousands upon thousands have died in this unnecessary and incompetently conducted war, yet here was the president handing out medals as if some kind of triumph had been achieved. If these guys could get the highest civilian award, what honor is left for someone who actually does a good job?

A third medal was given to Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, which Mr. Bush, in his peculiar way, has characterized as a "catastrophic success." It's an interesting term. Some people have applied it to the president's run for re-election.

By anyone's standards, terrible things are happening in Iraq, and no amount of self-congratulation in Washington can take the edge off the horror being endured by American troops or the unrelenting agony of the Iraqi people. The disconnect between the White House's fantasyland and the world of war in Iraq could hardly have been illustrated more starkly than by a pair of front-page articles in The New York Times on Dec. 10. The story at the top of the page carried the headline: "It's Inauguration Time Again, and Access Still Has Its Price - $250,000 Buys Lunch With President and More."

The headline on the story beneath it said: "Armor Scarce for Heavy Trucks Transporting U.S. Cargo in Iraq."

This administration has many things on its mind besides the welfare of overstretched, ill-equipped G.I.'s dodging bombers and snipers in Iraq. In addition to the inauguration, which will cost tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush is busy with his obsessive campaign against "junk and frivolous lawsuits," his effort to further lighten the tax load on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, and his campaign to cut the legs from under the proudest achievement of the New Deal, Social Security.

So much for America's wartime priorities.

Even domestic security gets short shrift. During the Republican convention, Mr. Bush said, "I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country." Try squaring that with the Bernard Kerik fiasco, in which the administration's background check of its candidate for the nation's ultimate domestic security post was handled with the same calamitous incompetence as the intelligence effort that led to the war in Iraq.

Mr. Bush's pick (at Rudy Giuliani's urging) for homeland security secretary turned out to be a slick character who had once ducked a required F.B.I. clearance, had a social relationship with the owner of a company suspected of business ties to organized crime figures and had rented a love nest that overlooked the ruins of the World Trade Center.

"I'm Not Perfect," said a headline next to Mr. Kerik's picture in Tuesday's New York Post.

You wonder, with so much at stake, where to look in the Bush constellation for the care and competence that the times call for. Colin Powell is heading toward the exit, to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice, who did her best to petrify the nation with loose talk about mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney would still have us believe in a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The man who took the lead in vetting Bernie Kerik, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, was also the point person in the administration's bid to duck the constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and even to justify torture.

The tests for this admin are ideological, rather than practical. Mouth the right words and you have a job. In any other world, Bernie Kerik would be considered a moral monster, but in Bushworld, he's right at home.

He'll hop to K Street from this little skirmish, and feel right at home.

The Price

Bumpers,

I'm all in, going to put on my robe and nightshirt and my fuzzy slippers and watch a little teevee while I nod off. The last couple of weeks have been brutal, both on the blog and in real life and I still haven't bought one Christmas present. I have a couple of hazy ideas, but that's about all.

Chances are the day tomorrow will start very early, with me on Amazon, trying to get some Christmas action going and trying to turn those hazy ideas into reality. I hope you are having better luck.

I'll be hitting the local small businesses first. I encourage you to support your local small businesses before you turn to the chains. The small merchants are idiosyncratic and interesting, even if they aren't to your taste or that of your giftees. And they are grateful for your business, something you won't find at the megabox, so browse them first. At this point, most of them have webpresences, so you can still shop online.

In the year coming forward, I want my custom to be personal. And to keep it in the community. It's going to take work to do this, but I think it will be worth it. Magruder's here I come. It's a longer commute than the Giant down the street, but it is a local chain.

Good Writing

Bump regular Robert Pankey just sent me a link to an online journal of which I was unaware, Godspy: Faith at the Edge. What to do tonight has just been determined: I'm going to be reading. Robert sent links to a couple of articles, but I'm surveying the whole journal: the writing and thinking so far is excellent. This is a tremendous resource for the religious left. I'll watch it for a few issues and if the quality remains as high as what I'm looking at tonight, this will be the first publication to get a place on the blogroll.

Go read if you've got a little time. Go read it even if you think you aren't interested in religion or Christianity: you might find your concept of "religion" challenged.

There was a time, not that long ago, when I had a huge bias against reading things on a monitor, preferring dead tree material. Boy, have I changed. But I still need a better monitor....

Here is what the 'zine says about itself:

Blowing the Dynamite

Godspy's mission is to be a place where such encounters can take place. A place where Catholics and others searching for the face of God can together ponder "the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies" [King Lear].

And that's why I'm a Catholic.

"What Does it Take to Get Fired Around Here?"

Rumsfeld rumblings grow louder

By Todd S. Purdum The New York Times

It is not the first time that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stirred controversy among even his fellow Republicans, and it probably won't be the last.
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But Rumsfeld's seeming dismissal last week of a National Guardsman's concerns about lack of armor for vehicles headed to Iraq has sparked a sharp round of fresh criticism from prominent Republican senators, a retired general and an intellectual architect of the Iraq war.
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"I think there are increasing concerns about the secretary's leadership of the war," Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in an interview.
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Collins, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a leader in the recent successful fight to pass, over the objections of some in the Pentagon, a bill overhauling intelligence-gathering, predicted that Rumsfeld would face increasing scrutiny and skepticism on Capitol Hill.
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No one was willing to predict any groundswell of Republican calls for Rumsfeld's ouster.
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But by nature, Collins is the opposite of a bomb-thrower. So her sharp comments, together with those of two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, retired, who led the Gulf war and twice campaigned for President George W. Bush, suggested that the ground might well be shifting under Rumsfeld a bit, posing new risks to his political survival in the months ahead.
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Moreover, William Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard and a longtime advocate of using force to topple Saddam Hussein, wrote in an Op-Ed article published in The Washington Post on Wednesday, that Rumsfeld's time had passed.
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"Surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term," Kristol wrote. He added that American soldiers "deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."
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Rumsfeld has been the subject of sharp criticism and the butt of late-night jokes since he dismissed a National Guard scout's complaint in Kuwait last week about a lack of armor on vehicles bound for Iraq by asserting, "You go to war with the army you have."
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McCain, Hagel and now Collins have all raised pointed questions about Rumsfeld's leadership. So has General Schwarzkopf.
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But several Republican aides on Capitol Hill, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was Kristol's criticism that was jarring - because he has long been one of the war's most ardent supporters, because he cast Rumsfeld's comments as part of a broader pattern of misjudgments and buck-passing since the war began, and because he concluded that Rumsfeld was not up to the task of winning the peace.
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The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, told reporters that, "the president has every bit of confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld."
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But with so many prominent Republicans now on the record critical of Rumsfeld, some of them predicted that he would face even greater skepticism and scrutiny from Congress in the coming months.
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Senator John Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was addressing a NATO gathering in Brussels and not available for comment, said his spokesman, John Ullyot. He has held critical hearings into the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some colleagues suggested that he, too, was none too pleased by Rumsfeld's latest controversial comments.
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One Republican Senate aide summed up the prevailing feeling about Rumsfeld this way: "What does it take to get fired around here?"

That's an interesting question. Obviously, the W admin isn't about competence, but since the voters don't seem to care, it's a dead letter.

I'm looking at an explosion of yellow ribbons around here, and this is an inside the beltway neighborhood. (Inside the beltway is Blue State, outside is purple tending red the further you get from DC.)

Infosec

Told ya. We have to take responsibility for our own security. Charles' series on harware firewalls couldn't be more timely.

I'll be away for a few hours at the office holiday party. Treat this as an IT Open Thread.

Going Online? Wear Your Galoshes

By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, December 16, 2004; 7:55 AM

Even without such an in-your-face strategy, moms don't get off scot-free. They shouldn't be required to secure a degree from the polytechnic or to distinguish a .vbs from a .dll, but they do need to know that surfing the Web is, personal responsibility-wise, akin to driving a car.

And nice as it would be to get the government in on the act, don't look to Uncle Sam for help. The Bush administration made a half-hearted attempt to convince the corporate world to strengthen network security, but it would have been much more whole-hearted had the original version gone live -- the one that said, "This is not a suggestion, it's an order."

Now, even the private sector is looking to the government for more leadership. Earlier this month, a coalition representing several brand-name tech firms practically begged the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to place cyber-security a little more prominently on their radar screens.

The government's best bet may be to push for more laws that punish the bad guys. It passed a federal law to reduce spam e-mails, and Congress did its darnedest this year to cut down on spyware and other intrusive software.

So what do regular computer users do in the meantime? Dress your computer in layers, the same way Mom would do for you on a cold winter's day. When you head online in 2005, don't forget the (fully up-to-date) anti-virus software , the firewall, the spam filter, the this and the that -- all the inescapable necessities for the modern computer user.

As 2004 showed us (and 2003, 2002 etc. showed before), to ignore computer safety is to make you and your personal financial records vulnerable to a worldwide network of thieves. Doing nothing to protect yourself makes you part of the problem.

Mom's already learning. Just this week she got a message from the tech department at her workplace warning employees not to click on the links or open attachments that come in e-mail holiday greetings cards, even if they appear to be from someone she knows. "Do you know what I mean?" she asked with that hesitating tone that suggests she's still getting her security sea legs. "You know me, how absolutely basic my knowledge is of all this stuff."

I do know. Mom has taken a giant step toward safe computing. If she can do it, so can everyone else.

Koufax Time

It's Koufax nomination time. Go over and tell Mary Beth what you think.

The Whatever Administration

Rumsfeld rumblings grow louder

By Todd S. Purdum The New York Times

It is not the first time that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stirred controversy among even his fellow Republicans, and it probably won't be the last.
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But Rumsfeld's seeming dismissal last week of a National Guardsman's concerns about lack of armor for vehicles headed to Iraq has sparked a sharp round of fresh criticism from prominent Republican senators, a retired general and an intellectual architect of the Iraq war.
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"I think there are increasing concerns about the secretary's leadership of the war," Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in an interview.
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Collins, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a leader in the recent successful fight to pass, over the objections of some in the Pentagon, a bill overhauling intelligence-gathering, predicted that Rumsfeld would face increasing scrutiny and skepticism on Capitol Hill.
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No one was willing to predict any groundswell of Republican calls for Rumsfeld's ouster.
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But by nature, Collins is the opposite of a bomb-thrower. So her sharp comments, together with those of two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, retired, who led the Gulf war and twice campaigned for President George W. Bush, suggested that the ground might well be shifting under Rumsfeld a bit, posing new risks to his political survival in the months ahead.
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Moreover, William Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard and a longtime advocate of using force to topple Saddam Hussein, wrote in an Op-Ed article published in The Washington Post on Wednesday, that Rumsfeld's time had passed.
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"Surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term," Kristol wrote. He added that American soldiers "deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."
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Rumsfeld has been the subject of sharp criticism and the butt of late-night jokes since he dismissed a National Guard scout's complaint in Kuwait last week about a lack of armor on vehicles bound for Iraq by asserting, "You go to war with the army you have."
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McCain, Hagel and now Collins have all raised pointed questions about Rumsfeld's leadership. So has General Schwarzkopf.
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But several Republican aides on Capitol Hill, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was Kristol's criticism that was jarring - because he has long been one of the war's most ardent supporters, because he cast Rumsfeld's comments as part of a broader pattern of misjudgments and buck-passing since the war began, and because he concluded that Rumsfeld was not up to the task of winning the peace.
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The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, told reporters that, "the president has every bit of confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld."
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But with so many prominent Republicans now on the record critical of Rumsfeld, some of them predicted that he would face even greater skepticism and scrutiny from Congress in the coming months.
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Senator John Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was addressing a NATO gathering in Brussels and not available for comment, said his spokesman, John Ullyot. He has held critical hearings into the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some colleagues suggested that he, too, was none too pleased by Rumsfeld's latest controversial comments.
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One Republican Senate aide summed up the prevailing feeling about Rumsfeld this way: "What does it take to get fired around here?"

That's an interesting question. Obviously, the W admin isn't about competence, but since the voters don't seem to care, it's a dead letter.

I'm looking at an explosion of yellow ribbons around here, and this is an inside the beltway neighborhood.

You Can't Bite It Anymore

Bush Pledges Stronger Dollar
# He assures a European ally that he will work to boost the currency and cut the budget deficit. But Cheney's tax cut vow worries analysts.

By Joel Havemann and Warren Vieth, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — President Bush, facing complaints from a European ally about the weakening dollar, said Wednesday that he favored a strong dollar and would work with Congress to cut the massive federal budget deficit that puts downward pressure on the U.S. currency.

But before Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated to a White House economic conference that the administration supported more tax cuts, which some analysts said could deepen the budget deficit and threaten the dollar's value.

The White House conference, which continues today, is intended to pave the way for Bush to promote changes to Social Security that the White House has said would probably require more federal borrowing.

Despite Bush's statement of support for a strong dollar, the U.S. currency weakened further on international markets, losing more than 1% of its value against the Japanese yen and nearly 1% against the euro.

The dollar's slide illustrates the difficulty Bush faces as he tries to assemble a set of economic policies that work in concert with his political goals. Trading partners have complained about the weak dollar, which makes U.S. goods cheaper on international markets, and Bush said Wednesday that he wanted to cut spending and reduce the deficit to create an environment that would strengthen the dollar.

At the same time, the president's top priorities include extending tax cuts, revamping Social Security and spending money for the Iraq war, all of which could add to the deficit and weaken the dollar.

From Europe's viewpoint, the euro's ascent compared with the dollar had damaged sales of its goods in the United States. This is why Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on a visit Wednesday to the White House, complained to Bush about the weak dollar, which has declined about 35% against the euro since February 2002. The euro is the currency of Italy and 10 other European nations.

"The policy of my government is a strong-dollar policy," Bush said after meeting with Berlusconi.

"He expressed his concerns about the relationship between the dollar and the euro," Bush told reporters in a brief Oval Office interview, with the Italian leader by his side. "I told him we're going to take this issue on seriously with the Congress. The best thing that we can do from the executive branch of government in America is to work with Congress to deal with our deficits."

Analysts said Bush had little choice but to stand behind the dollar.

"Comments about a strong dollar are kind of like saying, 'I'm all for education, motherhood and apple pie,' " said James Paulsen, chief investment officer for Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. "It's pretty much meaningless. The president can't get up in front of the nation and say, 'I'm for a weak dollar.' "

This "mirrors and blue smoke" strategy isn't fooling anybody. The dollar has to fall and we actually need it to, to finance our W debt. And we've got another $100 billion in IOUs coming up for the next year of Iraq. How are you spending your tax cut? You have a civic duty to shop.

The "Coalition"

EDITORIAL: SDF deployment in Iraq

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, known for his brusque comments, seemed unusually humble Thursday during his news conference to announce that the Self-Defense Forces mission in Iraq is being extended for another year. And he bowed deeply, saying, ``I sincerely ask the Japanese people for your understanding and support.''

The decision to extend the SDF term of service flies in the face of multiple opinion surveys that show more than 60 percent of the public is opposed. On top of this, the prospects for rebuilding Iraq seem unlikely to be completed anytime soon. It is against this background that the SDF has to stay put.

Judging by his facial expression and the way he delivered his words, Koizumi seemed to try to show how he wrestled with his conscience in reaching the decision and that he himself is beset with anxiety about the future.

In our editorial of Dec. 2, we argued that the government should completely withdraw the SDF from Iraq by March 2005, since by then, Iraq's National Assembly elections will be over, and Dutch troops (who have been in charge of security in Samawah, where Ground SDF troops are stationed) will have withdrawn.

We recognize the SDF's contributions in Samawah, but we also recognize the limitations of their activities. Instead of supporting the United States in this way, we proposed that it would be better for Japan to start afresh by helping the international community come up with a new outline for Iraq's reconstruction.

Koizumi's explanation on Thursday did not convince us that our editorial stance is wrong. He tried to explain why it was important to send the SDF, pointing out that since the Japan-U.S. alliance and international cooperation were the two mainstays of Japan's foreign policy, the government is acting accordingly. The alliance with the United States is no doubt crucial, but what about ``international cooperation''? Does it really exist in this case?

Yes, there is a unanimous U.N. resolution calling for Iraq's reconstruction. But only 30 countries are participating in the multinational forces, and France, Germany, Russia and China are not among them. More countries are withdrawing their troops out. Only the American forces are continuing to increase troop numbers to levels that exceed the war's start.

Iraq is in turmoil partly because the Iraqi people are bitter about being under what amounts to foreign occupation. Another reason is that the international community, still split, is powerless.

This is why many people doubt that National Assembly elections will take place next month. Koizumi gave his reasons for extending the SDF's deployment by intentionally ignoring these realities.

Anybody know how to spell "CYA" in Japanese?

The 51% Mandate

Presidential Medals of Failure

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, December 16, 2004; Page A37

It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.

Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.

The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?

To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.

Maybe next year.

Making awards to the face of failure is the perfect picture of W. He's the "Let's pretend" president.

Image and Likeness

A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict
By SCOTT SHANE

Published: December 16, 2004

Yoni Brook/The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans' advocates and military doctors say.

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

"There's a train coming that's packed with people who are going to need help for the next 35 years," said Stephen L. Robinson, a 20-year Army veteran who is now the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group. Mr. Robinson wrote a report in September on the psychological toll of the war for the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group.

"I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war," said Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997.

What was planned as a short and decisive intervention in Iraq has become a grueling counterinsurgency that has put American troops into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Psychiatrists say the kind of fighting seen in the recent retaking of Falluja - spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling Iraqi friend from Iraqi foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device - is tailored to produce the adrenaline-gone-haywire reactions that leave lasting emotional scars.

And in no recent conflict have so many soldiers faced such uncertainty about how long they will be deployed. Veterans say the repeated extensions of duty in Iraq are emotionally battering, even for the most stoical of warriors.

Send people into a moral quagmire in which they have little guidance and you are going to create monsters. You get what you wish for.

Hung By The Chimney With Care

For this one night, everything is working: I have sufficient cat food until the weekend, the trash and recycling have gone out and I have a week's worth of laundry on hangers, ready to wear with a touch up by the iron.

The kitchen floor will wait until the weekend, I'll hit the major (and only, sadly) downtown department store after work tomorrow.

I'll pay the major bills online in the morning and pray for inspiration. I'm so disconnected from the commercial culture that I don't have a clue about what to get folks this year, and don't own a credit card anymore, so ordering off the Internets is limited. If you know about sites that accept debit cards and would be willing to share, me and the rest of us with long-term unemployment issues will be VERY grateful. Getting a credit card back once you've lost it isn't a piece of cake.

We've got the phone line working again and I'll happily settle for "The God of Small Things."

I'm to bed. The sheets are just out of the drier. I don't think I need to say more.

David Blunkett is Gone

For the one or two of you who don't already know, David Blunkett is the British equivalent of John Ashcroft. Except that he's even crazier. And an even more devoted foe of anything even remotely resembling civil liberties.

The celebrations among leftie Brits are no doubt in full swing by now.

What brought him down? Well, a scandal, that's what.

Senior British cabinet minister David Blunkett resigns in fallout from affair

06:49 PM EST Dec 15
ROBERT BARR

LONDON (AP) - Britain's top law-enforcement officer, a key member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet, resigned on Wednesday after acknowledging that his department had fast-tracked a visa for his former lover's nanny.

David Blunkett's resignation was a blow for Blair, who had strongly supported him and confidently asserted he would be cleared of wrongdoing. Blunkett was in charge of key government legislation on crime and terrorism, and was establishing a new and controversial system of national identity cards.

Blunkett said he felt he had to step down because his actions led to preferential treatment for a residence visa for a Filipina nanny employed by his former lover, American magazine publisher Kimberly Quinn.

"I believe these issues would never have been raised had I not decided in September that I could not walk away from my youngest son," said Blunkett, who has gone to court to establish that he fathered Quinn's two-year-old son.

"Any perception of this application being speeded up requires me to take responsibility," Blunkett told reporters, but he denied that he had been dishonest about his role.

Blunkett, Britain's only blind legislator, had gained some sympathy for his shattered love affair, but appeared to undermine his position by making caustic comments about colleagues to the author of a newly published biography.

His problems have been a continuing distraction and embarrassment for the government since the affair was revealed in August, but it got worse this month with the disclosure of his low opinion of some of his colleagues.

Quinn's nanny, Leoncia Casalme, had been told by the Home Office that it might take a year to process her visa application. Quinn brought that to Blunkett's attention, and he said he in turn showed the letter to officials to stress that such delays were unacceptable.

That letter got into the system, Blunkett said, "and the system then spewed it out."

"And the system in the end did fast-track that particular application along with many others.

"And an e-mail was sent back which we were not aware of . . . which actually said, 'No favours, but slightly quicker.'

"And once I had found that out yesterday, I realized that I had to resign," Blunkett said.

He described the anguish of recent weeks as the "worst of my life," but indicated he would continue his legal fight over the boy - and take comfort from his future relationship with him.

"The disappointment and sometimes I think probably the depression of the months to come are absolutely nothing compared with the joy of being able in the future . . . to grow and work alongside - along with my older sons - my little lad," he said.

Earlier Wednesday, Opposition Conservative leader Michael Howard seized on Blunkett's comments to his biographer about his colleagues.

Howard tossed the biography toward Blair during a debate in the House of Commons, suggesting that he read it so that he could "give a full explanation of the government's total failure to deliver."

After Blair had left the chamber, a Labour Party member tossed the book back at the Conservative benches.

Blunkett's targets included Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Treasury chief Gordon Brown and Education Secretary Charles Clark. And Blair, Blunkett told biographer Stephen Pollard, doesn't like people who stand up to him.

Blunkett showed signs of feeling the pressure - using a back door to leave his home Wednesday to avoid reporters waiting at the front, and cancelling plans to appear in the House of Commons Wednesday afternoon to introduce initiatives to combat crime with knives.

He may not have helped himself by turning up at a Christmas party and singing a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers ditty, "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again." News reports said the song bombed, and Blunkett quickly departed.

An allegation in Wednesday's Daily Mail newspaper that Blunkett also interceded to get an Austrian tourist visa for the nanny was denied by Austria's ambassador. The newspaper quoted Casalme as saying Quinn had telephoned someone to seek action on the visit, but Casalme didn't know who.

Austrian Ambassador Alexander Christiani said he had reviewed the case file Wednesday morning and found no indication of any intervention from Blunkett's office.

"There was nothing untoward," he told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"Even if someone would have intervened it would have been superfluous because it was not a contentious matter," Christiani added.

Every once in a while, the Good Guys win one.

Morality and War

Australian terror suspect offered prostitute by US military

CANBERRA: An Australian terror suspect was offered the services of a prostitute by the US military if he agreed to spy on other detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, according to court documents. In an affidavit unsealed by a US District Court and seen by Reuters on Friday, David Hicks, a 29-year-old convert to Islam, said he was also beaten while blindfolded and handcuffed, threatened with weapons and had his head rammed into asphalt. Hicks was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2001 and was among the first small group of Guantanamo Bay detainees to be charged. He has pleaded not guilty to aiding the enemy, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit war crimes. “Interrogators once offered me the services of a prostitute for 15 minutes if I would spy on other detainees. I refused,” Hicks said in the affidavit, which is dated Aug. 5 and witnessed by his US military lawyer Major Michael Mori. reuters

In an earlier post, Charles mentioned that there is a moral dimension to US action at home and abroad. Charles and I haven't discussed this yet (we're both students of military history and tactics ala B.H. Liddell-Hart, the theory and practice of modern war, and I'm a big fan of Col. John Boyd, the originator of most of what has come to be thought of as Fourth Generation War, assymetrical war such as we are seeing in Iraq) but war also has a moral dimension and it is on moral grounds that we've lost all of the wars we've provoked. Boyd's disciple, William Lind, wrote back in the fall:

As is so often the case in Fourth Generation war, the most useful way to look at the situation is through the prism of John Boyd’s three levels of war: the physical, the mental and the moral. On the physical level, American-trained Iraqi security forces may have advantages over their Fourth Generation opponents. American training in techniques is often very good. While we are not giving the Iraqis equipment as good as our own (a big mistake on the moral level), it may be better than that of their enemies. With salaries of about $200 per month, our mercenaries are among the best paid men in Iraq.

That fear opens the door to the sort of deal that typifies Arab countries: the police and Guardsmen collect their paychecks, but look the other way when the resistance is up to something. In some cases, the deal can go further and create double agents, men inside the security forces who actually work for one or more of the resistance organizations. The same day’s Post announced the arrest of a “senior commander of the Iraqi National Guard” for, as the U.S. military put it, “having associations with known terrorists, for alleged ties to insurgents.” I suspect that if we arrested all the Iraqi Guardsmen who fit that description, Abu Ghraib would again fill to overflowing.

And then consider this:

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the decision that you made, why you decided you did not want to go to Iraq?

JEREMY HINZMAN: Well, I think it was -- if you are ever going to go destroy a country or wreak havoc on a country, it would need to be justified. Every justification or rationale that we have ever offered for going to Iraq has been bogus. There were no weapons of mass destruction there. There have been no links established between Saddam and international terrorists, and then the notion that we're going to bring democracy to Iraq is -- we'll see if that comes to fruition, but I don't think we'll see it, unless it's convenient to America's agenda. So anyway, I felt that we had attacked Iraq without any defensive basis, and I think it's been well established at Nuremburg that in those instances, you cannot simply just say that you're following orders, but you have a duty and obligation to disobey.

Reasonable people can and should debate "just war doctrine," and the way it applies in Iraq, but for me, this says everything I need to know:

Navy Documents Detail Iraqi Abuse Claims

By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer

12/15/04 "LA Times" -- WASHINGTON — Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners last year, burned and tortured other detainees with electrical shocks, and warned a Navy corpsman they would kill him if he treated any injured Iraqis, according to military documents made public Tuesday.

The latest revelations of prisoner abuse cases, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit against the government, involved previously unknown incidents in which 11 Marines were punished for abusing detainees. Military officials indicated that they had investigated 13 other cases, but deemed them unsubstantiated. Four investigations are pending.

Military superiors handed down sentences of up to a year in confinement after finding Marines guilty of offenses ranging from assault to "cruelty and mistreatment," the documents show.

The new documents are the latest in a series of reports, e-mails and other records that the ACLU has obtained to bolster its contention that the abuse of prisoners goes far beyond the handful of soldiers charged with abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American troops at the prison shocked the world in April. The scandal involved abuse by reservists and members of the Army and National Guard; the latest cases elaborated for the first time on numerous allegations of abuse by Marines.

The mistreatment occurred as early as May 2003, months before the first allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib were recorded. And the most recent case involving prisoner abuse by the Marines occurred in June, two months after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

And CNN is talking about war crimes trials for the top Ba'athists in Iraq?

You'll notice the morals and values voters aren't thinking about this. Sometimes I get so angry....

When Newsies Actually Report the News, then They Write Like Ninth-Graders

Iraq War Price Tag Tops $100B
# That's About Double The Original Prediction

Dec 15, 2004 6:34 am US/Central
(CBS News) It is not as grim a milestone as the number dead and wounded, but Pentagon officials say the latest accounting of dollars spent on the war in Iraq now exceeds $100 billion, CBS News National Security correspondent David Martin reports.

Compare that to the first war with Iraq, which cost about $80 billion, most of it paid by Saudi Arabia. The difference is that then the U.S. did not attempt to occupy another country.

But Rove has CNN reporting "he said/she said bogus debates about a Social Security system which needs a little tweaking. Iraq news is relegated to the crawls at the bottom of the cable news screens. And the American people, who love to be fooled, have succeeded at being fooled yet again.

Jeebus, I think I feel another recipe attack coming on for the weekend. Pablum writing like "another grim reminder" is starting to give me stomach trouble. I think I need to retreat to some good writing...if we are what we eat, then we are what we read, too, and this diet can't be good for my brain.

Hubbert's Peak

Stocks Move Lower on Climbing Oil Prices
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 15, 2004

Filed at 2:29 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Stocks crept higher Wednesday as investors overlooked rising oil prices to focus on strong results from Lehman Brothers and Sprint's much-rumored acquisition of Nextel Communications.

Bullish corporate news has trumped mixed economic numbers during the past two sessions, helping the Standard & Poor's 500 and the Nasdaq composite reach new three-year highs. Stocks drifted in and out of negative range Wednesday, but for the most part the indexes seemed to be holding their levels, which some analysts took as a positive sign.

``The markets are a little bit flat, it's nothing rip-roaring. Normally when you get to a significant trading level ... there's a natural inclination to take profits,'' said Brian Pears, head equity trader at Victory Capital Management in Cleveland. ``The fact that we're still higher speaks to the strength of the underlying bullish trend.''

In afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 1.12, or 0.01 percent, at 10,677.57.

The broader gauges were also narrowly higher. The S&P; 500 added 1.12, or 0.09 percent, to 1,204.50. The Nasdaq composite index fell 2.24, or 0.10 percent, to 2,157.60.

Oil prices trekked upward following the government's weekly inventory report, which showed a 100,000 barrel decline in crude stores. Supplies of distillate fuels, which include heating oil, were unchanged -- a disappointment to traders who had expected a build of 1 million barrels. Light, sweet crude for January delivery surged $2.18 to $44 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Obviously, the headline was not updated when the rest of the story was. That having been said, the oil news is very seriously scary. As has become abundently clear in the last couple of days, after a mild fall, the northeast and mid-Atlantic are headed for a colder than normal winter. This is the same geography which disproportionately relies on heating oil in the winter. OPEC announced last week that they are cutting production by a million barrels a day starting in January, but world consumption is already greedily swallowing everything they are producing now. That means the drop in gas prices of the last couple of weeks is only temporary.

The equities markets typically miscount the effect of changes in oil prices. This won't get Wall Street's attention until prices head for 50 dollars a barrel again.

Thanks for your Help and Patience

It's been a gold-plated bi*ch of a couple of weeks, but, by damn, we are back, all of us, me and you and Charles and pogge. I really can't even begin to tell you how much you were missed while Verizon took it's own sweet time.

We've survived browser crises, server meltdowns and telco idiocy. I'd say that we are pretty sturdy.

When I went to work at the place I work now (the blogging deal is that I don't talk about it) my then-boss argued to the top management that, as long as I keep the place out of the blog, I get to keep the blog. She said, "That's Melanie's community". She gets it.

I've decided to join some other communities and learn more about this medium, Webspace. Charles offered a very interesting invitation to pogge and I just before this latest set of crises, and now that I'm back on line, I'm going to take Charles up on the invitation, because I believe it will bring new information of importance for you, its a hang for the tech community. I'm growing my inner geek.

This will never be a tech site, there are enough of those already, but I read slash/dot and the Register, and when they surface something of importance to the general user, they'll get a headline.

We, the non-techs and home users, can't afford to be innocents about tech and security any more.

Think about this: while I was offline (sigh, it was weird) I went back through all the mail and comments I've received from pogge, alyosha and Charles over the last 9 months by using the search function on my email client.

What I got was the most concentrated tech education I could have asked for. I'll be following up on these leads for months, in addition to what I've already figured out at work.

Bump isn't just a community, it is a community with a university. There is enough wisdom here to keep those worthies busy for months. Do them a favor, they'll keep providing their wisdom to the site in direct proportion to their free time. If you make a lot of demands, they won't have much free time. Keep it in mind and read "comments," with a sense of direction.

Bump is a place for smart people with a sense of community who are willing to learn, and to teach. How cool is that?

We are re-starting today with a new keyboard with a bunch of bells and whistles. I will need to spend a little time poking around this new moonscape, too.

It's good to be back. It's lonely out there without Internet. You've been missed.

Please tolerate the typos while I learn my way around the spacing on a new keyboard. Yeah, I managed to fry the old one while trying to figure out why I'd lost my Internet connection.

Two things happened today that will make many of us noticeably poorer

No, I'm not talking about the fiscal policies of the Bush administration. I'm talking about the release of two boxed sets of DVDs. Namely, the third season of ST:TOS, and the extended edition of LotR/RotK.

Fortunately, this potentially bank balance crushing state of affairs is mitigated by the fact that the less expensive of these items is of the higher quality, and it happens to be on sale at Borders. :)

Sorry. The Devil made me do it. :)

Economic news

U.S. Economy: Trade Gap Widens to a Record $55.5 Bln (Update3)

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. trade deficit widened to an all-time high of $55.5 billion in October, boosted by a rise in oil prices and record imports from China as retailers geared up for the holidays.

The gap in goods and services trade exceeded the median forecast of $53 billion in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The deficit reached $500.5 billion in the first 10 months of the year, surpassing the record for all of 2003, the Commerce Department said today in Washington.

Factory production rose for a second month in November, reflecting greater demand for machinery and computers, the Federal Reserve said today. The two reports suggest a growing economy that will allow Fed officials, who meet today, to stick to their policy of ``measured'' interest-rate increases.

``Consumer spending is strong, the economy is doing OK and manufacturing is plateauing at a good pace,'' said Cary Leahey, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in New York. ``These numbers suggest continued modest tightening by the Fed.''

Americans bought more imported televisions, clothing, toys and stereos from foreign producers. Oil prices surged during the month, rising Oct. 25 to $55.67 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since futures trading began in 1983.

At $16.8 billion in October, the gap with China was the largest for any U.S. trading partner and almost three times the size of the deficit with Japan, which at $5.9 billion was the second biggest.

Reuters-
Fed Raises Interest Rate to 2.25 Percent
Business - Reuters

By Tim Ahmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve (news - web sites) raised U.S. interest rates on Tuesday by a quarter-percentage point for the fifth time this year and said it will keep gradually lifting them from rock-bottom levels as the economy grows.

The dollar dipped in the wake of the decision while stocks edged higher and Treasury bonds pared losses.

In other quarters, I'm hearing the European central bankers starting to get shrill about the rising Euro, but I'm not seeing any signs they are planning to do anything about it yet.

Election Headfake

Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote
by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke (bio) and Brian Dominick (bio)
Washington-funded organizations are hard at work providing assistance to political campaigns in the lead up to next month’s nationwide elections, but critics suggest their participation is anything but benevolent.

"As should be clear, the electoral process will be an Iraqi process conducted by Iraqis for Iraqis," declared United Nations special envoy, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, in a September 14 statement to the Security Council. "It cannot be anything else."

But in actuality, influential, US-financed agencies describing themselves as "pro-democracy" but viewed by critics as decidedly anti-democratic, have their hands all over Iraq’s transitional process, from the formation of political parties to monitoring the January 30 nationwide polls and possibly conducting exit polls that could be used to evaluate the fairness of the ballot-casting.

Campbell estimated that NDI’s contributions are probably disproportionately helpful to the more obscure, less experienced Iraqi parties.
Two such groups -- the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) -- are part of a consortium of non-governmental organizations to which the United States has provided over $80 million for political and electoral activities in post-Saddam Iraq.

Both groups publicly assert they are nonpartisan, but each has extremely close ties to its namesake American political party, and both are deeply partial to the perceived national interests of their home country, despite substantial involvement in the politics of numerous sovereign nations worldwide.

NDI is headed by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who took over the chair from former president Jimmy Carter. Republican Senator John McCain chairs IRI. Both groups have highly controversial reputations and are described throughout much of the world as either helpful, meddlesome, or downright subversive, depending on who you ask. In some places their work has earned praise from independent grassroots democracy advocates, but in many Third World republics, both groups have been tied to alleged covert plans to install US-favored governments.

The groups’ separate but overlapping mandates in Iraq include educating Iraqis on the democratic process, training Iraqi organizations to monitor the elections and deal with electoral conflicts, and providing impartial advice and training to political parties, according to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the official governmental organ funding the consortium's operations in Iraq. USAID contracts with and provides grants to private organizations that uphold its objectives, which include, according to the Agency’s own literature, "furthering America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets while improving the lives of citizens in the developing world."

IRI's relationship with parties dominating Iraq's interim government raises the question of how much influence the American group has had in determining the makeup of current coalitions
Far from the United Nations’ mission to oversee the election process itself, the American groups are actively engaged in cultivating political parties, and IRI appears to be working most heavily with parties and politicians favored by Washington.

Critics have expressed alarm, if not surprise, that policies carried out in other countries over the past two decades appear to be repeating in occupied Iraq. "USAID has learned that ‘legitimate’ leaders are not just found, they're made," wrote Herbert Docena, a research associate specializing in Iraq at the Bangkok-based activist think tank, Focus on the Global South. "Before the US withdraws from the scene, it first has to ensure that its Iraqis will know what to do."

According to Docena, USAID’s activity in Iraq, as carried out by non-governmental proxies, is drawn straight out of the Agency’s handbook, which advocates "capitalizing on national openings" and "[taking] advantage of national-level targets of opportunity" as they emerge, all while looking for a "strategic doorway" -- called an "entry point" -- that enables an Agency project to "anchor its program and optimize overall impact" in a target area.

"In Iraq, the ‘entry point’ was the invasion," Docena explained. "The ‘national opening’ was the collapsed state left in its wake."

Not in my name, you don't. This is the way we've been trying to remake the world for the benefit of our business interests for decades. Stories like this are why an AP-Ipsos poll released yesterday says that the French, Germans and Spanish are now majority unfavorable of Americans in general, not just Bush.

The Serf Class

What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal
By ADAM COHEN

Published: December 14, 2004

The New Deal made an unexpected appearance at the Supreme Court recently - in the form of a 1942 case about wheat. Some prominent states' rights conservatives were asking the court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn, a landmark ruling that laid out an expansive view of Congress's power to legislate in the public interest.

Supporters of states' rights have always blamed Wickard, and a few other cases of the same era, for paving the way for strong federal action on workplace safety, civil rights and the environment. Although they are unlikely to reverse Wickard soon, states' rights conservatives are making progress in their drive to restore the narrow view of federal power that predated the New Deal - and render Congress too weak to protect Americans on many fronts.

We take for granted today the idea that Congress can adopt a national minimum wage or require safety standards in factories. That's because the Supreme Court, in modern times, has always held that it can.

But the court once had a far more limited view of Congress's power. In the early 1900's, justices routinely struck down laws protecting workers and discouraging child labor. The court reversed itself starting in 1937, in cases that led to Wickard, and began upholding these same laws.

States' rights conservatives have always been nostalgic for the pre-1937 doctrines, which they have lately taken to calling the Constitution-in-Exile. They argue - at conferences like "Rolling Back the New Deal" and in papers like "Was the New Deal Constitutional?" - that Congress lacks the power to do things like forcing employers to participate in Social Security. Given how entrenched New Deal programs have become in more than half a century, these plans for reversing history have always seemed more than a bit quixotic.

But that may be about to change. The attacks on the post-1937 view of the Constitution are becoming more mainstream among Republicans. One of President Bush's nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Janice Rogers Brown, has called the "revolution of 1937" a disaster. And last month in the Supreme Court - in a case about medical marijuana - the justices found themselves having to decide whether to stand by Wickard.

This is what is behind a whole lot of the neocon's policy initiatives, from the FCC to the "reform" of Social Security the Bushies are proposing. I wonder if anything will change when his poor, white, evangelical base discovers that they are not just poor, but permanently reduced to serf class.

Good News

Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT

Published: December 14, 2004

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer - has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced today while also adding its own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands of pages a day at each library.

Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at $10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could take at least a decade.

Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the pacts are almost certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Like Google, they might seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own institutional uses.

"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University's head librarian.

The Google effort and others like it that are already under way, including projects by the Library of Congress to put selections of its best holdings online, are part of a trend to potentially democratize access to information that has long been available to only small, select groups of students and scholars.

Last night the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of one million books on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by next April.

With good news being in short supply these days, this is about as close to bliss as a dataminer like myself is going to get. The democratizing effect of the Interactive Web through widespread information availability is going to have effects none of us can predict.

Progress

Much thanks to pogge for helping to hold down the fort.

This is the third multi-day phone outage I've had in the last couple of years. I guess that answers the question "cable or DSL?"

I've got meetings all morning, but I'll try to get us caught up on the news at lunch time. Lots of interesting things in the papers this morning.

And I'm rather enjoying sleeping in until 6 AM for a couple of days. I'm sure I'll be up at 4 again on Thursday. Wednesday will be a good posting day once I get my dial tone turned on: I have to be home the entire day to wait on the tech. The window they gave me is from 8 AM to 6PM.

Once I get phone service restored, I'll be looking at broadband phone. Anybody have any experience with it? It can't be worse than the service I get from Verizon!

Light posting ahead

Hi Bumpers. This is actually pogge pretending to be Melanie.

It turns out that the modem problem Melanie referenced earlier isn't a modem problem at all. It's a phone problem. Until Wednesday, when the nice people from the phone company come to fix things up, posting will be light.

You can probably expect a few posts through the day though, so it's not like you have to go cold turkey.

So call this an open thread. And in the interest of providing some direction: what do you think of phone companies?

Universal Ugliness

Fans' Racist Taunts Rattle European Soccer
Governing Federations Debate New Rules, Sanctions to Curb Abusive Behavior in Stands

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 13, 2004; Page A12

PARIS -- Europe's soccer stadiums, long known for boisterous, drunken fans and hooligans, have lately become fertile ground for a continent-wide problem: racism.
.....
Among recent incidents across the continent:

• In France on Nov. 13, two black players for the Bastia team, Pascal Chimbonda of Guadalupe and Franck Matingou of Congo, along with their family members, were abused and roughed up in the parking lot following their team's 3-0 loss to rival Saint-Etienne. The incident prompted French players, coaches and referees to don "No to Racism" T-shirts for their game the following week.

• In England, about a week later, Birmingham player Dwight Yorke, who is black, confronted two men in the stands who harassed him during his pregame warm-up drills by making monkey noises and imitating a monkey's scratching. One of the men, who said he was drunk at the time, was fined the equivalent of about $1,900 for the incident and banned from soccer stadiums in England and Wales for five years.

• In the Netherlands last month, a referee, Rene Temmink, for the first time invoked a new rule and stopped a game in The Hague. The crowd had become hostile, chanting, "Temmink, to the gas chamber!" and calling the referee "the whore of Hamas," referring to the Palestinian Islamic militant group. When the Amsterdam team Ajax plays, fans of rival teams typically make a loud hissing noise, to simulate Nazi gas chambers -- a reference to the Ajax team's supposedly Jewish origins.

• In Spain on Nov. 17, during a friendly match between Spain and England, two black players for the English team were subjected to monkey noises and racist slogans chanted by thousands of fans in the 55,000-seat stadium. England protested, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was "very disappointed." Spanish officials waited a full day before condemning the incident and Spanish newspapers played it down, saying the British press had exaggerated it.

• Also in Spain, on Nov. 23, a Champions League match between Real Madrid and visiting Bayer Leverkusen was disrupted by fans at Madrid's Bernabeu stadium who gave Nazi salutes and made monkey noises whenever Leverkusen's black player, Roque Junior of Brazil, had the ball. On Friday, Europe's football governing body, UEFA, fined Real Madrid the equivalent of about $13,000.

• In Italy, Lazio -- already fined for racist incidents -- was sanctioned by the UEFA on Friday after Pierre Boya, a Cameroonian player for Partizan Belgrade, was subjected to a torrent of monkey noises and grunts from Lazio fans in the stands whenever he had the ball. Belgrade's other black players also came in for abuse from Lazio fans making monkey noises during the Nov. 25 match in Rome. Lazio was ordered by the UEFA to play its next European home match in an empty arena. Partizan Belgrade was fined the equivalent of about $6,900 for misbehavior by its fans.

I found the timing of this story interesting, given the discussion we had yesterday regarding American racism vs. European racism.

There is plenty of ugliness to go around, it seems.

Fugative Faith

One Christian feeling hijacked by politics
By Gena Caponi Tabery

These days, I worship twice on Sundays, playing for one service at 9 a.m. and singing with the choir at 11. I get to hear the sermon twice. I get to confess twice. I pray for the poor, the sick, the dying, for mercy, peace, and justice, and for our country. At the second service, I take communion with my family.

At both services, I exchange the peace with Christians who span the political spectrum. Before he left Texas for Washington, Karl Rove and his family belonged to my church. I voted against Bush. Four times. We don't all believe the same things, but we belong to a community whose members have agreed to try to love each other. Much of the time, we succeed.

Meanwhile, I live in a country that is increasingly eager to challenge its citizens' loyalty, among people of faith increasingly determined to dispute the faith of others. Some people who call themselves Christians - and some church leaders - are beginning to redefine Christianity in such a way as to exclude worshipers with whom they disagree. I fear a religion in which ideology is more important than theology.

If someone - like me - who has worshiped as a Christian for more than 50 years suddenly feels afraid of the extremes of that religion - what must it be like for those of different beliefs, or of unbelief?

My 14-year-old son has attended two bar mitzvahs this year, and I'm thrilled for him to witness the serious commitment his friends have made to Judaism. I wonder how included those boys feel in our suddenly very Christian nation, in their suddenly very Christian public schools, football stadiums, and town meetings.

If I question political decisions, am I un-American? If I don't agree with a fundamentalist, am I un-Christian?

There used to be two things that you didn't talk about for fear of causing offense: politics and religion. Today the two are so intertwined, you can't talk of one without the other. And when you do, them's fightin' words, pardner. Nowadays, so many people are looking for a fight.

I'm not. Neither am I afraid to pray in public. But I am afraid of my faith being hijacked to promote someone else's political agenda. I am afraid of my faith being used as a weapon in a crusade against anyone who dares to think or believe differently.

I'm not giving up my faith. I plan to keep playing those hymns. And I will continue to pray for our country and to give thanks for our food, our family, and our friends. Twice on Sunday, and at every meal. But not in public.

I don't want to be mistaken for a hijacker.

I know how she feels. This kind of misery I wish I didn't have company for.

HOLLY JOLLY

In the Loop:

The Real Daily Outrage

The liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) recently gave its "daily outrage" award to the conservative Heritage Foundation for referring holiday shoppers to something called the Town Hall Book Service. CAP was most upset that the book service features one work comparing the "American Left to Stalin, Hitler and Mao," and another saying that "the civil war wasn't really about slavery" and so on.

So what? It's a very conservative Web site. What's the big deal?

But what CAP missed was this: Seems the book service also offers the 2004 White House Christmas Ornament on "special sale" for $24.95. It "honors President Rutherford B. Hayes . . . and recreates a snowy scene on the North Lawn" where "laughter, mingled with the jingling of sleigh bells, filled the crisp air." All this language is lifted directly from a blurb on the official White House Historical Association Web site, which warns people: "Please be aware that third party vendors resell the official White House Christmas ornament. Always look for the WHHA logo on the web page to ensure that your purchase of the ornaments is from the association."

And WHHA's price? $16. Vs. $24.95? That's the outrage.

Capitalism at work.

Leaking Talent

Exodus of Staff Hobbles the FBI
# The bureau is struggling with rapid turnover among top officials and analysts. The disorder further weakens efforts at a post-9/11 makeover.

By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The rapid turnover of top-level managers and highly trained specialists since Sept. 11 is causing disorder within the FBI and undercutting its efforts to meet the mandate of Congress to dramatically expand its intelligence and counter-terrorism capabilities.

Its new intelligence arm, which is to form the core of a transformed FBI, is losing dozens of analysts who are supposed to connect the dots to protect the country from another terrorist attack.

All four members of the top management team announced by Director Robert S. Mueller III shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks have left their jobs — as have their successors. Some other officials have had three or even four jobs since the attacks.

Since Sept. 11, five people have held the bureau's top counter-terrorism job. Five others filled the top computer job within a 24-month period.

And more than 1,000 other senior FBI agents and officials are eligible for retirement, boding a further exodus of employees who form the agency's backbone. In figures provided recently to Congress, the FBI estimated that the number of top managers below the senior executive rank would decline by 16% — about 70 people — in the next year alone.

The rush to the exits partly stems from burnout caused by the intense pace and scrutiny that followed Sept. 11, officials say. It also reflects the growing post-9/11 demand for security expertise in other fields, which has lured dozens from the FBI to lucrative jobs.

One example: The head of the Los Angeles FBI field office left in January to become Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's head of homeland security, only to leave that job six months later for Walt Disney Co.
....
Like other federal agencies, the FBI has offered bonuses to senior executives before. But the new bonuses are more lucrative — up to 50% of base pay — and appear to be available to more employees. According to the newly enacted legislation, they would be available to those of "unusually high or unique qualifications" whom Mueller deems "essential" and who are likely to leave without the incentive.

Some question whether the money will be enough, and fear that the departures from the FBI have just begun.

About 1,224 special agents, or about 10% of the agent workforce, are eligible to retire now, the FBI says. FBI rules enable people to retire with 20 years' service, and a less-generous retirement program under which most came into the FBI years ago gives them little financial incentive to stay. Many apparently are looking to make the leap, knowing they have a limited window of time when they are attractive to private industry.

"People are just hitting that 20-year mark. No one has quite reckoned with it," said a senior agent on condition of anonymity. "It is going to be like a break in the dike."

Couple this with the hemorrhage of mid-level analysts fleeing Porter Goss's politcized CIA, and I think we have a problem.

Contempt for War Fighters

The paper that gave me my start continues to make me proud.

The Rumsfeld the Army needs
This particular lack of support for troops by the United States is not news.

T

The House Armed Services Committee has said only 10 percent of medium-weight transport trucks and 15 percent of heavy transport vehicles have armor. Combine this with the fact that two-thirds of U.S. casualties in combat have come because of roadside bombs, and you have the U.S. government with the blood of its soldiers on its hands.

It is a shame that it took the embarrassment of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from the pointed questioning of Spc. Thomas Wilson for this story to finally get traction.

This particular lack of support for troops by the United States is not news. Rumsfeld has been questioned about the lack of Humvee armor at least as early as September 2003 and maybe even earlier.

Rumsfeld tried to defend himself by saying, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.” This is a cop-out, and a startlingly revealing one. The military certainly could have produced more armored vehicles. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer story points out that Humvee manufacturers are not running near capacity and had fulfilled the requests by the Pentagon for armored vehicles. The Iraq war was a war of convenience and not necessity, and Rumsfeld’s response certainly makes it clear that it knowingly sent troops into combat under-equipped.

Sadly, the funding for medium truck add-on armor kits was $0 in 2004 and 2005 funding. The same can be said of heavy truck add-on armor kits. How many times does Rumsfeld have to prove his incompetence before he is relieved of his duty? The armor scandal is another in a line of foul-ups, including the torture scandals of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the underestimation of troops and the ongoing complaints from the troops. Quick answers seem to be in line for the problems.

Troops should be provided with the equipment they need to survive. President George W. Bush should reprimand Rumsfeld if he does not have the guts to fire him. How many soldiers have to die because of executive mistakes?

But as long as they keep their pants zipped, impeachment for Rummy or Bush isn't an option, I guess.

Equipment problems

It appears that my modem on my home machine has given up the ghost. I'll pick up a new one over lunch, but my posting frequency is going to take a hit today.

I lost the dial tone about 5:40 yesterday afternoon and haven't been able to recapture it. If any of you can do any troubleshooting, feel free.

You can email me at my Yahoo account
[email protected] or leave a comment.

The Perfect Burger

Clearly, you all are out Christmas shopping, as my hit counter is recording new lows. The numbers today look like Thanksgiving day. So here is another favorite recipe and I'm going to go watch some TeeVee. I've got a hundred channels, and the Food Channel usually has something good on....

The Perfect Burger

You can do this on the grill (preferred, but it is December and I see we are expecting our first snow this week) but a good burger can be sauteed or broiled and still get a good result with a few simple steps:

Per serving
1 clove garlic
1/3 lb ground sirloin
2 tbsp brandy
1/4 cup chopped mushrooms
Crumbled blue cheese (about 2 tbsp per burger)
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper (I use one of the melange mixes)
Dash salt
Two strips of bacon (the precooked stuff works fine, thank you very much)

Saute the mushrooms in a little olive which has been dressed a clove of garlic, sliced, on low heat. When the mushrooms begin to sweat, that is, throw off water, remove them and drain them on a paper towel.

While the mushrooms are sauteeing, combine the ground sirloin, brandy and seasonings in a bowl. Mix lightly, this is key, the less you handle the beef, the better the burger. Use your fingers, but use them gingerly.

Lightly fashion each burger in two pieces, two slim patties. Once the bottom patty is ready, top it with the mushrooms and blue cheese. Top it with the other slim patty and close the edges with your fingers. Try to keep the thickness constant throughout, this will cook quickly, no more than a minute or two on a side. The blue cheese will leak. Deal with it.

Serve on a toasted sesame bun, topped with bacon, lettuce and a tomato slice and red onions and really good mustard. I like the really grainy french stuff and won't let the yellow stuff get near a burger or hotdog in my house. Ketchup is forbidden.

After all, we have some standards.

The brandy keeps lowfat beef moist in the cooking, apricot juice serves the same purpose for alcoholics who want to avoid even cooked alcohol. You never want the burger to steam in the pan, it makes the beef tough, the alcohol or fruitjuice helps it cook because it has a lower boiling point than water, which is already in the meat. This recipe works.

It's about one minute on a side. Flip as soon as the cheese begins leaking and you'll enjoy burger heaven.

Fuddruckers has a different philosophy, and a burger I totally respect and eat once a month.

Planet Juilliard

This NYT story does a decent job with the truth. Let me quote a bit and then comment.

The Juilliard Effect: Ten Years Later
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

FOURTEEN years ago, Chad A. Alexander took his bassoon and headed east from a small California town, assumed a coveted place at the Juilliard School and began training for a job in one of the country's great orchestras.

"Everything seemed possible," he said recently. "Going to Juilliard makes you feel very special and privileged and in awe of the history of the school." He graduated and quickly won a three-year position in the New World Symphony, a training orchestra based in Miami. But his career fizzled with a succession of fruitless auditions, dwindling freelance gigs and mounting debt.

He needed a day job. But a Juilliard degree had not prepared him for much besides playing. "When you go to a conservatory, something as specialized as that, you're basically from a different planet," he said. He cast a wide net, but the only outfit that offered him a job was an insurance company in Long Beach, N.Y., on Long Island. He played a few jobs in the evenings. But he was earning his living as a customer service representative.

Last May, Mr. Alexander finished out of the running in yet another audition, for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and saw his finances on a precipice. So in what he called a heartbreaking moment, he sold his bassoon for $5,300 to pay credit card bills. "It was time," he said. "It got to the point where you're just tired of being poor." Now he lives in Phoenix and works as an assistant underwriter.

Eric Crambes is another former resident of Planet Juilliard. A charming French violinist and a native of Lyon, Mr. Crambes studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Britain as a child and then with the teacher Tibor Vargas, living at his home in Switzerland. Ready for a change at 17, he broke away from Mr. Vargas and came to Juilliard.

Since graduating, he has moved smoothly into a flourishing career. He has forged a role as a fill-in concertmaster with respected European orchestras, and he commissions pieces, directs a music festival and plays as a soloist with dancers from the New York City Ballet. "I don't want to label myself," he said. "I have a very large spectrum of activities, and I like it that way."

In the years since I took my master's at New England Conservatory in Boston, the situation has only gotten worse and I feel for those who take their undergrad degree at conservatories rather than liberal arts institutions. Music school is every bit as much a school of formation as a seminary, med or law school and forces you to specialize very quickly. A BA or BM in music prepares you to do nothing other than music. I took a BFA from a Big Ten university for my undergrad and, while it's a music degree, I had four minors and most of the coursework toward pre-med.

Here is the reality of life in classical music: most grads won't get a job in the field. There were 18 bassoon students matriculating at NEC when I was there, some of them real stars. I was the only one who had a career in the field, and I had to vamp for years after graduation because there were no job openings for the first three years after I graduated. I won my job in the Kennedy Center Orchestra in 1986, and in the previous 6 years since graduation I'd taught at a university, been program director for a public radio station and temped. I was good with computers.

When I left the KCO in 2000, there were more than 400 applications for the vacancy. Bottom line, if you are or know a young person considering a career in classical music, discourage them. What I've always told my own students is that if you think there is a ghost of chance you will be happy doing something else, do it. No matter how talented you are, how determined and disciplined, the likelihood of your getting a good job in music are very small. The number of jobs decline every year as orchestras go out of business (an increasing trend in the most recent recession) and graying audiences mean smaller audiences and financial problems.

If a talented young adult cannot be disuaded, urge them to develop skills in another field, just in case. Learn to be a good writer, get handy with computers and take as many electives in other subjects as possible to widen your horizons. Save conservatory for graduate school.

Islam and the US

I disagree with Peter Bergen at least as often as I agree with him, but this seems spot on:

They Will Strike Again ...
# Europe is fast becoming the staging ground for terror attacks on the U.S.

By Peter Bergen, Peter Bergen, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden" and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University School

How Al Qaeda succeeds or fails in Europe is critical to its future in the West. Although few American Muslims have embraced Al Qaeda's ideology, that is not the case with Europe's 20 million Muslims.

Part of the reason is alienation. In general, Muslims in Europe face more discrimination than their U.S. counterparts. Algerians in France and Pakistanis in Britain, for example, are often treated as second-class citizens and are less integrated into their host countries than Muslims in the U.S. As citizens of the European Union, however, adherents of Al Qaeda's ideology have considerable latitude to move around Europe and visit other countries in the West.

A suicide attack in Israel illustrates the threat. On April 30, 2003, two middle-class Britons of Pakistani heritage walked into a popular cafe near the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. One of them had attended meetings of Al Muhajiroun, a British Islamist group broadly sympathetic to the goals of Al Qaeda. Once inside the cafe, the younger man detonated a bomb, killing himself and three bystanders and wounding dozens. The other man fled. It was the first time that a citizen of Britain had committed an act of suicide terrorism in Israel.

If such an attack can happen in Israel, a country with the most rigorous counter-terrorist defenses in the world, it can happen in the United States. The so-called shoe bomber, Richard C. Reid, who failed to blow up an American Airlines flight between Paris and Miami in December 2001, is a British citizen. And the July 2004 terror alert in the United States was sparked by word that a British Al Qaeda operative, alias Issa al Britani, had scoped out U.S. financial institutions in New York and New Jersey before Sept. 11.

Just as light can be defined as both a wave and a particle, Al Qaeda is now both organization and political movement.

It lost its base and training camps in the Afghanistan war, which damaged its formal organization. But the war in Iraq has helped promote its ideological movement.

The most significant evidence of Al Qaeda's growing ideological appeal in Europe beyond the Madrid bombings were last month's assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by a Moroccan who said that Van Gogh had blasphemed Islam; the 2003 arrests of a group of men in London experimenting with ricin, a biological toxin used in assassinations; and the breakup by British police of an Al Qaeda plot to attack Heathrow Airport.

At a Dec. 2 conference on Al Qaeda in Washington, Steven Simon, former senior director for transnational threats at the National Security Council, described Europe as both a "new field of jihad" for Al Qaeda and a "ripening" threat. Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside Al Qaeda," described Europe as a "staging ground" for future attacks against the U.S. and said European governments had been overly tolerant of the terrorist organization's support networks in their countries. Ursula Mueller, a German diplomat, said the group posed a "greater risk" in Europe than it did in the United States.

This is not to say that the US is free of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab (and anti-brown people) sentiment. There is still plenty of racism built into the culture, but we have not ghettoized our Islamic immigrants in the way that the Europeans have. The US has always been more accomodationist than the Europeans, which is one of the reasons that people want to come here.

Spiritual Unease

Jack Whelan articulates clearly what is bothering me this morning:

Any kind of idealism or hope for a life that is not circumscribed by our instinctual impulses comes from a super-rational or transcendent source. You don't have to be a conventional religious believer to know what I'm talking about. Civilization is a spiritual work. There is no civilization in the history of the world that does not have at its root a spiritual impulse. The spirit is what lifts us and enables us to become something more than the animals. Because the secularists have become tone deaf to its music does not mean that it is not playing.

But we have no such leadership, and we have good reason to fear for the future of our republic. If we are attacked we will rally behind our president who will ask us to give up our freedom telling us all the while we must do so to protect our freedom. And it will seem to make so much sense. But the security state, which is our likely future, is a state we will chose out of fear, not out of freedom, and it will be a state in which fear shall be the rule.

Noodle Kugel

Sweet noodle kugel is traditionally served on the last night of the High Holidays, a dairy repast breaks the fast at Yom Kippur. It's also a delightful brunch dish for Hanukkah.

For noodles
1 lb dried wide egg noodles
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 cup whole milk
5 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 (1-lb) container sour cream
1 (1-lb) container small curd cottage cheese (4% fat)
1 (20-oz) can crushed pineapple, drained

For topping
2 cups cornflakes, coarsely crushed
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into bits

Prepare kugel:
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat to 350°F. Butter a 13- by 9- by 2-inch glass or ceramic baking dish.

Cook noodles in a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Drain well in a colander, then return to warm pot and add butter, tossing until noodles are coated.

Whisk together milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt until combined, then whisk in sour cream. Stir in cottage cheese and pineapple and add to noodles, stirring to coat well, then spoon into baking dish.

Make topping and bake kugel:
Stir together cornflakes, sugar, and cinnamon and sprinkle evenly over noodles. Dot with butter and bake until kugel is set and edges are golden brown, about 1 hour. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Makes 8 to 10 side-dish servings.

Double the recipe and use a tinfoil cassarole and you have a different dish to bring to a potluck.

Elegant and Easy

After having looked a couple score recipes for Welsh Rabbit, I'll just give you the one I use because it is delicious. The page is covered with stains.

This is adapted from " The Vegetarian Epicure," Anna Thomas's wonderful bible or excellent vegetarian recipes.

For 2

needed immediately:
2 Tbs melted butter

have at hand:
1/4 cup light beer at room temp
2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp. dry mustard
pinch of cayenne
1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
3 cups coarsely shredded Cheddar cheese

In a double boiler

melt 2 tbs of butter

Beat together the ale, egg yolks and seasoning. Have this mixture at hand, along with the grated cheese and a wooden or enamel spoon.

To the melted butter in the double boiler, add a bit of the cheese, stirring constantly and in one direction only (to keep the sauce from breaking.) When the cheese and butter have formed a thick mass, add a bit of the ale mixture and don't ever stop stirring. Add more cheese until the sauce thickens, and add more ale, until all of the cheese has been used and you have velvety sauce thick enough to coat a spoon. Continue heating and stirring over very low heat (the sauce should steam but not boil) for an additional ten minutes.

Classically, this is served over toast points or english muffins, but I love it with fresh french baguette, sliced into thin rounds. Broiled tomatoes topped with oregano are a nice side, and that is the way it is served at Martin's Tavern, my favorite DC hangout, where one or more of the city's rapidly expanding collection of mystery writers can be found.

Third Rail

The LAT seems to be the most egregious offender in the "he said, he said" relativism sweepstakes this morning. This one is a doozy:

Some Find Strong Pulse in Social Security

By Joel Havemann, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Even before settling on a proposal to privatize part of Social Security, President Bush is mounting an aggressive campaign to convince the public of something that many Democrats and economists say is mistaken: that the massive government retirement system is hurtling toward disaster.

Three times in the past week, Bush has created or used public relations events to promote his view that Social Security is facing a dire financial threat and needs major repairs. Most recently, Bush said in his Saturday radio address that "the system is headed towards bankruptcy down the road. If we do not act soon, Social Security will not be there for our children and grandchildren."

The issue will also be central to a White House conference scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday meant to draw attention to Bush's economic agenda for the next four years.

The public relations campaign shows that even before Congress and the public debate various plans to overhaul the hugely popular program, a major battle over Social Security is underway.

Bush, as one of the legacies of his presidency, wants workers to be able to shift some of their Social Security taxes into privately owned accounts, which they would invest in the stock or bond markets. In this vision, the government could pare back the benefits promised under Social Security, shoring up the finances of the program, because the return on the investments in the private accounts would help workers support a comfortable retirement.

But Bush's critics say that he is overstating the financial problems so that the public will more readily accept the "radical" cure of private accounts.

Some critics worry that they are running second in the public relations race. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, warns of "an incredible misunderstanding of the basic problem. The public thinks the program will disappear in 10 to 20 years."

Critics of private accounts point out that the board that oversees Social Security estimates that the program will not run out of funds until 2042 — and even then, ongoing payroll taxes will be able to foot the bill for about 75% of full benefits.

That leaves plenty of time, they say, to assure Social Security's future with just a little nipping and tucking — slightly higher taxes, minimally smaller benefit increases, maybe a higher retirement age.

"Social Security is not in crisis, and the financial challenges facing the system are manageable," said Rep. Robert T. Matsui of Sacramento, the senior Democrat on the House Social Security subcommittee.

Matsui, of course, is a member of the reality-based part of our government, but the damn reporter can't come out and tell you that, can he?

Let's be clear about what this Bush initiative is about: the eventual destruction of the social security system.

As Brad deLong illustrates, and contrary to Fox News Sunday's headline, Social Security ain't broke and doesn't need to be "fixed." Lifting the income cap would take care of future shortfalls, but that would be taxing the rich and we can't have that, can we?

Fingerpointing

White House Puts Blame on Kerik
Nominee Initially Denied Having Hired an Illegal Immigrant, Officials Say

By Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 12, 2004; Page A01

White House officials yesterday blamed Bernard B. Kerik for repeatedly failing to disclose potential legal problems to administration lawyers vetting his nomination to be homeland security secretary, as President Bush prepared to quickly name a replacement and try to put the controversy over the former New York police commissioner's background behind him.

Kerik, who withdrew his own nomination Friday and apologized yesterday for embarrassing Bush, was asked numerous times by White House lawyers if he had employed an illegal immigrant or failed to pay taxes on domestic help, the sources said.

Kerik was told he would humiliate his family, himself and the president if he lied on either account, the officials said. He responded with firm denials. After digging deeper, however, Kerik said he discovered last week that he might have a problem on both accounts and withdrew his name.

In the vetting process, which was conducted by the office of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, Kerik also never mentioned that a New Jersey judge had issued a warrant for his arrest in 1998 over a civil dispute over unpaid bills, the sources said. The existence of the dispute was first reported by Newsweek Friday night.

It is unclear why White House lawyers could not uncover a warrant that Newsweek discovered after a few days of research, although some are blaming Bush's insistence on speed and secrecy for failing to catch this and other potential red flags in Kerik's background.

White House officials said they believe Kerik could have survived a controversy over the warrant in a civil matter, despite having served as New York City police commissioner and being nominated to lead an agency with major law enforcement responsibilities.

Joseph Tacopina, Kerik's lawyer, said his client was not aware of the warrant, which stemmed from a dispute over about $5,000 in condominium fees. In an interview, Tacopina said there are no outstanding warrants for Kerik but he could not "confirm or deny" there once was one. A copy of the warrant was provided to The Washington Post by Newsweek.

Still, it is the nanny controversy, according to White House officials, that cost Kerik a high-profile job. "This is my responsibility, this is my mistake," Kerik said outside his home in Franklin Lakes, N.J., in an interview broadcast by CNN yesterday. "I didn't want this to be a distraction going forward."
....
White House officials said senators, including several Democrats, confirmed that the nomination was on track, despite a host of questions about Kerik's quick riches after leaving public office and his responsibility for training the Iraqi police force on a mission for the administration.

Here we come to the nut of my issue: the guy is demonstrably incompetent, but the Dems were willing to give him a pass until the nanny issue came up.

Kerik is virtually a cut out for Bush, having failed at every job he's taken on as an adult, while racking up millions of dollars. The lazy wealthy DO take care of each other.

Major Recipe Attack

Once again, I need to get away from all the bad news for a bit. I'm going to retreat into the house of recipes on Sunday. Lord knows what the AmStreeters will make of it. If they are smart, they'll make dinner.

Tomorrow will be "a carnivore visits the house of veg." I'm a carnivore (a couple of times a week) at the moment, but have been both ovo-lacto veg and a macrobiotic vegan at other points in my life.

These will be recipes to share, they are designed for company for dinner and you aren't sure what they eat. Carnivores and ovo-lacto veggies will both be happy.

Yes, I need something to look forward to while I'm dreading the Sunday papers, and an alternative to them. I caught WaPo early edition headlines while I was at the grocery. Tomorrow is going to be a stinky news day. I need some relief. And I'll march to the recipe box to get it.

Haven't had Welsh Rarebit? You'll learn to take the five minutes to make it tomorrow. Both you, and the spouse and your chili-mac kids will demand this one once a week.

And we'll do some foods for the holiday table, Christian and Jewish, we can always eat together. In fact, I recommend it.

Job Insecurity

Job cut plans accelerate
Survey: Firms set 104,530 November cuts, ending first 3-month stretch at that level since '02.
December 7, 2004: 2:52 PM EST

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Hit by rising health care and energy costs, employers announced more than 100,000 job cuts in November, capping the first three-month stretch above that level since early 2002, an outplacement firm said Tuesday.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said companies announced 104,530 job cuts in November, up 5.1 percent from a year earlier and 2.6 percent from October.

"We've fallen far short of prior economic expansions," said JPMorgan Fleming's Chan. "We're about 5-1/2 million (jobs) short of where would be today if this were a typical expansion."

Wonder why low to moderate rate retailers' sales are off this year? People who are worried about losing their jobs, credit cards already maxed out, aren't going to be spending this season. I know I'm going to be a very chintzy shopper this year.

Mythology

The Poor Have More Things Today -- Including Wild Income Swings
# As economic risk rises, those near the bottom are hit with a vengeance: china plates, perhaps, but also more pay cuts and evictions.

By Peter G. Gosselin, Times Staff Writer

PART 2

"The poor are not like everyone else," social critic Michael Harrington wrote in the 1962 best-seller "The Other America," which helped shape President Johnson's War on Poverty.

"They are a different kind of people," he declared. "They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class."

How then to account for Elvira Rojas?

The 36-year-old Salvadoran-born dishwasher and her partner, warehouse worker Jose Maldanado, make barely enough to stay above the official poverty line — $18,810 last year for a family of four. But by working two, sometimes three, jobs between them, they are grabbing at middle-class dreams.

Rojas and Maldanado live in a two-room apartment in Hawthorne but have china settings for 16 tucked in a wooden hutch. Their two young daughters receive health coverage through Medi-Cal but get many of their clothes at Robinsons-May.

The family struggles to meet its monthly bills but has taken on a mountain of credit-card debt. They have used plastic to buy a large-screen TV and other luxuries but have also relied on it to cover bare necessities such as rent and emergency-room visits.

"That's why I'm really poor even though I work so hard," Rojas said with a rueful laugh.

Some see circumstances like Rojas' as testament to the economic strides that America has made over the last generation, rather than a reflection of its failures.

"We've won the War on Poverty," asserted Robert Rector, an influential analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. "We've basically eliminated widespread material deprivation."

But if deprivation is no longer as big a problem, that hardly means all is well. In many ways, Rojas is the new face of the working poor, suffering not so much from a dearth of possessions as from a cavalcade of chaos — pay cuts and eviction notices, car troubles and medical crises — that rattles her family's finances and nudges it toward the economic brink.

In this way, Rojas and millions like her are not — as Harrington described them — fundamentally different from most other Americans; they are remarkably similar.

Indeed, today's working poor are experiencing an extreme version of the economic turbulence that is rocking families across the income spectrum. And the cause, no matter people's means, is the same: a quarter-century-long shift of economic risk by business and government onto working families.

Protections that Americans, especially poor ones, once relied on to buffer them from economic setbacks — affordable housing, stable jobs with good benefits, union membership and the backstop of cash welfare — have shriveled or been eliminated. These losses have been only partially offset by an expansion of programs such as the earned-income tax credit for the working poor and publicly provided healthcare.

For the most part, the poor have been left to cope on their own, scrambling from one fragile employment arrangement to the next, doubling up on housing and borrowing heavily.

"Families up and down the income distribution are bearing more economic risk than they did 25 or 30 years ago," said Johns Hopkins University economist Robert A. Moffitt, "but the increase has been especially dramatic among the working poor."

This piece is so fundamentally dishonest that it is hard to know where to begin in deconstructing it. Gosselin obviously belongs to the perfumed class who isn't aware of what life is like for so-called lower middle class workers, the ones who used to be considered part of the "professional class," whose "professions" have been outsourced, downsized or otherwise diminished.

My father was able to support a family on his salary. My mom went back to work after the three of us were in school. Neither had a college degree, but we could have lived fairly handily on dad's salary.

I have multiple grad degrees and thirty years of working experience and, in constant dollars, I'm making less than my dad did when he retired 12 years ago. Those of you who have commented in recent days have talked about your own tales of unemployment and diminished circumstances.

I'm wondering what definition of "the poor" Gosselin is using. Almost everyone I know is carrying an astonishing debt load, either from a lengthy period of unemployment or from school loans. None of us have a boatload of "things" because we can't afford it. I bought my first pair of shoes in seven years at the outlet place down the street a couple of months ago. I lived on five-for-a-buck packs of Top Ramen for months, and I keep wondering when I will get to stop living hand to mouth and have a grown up life with some things like savings and the odd vacation. Retirement? I doubt I'll ever be able to afford it.

Brooksie's piece in the NYT this morning was clearly mailed in from some alternate reality.

Wild income swings are hardly restricted to some mythological "poor." Take a look at my tax returns for the last six years. Or yours.

De Profundis Clamavi ad Te

The Net of Indra, an Open Thread for thoughts philosophical, poetical and historical.

News Open Thread

Um, I don't think Bernie Kerik's "problem" was his nanny, regardless of Daniel Shorr's commentary. What is the next name on Unka Karl's list?

Bumper Sticker Open Thread

The best bumper sticker I've seen in recent weeks:

Forget about world peace. Use your damn turn signal.

At Weddings And Wakes

I'm off, then, to help tend to the life-cycle needs of a colleague. Births, deaths, weddings and funerals remind us that we are caught up in a great web of being that requires something from us: caring for ourselves means caring for each other.

Ponder, then, the roots of the word "religion:" from the Latin "re" + "ligar" = to reconnect, to bind up again. It implies a wholeness which once existed and must be found again.

At moments such as this, I'm reminded of the
words of E.M. Forster in his novel Howard's End:

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

Only connect.

I'll be back this afternoon, EST, with thoughts on the economy.

This is a discussion thread and the topic is religion. What does that mean to you?

Error Message

Kerik Pulls Out as Bush Nominee for Homeland Security Job
By ERIC LIPTON and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: December 11, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, abruptly withdrew his name from consideration to be President Bush's secretary of homeland security late Friday night, citing questions related to the immigration status of a former household employee.

Mr. Kerik's swift fall - he was nominated only a week ago by President Bush to succeed Tom Ridge - came in a letter in which he called the offer "the honor of a lifetime" but said that "moving forward would not be in the best interest of your administration, the Department of Homeland Security or the American people."

In reviewing his personal finances this week as he prepared for confirmation hearings, Mr. Kerik said in a statement issued late Friday, he determined that a housekeeper and nanny he had once employed was not clearly a legal immigrant and that he had not properly paid taxes on her behalf.

"I uncovered information that now leads me to question the immigration status of a person who had been in my employ as a housekeeper and nanny," Mr. Kerik said. "It has also been brought to my attention that for a period of time during such employment required tax payments and related filings had not been made."

His lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said that Mr. Kerik called the president at 8:30 p.m. to inform him of the decision. The White House had not pressured him to withdraw, Mr. Tacopina said, but he decided he had to do so because as homeland security secretary, he would be in charge of supervising the nation's immigration laws.

Within two days after the issue surfaced, it became apparent to all involved that Mr. Kerik had no choice but to withdraw his name, said former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had urged Mr. Bush to nominate Mr. Kerik. The hiring of an illegal immigrant or failure to pay taxes had forced the withdrawal of other cabinet nominees, including Kimba M. Wood, Zoe Baird and Linda Chavez.

"When an issue like this emerges, it makes it impossible to go forward," Mr. Giuliani said on Friday night.

Or, perhaps, it was something like this....

Saint Bernard
Not so fast on canonizing Kerik—Bush's pick has big critics in New York
December 7th, 2004 11:30 AM

Kerik was always at the edges of some screwy, not quite crooked but decidedly creepy deal, like using pictures of ground zero taken by police detectives in his book or sending other detectives to Ohio to ferret out the truth about his mother, also for the book—he eventually paid a fine for this conflict of interest—and then giving one of the detectives a top police department medal. His poor mother, they'd discovered, was a prostitute found beaten to death in an Ohio flophouse. New Yorkers are plenty sick of hearing the "my mother was a whore" story every time Kerik opens his mouth, or how he "fathered" an illegitimate daughter while in the army in Korea. Father and daughter were publicly reunited at his retirement dinner in 2002, and she has been warmly welcomed into the Kerik family.

While Kerik was the city's corrections commissioner, some $1 million in tobacco rebates for cigarettes bought with public funds and then sold at inflated prices to inmates were discovered to have been funneled into a foundation Kerik headed. A former aide is now serving a one-year prison sentence for mail fraud, for diverting some of this money to pay for inmates' phone sex.

After 9-11, Kerik was widely celebrated. A corrections facility in downtown Manhattan was named after him, and the Police Foundation paid for miniature busts of Kerik, which he gave to friends. In 2003, he announced he was going on a special six-month assignment to train the new Iraqi police force. He quit after three months, citing the need for a vacation. Now insurgents are slaughtering the new Iraqi police by the dozen.

Kerik joined Giuliani Partners, the former mayor's consulting firm. Two years ago, Kerik became a director of Taser International, manufacturer of the hot new stun guns whose safety has been questioned. Recently he sold his more than 100,000 shares of company stock for $5.7 million.

Newsday has done the best coverage of Kerik. "He couldn't run the Rikers commissary without getting greedy and making a mess, in a jam," Ellis Henican reported one corrections insider as saying. "Now he's gonna be in charge of the Department of Homeland Security? Let's just hope the terrorists don't decide to come back."

Added Henican, "He's a personal and professional time bomb the Bushies will learn to regret."

By the time you get around to the second inaug, you are supposed to have learned to deal with stuff like this. You don't can an inept and inoffensive guy like Tom Ridge to replace him with this possible felon. If Rove is so smart, how did this one pop up in his play book?

Maintenance

This has been the week from hell and I'm crashing early, my day tomorrow starts with a funeral. The decedent is the parent of a colleague, the death is a blessing in some ways for my colleague and for her parent. But that means I'm not going to be keeping a normal Friday night or Saturday schedule. The colleague is throwing an Irish Wake to celebrate her parent's life, and I think it will be a long day.

Regular readers know that I'm seated at the computer at unholy hours in the morning to start each day of Bump. Tonight, those early hours combined with long hours on the job have taken their toll, and tomorrow is not going to be about Bump, it is going to be about my colleague.

I'll leave some open threads, and, having learned from you, I'll give some direction in where to take them.

I'm so tired tonight that bursting into tears for no apparent reason seems like a decent option.

Tell me where to redirect my dreams, I'm dreaming in query language these days and it ain't restful.

This is an open thread. Tell us what you are shopping for and introduce us to your friends and relations. Leigh doesn't know it yet, but he is getting a copy of "Love, Actually," John Coltrane's credo, and one of the finest jazz cuts ever committed to tape.

How are you holding up?

I posted an essay at The Village Gate, if you want to keep up with that.

Green Power nearing Cost Competitiveness with Power from Fossil Fuels

Another reason to feel some guarded optimism. Houston customers ar now being offered electricity generated from wind turbines and hydroelectric plants at a price identical to the one they would pay to get fossil-fuel based electricity from another supplier, as reported by the Houston Chronicle.

'Green' power matches Reliant

Renewables gain as fuel costs increase for others

By TOM FOWLER
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Green Mountain Energy is offering Texas electricity consumers an environmentally friendly service at a rate matching that of Reliant Energy — a sign of a growing interest in green energy and the rising price of traditionally produced power.

Touted as a "pollution free" plan, Green Mountain Energy gets the power it sells from wind turbines and hydroelectric plants and will cost about 11.1 cents per kilowatt-hour, the same price current Reliant Energy customers are paying.

Houston-area electricity customers can pay as little as 9.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, a rate offered by Houston-based Gexa Energy. Other companies, like Starlight Electric and Cirro Energy, also offer rates below the price Reliant charges.

The Green Mountain plan, a 10 percent wind- and 90 percent water-generated mix, is about $9 per month less expensive than the 100 percent wind plan Austin-based Green Mountain currently offers, based on the use by a typical customer.

The new offering reflects a maturing of the electricity market from one where only early adopters would pay the extra money for green power to a market where renewable power is attractive to a broader range of customers, said John Savage, Green Mountain's senior vice president of marketing.

"Some see it as a way to counter the country's dependence on foreign oil; others see it as a way to promote good environmental stewardship, and others see it as being consistent with their faith." Savage said.

The power in Green Mountain's 100 percent wind plan comes from turbines operating in Texas, but most of the hydroelectric power in the new plan is generated in neighboring states, such as Arkansas and Oklahoma, Savage said.

While the power that arrives at a Green Mountain customer's home in Texas won't necessarily be from a hydroelectric plant, Green Mountain will buy a sort of "renewable power credit" from a hydro plant that generated the electricity and sold it to another user.

Green Mountain's plan also reflects the narrowing price gap between renewable power and power made by more traditional methods, such as coal and natural gas, said Tim Morstad, an analyst with Consumers Union.

Since 2002, the price electric consumers pay to Reliant Energy, known as the price-to-beat, has gone up 28 percent, or 2.48 cents per kilowatt-hour. Most of that is a result of rising costs, primarily natural gas.

"On the renewable front, it does bode well that customers can choose more environmentally friendly power for the price most residential customers pay," Morstad said. "But this is also a signal that the price to beat has gotten very high."

The cost of renewable energy hasn't necessarily dropped, either. While the cost of wind power is supposed to stay relatively stable compared with power generated by coal and natural gas, Green Mountain recently increased the price of its 100 percent wind product. Because the company must buy some power on the open market to meet customer needs, it is also subject to the fuel price increases imposed by its suppliers, Savage said.

Reliant Energy does not offer a renewable energy plan in the Houston area — state electricity deregulation laws allow it to offer only one plan here until Jan. 1, 2005 — but it has offered a plan to Dallas-area customers for several years.

Jim Robb, Reliant's senior vice president of retail marketing, said the renewable plan has been priced to roughly match the cost of the Dallas area's incumbent provider, TXU. The power comes from a combination of wind and landfill-produced natural gas.

"We haven't seen major evidence of increased interest in a renewable product," Robb said, noting that about 1,400 customers have signed on to its plan. "We could offer such a plan in Houston next year if we find customer demand, but we have-n't gone to the expense of marketing the plan."

There are no other renewable energy plans offered in the Houston area. Spokesmen for Entergy and TXU note that renewable sources are part of their mix of power generation. TXU is the fourth largest contractor of wind power in the country, while Entergy has several hydroelectric facilities.

Green Mountain has 600,000 customers in eight states but does not offer a state-by-state breakdown.

[email protected]

One of the interesting things .. the very interesting things .. about this piece is the fact that it actually is beginning to look as if wind power is nearly at parity with fossil-fuel based power as well. When I read that bit, my mind boggled. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Of course, one factor in this new parity is the fact that the cost of oil has skyrocketed, thanks to W's cluelessness and the Iraqi insurgents.

Could "The End of Oil" be nearing irrelevance?

For decades, we've been warned, repeatedly and correctly, that eventually, the oil will run out.

We can recycle aluminum and copper and manganese and vanadium. We can mine taconite for the iron, which is half of Earth's mass anyway, and recycle that. But we burn most of the oil, which is not a good thing, as we also need it as a precursor for industrial chemistry and all that implies.

Burning oil also increases the carbon dioxide burden, which most scientists now agree contributes to global warming. I'm not sanguine about theoretical models of the atmoshere's chemistry. But the last decade has given us entirely too much empirical evidence of global warming. And empirical evidence is the gold standard, in my book.

Other options? Solar power isn't that efficient on Earth's surface. Roughly 90% of the energy in solar photoflux never reaces the surface. And our launch vehicle woes, added to NASA dysfunctionality, pretty much close out the SPS option for the forseeable future.

Nuclear power via fission reactor will work, but disposal of the debris is a potato so hot it's radioactive. And with fission power, there's also the issue of securing the fissionables. We have too bloody many nuclear weapons lying about as it is. Sooner or later, somebody's going to drop a stitch, and then some band of nutbars is going to find themselves in posession of enough weapons grade fissionables to build an improvised nuke. Not good.

For the last 50 years, teams of researchers in Russia, the US, and Europe have pursued the option of fusion power. So far, it has proven to be a will-of-the-wisp. Every decade or two, we are told it is imminent. Then nothing. The problem generally boils down to the fact that as you heat plasma to ever-higher temperatures, it develops new instabilities. The degrees of freedom available to unstable motion keep increasing as the temperature does.

But it may be that recent improvements in computing gear have cracked the problem. The entire community investigating controlled fusion is coming to a boil, to the extent that they seriously intend to build an experimental thermonuclear reactor, as soon as the politics of where to put it die down.

I found the story at the Christian Science Monitor's web site.

I must preface this with the fact that I personally am going to remain skeptical until I actually hear that it works, and that electrical power generation is comfortably above breakeven.

Fusion: Stepping closer to reality

Scientists now say 100 million degrees C is not too hot to handle in this powerful energy-generating process.

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

When two physicists gather at a restaurant with steak on the menu and fusion on the agenda, you're likely to find scribbles. Or so it must have seemed to the server who cleared Robert Goldston's table recently.

A colleague had missed a talk Dr. Goldston had given on new developments in fusion-energy research. So the two repaired to a local eatery for a recap. By the time the check arrived, "the napkins and half the table cloth were covered with equations," recalls Goldston, director of Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Fusion, in other words, is generating renewed excitement among scientists in the field.

Given the challenges facing today's nuclear reactors, they have long dreamed of harnessing the same energy source that powers the sun. In theory, they could generate power more efficiently, more safely, and with less nuclear waste than today's reactors, and use a virtually limitless source of fuel - hydrogen. Fusion reactors represent a kind of holy grail for an energy-dependent world.

Now, researchers are poised to take the next big step in evaluating the technology's commercial potential. Scientists say they are more confident than ever that they can successfully build and operate a planned experimental fusion reactor. The bigger hurdle now looks political. The six-nation project - called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER - is caught in a big-money squabble over where to put the $5 billion reactor. Japan and France both want the privilege.

Scientists, meanwhile, are chafing to loose the bulldozers.

"There have been dramatic advancements in our scientific understanding" over the past five to 10 years, Goldston notes. The basic conclusion: The "fire" in the type of reactor planned for ITER may not be as finicky to control as many had previously believed.

Initial simulations had suggested that triggering and sustaining the fusion reactions might be too difficult. But "we've made enormous steps forward," says Anne Davies, director of the US Energy Department's Office of Fusion Energy Science. An International Atomic Energy Agency meeting last month in Portugal generated considerable excitement because experiments with test reactors around the world suggested ITER's reactor would work as designed.

The idea behind fusion is fairly straightforward. Today's nuclear reactors derive their energy by splitting atoms in a process called fission. Fusion works by combining them - actually the nuclei of two forms of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium. Fusing nuclei requires more energy than splitting them, but the payoff is larger. A fusion reaction gives off three to four times as much energy as a fission reaction does.

The challenge: For fusion to occur, the surroundings must be torrid. Researchers anticipate their experimental reactor will run at 100 million degrees C - roughly six times as hot as the sun's core. At these temperatures, atoms and their electrons part company and form a roiling particle soup called a plasma. Such temperatures also give the nuclei of the atoms enough speed to fuse with other nuclei when they hit them. But because the plasma is filled with electrically charged particles, many researchers hold that the only way to keep the plasma bottled up is with magnetic fields.

Enter ITER, which would represent a major step toward a commercial fusion reactor. Researchers have designed it to generate at least five times the amount of power it consumes in sustaining fusion reactions. It would use a reactor roughly shaped like a hollow doughnut, surrounded by magnets. The plasma forms and the reactions occur within the doughnut. The magnetic fields are designed to keep the plasma from hitting the reactor walls. If it did, it would cool sufficiently to snuff the reactions. "No one would get hurt, but if you were trying to sell electricity, you wouldn't be very happy," Goldston quips.

For years, researchers worried that at the energy levels ITER was aiming for, the plasma would fail to remain stable or that the magnetic fields would fail to keep the plasma bottled up.

But since the mid-'90s, technological advances have yielded fresh insights into the way such reactors can operate. They include improved test equipment, new ways to tweak the reactions from outside the reactor vessel, and more-powerful computers that model the conditions in the reactors. "Now we know what we're looking at," Goldston says.

For example, when the plasma grows turbulent, it forms eddies and the plasma cools. Researchers had a difficult time figuring out what determined the size of the eddies and how to control them. With the added computational horsepower and the new instruments, they determined the factors that controlled their size. Just as important, they found that they could apply more push to the flowing plasma than the system would generate on its own, shearing off the eddies almost before they got started.

"If you play that card right, you get these regions that are very quiet" and have distinctly higher temperatures than the regions surrounding them, Goldston says.

Another troublesome question revolved around how powerful a magnetic field the ITER reactor would need to contain the plasma.

"This is a key issue," he says. "Magnetic fields cost money and plasma makes fusion. If you can hold a lot of plasma in a little magnetic field, you can make money. If you can only hold a little bit of plasma in a big magnetic field, then you ought to find a different job."

Researchers are encouraged by the results they've gotten in this area so far.

Scientists are targeting other issues as well, the DOE's Dr. Davies says. A search is under way for materials that can line the reactor chamber without succumbing to the corrosive effects of the reactions. Scientists are also seeking new materials that will lose lethal levels of radioactivity faster than is currently the case. Today's fission reactors generate large amounts of long-lasting radioactive waste. Fusion reactors are expected to generate smaller amounts of highly radioactive waste. Scientists would like to use materials, such as silicone carbide, that don't become radioactive at all.

In addition, researchers are looking at alternative approaches to designing the reactor core itself.

"The fusion energy program has risen to a new level of scientific understanding," Davies says. "We're now measuring and controlling plasmas consistent with computer simulations. This represents an enormous step forward."

If we can get around the plasma instability problem, we're 75% of the way to the finish line.

Note the bit about a reactor failure messing up the reactor, but not the surrounding countryside. This is a good thing. And another advantage over fission power.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Thoughts Sinistral

I don't quite know how to characterize this story, but that's a fairly common occurance at The Register. Call it insider tech geek humor:

Southpaws thrash righties: study
By Robin Lettice
Published Friday 10th December 2004 16:53 GMT

Researchers have suggested that left-handed people are better at surviving fights to the death.

Left handed people are more likely to have certain health problems, including immune disorders, and thus logically the trait should have been removed by natural selection. The fact that there are still lefties in the population either suggests that being left-handed provides some survival advantage, or is a product of left-handedness not being governed by simple inheritance principles. For instance, there is only a 76 per cent chance that indentical twins, who have identical genes, will both use the same writing hand.

No, I have no earthshaking thoughts about this. It's just an odd little story.

Reading the Signs

Al Kamen's WaPo column In the Loop appears on Mondays and Fridays. It is one of my favorite things as he unravels the Washington backstory.

Sherlock Holmes Not Needed

To outsiders, the Cabinet transition kabuki can be a confusing time. On the one hand, the president always "accepts" the resignation with "deep regret," and is devastated at losing the services of so fine a public servant.

The Cabinet officer is equally saddened to disappoint but feels he must: a) spend more time with family; b) explore options in the private sector; c) return to his roots, or his first love, or whatever.

But we all know that some of these folks are simply getting the boot. So how to tell what's going on? It's not easy, but there are clues. One is the "48-Hour Rule," which raises a red flag if a replacement, especially someone from outside the federal government who needs a lengthy background check, is announced within 48 hours of the resignation.

For example, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge's letter sent and released on Nov. 30, followed by the announced selection of New Yorker Bernard B. Kerik a few days later was most suspicious.

Yesterday, Jim Nicholson, former Republican National Committee chairman and ambassador to the Vatican, was named to take over at the Department of Veterans Affairs from Anthony J. Principi, whose resignation letter was dated Nov. 16 but not revealed until Wednesday.

It's not certain, but Nicholson probably would have been re-vetted and interviewed some time ago. (Unless you assume Bush yelled out yesterday to counselor Karl Rove, "Hey, who do we have under 'Veterans'?" and Nicholson's name was on top and he just happened to be in town.)

Obviously there are exceptions, such as Supreme Court resignations where everything is kept secret until the replacement can be announced. And some Cabinet folks may sincerely want out. But abrupt departures without firm job offers and with quickly named successors can be useful hints.

See, don't you feel more like a Washington insider already?

The Borrow and Spend Party

Borrow, Speculate and Hope
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 10, 2004

The National Association of Securities Dealers," The Wall Street Journal reports, "is investigating whether some brokerage houses are inappropriately pushing individuals to borrow large sums on their houses to invest in the stock market." Can we persuade the association to investigate would-be privatizers of Social Security?

For it is now apparent that the Bush administration's privatization proposal will amount to the same thing: borrow trillions, put the money in the stock market and hope.

Privatization would begin by diverting payroll taxes, which pay for current Social Security benefits, into personal investment accounts. The government, already deep in deficit, would have to borrow to make up the shortfall.

This would sharply increase the government's debt. Never mind, privatization advocates say: in the long run, they claim, people would make so much on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees' benefits. Financial markets won't believe this claim, as I'll explain in a minute, but let's temporarily grant the point.

Even so, if personal investment accounts were invested in Treasury bonds, this whole process would accomplish precisely nothing. The interest workers would receive on their accounts would exactly match the interest the government would have to pay on its additional debt. To compensate for the initial borrowing, the government would have to cut future benefits so much that workers would gain nothing at all.

How, then, can privatizers claim that they could secure the future of Social Security without raising taxes or reducing the incomes of future retirees? By assuming that workers would invest most of their accounts in stocks, that these investments would make a lot of money and that, in effect, the government, not the workers, would reap most of those gains, because as personal accounts grew, the government could cut benefits.

Bush Rejects Tax Hike for Social Security
# His stance against bigger payroll deductions appears to rule out two key proposals for fixing the system. Borrowing is now more likely.

By Warren Vieth, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Thursday flatly rejected a payroll tax increase to shore up Social Security, narrowing the range of options available to lawmakers to address the retirement system's long-term financial needs.

"We will not raise payroll taxes to solve this problem," Bush told reporters following a meeting at the White House with Social Security trustees.

Although the president said he did not want to prejudge Social Security legislation under consideration in Congress, his declaration appeared to undermine two leading proposals for overhauling the program — both of which include an increase in the payroll tax for some higher-income workers.

It also made it more likely that any measure Bush signed into law would rely on borrowed money and reductions in promised benefits for future retirees to finance the creation of private investment accounts and make the system financially sound.

Bush has placed Social Security at the top of his second-term policy agenda. He has asked Congress to approve a plan to let younger workers divert a portion of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts that they would control.

Diverting money into private accounts, however, would deprive the Social Security system of money needed to pay benefits to current retirees. Economists have estimated that it could cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next decade to replace the payroll taxes that would be diverted into private accounts. The additional federal borrowing could put upward pressure on interest rates, some analysts say.

White House officials contend the additional debt would be more than offset by the eventual reduction of Social Security's long-term unfunded liability, which they estimate at $11 trillion over 75 years. Their argument assumes that future benefits would be reduced to offset the creation of private accounts.

Bush threw down the tax marker as the White House prepared to launch a public relations campaign to build bipartisan support for Social Security restructuring, beginning with a two-day economic conference next week.

As Krugman points out, the Bush policy is essentially a plan to borrow to finance speculation. That's like taking out a home equity line to finance a day at the track.

A Free Press

Officer crisis hits Army Reserve

By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

The Army Reserve is facing an extreme shortage of company officers, a situation aggravated by a surge in resignation requests.

The shortage — primarily of captains — has seriously reduced the capabilities of the Reserve, and continued losses will further reduce the readiness of "an already depleted military force," according to an Army briefing document submitted last month to Congress.

Army Reserve resignation requests have jumped from just 15 in 2001 to more than 370 during a 12-month period ending in September. To preserve its leadership ranks, the Reserve increasingly has rejected resignation requests, forcing some officers to stay on even after they have fulfilled their initial eight-year service requirement.

The resignation requests are another sign of a military under strain during the protracted war in Iraq, where more than 40 percent of the U.S. forces are drawn from the ranks of Reserve and National Guard.

These Reserve and Guard soldiers attend weekend drills and two-week annual training. When called to active duty, they may leave behind families and civilian jobs for prolonged oversea deployments, and some take a big hit in their family income while facing the prospect of injury or death.

To help maintain troop strength, the Pentagon now routinely invokes a "stop-loss" program that prevents thousands of enlisted soldiers and officers from leaving the military until their unit is through their combat tour.

Only after the unit returns to the United States can soldiers who have completed their volunteer contract then leave the service. This policy has been subject to several lawsuits, including a challenge filed earlier this week by eight soldiers.

The Army Reserve policy extends well beyond the combat-zone, stop-loss program. If an officer's specialty is in short supply, the Reserve may opt to reject a resignation even if the soldier is not on active duty in Iraq or scheduled for any such deployment. So far this year, the Army has rejected more than 40 percent of the resignation requests of lieutenants and captains.

"Exercise of this discretion is potentially controversial because it invites claims of involuntary servitude and arbitrary action," stated the briefing document submitted Nov. 16 to Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.

In one case reviewed by The Seattle Times, a Reserve Army captain was unable to resign after he completed 11 years as a commissioned officer that included a 2003-2004 tour of duty in Iraq. While in Iraq, the officer said the thought of resigning once he got home helped to get him through a difficult year.

"Sadly, that was not to be," said the captain, who requested anonymity. "This matter has become increasingly black and white to me: We are either a volunteer army, or we are not. I fail to see how I can be considered a volunteer at this point after I have been denied an opportunity to move on with my life."

The captain said he moved into the Reserve after graduating from West Point and initially serving in the active-duty Army. Other Reserve officers are drawn from graduates of training programs offered to college students and other training offered enlisted soldiers.

These officers lead units that maintain supply lines, tend to the wounded and offer other support services for the troops in Iraq.

But now the Reserve does not have enough officers moving through its chain of command. Currently, the Reserve has staffed only 70 percent of the 18,719 officer positions for lieutenants and captains.

More evidence of the over-stretch. Note the unattributed sources, this isn't a story the Pentagon wants you to know about.

Armor and Amputations

Bad headline, dishonest article.

Army Doctors Scrambling, Report Says
The military medical system has been overwhelmed by the scope and severity of injuries among troops, a health expert writes.
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

December 9, 2004

WASHINGTON — A shortage of surgeons to treat the wounded in Iraq has left Army medical teams in the country scrambling to handle the largest number of military casualties since the Vietnam War, the New England Journal of Medicine reports today.

The Army has fewer than 50 general surgeons and 15 orthopedic surgeons in Iraq at any one time to serve more than 138,000 troops. Despite the numbers, advances in battlefield surgical techniques and care mean a greater percentage of soldiers wounded in Iraq are surviving than in any previous American conflict.

The article describes a military medical system that has undergone fundamental changes since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but that nonetheless has been overwhelmed by the scope and severity of injuries occurring among troops in Iraq. It was written by Atul Gawande, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a former senior health advisor to the Clinton White House.

Since March 2003, 1,276 U.S. military personnel have died in the Iraq war, with an additional 9,765 wounded, according to Pentagon figures. The number of deaths directly related to combat passed 1,000 this week, the Pentagon said.

"Just as the rest of the military structure was unprepared for the length of the war and the evolution in the nature of the war, so has the military medical establishment been understandably unprepared for that," Gawande said in an interview.

"What is striking is that they have been able to adapt in ways that allow them to keep a high rate of survival for the soldiers," he said. "But there are costs, and what you see is a potential problem on the horizon."

Gawande did not specify the number of surgeons he thought the military should have in Iraq. He said there were several indications, though, that the current level was insufficient.

With just 120 general surgeons on active duty, the Army has been forced to use urologists, plastic surgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons to perform general surgery on soldiers in Iraq.

Many surgeons have been deployed for more than two years in the Iraq campaign, and military planners are contemplating pressing some to return, Gawande writes.

The physicians are working under difficult circumstances. In many cases, the military has taken over Iraqi hospitals, and the facilities are flooded with civilian patients whom the Americans are unable to treat. With no clear directive from the Pentagon on treating civilians, some physicians refuse to help even pediatric patients out of fear the children could be booby-trapped with bombs, Gawande writes.

Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of deployment health support with the Pentagon's Office of Health Affairs, acknowledged that Army surgeons working in Iraq had had to improvise in some cases and had been forced to work outside their specialties in others. But he said the relatively low number of deaths proved the system was working.

"There are certainly going to be times in any location where the workload is going to exceed the personnel present," Kilpatrick said. "There are going to be some extremely long hours at times."

But, he added, "the fact that they have responded as well as they have speaks to the fact that they were well prepared. You can't anticipate every eventuality. I think the training and preparation that people had has stood them in good stead."

Detailing the nature of combat injuries and their complications, Gawande says that blast injuries from suicide bombs and land mines are up substantially in recent months and have proved particularly difficult to treat without risking infection. Eye injuries have caused blindness among a "dismaying" number of soldiers, he says.

Soldiers who survive the initial blasts and field treatment are suffering at high rates from later complications, including pulmonary embolisms (when a blood clot travels to the lungs) and deep venous thrombosis (blood clots in the legs). Some of those soldiers have died of the complications.

Army medical teams are also worried about what Gawande calls an epidemic of multi-drug resistant bacterial infection in military hospitals. Among 442 medical evacuees seen at Walter Reed, 8.4% tested positive, a far higher rate than previously seen among wounded troops.
....
The strategy seems to be working, Gawande finds. Although at least as many U.S. troops have been wounded in combat in the Iraq war as in the first five years of Vietnam, 90% are surviving, compared with 76% in Vietnam.

Other experts also have credited superior body armor and equipment for improving combat injury survival. But the survivors often have injuries so severe that their future prospects are uncertain, Gawande writes.

One airman lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face. "How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question," Gawande said.

Let's deconstruct this, shall we? The doctors aren't "scrambling," they are desperately overworked because there aren't enough of them, and both soldiers and civilians are getting shoddy care as a result. Serious orthopedic and brain injuries can't be treated, and they are the majority of what are being meted out by explosive devices and suicide bombings.

Ms. Schrader isn't responsible for her headline, but the rest of the article is far too deferential to her Pentagon handlers. If she had done a little bit of Google research she would have discovered exactly how hard up for doctors the Army actually is:

A 70-year-old Satellite Beach Army surgeon is out of retirement -- and serving in Afghanistan.

Defense Department officials say Caulfield is one of about 100 over the age of 60 serving.

And what this story doesn't tell you is that his call-up was from the IRR, the Indiviual Ready Reserve. He didn't "voluntarily accept a return to active duty," he would have been subject to criminal penalties if he hadn't shown up.

When "supporting the troops" means hiding from the truth, we're in real trouble.

Here's more:

Truth be told, lies are part of Pentagon strategy

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - "The first casualty when war comes is truth." So said Sen. Hiram Johnson, a California Republican, in the year 1917.

There is a struggle inside the Pentagon over where to draw the line in conducting so-called information operations or propaganda in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and who will be involved. On one side are the information warfare activists, led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary Douglas Feith. On the other are those who believe that telling lies to the media is wrong and military public affairs officers should never be involved in that.

The wrangling has been going on since soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 when a Pentagon war planner, speaking anonymously, told a Washington Post reporter, "This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. We're going to lie about things."

Not long afterward the Pentagon opened its controversial Office of Strategic Influence amid reports that its mission included planting false news stories in the international media. A public outcry led to the hasty shuttering of that office, but Rumsfeld served notice that while the office may have been closed, its mission would be continued by other entities.

The defense secretary told reporters on Nov. 18, 2002: "Fine, you want to savage this thing, fine. I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done, and I have."

This week the Los Angeles Times reported that CNN had been targeted in an information war operation three weeks before the start of the attack against Fallujah. On Oct. 14 Marine 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert, a public affairs spokesman, went on camera to declare that "troops crossed the line of departure" - that the Fallujah operation was under way.

It was not. The U.S. commanders obviously hoped that the false news broadcast by CNN would trigger certain moves by the insurgents and foreign terrorists holding the Sunni city - moves that then could be analyzed to gain information on how they would defend Fallujah.

Marine sources in Iraq flatly deny that Lt. Gilbert's statement to CNN was a deception operation or part of a larger psy-war operation. They say the distinction between public affairs and information operations is very clear and jealously guarded by the public affairs community.

And what are they lying about?

Amputation rate for US troops twice that of past wars
Doctors cite need for prosthetics as more lives saved

By Raja Mishra, Globe Staff | December 9, 2004

US troops injured in Iraq have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars, and as many as 20 percent have suffered head and neck injuries that may require a lifetime of care, according to new data giving the clearest picture yet of the severity of battlefield wounds.
ADVERTISEMENT

The data are the grisly flip side of improvements in battlefield medicine that have saved many combatants who would have died in the past: Only 1 in 10 US troops injured in Iraq has died, the lowest rate of any war in US history.

But those who survive have much more grievous wounds. Bulletproof Kevlar vests protect soldiers' bodies but not their limbs, as insurgent snipers and makeshift bombs tear off arms and legs and rip into faces and necks. More than half of those injured sustain wounds so serious they cannot return to duty, according to Pentagon statistics.

Much attention has focused on the 1,000-plus soldiers killed in Iraq, but the Pentagon has released little information on the 9,765 soldiers injured as of this week.

"The death rate isn't great compared to Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. But these soldiers are coming back to their communities and people are seeing just how high the price is that these young people are paying," said Dr. G. Richard Holt, a head and neck surgeon at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and a retired US Army surgeon who served as a civilian adviser in Iraq earlier this year.

Responding to the large number of amputations, scientists at Brown University in Providence and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yesterday announced a $7.2 million research program to design more functional prosthetic limbs. The US Department of Veterans Affairs is paying for the work.

Data compiled by the US Senate, and included in the 2005 defense appropriations bill in support of a request for increased funding for the care of amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, reveal that 6 percent of those wounded in Iraq have required amputations, compared with a rate of 3 percent for past wars.

According to Brown Medical School's Dr. Roy Aaron, the current VA medical system "literally cannot handle the load" of amputees.

And NPR is reporting this morning (no link yet) that armor manufacturers were never asked to ramp up production to armor those humvees and Bradleys, and could easily have doubled their production, had they been asked.

Yes, Rummy's lies to the troops earlier this week are part of this story: these terrible injuries are directly attributable to lack of vehicle armor. McPaper has the story:

On Thursday, Rumsfeld softened his tone. “It doesn't happen instantaneously, but it has been happening pretty rapidly,” he said.

A day earlier, he had called it “a matter of physics, not a matter of money. … It's a matter of production and the capability of doing it.” But spokesmen for two companies making armor for vehicles said Thursday they had offered to step up the pace of production:

•Former Republican congressman Matt Salmon of Arizona, a spokesman for ArmorWorks in Tempe, Ariz., said his company will finish a $30 million contract with the Pentagon this month to make 1,500 armor kits for Humvees. “We are at 50% capacity, and we could do a lot more,” he said. “They are aware of it.”

•Armor Holdings of Jacksonville told the Army last month it could add armor to as many as 550 trucks a month, up from 450, said Robert Mecredy of its aerospace and defense group. “We're prepared to build 50 to 100 vehicles more per month,” he said.

Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the Pentagon had no immediate response.

And, from the NYT:

Armor Scarce for Big Trucks Serving in Iraq
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: December 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 - Congress released statistics Thursday documenting stark shortages in armor for the military transport trucks that ferry food, fuel and ammunition along dangerous routes in Iraq, while President Bush and his defense secretary both spoke out to defuse public criticism.

Soldiers confronted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday with complaints that the Pentagon was sending them to war without enough armored equipment to protect them. One soldier who challenged Mr. Rumsfeld was apparently prompted by a reporter traveling with his unit. The commander of American ground forces in the Middle East responded Thursday to the complaints with a vow to provide armored transportation into Iraq for all troops headed there.

"The concerns expressed are being addressed, and that is, we expect our troops to have the best possible equipment," Mr. Bush said. "And I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission which is vital and important."

The House Armed Services Committee released statistics on Thursday showing that while many Humvees are armored, most transport trucks that crisscross Iraq are not.

The committee said more than three-quarters of the 19,854 Humvees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait carry protective armor, which can vary in quality. The most secure are factory-armored Humvees, and the Pentagon has received only 5,910 of the 8,105 that commanders say they need. But only 10 percent of the 4,814 medium-weight transport trucks have armor, and only 15 percent of the 4,314 heavy transport vehicles.

The uproar has exposed some of the most crucial challenges facing the Pentagon: how to equip and train troops for a war whose very nature has changed.

A resourceful insurgency has seized on an American vulnerability - the shortage of armored vehicles - and attacked supply lines with roadside bombs. These trucks are driven primarily by reservists, while a much greater percentage of active-duty soldiers are deployed in direct combat, and disparities between these troops have already prompted the Defense Department to begin sweeping changes in the way soldiers are trained and equipped.

These issues gained new intensity and widespread attention because they were raised not in the safe confines of a Capitol Hill hearing or a Pentagon suite, but by a scout with the Tennessee National Guard who directly pressed the secretary of defense in the deserts of Kuwait just days before the soldier is to be sent into Iraq for a year.

Gen R. Steven Whitcomb is the "commander of ground forces" in question. I listened to a bit of his video presser on C-Span Radio while querying the data base yesterday morning. Yes, you can tell if someone is lying even if you can't see their face. Gosh, you learn something new every day.

Do Not Call

I just arrived home to find this in my email from our friend RevKenn:

Important Cell PhoneInfo

A directory of cell phone numbers will soon be published for all consumers to have access to. This will open the doors for solicitors to call you on your cell phones, using up precious minutes that we pay lots of money for. The Federal Trade Commission has set up a "do not call" list. It is called a cell phone registry. To be included on the "do not call" list, you must call from your cell phone to register that number to the "do not call list" The number is 1-888-382-1222 OR you can go to their web site at http://www.donotcall.gov/and add your number to the do not call list.Please give this to friends who have cell phones.

Send this on to anyone you think might use it.

Melanie here. Bump is sometimes useful. I did not know about this.

Worm Turning?

Seeing Iraq as Another Vietnam

Commentary / Commentary
Date: Dec 06, 2004 - 11:51 AM
With violence rising and insurgency spreading, is the media moving from cheerleading the Iraq War to questioning if Iraq is another Vietnam?
By Stewart Nusbaumer

On my computer screen, AOL asks: “Is Iraq Mission on Right Track?” Then on the front page of the New York Times, reporter John F. Burns compared Iraq to Vietnam. Later on my car radio, Michael Savage, a right-wing talk radio celebrity, predicted Iraq will end just like Vietnam.

The press it is a-changin’, so it seems.

The media has been reporting that the Iraqi military and police refuse to pursue the enemy aggressively; the Iraqi bureaucracy has been infiltrated by the enemy; the insurgency is growing larger and stronger; the U.S. military is frustrated because it can’t distinguish between friend and foe. The American media has been reporting another “Vietnam.” It just hadn’t used the word, “Vietnam.” Now they are.

Since the Iraqi insurgency is unwilling to fight our type of war, and our mega-powerful U.S. military is unable to fight an effective counter-insurgency war, a bloody stalemate has ensued. But time is on the side of the Iraqi insurgents. It is their country; we are the foreign occupiers. This is their very highest priority; America has other higher priorities.

Although the super confidence derived from our superpower status still runs strong in neoconservatives and other politicals who are safely insulated from our approaching Southwest Asian disaster, the arrogance seems to be disappearing in journalists, or at least diminishing. If you listen closely, you might even hear that French phrase, déjà vu.

All of this is not a surprise to those who fought on the ground in Vietnam and then reflected on that catastrophe. We predicted the violence in Iraq would increase and the insurgency would spread throughout the country. We understood the U.S. could not win this war of occupation, as we did not win in Vietnam. We understood because “we been there, done that.”

We dismissed the avalanche of fearless reassurances coming from those who avoided--if not hid--from Vietnam. An avalanche of fearless reassurances that was amplified by the American media.

I created Veterans Against the Iraq War which attracted large numbers of combat vets, many retired career soldiers (some conservative and Republican), all passionately opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But the media was too busy to listen to us. It was too busy amplifying the Pentagon’s optimistic statements and broadcasting the certitude of Bush Administration officials that Iraq would be fast and easy.

Iraq has not been fast and easy. And now the media is growing skeptical, even comparing the failure in Iraq to our national nightmare, Vietnam.

I dunno. CNN is still cheerleading and I have yet to hear a hard question being asked when the admin talking heads show up to be "interviewed" by Woodruff or Blitzer. I think the watershed moment, if there is one, was Rummy's Q&A; with the troops in Kuwait yesterday. The fact that the grunts are both skeptical and angry IS news.

Flu Update

Growing fears over bird flu
By Hamish McDonald, Herald Correspondent, in Beijing
December 10, 2004

Chinese health officials are making plans to deal with a pandemic as the World Health Organisation warns that mutated influenza jumping from birds to humans could kill up to 100 million before a vaccine is ready.

Senior WHO officials yesterday spoke of a contingency where up to 25 per cent of China's 1.3 billion people are stricken with a new form of flu, which, even if not fatal in most cases, could bring the country's food and other vital supplies to a halt.

This month, the organisation's regional director for the Western Pacific, Shigeru Omi, expressed fears about avian flu mutating or combining with another virus to spread from human to human.

"We are talking at least 7 million [deaths], but maybe more - 10 million, 20 million and the worst case 100 million," Dr Omi told health ministers from 13 Asian countries meeting in Bangkok.

The semi-tropical southern provinces of China have been a breeding ground for influenza epidemics because of their dense population intensively raising chickens and ducks in close proximity with pigs, which can act as a bridge species for viruses between poultry and humans.
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The WHO's representative in China, Hank Bekedam, told reporters yesterday that Beijing is drawing up a pandemic contingency plan, which will involve detailed preparations to deal with mass infections by a new virus form, including mass production of vaccines, stockpiling of anti-viral drugs, and emergency logistics for feeding the population.

OK, it looks like that NPR story from last night was apocryphal. But this is the first time I've seen a story that includes the social and economic dimensions of a bad pandemic.

Until this thing mutates and we know 1) how contagious it is going to be; 2) how lethal it is going to be, we can't even model for it.

Help a Blogger

Susie is having a serious cashflow problem which is emperiling her ability to blog. If you can help, her tip jar is up.

Believe me, I completely understand. Having been unemployed for more than half of the last four years, I'm so far in debt I don't know how I'll ever get out. The new gig pays the bills but little more than that. I had to clean out my retirement accounts to get through the last couple of years and, at age 50, that's a pretty serious piece of business.

Hey, Suze, I'll take one of those gmail accounts!

Drafty

Take a look at the post below this, and then read this:

We’ll soon have 150,000 U.S. troops stuck in the ever-expanding Iraqi quagmire, a number that will probably grow even larger before Iraq holds elections presently scheduled for the end of January ’05.

“I believe the Army will have to drastically change what they offer to enlistees to overcome what’s happening in Iraq. The war is ugly, and not many kids want to enlist to be blown up.”

This is from Soldiers for the Truth, Col. David Hackworth's (ret.) site, hardly the home of liberals. Hack is a proponent of the "warrior culture, but he knows abuse of the military when he sees it.

If you've been reading this site for a while, you know that I'm hardly a pacifist. As my friend Peg says, the world needs both warriors and monks, and I admire both. While I don't support this war, never did, I have empathy for the people we've stranded in it, both the Iraqis and our troops. If you have a little extra you can donate in this holiday season, consider phone cards for the wounded at Walter Reed and Bathesda Naval, frequent flyer miles for those serving (they have to pay their own way home for furloughs, can you believe it?) or a little something for international relief agencies like the Red Crescent, one of the few agencies which haven't pulled out of Iraq. The International Rescue Committee, one of the "last ditch" humanitarian agencies, like Doctors Without Borders, which pulled out last month, is leaving in January.

Far from all of Bush and Rummy's happy talk, we are in serious trouble in Iraq. CNN and the broadcast networks certainly haven't noticed yet, but I see from the dailies this morning that the newspapers are finally starting to catch on.

Fleeing North

Deserters: We Won't Go To Iraq

Dec. 8, 2004

"I was told in basic training that, if I'm given an illegal or immoral order, it is my duty to disobey it, and I feel that invading and occupying Iraq is an illegal and immoral thing to do."
Spc. Jeremy Hinzman

60 Minutes Wednesday found several of these deserters who left the Army or Marine Corps rather than go to Iraq. Like a generation of deserters before them, they fled to Canada.

"I honor their dead. Maybe they think that my presence dishonors their dead. But they made a choice the same as I made a choice," says Felushko. "My big problem is that, if they made that choice for anything other than they believed in it, then that's wrong. Right? And the government has to be held responsible for those deaths, because they didn’t give them an option."

His moral reasoning is hardly flawless, but his vote with his feet has been repeated by at least 5,500 other contracted military.

This is worth a further thought: our soldiers, sailors, airpersons and Marines have a contract with us. It obligates them to certain things for a certain period of time (some interesting lawsuits are proceding around that very idea) but what is OUR obligation under the terms of such a contract?

Any Vets want to weigh in with some possible answers?

I don't watch much TV, but I was able to catch the tail end of PBS's Newshour last night. Their silent tribute to our war dead ran to 16 last night. We are getting a little past George Nethercutt's "losing one or two soldiers" each day.

"Incendiary Devices"

Congress Bans Lighters From Airliners

Thursday December 9, 2004 3:46 AM

By LESLIE MILLER

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Passengers already are barred from smoking on commercial flights. Now they won't be allowed to bring their butane lighters on board either.

As part of the intelligence reform bill passed Wednesday, Congress added the lighters to the long list of items, including scissors, pen knives and box cutters, that passengers are barred from carrying on to planes. The ban does not apply to checked luggage.

Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota had pushed for the change for more than a year after learning the Transportation Security Administration allowed them on planes.

``When I found out that they had explicitly, in their rule, said you could take two butane lighters and four books of matches on board, I thought, 'What have they been drinking?''' Dorgan said. Matches still are allowed.

Dorgan cited FBI reports that would-be ``shoe-bomber'' Richard Reid would have been able to ignite his explosive and blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner three years ago if he'd brought a butane lighter with him.

Wyden and Dorgan were so persistent in their campaign against the incendiary devices that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., joked earlier this year that he never thought butane lighters would get so much attention.

``This is probably not the biggest thing in the world,'' Dorgan said. ``But it's one of those areas where a big government agency couldn't develop a little bit of common sense about something so obvious.''

The ban takes effect 60 days after President Bush signs the intelligence reform bill into law.

Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, used matches, which are still allowed.

Is there some way we can defund the Senate, while letting the rest of the machinery hum along as usual?

A Tale of Idiots

Defying Speculation, Snow Will Remain Treasury Secretary
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - John W. Snow will stay on as treasury secretary, the White House said this afternoon, dashing speculation that he would soon be forced out of the Cabinet.

"The president is pleased Secretary Snow agreed to continue," said Scott McClellan, President Bush's chief spokesman. Mr. McClellan made the disclosure after the regular White House news briefing.

The spokesman said Mr. Bush had asked Mr. Snow this afternoon if he would stay on. The secretary and other members of Mr. Bush's economic team had lunch at the White House today.

Mr. Snow, 65, campaigned tirelessly for Mr. Bush, promoting the president's message of tax cuts. But he occasionally seemed politically tone-deaf, as when he remarked in Ohio, a crucial battleground state that has suffered economically, that job losses were a myth. He later said he had been misinterpreted.

The secretary also created political fodder for Democrats with comments that "outsourcing," a euphemism for United States companies' shipping jobs overseas, was part of the global trading system.

Over the past week, there had been increasing speculation that Mr. Snow was on his way out as Mr. Bush continued to reshape his Cabinet for his second term. The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Bush planned to replace the treasury secretary, perhaps with Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff.

And The Washington Post reported recently that a White House aide said Mr. Snow could stay "as long as he wants, provided it is not very long."

Administration officials and advisers had been signaling for weeks that Mr. Snow was likely to depart eventually but had left open the possibility that he might stay into next year.

Eight Cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft, have announced their resignations. Norman Y. Mineta, the transportation secretary and the Cabinet's only Democrat, is also expected to step down, perhaps this week.

Well, competence has never been the hallmark of this administration, so I guess shouldn't be a suprise. Let's see, how many collapses are we presiding over now? Oh, Snow isn't smart enough to go hide from the financial collapse which is in the works.

The tale of idiots continues. If I performed on my job like this guy does at his, I'd have been history a long time ago.

Moonie Meltdown and Some Blogging Business

What on earth is going on at the Moonie Times? Anybody know anything about this guy?

Is the Bush administration certifiable?

By Paul Craig Roberts

Web only

Has President Bush lost his grip on reality?
In his Dec. 1 speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia, President Bush again declared his intention to pre-emptively attack "enemies who plot in secret and set out to murder the innocent and the unsuspecting." Freedom from terrorism, Bush declared, will come only through pre-emptive war against enemies of democracy.
How does Bush know who and where these secret enemies are? How many more times will his guesses be wrong, like he was about Iraq?
What world does Bush live in? The United States cannot control Iraq, much less battle the rest of the Muslim world and beyond. While Bush threatened the world with U.S. aggression, headlines revealed the futility of pre-emptively invading countries: "Pentagon to Boost Iraq Force by 12,000," "U.S. Death Toll in Iraq at Highest Monthly Level," "Wounded Disabled Soldiers Kept on Active Duty."
We are getting out butts kicked in Iraq, and Bush wants to invade more countries? It is clear as day that we do not have enough troops to deal with Iraq. The 12,000 additional troops "to improve security" are being acquired by extending the combat tours of troops already on duty in Iraq. More U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq in November than in any previous month. The United States is so hard up for troops that the Pentagon is deploying soldiers who have lost arms and legs in combat. On Dec. 1, The Washington Post reported: "U.S. armed forces have recently announced new efforts to keep seriously wounded or disabled soldiers on active duty."
Redeploying the disabled is presented as a heroic demonstration of our gung-ho warriors' fighting spirit. But what it really means is we have no more troops to throw at the few thousand lightly armed Iraqi insurgents who have tied down eight U.S. divisions.
According to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, it has treated 20,802 U.S. troops for injuries received in Iraq. According to the Pentagon's figures, 54 percent of the wounded are too seriously injured to return to their units. If that figure is correct, it would mean that the insurgents have put 11,233 U.S. troops out of action. Add in the 1,254 U.S. troops who have been killed for a total of 12,487. That's 9 percent of our total force in Iraq and a much higher percentage of our combat force.
There is no indication that we have put 12,487 Iraqi insurgents out of action. Indeed, until very recently the U.S. military estimated that there were only several thousand active insurgents in all of Iraq.
Someone needs to tell Bush that terrorists are stateless and that invading states creates insurgencies. In Iraq, our soldiers are not fighting terrorists. They are fighting an insurgency that Bush created by invading Iraq. Bush's pre-emptive wars are a good way to depopulate the United States and bankrupt our country.
For all our firepower, we are not winning the war. Fallujah has been destroyed, but the U.S. military can claim only 1,200 to 1,600 insurgents were killed. Many of the dead counted as insurgents are probably civilians killed by the U.S. military's indiscriminate use of high explosives. But even if we assume the military's estimate of enemy dead is accurate, it is an unimpressive figure in view of the 850 wounded and 71 dead Americans. U.S. Fallujah casualties of 921 is a strikingly high figure considering the heavy armor, artillery, helicopter gunships, jet fighters and sophisticated communications that back up U.S. troops.

I dunno. This guy seems a whole lot more reality-based than the rest of this paper. Anybody know where else he gets printed?

And yes, I know that the really big story today is that the torture scandal has really broken out into the MSM (main-stream media, remember this for the quiz) and everybody else on the planet has covered it.

Here is a little something about the philosophy of this site:

The lefty blogosphere is every bit as much an echo chamber as the right is. Everybody picks up what Atrios, Kos and Kevin Drum are doing. Big deal. The three of them repeat pretty much the same party line on the same stories. The only time I find these writers interesting is when they cover something that is off the radar of the MSM, which they also do fairly frequently. I read Duncan Black for his expertise in money policy. Kevin gets a wild hair now and then about something and he's the go-to guy for things like Bush's TANG service (a story that sank without a trace) and Peak Oil. I have next to no interest about the "inside baseball" political aspects of Kos, but the diaries and comments threads are fair for mining. We'll see if the new crew of guest posters was as interesting as the last one.

Mostly, I'm looking for stories which are important information but never make the front page of the Bigs. If you've read this site for a while, you know what my prejudices are: the war, inside Washington backstories, ecological devestation, epidemiology, the economy, and meta themes in politics and culture and religion (and the way the last effects the previous two.) I'm interested in the ways that science, popular culture, religion and politics all effect each other. I work for the kind of context that Cursor.org and the other aggregator sites I read provide daily. My bias is thinking that all of you are intelligent enough that you want me to find the heart of each of the news or policy stories, edit them to get the gist so that you can move on. Kos and Atrios have become, to at least some degree, fandom sites. I have no interest in that.

I've also got a very demanding job, and trying to balance what I'm able to do here and still get a paycheck which allows me to do it is a daily calibration. Somedays I get it right and both you and the boss are happy. Somedays I miss it, and I have to have a bias in favor of the paycheck. If the boss ain't happy, nobody is happy.

I do fairly long quotes from the stories I'm following so that you can get the information that I think is critical right here. If you just wanted links, there are a ton of places you can get that. I provide what I know beyond what you'll read in the MSM.

I hope what I do helps your life. When I started this site, it was about my anger. That's changed, although I'm still plenty angry, but I can't stay that way or I'd have burned out a long time ago. Now, this site is still about what attracts my attention, but I've also learned a lot about you and what you want to know.

Stay engaged and keep telling me what works for you and why or why it doesn't. I'm a learning blogger. This is a community and I can't do what I do unless you do what you do.

Now, anybody know anything about this Paul Craig Roberts character?

Ominous Signs

I am looking for a print story, but this will probably have to wait until I get home from work. NPR is reporting a case of possible human to human transmission of avian flu. I'll do more looking after I get home. The NPR story says that one of the anti-virals will work against this bug.

Speaking Up

U.S. Soldiers Air Grievances to Rumsfeld

By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer

December 8, 2004, 4:47 PM EST

CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait -- In a rare public airing of grievances, disgruntled soldiers complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday about long deployments and a lack of armored vehicles and other equipment.

"You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld replied, "not the Army you might want or wish to have."

Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld.

The defense secretary hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.

"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson, 31, of Ringgold, Ga., concluded after asking again.

.....
Wilson's wife, Regina, said she wasn't surprised he challenged Rumsfeld.

"It wouldn't matter if it was Bush himself standing there," she said. "He would have dissed him the same."

Wilson joined the National Guard in June 2003; previously, he had served about four years in the Air Force, beginning in 1994.

I'm hearing stories of resistence across the services. As Charles said to me in an email earlier this afternoon, by this point in Viet Nam, better commanders than Rummy and his perfumed princes in the Joint Chiefs were getting fragged in Viet Nam.

Weird Problems

Most of you, particularly those of you using Firefox and Mozilla, will have had difficulty viewing the site today. We've been working with the hosting company all day. I haven't looked yet, but pogge tells me we're back up in IE, the irony is just too thick, given the post below. If you can see Bump, so I have a sense of where the problem, tell me which browser you are using in Comments. I won't be home to catch my email until after 7 tonight, so if you need to email me, use my Yahoo
[email protected]
until this evening. Thanks for your help.

UPDATE: Thanks once again go out to pogge, who did some of the technical digging around, diagnostics and ran interference with the hosting company. pogge has certainly been making himself useful around here, lately. With all those American liberals wanting to marry Canadians and move north, his efforts haven't gone unnoticed....

Flying Free

Mozilla's Thunderbird is go

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0 of its Thunderbird open source email client, following up on the successful recent launch of its Firefox web browser, and delivering new anti-spam and anti-virus technology to the desktop.

8 Dec 2004, 09:44 GMT -
Mozilla claims the Firefox web browser has been downloaded by over 9 million users since its release in November, and will be hoping for more of the same for Thunderbird, which is available now for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download.

The email client includes adaptive junk mail control technology designed to stop spam by learning from users' email management practices, automated email migration functionality to switch email from existing Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and Netscape Communicator clients.

If you are using Outlook Express, in particular, it is time to switch. OE is one of the biggest security holes in the Windows suite, in addition to being a less than fully useful email client. Thunderbird is a big improvement, and all of your OE settings are completely importable with a couple of clicks.

If you are staying with the full Outlook because of the scheduling and meetings functions, be advised that Mozilla has an application in development. This open source organization is one of the finest knowledge sharing processes since Linux. The whole open source movement turns some basic understandings about cooperation v. competition on its head and is worth pondering.

Spying on Us

Since I've not read the bill, and neither have any of the reporters, I don't know what the hell the intel bill means. This LAT article suggests that it is just shuffling the deck chairs:

The new director will have a say in hiring the heads of intelligence agencies, but no clear authority to fire them. He or she can move money from one agency to another to meet the needs of the U.S. war on terrorism and other challenges, but always subject to strict limits.

Above all, the new structure has the president's chief intelligence advisor several bureaucratic layers removed from the analysts and clandestine operatives who actually gather and try to make sense of enemy secrets. As a result, current and former intelligence officials said, the new director would have significant leverage but face a struggle in the federal bureaucracy.

Turner stressed that he had not fully examined the 600-plus-page reform bill but said he was "not comfortable at this point that they're giving the director of national intelligence adequate authority."

Indeed, the lawmaker who had been the main obstacle to passage of the bill — House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) — said he had agreed to support the measure only after winning what he described as substantial curbs on the director's powers.

Earlier versions of the legislation "had unlimited reprogramming authority. The DNI could take billions from the Department of Defense and move it to the FBI or other places," Hunter said Tuesday. "We scaled that way back — to $150 million, but not more than 5% of any given program or agency."

Similarly, Hunter said, the Senate version of the bill "had unlimited power to transfer personnel. We moved that back to 100 personnel."

Hunter, who had opposed the bill over concerns that it would make spy agencies less responsive to the military, said that for him and other members of the Armed Services Committee, "this … was an exercise in control."

Senate backers of the bill disagreed with the suggestion that it had been weakened. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and was a lead negotiator on the legislation, said language added in recent days to assuage Hunter's concerns "would in no way weaken the authorities of the new director of national intelligence."

She called the measure "the most significant reforms of our intelligence community in more than 50 years."

Talkleft's Jeralyn Merrit has been giving the bill quite a bit of review as it has gone through changes in the conference process, and she is NOT happy:

Once again, a bill that won't make us safer, only less free. Anyone who thinks this bill will stop a future attack is in Dreamland.

Jeralyn has detailed the scary features of this bill in this post and notes:

The bill includes hundreds of added crime measures and provisions that intrude on our civil liberties. The full text of each provision is available.

It calls for a counter-narcotics office. More wiretaps. Greater deportation. Expedited removal. Increased alien detention bed space. No bail for suspected terrorists. Drivers' license controls. Greater passenger screening. Implementing of biometric screening. Provisions for combating biased foreign media coverage of the U.S. It's disgusting.

She provides an extensive list of the most odious provisions. The entire bill is available for your perusal at Thomas. Type in "S. 2845".

Beneath the Waves

Huge no-fishing zones 'offer only hope' of saving marine ecosystem from disaster
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

08 December 2004

It has been invisible, so it has gone largely unheeded, but the wrecking of the seas is now the world's gravest environmental problem after climate change, British scientists said yesterday.

Such destruction has been caused by over-fishing in the marine environment and only massive protected zones, where all fishing is banned, will allow the sea's damaged areas to recover, members of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution said.

These non-fishing reserves should cover fully 30 per cent of UK territorial waters, the commission suggested, in the most drastic call ever made to scale back fishing in Britain or Europe. The proposals were welcomed by environmentalists, but attacked by some fishing industry groups, who said they would threaten yet more livelihoods, and that recovery measures have already been taken.

But the commission, representing some of the country's most senior environmental scientists, was insistent. It is not just the question of plunging fish stocks, critical though many of these are, it said in a new report; rather, the concern is for the whole marine ecosystem, with seabirds, dolphins and porpoises killed in their thousands, smaller marine organisms wiped out and the seabed comprehensively destroyed by trawling over vast distances.

The report, Turning The Tide, calls on people and policymakers everywhere to recognise for the first time the real scale and true nature of the problem: that decades of competitive fishing have put the whole marine ecosystem under siege. The central point is that it is the ecosystem, and not just threatened individual fish stocks, such as cod or haddock, that needs looking after.

The commission's members call for a simple but profound policy change: the "presumption in favour of fishing" should be reversed. Until now, fishing has been allowed anywhere unless the regulating authorities can demonstrate that harm is being done to ecosystems or habitats.

But this has not prevented severe ecosystem damage, the commission reports, saying that it should be for fishing interests to demonstrate that their activities will not cause harm. There should be spatial planning in the sea just as there is on land, it says.

Sir Tom Blundell, the commission's chairman and a professor of chemistry at Cambridge University, said: "It is hard to imagine that we would tolerate a similar scale of destruction on land, but because it happens at sea, the damage is largely hidden. On land, we have had a planning system for over 50 years to ... set aside areas for protection. Unless similar steps are taken at sea to allow recovery from decades of intensive fishing, species may disappear and the ecosystem itself be put in danger."

The report concludes that fishing is a threat to our seas, not only around the UK, but globally, and sets out a litany of the destruction that has been caused. Populations of more than 40 per cent of commercial fish species in the north-east Atlantic and neighbouring seas are below sustainable limits. Large quantities of unmarketable fish - in some cases up to 50 per cent of the catch - are discarded at sea.

Thousands of seabirds and marine mammals such as dolphins and porpoises are killed, getting tangled and drowning, in nets or caught on the hooks of "long-line" fishing gear.

The seabed has been destroyed over vast areas in the North Sea and other seas, and the myriad organisms that live there wiped out by beam-trawling, in which heavy gear is dragged along the bottom. Substantial marine nature reserves, off-limits to fishing boats, must now be the way out, the commission says. Britain is committed to setting up marine reserves over the next decade, but the call for 30 per cent of UK waters to be so dedicated is the first time anyone has put a precise number on the project.

If you only read this story as a local story, you are missing the larger picture. When you start putting a bunch of the local stories together, a larger picture emerges.

In the last 20 years, I've spent quite a bit of my vacation time in Atlantic Canada. Unless you've been there, I don't know if you can appreciate what the collapse of the cod stocks have done to that economy.

I live near the Potomac River where it dumps into the Chesapeake Bay. In my 20 years here, Chesapeake Blue Crab have gone from plentiful to threatened and the local oyster industry no longer exists.

The fish called "Chilean Sea Bass" in US restaurants is gone from the Gulf of Mexico, and increasingly hard to find in both the southern Atlantic and Pacific.

Some fundamental re-thinking of how we use the oceans must happen before they completely collapse as eco-systems. A massive die-off of the world's coral reefs is already underway. What that will mean for the overall health of the oceans is unknown. The damage done to the sea beds by ground trawling is also unknown.

As the article says, "out of sight, out of mind," because we don't see it, we don't think about it.

Do restrictions on fishing/crabbing/lobstering/oystering cost jobs/ways of life? You bet. But consider the alternative.

Who's the Blogger?

Tomorrow should be a relatively normal day, but I'm going to be very tied up in meetings for the rest of the week, daylight hours, until the weekend. And I'm fighting a sinus infection, and I'm not sure which of us is going to win.

I'm not the only blogger around here. The comments threads are your blog, and Open Threads are the invitation. It always amazes me that I can make a little remark about something and a string will run out a dozen or so comments, but when I give you the chance to say your piece, the thread is empty. Why is that?

I got started as a blogger as a commentor at Kos, Atrios, the Nielsen Haydens'and a few other places. It gave me a chance to try out my writing and my rhetoric in some pretty hostile territory. As Teresa like to say, if you aren't reading (and, I might add, writing) comments, you are missing most of any blog.

Yes, this self-publishing stuff is neat for me, and all that. But I learned to do it in comments, because I learned that comments make a community. You are here because you like what I write. Great. But you are interesting, too, and, if you haven't noticed, the comments around here are some of the most erudite, soulful and thoughtful of any of the top coupla hundred blogs (we are in that territory now.) Mel Goux, our benefactress, has often said to me, "M3 (we have a private Melanie vocabulary), your readers are the smartest on the planet." She's right. Compare the commentory here against the other dozen blogs which are just above us in traffic on the left. You folks post opinions which run up against anything which would hit the 700 word limit in a NYT op-ed. You are terrific, and one of the reasons that I retain my enthusiasm for this site for posting as often as I can is you.

I have learned so much from you, and I want to continue to do so and so do your fellow comments posters. We are a community of shared knowledge, shared interests, shared values. Don't hold out.

You've moved me to tears and laughter and changed my life. Do you know that?

Who knows how many other lives you'll change by dropping a couple of smart-ass lines, or an epic of argument, into a comments box? Yes, it's risky to put yourself out there, someone might disagree with you. Around here, they do it with a fair amount of class--this isn't Atrios, and "Mars, bitches" doesn't fly around here. The regulars are hard-headed realists, well-read but still tender hearted. In this house, values get lived and not just yakked about.

Join in. Disagree even. A thoughtful, compassionate argument will get a fair hearing. Write to each other: I have multiple email correspondences going on with regular commentors and I know how good you are. One of the things which pursuaded me to start a front page blog were the private conversations I had with so many other commentors at Kos. You might decide that, too. Our very own millerdunwoody just took the step.

I don't have to worry about trolls; you take them out and isolate them. A couple thousand people read this site on weekdays, and they manage to do it with class, compassion and good English.

Join in. A decent sense of humor won't hurt.

Busy Day

Lotsa meetings. This is an open thread.

Hang on to your Wallet

KRUGMAN!! Back, briefly, from his textbook-writing break, he debunks the Social Security "crisis."

Inventing a Crisis

Right now the revenues from the payroll tax exceed the amount paid out in benefits. This is deliberate, the result of a payroll tax increase - recommended by none other than Alan Greenspan - two decades ago. His justification at the time for raising a tax that falls mainly on lower- and middle-income families, even though Ronald Reagan had just cut the taxes that fall mainly on the very well-off, was that the extra revenue was needed to build up a trust fund. This could be drawn on to pay benefits once the baby boomers began to retire.

The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that this tax increase wasn't quite big enough. Projections in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity - it's just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis - you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

There's no honest way anyone can hold both these positions, but very little about the privatizers' position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success.

For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.

In everything the neo-cons do, it is worth the not-inconsiderable exercise to ask the question, "who benefits?", "qui bono?" in the language of rhetoric I learned in my youth.

If you are, like me, a lower middle class person, chances are it isn't you.

As Krugman points out, regardless of what you hear out of the Congresscritters or in the media, there is no social security crisis. You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to figure this out. The basic math is here.

The neo-con view of the social safety net for the non-rich is rather like their view of Fallujah: they want to destroy it in order to save it.

The Number of the Beast

Afraid to look in the moral abyss

By James Carroll | December 7, 2004

Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed.

Astoundingly, the Democrats cooperated with the Republicans in assuring that the war in Iraq -- the one thing that might have defeated Bush -- was not an issue. That marginalization of the anti-war impulse continues in the suspended animation of a period after the American election and before the Iraqi election.

The new Bush administration has moved to reconfigure itself in most ways but one. The president's affirmation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in combination with his naming of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, reflects a blind determination to "stay the course" in Iraq, never mind that the course is heading off a cliff.

The main US news media treat the "story" of Iraq as if it is a morality tale about 20-year-old Americans -- a few of whom are shown making bad choices, but most of whom are lionized as heroes. When their deaths are mourned on television each night -- that heartbreaking silence under those smiling commissary snapshots -- the effect is to deepen the paralysis of the American public, which can only look away.

The barbarity of the Iraqi insurgency has been a particular source of repugnance. First it was hostage-taking, and beheading -- low-tech "shock and awe" assaults aimed at "foreigners," precisely to terrorize their sponsoring populations. The apparent murder of the admirable Margaret Hassan, war-opponent and humanitarian worker, was especially deplorable.

Then it was systematic attacks on Iraqis themselves, anyone daring to cooperate with the "coalition" occupiers. The execution-style murders of Iraqi police recruits and soldiers in recent weeks has been chilling, and now workers on a bus are massacred. What makes these tactics so appalling is their intensely personal character.

But it takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery, and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement.

The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the "normalcy" of the news.

On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for nation, honor, or buddy -- but they will not kill themselves with forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of reasons. The United States has given itself an enemy that shows by its central tactic that it is fighting for God.

Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which "religious values" were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion. America's purpose in Iraq is a compound of such deflection, self-deception, half-measures, and shallow thinking. The opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back.

Don't blame me, I was a Dean voter.

The United States's claim to the moral high ground in foreign policy has been dealt a death blow. Thank God. The rest of the world looks on America's religious craze and its actions and wonders how we can claim to be so Christian while we blow up people. It is a worthy question.

It is more than past the time that we should begin to mature as a people and begin to notice our errors. School yard adolescent bullies are rarely welcome anywhere. The rest of the world has noticed, while Joe Sixpack slaps another yellow ribbon onhis SUV.

Mythical Beast

Commander Sees Shift In Role of U.S. Troops
Force Would Focus On Training Iraqis

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 7, 2004; Page A01

CAMP AS SAYLIYAH, Qatar, Dec. 6 -- Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region, raised the possibility Monday that U.S. forces in Iraq could start to be reshaped as early as next year to reduce the number of combat troops and concentrate on the development of Iraqi security forces.

Abizaid declined in an interview to set a timetable for the shift, saying it would depend on the outcome of national elections in January and evidence that Iraqi forces could assume a greater share of combat operations against the country's entrenched insurgency. Other senior U.S. officers who elaborated on the plan said the change would not necessarily lead initially to an overall decrease in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq but could eventually facilitate a lower troop level.

This outlook comes in the face of a series of brazen attacks by insurgents intent on disrupting the elections and terrorizing Iraq's fledgling security services. The violence, together with a campaign of intimidation aimed at those associated with the new governing structures or with the Americans, has deepened perceptions of insecurity, particularly in areas heavily populated by Sunni Arabs. It also contributed to a Pentagon decision last week to boost the U.S. force in Iraq to 150,000 troops.

While acknowledging concern about the performance of Iraqi forces and about heavy insurgent activity in such key cities as Mosul, Abizaid said he also saw reasons to be optimistic.

"What's encouraging to me is that despite the very high levels of intimidation, that there are plenty of people within the Sunni Arab community who are coming forward, both politically and militarily, to play a role in the future of their country," the general told The Washington Post and Bloomberg news service.

I don't take it as a good sign that someone this delusional is commanding our illegal action in Iraq. Abizaid has clearly put his career interests above the good and welfare of our troops and our common sense.

If he had any integrity, he would have resigned rather than ridden this particular campaign up the career ladder. Only a fool and a knave would allow himself to be in charge of life and death in Iraq. REAL leaders don't put their troops in harm's way for such chimerical ends.

Heat and Light

As if this is news for anyone who has been paying attention....


2 C.I.A. Reports Offer Warnings on Iraq's Path
By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: December 7, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.

The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq.

The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient.

But over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy.

Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq next month, the officials said. The cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters after American forces completed what military commanders have described as a significant victory, with the retaking of Falluja, a principal base of the Iraqi insurgency, in mid-November.

The American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, was said by the officials to have filed a written dissent, objecting to one finding as too harsh, on the ground that the United States had made more progress than was described in combating the Iraqi insurgency. But the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., also reviewed the cable and initially offered no objections, the officials said. One official said, however, that General Casey may have voiced objections in recent days.

Negroponte, where do we begin? The man's a political crackwhore in a cheap dress. Bush didn't even try to pretty up this appointment: the signal was that Iraq was in the hands of the mafia.

Where is all this freaking "progress?" Chris Albritton writes from Baghdad:

BAGHDAD - I returned to Baghdad on Monday. The city is as chaotic and choked as ever, but the level of violence in the last few days has been less than I expected. I’ve only heard two explosions near my house in eastern Baghdad, and they were far away. I get the impression that the Green Zone is not attacked as much. Perhaps I was wrong to pooh-pooh the Fallujah offensive… Or perhaps the insurgency has just gone to ground for a while.

The mobile network is collapsing, too, but everyone knows the reason for that: Insurgents are targeting the transmitters. Half the time, the phones don’t work at all, forcing us to rely on our satellite phones. Of course, the average Iraqi doesn’t have one of these, so they get an unreliable landline or nothing.

We put up with this for a couple of weeks during the last hurricane. The Iraqis have been living with it since the invasion. If you want to win hearts and minds, I'd say electricity and phone service would be real day-brighteners.

Winter's coming. Perhap the Iraqi people would like to have heat.

Paging Winston Smith

Fallujah as a 'Model City'
Dhar Jamail, Electronic Iraq, 6 December 2004

Driving across Baghdad yesterday a GMC full of armed men races past our car, missing it by inches. Along with guns pointed out their windows at us (and all the other cars), a couple of the men hold their hands out, waving them down towards the ground in order to instruct the traffic they are pushing their way through to stay back.

The intent of the US commanders and Iraqi leaders is to make Fallujah a "model city."

This is our "model city" all right: mostly leveled, and what population remains will be treated to population controls and monitoring which will make George Orwell look like the Psalmist.

The minds which can conceive of such things used to be novelists. Now they are running the government.

Crimes Against Humanity

I Am Become Death - The Destroyer Of The Worlds

Saturday November 27, 2004 (1257 PST)

Anwaar Hussain
[email protected]

Not a single major voice has been raised in the American media against the ongoing destruction of Fallujah. While much of the world recognizes something dreadful has occurred, the US press does not even bat an eyelash over the organized leveling of a city of 300,000 people. In none of the US media commentaries is there a single phrase of unease about the moral, or legal, questions involved in the attack on Fallujah. None have dared say it in as many words that the American military operation in the city is an unlawful act of aggression in an equally illegal, criminal, aggressive war.

Fallujah will enter history as the place where US imperialism carried out an offense of heinous proportions this November, a monstrous crime far beyond any possible forgiveness. The crimson waters of the Euphrates are now emptying into the Persian Gulf the hopes and aspirations of innocent people whose lives were snuffed out on the orders of a man rewarded for his monumental crimes by his great nation.

Regrets all Around

Rumsfeld Sees U.S. Troops Leaving Iraq Within 4 Years
By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: December 6, 2004

KUWAIT, Dec. 6 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that he expected American troops to withdraw from Iraq within four years, but he cautioned that any final decision hinged on the progress that Iraq's civilian government and security forces make by then.

Asked by reporters traveling with him whether United States forces would be out of Iraq by the end of his term, Mr. Rumsfeld paused to ask whether that meant a second four-term term. When told yes, he then said, "I would certainly expect that to be the case and hope that to be the case."

Mr. Rumsfeld quickly noted that President Bush has repeatedly said American forces would stay as long as needed in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld's answer offered intriguing clues into his thinking on two crucial subjects: the duration of American troops in Iraq and how long he will stay in his job.
....
Looking back over his first four-year term, Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the two biggest mistakes or misjudgments that had been made - though not necessarily by him - were the failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ("that's clearly a disappointment") and a lack of intelligence that predicted "the degree of insurgency today."

Mr. Rumsfeld remained defiant in the face of critics who say the United States failed to send enough troops to Iraq initially to handle postwar security and now, to combat the insurgents.

He said that the decision on troop levels was largely "out of my control," since he was following the advice and requests of his regional commanders, first Gen. Tommy R. Franks and now, Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr.

While that technically may be true, Mr. Rumsfeld approves all decisions on troop levels in Iraq, and is famous among his commanders and top civilian aides for demanding detailed explanations for troop increases and movements.

American commanders in Iraq have said the timing of the withdrawal of any American troops in Iraq depends on the security situation on the ground and the ability of Iraqi security forces, now 115,000 strong, to conduct operations independently and competently.

Mr. Rumsfeld said the Iraqis have been "performing very well," but acknowledged that in the battle against a well-armed, well-trained and well-led insurgency, some troops, like Iraqi army forces, had fought well, but that poorly equipped police officers had been caught in "a mismatch" with militants.

This is all fantasyland, of course. The subtext that I find interesting here is that Rummy's imagination is so Rummy-centric: the war in Iraq is co=terminus with himself.

Having demonstrated over and over that my skills at predicting the future are extremely limited, I think we'll be leaving Iraq at the point when the media gets the public's attention that this is going very, very badly. At this point in time, more than half of the country still thinks that Iraq had something to do with 9-11.

Sci-fi author and Scottish socialist Ken McLeod sums up the common European and Canadian view of America:

That's how I feel sometimes. I love you guys, but I don't understand you. Add to this that I have a tin ear for US politics, and my qualifications for commenting on last week's election, and giving my liberal friends tips on how to warm their eggs and suckle their young are complete.

It's been like a death in the family. Not of someone close, but of someone you didn't expect to miss so much until after they were gone. You wish you'd made more of an effort. You find yourself thinking of other things, and then feeling an unaccountable sadness seep into your day, and then remembering why. Or you keep coming back to it, looking again at the old photos, at the once insignificant postcards. I mean all that; that's been, to my surprise, exactly how I felt. The death is of an idea of America and the mementos are the blogs of my friends.

They Tossed Him Back

Scoff Goes Public in Canada

And after spending two days in Canada last week trying to burnish relations with his new friend, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Bush probably didn't expect Martin to tell reporters about a comment made behind closed doors that might subject him to ridicule.

"But while aides designed events to show Bush at his most magnanimous, observers on both sides of the border came away from the trip convinced that, whatever the need to repair relations with allies, Bush's trip was not about humility, contrition, or moderation."

I haven't checked the Canadian blogs yet for their reaction. Will report back when I have more.

Looking Up

Stephen Roach:

Even I have to concede that a number of positives have fallen into place recently. I am on record of assigning a 40% probability to a global recession scenario in 2005 (see my 25 October essay, “Cracked Façade”). However, given recent favorable shifts in oil, the dollar, and China, I now believe that it is appropriate to reduce this risk to 25%. Don’t get me wrong, risk-assessment is not nuclear physics. The probability distribution I place around our baseline view of the world is determined by a combination of analytics, experience, and gut instinct. While it seems reasonable to reduce near-term risks, I am still not willing to go below the 25% threshold on the recession alternative. Moreover, I would stress that a 25% recession probability is more than double the 10% odds that I would normally assign to such an outcome at this point in the global business cycle.

As I said, macro risk assessment is as much art as science. Recent developments with respect to oil, the dollar, and China temper my immediate concerns. But the heavy lifting of global rebalancing remains a tricky and perilous undertaking. It is human nature to seek the painless way out. But that’s not the way macro works -- especially for a global economy that is so dependent on an over-extended US economy. An unbalanced world needs a realignment of saving and consumption disparities. To the extent a weaker dollar triggers other adjustments that spark such a realignment -- such as higher US interest rates -- a rebalanced world will be much better positioned for sustainable growth. I’m lowering my 2005 global recession probabilities from 40% to 25%, but the odds of a nasty outcome are still far too high for my liking.

Coming from Steve Roach, this qualifies as nearly boundless optimism.

UPDATE: Roach may have gotten a little ahead of himself and his earlier, gloomier forecast may still be justified:

The Dow Jones industrial average (down 49.95 to 10,542.26, Charts) fell about 0.3 percent by around 1:30 p.m. ET.

"Oil still remains the big uncertainty out there for the market and crude prices are up today," said Timothy Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management. "I think the attack in Saudi Arabia and worries about Friday's OPEC meeting are unsettling financial markets."

More of What We Don't See

Unembedded in Iraq

By Charles Shaw, Newtopia. Posted December 4, 2004.

This exclusive interview with un-embedded journalist Dahr Jamail reveals an almost unrecognizable picture of Iraq and its people.

Editor's note: After covering post-9/11 politics and the run-up to the Iraq War for a weekly in Alaska, Dahr Jamail saved his money to cover the war from the front lines.

On Nov 18 in one of your dispatches you wrote, "Journalists are increasingly being detained and threatened by the U.S.-installed interim government in Iraq. Media have been stopped particularly from covering recent horrific events in Fallujah." What are the predominant differences between your reporting and that of the corporate media and embedded reporters, or that of Iraqi and Muslim journalists? In other words, what does each group do with the same pieces of information? Do you feel you have a freer hand by being "unembedded"? Have you or anyone you know been intimidated or harassed in any way?

Here, these fighters in the Iraqi Resistance are referred to as freedom fighters, holy warriors and patriots.

Drinking Liberally

If I manage to shake this sinus infection in time, DC area Bumpers can join me this Thursday night at Drinking Liberallyat RFD, 810 7th. St, NW, close to Gallery Place and Metro Center Metro stations.

The Pubcrawler review in the link indicates that the food and service are only so-so, but they've got Welsh Rarebit, something I love which doesn't show up on many menus around town.

See you after 6 Thursday night.

Terrorism

Icarus Over Iraq: The Miracle of a Single Haasen Hand Grenade
by Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch

Look at it this way: the Wright Brothers' "whopper flying machine" leaves the beach at Kitty Hawk for the first time on Dec. 17, 1903. That initial flight lasts all of 12 seconds before the plane hits the sand 120 feet away. Later the same day, the plane flies 859 feet in 59 seconds before, on a final flight, it totals itself and is no more. Only five years later, the Wright brothers are demonstrating their new invention in the skies over Washington for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. By 1911, two years short of a decade after its invention, the plane is wedded to the bomb. According to Sven Lindqvist's (irritatingly organized but fascinating) labyrinth of a book, A History of Bombing, one Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb – a Danish Haasen hand grenade – on the North African oasis Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total, each weighing two kilos, were dropped during this first air attack."

Then imagine that both civilian plane flight and the killing of enormous numbers of civilians from the air (now subsumed in the term "collateral damage") have over that not-quite-century become completely normal parts of our lives. Too normal, it seems, to spend a lot of time thinking about or even writing fiction about. When we get on a plane today, what do we do – close the window shade and watch a movie on a tiny TV screen or, on certain flights, TV itself in real time as if we were still in our living rooms. So much for either shock or awe. Today, American planes regularly bomb the distant cities of Iraq and no one even seems to notice. No one, not even reporters on the spot, bothers to comment. No one writes a significant word about it. Should we be amazed or horrified, proud or ashamed?

There is a straight line from Dresden and Hiroshima to Fallujah, but American mythology means that no one is going to connect the dots.

Flower Drum Song

Generals See Gains From Iraq Offensives
Insurgents Expected To Adopt New Tactics

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 6, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 5 -- A series of large military offensives over the past few months culminating in the battle for Fallujah has given U.S. military commanders here a sense of having gained ground against Iraq's fierce insurgency, but they predict no easy victory in pressing the attack and remain particularly concerned about a rising campaign of intimidation.

Indeed, senior officers say they regard the militants as still well armed and well financed, and likely to avoid trying to mass anywhere again after losing their primary stronghold in Fallujah. The officers say they expect the insurgents to engage in more decentralized operations and sporadic attacks while stepping up threats and violence against Iraqis who serve in the government or the security forces, or who otherwise cooperate with Americans.

"We do believe their tactics are going to change some," said Army Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas III, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq. "They will probably not mass forces again. They'll fight in small teams. We get some sense that they're thinking of adopting more guerrilla-type tactics -- small teams, hit-and-run."

On Sunday, insurgents killed 17 Iraqi civilians as they arrived for work at a job site run by the U.S. Army near the city of Tikrit, the military said. Four Iraqi soldiers and National Guardsmen were killed in two other attacks in north-central Iraq.

The dispersion and guerrilla tactics of the militants, U.S. officers say, will draw U.S. forces into more classic counterinsurgency operations characterized by focused raids, along the lines of the recent sweep through the northern part of Babil province led by U.S. Marines. Such troop-intensive operations are the reason behind the decision announced last week to boost U.S. forces in Iraq to 150,000.

But while the U.S. military has plans to pursue militants as they attempt to regroup, commanders appear frustrated by their inability to defeat the intimidation. An internal assessment of the U.S. strategy in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, concluded last week that "no silver bullet" exists for this problem.

Happy talk, keep talking, happy talk. Talk about things you like to do. If you don't have a dream, you gotta have a dream, how you going to make a dream come true?

Off the Map

For reasons that may be as obscure as Mercury going retrograde, this site and I became the matters of discussion at two other sites over the weekend. Since I was not invited in to either discussion, I consider this gossip, and you can do with it what you like. This site has been open for over a year and has its own track record.

Things Seen and Unseen

Images of Fighting in Fallujah Compel at Different Levels
Blogger's Display Is More Graphic Than a Military Slide Show

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page A20

Two photo-rich summaries of the battle of Fallujah -- one produced by the U.S. military in Iraq, the other by an anonymous American blogger -- highlight how the terrain in such counterinsurgency fights can be as much psychological as physical.

Both presentations have gained increasing Internet audiences recently and attempt to convey, among other things, the suffering imposed on Iraqi civilians in Fallujah.
....
It comes as the U.S. military is trying to step up "strategic communications" in Iraq, after being heavily criticized, internally and by outside experts, for failing to get its message to the Iraqi people and the world in general.

The military briefing, an electronic slide show that has rocketed around the Internet over the last week, can be read at Soldiers for the Truth (www.sftt.org) and other Web sites, frequently with comments such as, "Why is the DOD not getting this information to the media?" Another version of the briefing was released Friday by the Pentagon and is reachable at Here.

Charles Krohn, a former Army public affairs official who worked with the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, said he suspects the presentation is directed at American audiences. He said the United States has failed to get out its message in Iraq, and has not even appeared to want to do so. "How we can invade a country and eject its government without letting the people who live there know what we were doing and why is a mystery to me," he said.

The U.S. military briefing focuses on violations of the law of war by the insurgents. It states that of 100 mosques in Fallujah, 60 were used to hide weapons or as defensive positions. A map shows nine locations of bomb-making factories and comments that roadside bombs are "the insurgents' principal instrument of attack on innocent civilians." It also shows a van whose side panels have been "removed and filled with PE-4," a kind of plastic explosive.

Another slide shows a photograph of bloody handprints on a wall, and blood on walls, presumably evidence of torture or murder. There also is other evidence of hostage-taking presented.

"The anti-Iraqi forces took hostage the city of Fallujah and projected terrorism across all of Iraq," it states.

The presentation ends with photos of local Iraqis "securely and calmly" receiving food supplies from Iraqi security forces.

"Overall, we've gotten positive feedback on the packaging, because it contains a lot of information and provides visuals," Bleichwehl said. An Arabic version of the presentation has been released, he said.

A competing vision of the Fallujah operation is presented by the blog titled "Iraq in Pictures" Iraq in Pictures), which Krohn says is far more similar to what Iraqis, and the Arab world, see on their satellite news channels.

The pictures are hard to look at. Make up your own mind.

No Buck Stopping Anywhere

Via em-dash at Liberal Street Fighter:

Federal Budget Measure Cuts Spending on Many Charity Programs
By Elizabeth Schwinn

Congress has passed a $388-billion spending bill for 2005 that would cut a broad array of federal programs that support charities and the people they serve, including programs in housing, social services, education, and national service, while increasing the budgets of some others, including those supporting the arts and the international fight against AIDS.

The measure, an omnibus bill that incorporates nine separate federal spending bills, overall would spend about 1 percent less than last year on all programs that don't involve defense. The bill also included millions of dollars earmarked for specific charities.

The bill covers federal spending for the 2005 fiscal year, which began October 1. Congress previously approved a series of temporary resolutions to keep the government running until the full spending bill becomes law.

Charity leaders who help the poor say that tax cuts, the rising deficit, terrorism, and the war in Iraq have strained the federal budget, leaving little money to meet the needs of those they serve. And they say they fear the Bush administration is likely to make deeper cuts in their programs in the future.

"We are truly alarmed," says Irv Katz, president of the National Human Services Assembly, a coalition of human-service groups. "Investing in human development on our own shores has taken a back seat to all other expenditures by the federal government."
....
Among the key budget proposals that affect nonprofit organizations:

Arts and humanities. Congress has approved $121.2-million for the National Endowment for the Arts, up from last year's $121-million. The National Endowment for the Humanities would receive $138-million, up from $135.3-million last year. An estimated $34.5-million would go to the Office of Museum Services, up from $31.4-million last year.

Community service. The bill would cut spending by $9-million at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees the AmeriCorps national-service program. Money for AmeriCorps members would be reduced by $11-million, to $430.4-million, enough for 70,000 members -- or 5,000 fewer than President Bush had requested.

Education. The Head Start preschool program would receive $6.8-billion, slightly more than last year. Advocates say the increase is not enough to keep pace with inflation. Funds for vocational and technical education would be cut by 0.8 percent, to about $1.3-billion, as would money for the Job Corps job-training program for youth, which would fall to $1.5-billion.

Housing. Neighborhood planning and development and other housing programs would be cut by an estimated $378-million in 2005. These programs include housing for the elderly, construction of low-cost housing, and housing for American Indians and the disabled. Housing groups worry that the cuts will mean they will have to turn away some of those who seek assistance. Says Linda Couch, deputy director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, "The need is out there and it's greater than ever."

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program would receive almost $2.2-billion, up from $1.9-billion last year. But over the same period, fuel costs have increased 24 percent, meaning that the program will actually serve fewer families, according to Richard Kogan, a senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that studies the impact of public policy on low- and moderate-income Americans.

Science and technology. The budget for the National Science Foundation would be cut by $105-million, to $5.5-billion.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Opportunities Program, which seeks to bring information technology to people who are poor, who live in rural areas, or who are members of minority groups, would be eliminated. The program last year awarded grants totaling $14.4-million to 27 nonprofit organizations and state and local governments.

The direct services providers are taking on the chin, while the culture wars are getting a right wing shot in the arm. This isn't going to be pretty. The cut to the National Science Foundation is particularly brutal.

I remember when Bush I did away with the Office of Technology Assessment. This is yet another way to get rid of quantifiable evaluation of administration policies.

About Time

Is the Low-Carb Boom Over?
By MELANIE WARNER

Published: December 5, 2004

LAST July, executives of the American Italian Pasta Company decamped at the Atkins Nutritionals office in midtown Manhattan, determined to cook up a new blockbuster product. They spent several days hammering out a deal to put the Atkins name on a line of low-carbohydrate, soy-based pasta.

It was the latest food group to be Atkinized. The two companies seemed certain that soy pasta, with 5 to 10 grams per serving of what manufacturers call "net carbs," would be a hit. Regular pasta contains up to 45 grams of carbohydrates, so the new product would offer a great way for people on Atkins and other low-carb regiments to indulge - free of guilt - in fettuccine Alfredo and baked ziti. Atkins allotted $15 million for a campaign to announce the introduction.

Today, boxes of the stuff are gathering dust in warehouses in Excelsior Springs, Mo. Evidently, consumers never quite cottoned to the unusually chewy pasta. "Low-carb pasta is an oxymoron," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.

Atkins and American Italian, the largest maker of dry pasta in North America, have been forced to admit defeat. A month ago, American Italian said that it didn't ship any soy pasta in the previous quarter and that sales of its own line of reduced-carbohydrate pasta were 50 percent below projections. The company's stock plunged 23 percent on the news.

The story of soy pasta reflects a general malaise that is overtaking what was once the hottest - and still the most controversial - trend in the food business. Last year, practically every major food company was busy re-engineering its high-carb goodies into newfangled low-carb versions. Some 3,737 products, including new flavors and varieties of existing foods, were introduced with low-carb marketing in the last two years alone, according to ProductScan Online, a service that tracks new products.

Over the last several months, however, manufacturers have begun to wonder what to do with all of this food. In a conference call in July, Carlos Gutierrez, the chief executive of Kellogg (and now President Bush's nominee to be the next commerce secretary) told investors: "There's a bit of a glut of low-carb products. Inventories are extremely high."

Although it may be premature to declare the death of low-carb foods, many food industry analysts say that the movement is at least deeply wounded. "The bloom is off the rose," said Tom Vierhile, executive editor at ProductScan Online.

I'm glad to see the death of this fad. It's unhealthy and it ultimately doesn't work, those supposed "low carb" replacement foods had about all the deliciousness of corrugated cardboard.

To lose weight and keep it off you have to permenantly alter your relationship with food. You have to eat less and get more exercise. There isn't any shortcut

New Year's Day Menu

Boeuf Bourguignon
As is the case with most famous dishes, there are more ways than one to arrive at a good boeuf bourguignon. Carefully done, and perfectly flavored, it is certainly one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man, and can well be the main course for a buffet dinner. Fortunately you can prepare it completely ahead, even a day in advance, and it only gains in flavor when reheated.

Vegetable And Wine Suggestions: Boiled potatoes are traditionally served with this dish. Buttered noodles or steamed rice may be substituted. If you also wish a green vegetable, buttered peas would be your best choice. Serve with the beef a fairly full-bodied, young red wine, such as Beaujolais, Cotes du Rhone, Bordeaux-St. Emilion, or Burgundy.

Serving: 6
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 3 hours 30 minutes
Total Time: 4 hours

A 6-ounce chunk of bacon
1 tablespoon olive oil or cooking oil
3 pounds lean stewing beef cut into 2-inch cubes
1 sliced carrot
1 sliced onion
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon flour
3 cups of a full-bodied, young red wine such as one of those suggested for serving, or a Chianti
2 to 3 cups brown beef stock or canned beef bouillon
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 cloves mashed garlic
1/2 teaspoon thyme
A crumbled bay leaf
18 to 24 brown-braised onions
1 pound quartered fresh mushrooms sauteed in butter
Parsley sprigs

Equipment:
A 9- to 10-inch fireproof casserole 3 inches deep
A slotted spoon

1. Remove rind, and cut bacon into lardoons (sticks, 1/4 inch thick and 1 1/2 inches long). Simmer rind and bacon for 10 minutes in 1 1/2 quarts of water. Drain and dry.

2. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

3. Saute the bacon in the oil over moderate heat for 2 to 3 minutes to brown lightly. Remove to a side dish with a slotted spoon. Set casserole aside. Reheat until fat is almost smoking before you saute the beef.

4. Dry the beef in paper towels; it will not brown if it is damp. Saute it, a few pieces at a time, in the hot oil and bacon fat until nicely browned on all sides. Add it to the bacon.

5. In the same fat, brown the sliced vegetables. Pour out the sauteing fat.

6. Return the beef and bacon to the casserole and toss with the salt and pepper. Then sprinkle on the flour and toss again to coat the beef lightly with the flour. Set casserole uncovered in middle position of preheated oven for 4 minutes. Toss the meat and return to oven for 4 minutes more. (This browns the flour and covers the meat with a light crust.) Remove casserole, and turn oven down to 325 degrees.

7. Stir in the wine, and enough stock or bouillon so that the meat is barely covered. Add the tomato paste, garlic, herbs, and the blanched bacon rind. Bring to simmer on top of the stove. Then cover the casserole and set in lower third of preheated oven. Regulate heat so liquid simmers very slowly for 2 1/2 to 3 hours. The meat is done when a fork pierces it easily.

8. While the beef is cooking, prepare the onions and mushrooms. Set them aside until needed.

9. When the meat is tender, pour the contents of the casserole into a sieve set over a saucepan. Wash out the casserole and return the beef and bacon to it. Distribute the cooked onions and mushrooms over the meat.

10. Skim fat off the sauce. Simmer sauce for a minute or two, skimming off additional fat as it rises. You should have about 2 1/2 cups of sauce thick enough to coat a spoon lightly. If too thin, boil it down rapidly. If too thick, mix in a few tablespoons of stock or canned bouillon. Taste carefully for seasoning. Pour the sauce over the meat and vegetables.
_____________________________________________

I traditionally make this every year for New Year's Day dinner. I like to use top round instead of stewing beef.

This is a dish which translates nicely for the crock pot, which is the way I like to make it. The longer, slower cooking method really develops the flavor of the dish.

Canadian Bounty

Prince Edward Island mussels are in season now. I eat them every chance I can, and they are easy to prepare at home. This Martha Stewart recipe is both quick and rich:

Mussels with White Wine and Parsley

Serving Size : 4
Preparation Time :0:05
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 shallots -- minced
2 cloves garlic -- minced
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
2 cups dry white wine
4 pounds mussels (about 48) -- scrubbed and debearded
1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons creme fraiche or sour cream

Melt the butter in a Dutch oven set over medium heat. Add the
shallots and the garlic; cook until transparent, about 3 minutes. Add
the thyme, bay leaves, and wine. Bring mixture to a boil over high
heat.

Add mussels, and cover. Cook, shaking pan often, until mussels open,
5 to 6 minutes. Discard any mussels that fail to open. Using a
slotted spoon, transfer mussels to a large bowl, reserving liquid in
pan. Sprinkle 1/4 cup parsley over the mussels.

Remove and discard bay leaves and thyme. Return liquid to low heat;
stir in crème fraîche or sour cream and remaining 1/4 cup parsley.
Cook just until warm again, and pour over mussels. Serve.
____________________________________________

This makes a marvelous first course. Serve with a dry white like a Pinot Grigio.

Living Poets

For Kevin Hayden.

For those who prefer pictures.

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned up pal is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to next.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labor and not seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank, forgotten the river's name.

Wise Words in the Dark

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn, thanks to Kevin Hayden

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.

In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing -- for the sheer fun and joy of it -- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.

-- I.F. Stone, thanks to Jordan Barab

Judicial Temperament

Death Sentences in Texas Cases Try Supreme Court's Patience
By ADAM LIPTAK and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Published: December 5, 2004

In the past year, the Supreme Court has heard three appeals from inmates on death row in Texas, and in each case the prosecutors and the lower courts suffered stinging reversals.

In a case to be argued on Monday, the court appears poised to deliver another rebuke.

Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, will appear before the justices for the second time in two years. To legal experts, the Supreme Court's decision to hear his case yet again is a sign of its growing impatience with two of the courts that handle death penalty cases from Texas: its highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans.

Perhaps as telling is the exasperated language in decisions this year from a Supreme Court that includes no categorical opponent of the death penalty. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in June that the Fifth Circuit was "paying lip service to principles" of appellate law in issuing death penalty rulings with "no foundation in the decisions of this court."

In an unsigned decision in another case last month, the Supreme Court said the Court of Criminal Appeals "relied on a test we never countenanced and now have unequivocally rejected." The decision was made without hearing argument, a move that ordinarily signals that the error in the decision under review was glaring.

The actions of the two appeals courts that hear capital cases from Texas help explain why the state leads the nation in executions, with 336 since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, more than the next five states combined.

In the Miller-El case, appellate lawyers and legal scholars are buzzing over what they say is the insolence of the Fifth Circuit.

In an 8-to-1 decision last year, the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to rethink its "dismissive and strained interpretation" of the proof in the case, and to consider more seriously the substantial evidence suggesting that prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from Mr. Miller-El's jury. Prosecutors used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 out of 11 eligible black jurors, and they twice used a local procedure called a jury shuffle to move blacks lower on the list of potential jurors, the decision said. The jury ultimately selected, which had one black member, convicted Mr. Miller-El, a black man who is now 53, of killing a clerk at a Holiday Inn in Dallas in 1985.

Instead of considering much of the evidence recited by the Supreme Court majority, the appeals court engaged in something akin to plagiarism. In February, it again rejected Mr. Miller-El's claims, in a decision that reproduced, virtually verbatim and without attribution, several paragraphs from the sole dissenting opinion in last year's Supreme Court decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas.

"The Fifth Circuit just went out of its way to defy the Supreme Court on this," said John J. Gibbons, a former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, who joined a brief supporting Mr. Miller-El. "The idea that the system can tolerate open defiance by an inferior court just cannot stand."

This is the kind of appellate court system that Bush wants to encourage by appointing all-hat-no-cattle judges.

Judicial temperament among the Supremes mean that he is unlikely to be able find canidates for the SCOTUS who are likely to let crap like this stand, but this is the direction he is heading.

His happy-to-let-you-die record, signed off on by the AG nominee Gonzalez, as Texas Governor, doesn't signal good things for court appointments.

The very idea of a court where you have standing as a citizen, rather than being a pleader like a serf, is outside of his limited imagination.

Finding Your Direction

I just saw the most amazing program on BookTV, Kay Redfield Jamison's book talk about her new book, Exuberance: The Passion for Life". I'll be at Chapters, A Literary Bookstore on my lunch hour Monday.

Dr. Jamison is an extraordinary person. I've read her earlier books An Unquiet Mind and Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. These texts, along with her Night Falls Fast are essential studies for any of us who work with the general population as spiritual directors or therapists. This is also brilliant writing on the human condition which rivals any thing by my other heroes, Barry Lopez and Robertson Davies.

Here is the personal hook: I'm bipolar. I have the cyclothymic form of the disease: I only get hypomanic, not really manic, but the fall after one of those episodes has gotten progressively worse as I've aged. I went into a research protocal at NIMH in '97 after a particularly nasty high-low crash. What they taught me there has allowed me to come off medication after decades on the prozac/lithium/xanax/trazadone cycle. Ditching the Lith was one of the high points of the last ten years. It flattens the highs, puts weight on and makes you permanently thirsty while having bad breath. Which is enough to make any normal human depressed, not to mention those of us with the precondition.

I've been med-free since 2000, and the clinicians I check in with regularly don't seem to want to make any changes.

Affective disorders don't get cured, but they can be managed with drugs, therapy and spiritual direction. It was that last piece that allowed me a window on my disease that I couldn't get any other way. But I'd had a boatload of therapy and drugs before I landed on the spiritual director's sofa, and I frequently refer my own directees to doctors, therapists and pastoral counselors. My own director is now studying for a degree in pastoral counseling. I don't feel pulled there, but I understand why she does.

Bottom line: if you are feeling stranded in the world, there is a lot of help available for you right in your own community. Ask for help. You never know who has the magic key to the lock in your life until you ask. And keep asking until you get an answer which actually answers your need. I can't tell you how many shrinks I went through until I got a good one. I give them each a test: you have three sessions in which "you" start talking to me, instead of your case load; remember what you said in the last session; remember what I said in the last session. All but one failed this test.

The rules for spiritual direction are a little different. I'll post them at The Village Gate tomorrow.

Charles Bukowski

In an email earlier today, Kevin Hayden of The American Street asked me if I'd be willing to get into a discussion with him about blogging, writing and why we do it. This is an exercise a number of bloggers are having lately, either with themselves, their readers or other bloggers. Like most of us, Kevin is trying to figure out how to find some balance in his life, one which seems to want more time at the keyboard AND more time away from the Internet. I sympathize, because I haven't figured it out yet, either.

As usual, I'm on the Sunday roster at TAS, so you can see a different side of my writing and interests there tomorrow. I'm also hoping to get a couple of pieces up at The Village Gate by early in the week.

Anywho, when someone asks me a question, as per usual, I went digging around on the Internets to see if someone has come up with a better answer than the one I gave Kevin. As per usual, someone had. This is the answer by Buddhist Beat poet Charles Bukowski.

one thirty-six a.m.

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won't have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it's those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.

Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn't know what a writer's block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.

and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.

he's not alone tonight
and neither am
I.

Bites with Drinks

I think I'm starting this tonight for dinner tomorrow....

PESTO, OLIVE, AND ROASTED-PEPPER GOAT CHEESE TORTA
Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 9 hr (includes chilling)

Ingredients:

1/4 cup prepared basil pesto
Vegetable oil for brushing pan
1/4 cup finely chopped rinsed drained bottled roasted red peppers
20 oz soft mild goat cheese, softened at room temperature (2 cups)
3 tablespoons bottled black olive paste or tapenade

Special equipment: a 2 1/4-cup loaf pan (5 3/4 by 3 1/2 by 2 1/4 inches)

Accompaniment: crackers or toasts

Preparation:

Drain pesto in a small fine-mesh sieve set over a bowl 15 minutes, then discard excess oil.

Lightly oil loaf pan and line with a sheet of plastic wrap large enough to allow a generous overhang on all 4 sides.

Blot peppers well between paper towels to remove excess liquid.

Spread about one fourth (1/2 cup) of cheese evenly over bottom of loaf pan and top with all of pesto, spreading evenly. Drop 1/2 cup cheese by tablespoons over pesto and spread gently to cover pesto.

Top with chopped peppers, spreading evenly. Drop another 1/2 cup cheese by tablespoons over peppers and spread gently to cover peppers.

Spread olive paste evenly on top, then drop remaining cheese by tablespoons over olive paste, spreading gently to cover olive paste. Cover pan with another sheet of plastic wrap and chill at least 8 hours.

Remove plastic wrap from top of pan and invert torta onto a serving plate, then peel off remaining plastic wrap. Let torta stand at room temperature 20 minutes before serving.

Makes 8-10 hors d'oeurve sized servings

Prior Restraint and Irrationality

My colleague at The American Street, Jude Nagurney Camwell makes an interesting catch this morning which is a bookend to the broadcast channels' refusal to take money to air a thoroughly inoffensive ad for the United Church of Christ.

Jude writes:

The San Diego Union-Tribune loses Jim Goldsborough

Mr. Goldsborough won’t sit back and watch the newspaper’s editorial page tilt in one right-heavy direction. Not while he’s still part of the team. He’s leaving on principle.

Contrast this principled action with the cowardice of CBS, NBC and ABC. The link to the ad is here. There is one frame which features a photo of two women. It requires a real stretch of the imagination to determine that because there are two women in the photo, and the UCC welcomes gay people, that the two women must be lesbians. Unlike Jim Goldsborough, the networks are willing to self-censor to a really laughable degree. It really requires wrpping your critical faculties into pretzel shapes to come up with the conclusion they did.

Fairy Tales

Far Fewer Jobs Were Added in November Than Forecast
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: December 4, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - The economy added 112,000 payroll jobs in November, far fewer than the month before and not enough to keep up with average increases in the adult population, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

The gain was well below Wall Street forecasts, and employment in manufacturing was flat for the third consecutive month.

The modest pace of job creation, along with a small decline in the number of hours worked, reinforced the image of an economy that is expanding more slowly and in which companies remain skittish about hiring more people.

Many analysts were stunned last month when the government reported a spectacular jump of 337,000 jobs in October. But on Friday, many said that the October jump was mostly an aberration in the more enduring trend of slow growth in jobs and wages.

The report cast a shadow on expectations for holiday spending this year, given that consumers face higher gasoline and heating prices without much rise in real personal income.

Three years after the last recession officially ended in November 2001, the rebound in jobs remains slower than in any previous economic recovery since World War II.

Unemployment inched down by 0.1 percentage point last month, to 5.4 percent, but the United States still has at least 200,000 fewer jobs than it did before the recession began. At the same time, the adult population has grown by about four million.

"The economy is adding jobs, but not at a feverish pace," said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research, an economic research firm in New York. "Economic growth is not expanding at a pace that can engender stellar job growth, and I think you have to get used to these kinds of numbers."

Worried Merchants Throw Discounts at Shoppers
By TRACIE ROZHON

Published: December 4, 2004

Got a credit card ready? The markdowns have begun.

America's merchants, shocked by a mediocre post-Thanksgiving weekend, are rushing to mark down their merchandise - way before the majority of holiday shoppers have even seen it.

At the beginning of November, merchants had reduced prices on 5 percent fewer of their goods than last year, according to John D. Morris, a retail analyst with Harris Nesbitt who keeps an annual holiday markdown index. "There's been a complete about-face," he said yesterday, speaking from the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus, N.J. "By the end of Sunday, markdowns were 5 percent higher than last year - and judging by what I see tonight, that figure is accelerating."

At the start of November, "everything was coming up roses," he added, "and suddenly there's a foul smell in the air."

After the numbers from Thanksgiving weekend were counted, retailers realized that shoppers bought only what was drastically discounted. "They didn't buy the whole store," said Burt Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group in New York. "Now, to stimulate the consumer, the stores must go broader and deeper." In the last few days, repeat shoppers at a wide variety of stores - from Restoration Hardware to J. C. Penney - have been deluged with e-mail messages offering friends-and-family coupons for as much as 40 percent off this weekend. Department stores like Lord & Taylor and Bloomingdale's are already running supersales, their racks dotted with signs proclaiming 20 to 40 percent discounts.

Even Borders bookstore was advertising nine best sellers for 50 percent off yesterday, including "The Da Vinci Code" and "My Life" by former President Bill Clinton. At the bottom of the ads were limited-offer coupons. Zales was offering Bonus Dollars on Diamonds, letting customers "take another $500 off."

In a report issued yesterday, Margaret Mager, an analyst with Goldman, Sachs, advised her customers to "expect higher promos ahead."

"We know that November was disappointing," she said in an interview. "Thirteen out of 16 of the specialty retailers we track came in below expectations." Two of these merchants, Gap and Limited Brands, are among the largest retailers in the country. Gap's sales were down 4 percent from last year - measured against the same stores open at least a year - and Limited reported sales were down 5 percent.

I'm listening to CNN as I scan the news this morning. The cognitive dissonance is literally painful. The economy is going into the tank as the bobbleheads uncritically parrot the Bush party line. I can no longer watch the financial channels, the so-called "analysts" are so far out of step with what is really going on at the macro-economic level that CNBC might as well be the Sci-Fi channel.

The Myth of Reconstruction

I have been entertained all this week by all the media condemnation of the "blogs" as this year's IT phenomenon. I have my own set of bloggers whom I trust for good information. Thank God for them, otherwise I'd be reading journos who mouth crap like this:

A Sharp Shift From Killing to Kindness
U.S. Troops in Iraq Torn by Competing Needs to Battle Insurgents and Win Over Populace

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 4, 2004; Page A14

BAGHDAD -- For Army Capt. Rex Blair, the contrast was jarring.

One minute a few weeks ago he was handing candy to a little girl in a southern Baghdad neighborhood. Then, suddenly, he received word over his military radio that a U.S. patrol had been ambushed along the Tigris River a couple of miles away. One soldier was dead, five were wounded.

Blair and his unit rushed to the scene, as did other nearby members of the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment. They overwhelmed the insurgents and easily won the battle. But Blair discovered that the U.S. soldier who had died was a close friend.

The next day, he was back trying to assist Iraqis by paving a road and installing a water pump.

Switching from kindness to killing and back, sometimes within minutes or hours, is a strange experience for many U.S. soldiers here. It results from fighting a tenacious insurgency while trying to win over a population and build a new nation. And it demands a mental flexibility that taxes Blair and his fellow soldiers.

"To go from one mind-set to another, that's what has been most tiring," said Blair, a 29-year-old West Point graduate who was escorting a journalist on a tour of Baghdad's restive al-Rashid district. "In all the courses you've had, nothing prepares you for that."

This unusual war is altering not just the way U.S. troops must think but how they are defined. In its campaign plan, the U.S. military command has stipulated what it calls "lines of operation." There is the traditional combat operations line, which means finding and eliminating the enemy. But there also are lines for restoring essential services, developing economic pluralism and promoting democratic government.

I don't know how much experience young Graham has in Baghdad, but the "hearts and minds" campaign was pretty much a complete failure. That's over, ground into the dust of the ruins of the ancient city of Fallujah

But there also are lines for restoring essential services, developing economic pluralism and promoting democratic government.

I guess young Graham doesn't read Juan Cole, Riverbend or Dahr Jamail. He's just reprinting the press releases from the "US Embassy" in the Green Zone and pretending they are news.

Me, I get the straight dope from Bathsheba Crocker and Frederick Barton at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Mike O'Hanlon at Brookings, along with the regular reviews from the scholars at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

Those wild-eyed optimists think there is still a slight chance that we can pull this thing off. However, I concur with paleocon Bill Lind, we lost Iraq before we ever went in because our moral reasoning was wrong.

BTW, I've requested an interview with Lind for this site. We may be too small an audience for him, but the request has been made.

The Peter Principle

I work with a batch of lawyers. One of my colleagues likes to say, "evidence brings comfort."

What evidence do we have that this guy is competent? Just askin'.

President Is Said to Be Keeping Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and THOM SHANKER

Published: December 4, 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - Sticking with the senior member of his war council at a time when the United States is struggling to stabilize Iraq, President Bush has decided to keep Donald H. Rumsfeld on as defense secretary, a senior administration official said Friday.

The decision, one of the most significant made by Mr. Bush as he reshapes his administration, suggests that he will enter his second term intent on moving ahead with his existing military strategy in Iraq and in the fight against terrorism.

The decision amounts to a strong vote of confidence by the president in Mr. Rumsfeld, one of the most high-profile, powerful - and polarizing - defense secretaries since Robert S. McNamara in the 1960's.

Mr. Bush asked Mr. Rumsfeld to stay on during their regular weekly meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, and Mr. Rumsfeld accepted, the senior administration official said. The White House does not plan any formal announcement, the official said.

The official said the president had not set any limit on the tenure of Mr. Rumsfeld, who at 72 is now both the oldest and the youngest defense secretary in American history, having held the job almost 30 years ago in the Ford administration.

Describing Mr. Bush's view of Mr. Rumsfeld, the official said, "We continue to be a nation at war, and he has proven himself a strong and capable leader."

It is not clear whether Mr. Bush will make any changes in the rest of the Pentagon's civilian leadership, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. Mr. Wolfowitz is a leader of the neoconservative group within the administration that saw toppling Saddam Hussein as an opportunity to begin sowing democracy throughout the Middle East but underestimated the violence and chaos that would engulf Iraq once Mr. Hussein's grip was loosed.

"Despite some colossal mistakes, Rumsfeld now emerges as unquestionably the president's most important security adviser," said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.

Mr. Thompson said Mr. Rumsfeld's energetic public schedule was indication enough that he was eager to remain in the post.

This is a crappy piece of analysis. Wolfowitz did a whole lot worse than "underestimate," and Shanker and Stevenson implicitly take the neocon's case that "transforming" the middle east is both legal and possible. I guess that international law in the area of national soveriegnty is now off the books for the American media.

The journos also fail to mention that Rummy's signature piece of work, Iraq, is a miserable failure, and that catching Al Qaida's elites (which Charles notes below is increasingly pointless) has eluded our mastermind in the Pentagon. Oh, Rummy? Now that you have completely broken the Army and neutered the Marines, what's your next act? Or should I look in Robert McNamara's playbook to answer that question?

Spam Kings

Its the title of a book, actually.

Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements, by Brian S. McWilliams. It's a hardcover, from O'Reilly (since when has O'Reilly published in hardcover?????), whose ISBN is 0596007329. It retails at $22.95.

I seriously considered leaving this one in the bookshelf at Border's rather than buying it. But I have this addiction for books. My sweeeet bank Infosec job lets me feed my Jones .... :)

This isn't a technical book, per-se. If you want advice on how to mitigate the spam torrent, Inside the SPAM Cartel looks like a better bet, although I must confess, I haven't had a chance to read the copy I picked up at 4 this afternoon just yet. :)

But OMG, I'm just three chapters and 76 pages into this, and I'm going to have to quit soon and sack out. If I keep up another couple of chapters non-stop, I'm going to have to tape the ribs I broke laughing. And it gets even better; this is a non-fiction work!!

Melanie, if you want something non-gloomy, or at least humorous to the max, to peruse, you should check this one out.

Lord, Lord. I need a keeper when I go book-happy. I went and spent $170 at the downtown Border's this afternoon. Then blew another $70 at the Alderwood Mall Barnes and Noble on the way home. But I think it may have been worth it. I panned some real gold. Another likely gem I haven't had a chance to dig into is Offshoring IT: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Hint. This is decidedly not a pro-offshoring book. Well, I'm not a pro-offshoring guy, either.

Sissy

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ends a month of light posting (thank G-d) with this:

President Sissy. From the BBC:

The president will not address parliament in the capital, Ottawa, apparently because of the risk of being heckled.

We have a President who’s afraid of being heckled. By Canadians.

This is part of showing the world how strong we are, right?

Canadian friends, I'm not posting this to diss you, but to note that you have managed to frighten the Leader of the Free World. I have spent enough time with you to know that you are more than a little bi-polar about your relationship with us, but you've managed to do something even our press hasn't been able to do. You scared him. My hat is off to you. But I'm going to put it right back on because I hear there's snow in Ontario tonight, eh?

And I wonder if W could find Ottawa on a map. I wonder if he could find a map.

The new face of terror

An interesting little item showed up in the Moonie Times today. It's all about terrorists. If it's credible, then OBL has become irrelevant, and a distributed model for international terror, one assuming no centralization exists, is the right one.

I thought you folks might be interested.

The new face of terror in al Qaida

By Kim Centazzo
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Washington, DC, Dec. 2 (UPI) -- Although al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is in hiding, terrorists groups are forming in large numbers, breeding hatred and acts of violence on innocent people, a sign the war on terror is far from over.

Dr. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and author of "Understanding Terror Networks," worked with the mujahedin in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1987 to 1989. He spoke about data he assembled to better understand who terrorists are and why they terrorize.
He assumed poverty and a lack of education directly related to the making of terrorists. His research proved him wrong.

Three-fourths of al-Qaida members are from upper-middle-class homes, many of which have wives and children. Sixty percent of men are college-educated; many of them studied in the Europe and the United States. The average age of a terrorist is 26, and the majority are professionals. Half of al-Qaida members are from religious families and 10 percent have converted from Christianity to Islam.

Many al-Qaida terrorists study abroad in Europe and the United States. They join the network to identify with a group and to feel at home in an unfamiliar place. They are not fighting because they are poor, but they are fighting for the poor people in their homes.

"They are their poor brothers and sisters who they empathize with," Sageman said Wednesday at a daylong symposium put together by the New America Foundation.

Yosri Fouda, lead investigative reporter for Al Jazeera television network and author of "Masterminds of Terror," believe these highly educated men are a danger to society due to their lack of knowledge of Islam.

"The highly educated know nothing about Islam," Fouda said. "That's what makes them so vulnerable. And in times of uncertainty, people become more extreme."

Sageman agreed.

"These guys are the best and brightest in society, they speak three, four or five languages and they're computer savvy," Sageman said. "They go abroad to study, they become homesick. Expatriates look for people like themselves and where do they find them? Mosques."

When they meet people like them, they form friendships and make cliques; these men are desperate to be a part of a group, no matter the price, Sageman said.

Sageman found that 68 percent of men who joined jihad -- holy war -- had close friends in jihad, or joined with friends. Twenty percent joined because they had fathers, brothers or cousins in jihad. Seventy percent went to jihad while living outside of their country.

Terrorists want to identify with a group, even if it involves violence. The numbers of men who want to join are high and so, al-Qaida does not need to recruit. Men apply to become members of the group.

"Fifteen to 25 percent are accepted," Sageman says. "It's like applying to an Ivy League school."

Even though al-Qaida's numbers are high and the application process is competitive, Sageman said al-Qaida is operationally dead. There is little communication between bin Laden, the supposedly mastermind behind several attacks on U.S. interest, including the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijacking in which some 3,000 people were killed, and his people. Without communication, there is no network.

"After September 11, 2001, the environment changed, we were not looking," Sageman said. "Now you can't even sneak over a cockroach. We've hardened our borders."

"With heightened security checks and government travel restrictions, we're not going to have another 9/11," Sageman said. "But we'll have lots and lots of masjids."

Al-Qaida's social movement is growing and the fight has moved to the Internet. Without known leadership, terrorists are difficult to detect.

Sageman refers to the Internet as a virtual command. Bin Laden gives general guidance on tape accessible on the Internet. There are 1,000 jihadi Web sites and hundreds of virtual magazines telling terrorists what to do.

"My nightmare are chat rooms," Sageman says. "Imagine five or six guys who have never met each other, from all over the world ... deciding to do an operation. When they meet, that's trouble."

It does not take long for al-Qaida members to plan and execute an attack. The bombings in Madrid, Spain, were done in five to six weeks, Sageman said.

The challenge for the United States and terrorist fighting groups is to prevent the next generation from terrorizing innocent people.

Jessica Stern, author of "Terror in the Name of God," said she believes the United States should concentrate less on today's terrorists, and more on what facilitates new recruitment.

"The United States has made progress," Stern said. "We're good at locating terrorists, but less good at penetrating the groups."

Terrorist groups tend to form in countries where there is a high male-to-female ratio. Failed states, prisons in the United States, immigrants and illegal aliens are important sources of recruitment, Stern said. It is important to investigate these people, to pinpoint the problem.

The United States needs intelligence from within the countries terrorists come from.

"We need intelligence from ordinary people because the threat is coming from ordinary people, not the states." Stern said. "We need intelligence in places like Jordan."

Instead of focusing on terrorist attacks, it is important to look toward the future and try to understand why new members are joining al-Qaida, Sageman said.

"An idea-based network requires idea-based solutions," Sageman said. "Not military solutions."

Hanukkah Eats

It's getting to be that time of the year again:

MAXINE'S LATKES
Food writer Adam Rapoport fried these latkes in a combination of vegetable oil and schmaltz (rendered chicken fat), a tactic that apparently gave him the edge over the competition in the James Beard Foundation's Fourth Annual Latke Cook-Off. He won both the People's Choice and the Amateur awards. This recipe has two things going for it, shared by most really good recipes: it's tried and true, and it came from someone's mother, in this case, Rapoport's mom, Maxine.

5 large russet potatoes
2 medium sized onions
2 eggs, lightly beaten
4 tablespoons toasted bread crumbs
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
Dash pepper
Schmaltz or vegetable oil for frying
Grate the potatoes and onions by hand, using the large holes of a box grater. Place the grated potatoes and onions in a dish towel and wring out the excess liquid. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, bread crumbs, salt, baking powder, and pepper. Stir in the potatoes and onions and mix well. Heat schmaltz and/or vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Drop the mixture by spoonfuls into the pan. Flatten latkes slightly while cooking, and turn only once. Remove from the pan when latkes are crisp and golden. Serve hot with apple sauce or sour cream.

I'll take issue with the schmaltz, although it is probably a very tasty addition. Hanukkah is all about the oil, and the schmaltz would render this a meat dish and therefore no sourcream for those who observe kashrut. No sourcream would make me very, very sad.

Invocation

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

tao te ching - lao-tse

Click on the link to see one of the most beautiful prayer sites on the Internets.

GOTV

Why Jan. 30 Won't Work
Postponing Iraq's elections would be bad; holding them would be worse.

By Peter W. Galbraith and Leslie H. Gelb, Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, is a senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations

Conversations in Baghdad and Washington in recent weeks suggest that for all the brave words about going forward, few of those actually responsible for the elections' success — Iraq's top government leaders, military commanders and election officials — actually believe they can be held in just two months. Postponing them would be bad, but holding them would be worse.

The purpose of the elections is to choose a national assembly to write a permanent constitution and establish a government with legitimacy. The U.N.-designed electoral system provides for proportional representation of political parties based on their share of the vote throughout Iraq. This would produce fair results only if the three major groups — Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the center and Shiites in the south — voted proportionate to their share of the total population.

But, and here is where disaster lurks, this is virtually certain not to occur. Sunni leaders have told their people not to vote in order to protest the Fallouja offensive, and insurgents will intimidate many others. Sunni Arab turnout, then, might well be as low as a quarter of their total number, compared with likely Kurd and Shiite voters reaching three-quarters of their totals, or more. In 1992, more than 90% of Kurds voted in free elections in the north.

If this were to happen, Sunni Arabs could end up holding only 5% of the assembly seats while constituting 20% of Iraq's population. Shiites could amass 65% of the seats with only 55% of the population, while the Kurds would have 25% of the seats with less than 20% of the population. Thus, Shiites and Kurds would dominate the elected assembly overwhelmingly, while Sunni Arabs effectively would be marginalized.

Such results would not only be unfair, but they could light a stick of ethnic, religious and policy dynamite. With a commanding majority in the assembly, the Shiites would understandably expect to govern Iraq. But the reality is that Sunni Arabs will not accept rule by the very people they bossed and victimized for most of the last century. National elections will make Iraq's Sunni center less governable, not more.

Shiite leaders would want to dictate the terms of Iraq's constitution. In fact, they opposed a provision in the country's interim constitution that would have given the two smaller groups a veto over the final document. This puts the Shiites on a collision course not only with Sunnis, but also with Iraq's powerful Kurdish minority. The Shiite parties are religious; the Kurdish parties are secular and nationalist. The Kurds, who have been de facto independent from Baghdad since 1991, look to the West for their political model; the Shiites are influenced by Iran. So, if Allawi and Bush go forward with nationwide elections in January, here's what they can expect: The Shiites will have the full legal authority derived from free and democratic elections, but not the power to enforce it outside their own region. Sunni Arabs will be further marginalized, and more will join the insurgents. Ethnic and religious conflict could explode.

It has already begun in Mosul, where Sunni Arab insurgents have targeted the city's Kurdish minority, leading the Kurds to deploy their military — flying the Kurdish flag, not the Iraqi flag — to the city. Tensions are also rising between Sunni and Shiite Arabs. South of Baghdad, a Shiite commando unit attacked and burned a Sunni Arab village near Latifiya thought to harbor insurgents who murdered Shiite pilgrims en route to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

The underlying problem is that Iraq's new electoral system suffers from the same conceptual flaw that has characterized U.S. policy since Saddam Hussein's fall — an incorrect assumption that Iraq's three main communities share a common sense of being a nation. In fact, all three think primarily in terms of their own ethnic or confessional community. These differences cannot be reconciled in a national vote based on a pretense that there is a unitary state.

If Iraq is to survive as a state, it can do so only as a loose confederation of at least three self-governing entities, with multiethnic Baghdad as a special capital district. To get there, Iraq's three main communities need to bargain as equals. The Kurds already have their regional government. Iraq's three Shiite southern governorates have recently proposed forming a single region and are seeking the same powers Kurdistan has, including ownership of the oil beneath their land.

The best solution at the moment is for Iraq's national elections to be postponed, but for previously scheduled voting to go ahead for the Kurdistan National Assembly and the governorate councils in the Shiite south. This still would leave Sunni Arabs in central Iraq out in the cold, but at least it would not disenfranchise them within their own central part of Iraq or in a future national assembly.

Postponing elections will be a terrible jolt to Iraq's long-suffering Shiites, who have seen democracy as providing them the fruits of their numerical majority. But regional elections will give the Shiites the self-government they desire without the burden of taking on an invigorated Sunni insurgency and a recalcitrant, but powerful, Kurdistan. To see what is possible in their own region, the Shiites need only look north to an increasingly prosperous Kurdistan that is today the only safe part of Iraq.

Galbraith and Gelb have an unspoken assumption that the security situation is going to improve by some sort of date certain, and that the entire electoral process is going to be seen as legitimate by that date certain.

I don't know what evidence they are looking at. I have yet to see it.

The Light

Poems, prayers and recipes, food for body and soul, will take us through this weekend as a break from the darkness. Along with Charles' tech updates. Oh, you'll get the news, too, but also some spaces for a deep breath.

The Snow Man

Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Darkness

Gunning for Satan resulted in slaughtered innocents
02 Dec 2004
By Robert C. Koehler Tribune Media Services

What a weird war. We’re officially ashamed of what we’re doing and get indignant not so much at criticism of our actions as unvarnished documentation of them. NBC, for its part, took pains to apologize to the country for being unable to fit its troublesome footage into the big, reassuring picture of American compassion. And except for that aberration, mainstream journalists have mostly behaved themselves, only giving us news embedded in official context: 1,200 insurgents (and no civilians) dead, the January elections on track, a great victory for the forces of good.

Thanks to them, George Orwell still has our number. “The nationalist,” he wrote in 1945, “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Actually, I think Orwell (who was quoted in an excellent piece by Linda S. Heard, writing recently for al-Jazeera), is only half right. We do disapprove of atrocities; Abu Ghraib, after all, was a PR nightmare. Public enthusiasm for war is a lot more iffy than it used to be. That makes “not even hearing about the atrocities” all the more crucial. It’s a lot easier to support our troops if we don’t know exactly what they’re doing.

So most of us are not going to read about children in Fallujah bleeding to death from shrapnel wounds because they can’t get medical attention. Nor will we hear about Abrams tanks firing randomly into residential neighborhoods or families huddled in their houses wondering where the next bomb or shell is going to hit.

We won’t know how badly the streets of Fallujah stink from rotting corpses, or that coalition mop-up operations included heaving bodies into the Euphrates. We won’t hear that at least 800 civilians (many women, many children) are dead from the latest onslaught, added to the 800 who died when we pounded the city last spring.

And that figure, a Red Cross estimate, is “extremely conservative,” independent journalist Dahr Jamail told Democracy Now. It “doesn’t take into account people buried under the rubble of homes, and other horrendous things that have happened there.” Officials expect the final toll to be “far, far higher.”

Nor are we likely to realize, as non-embedded news organizations are reporting, that a humanitarian crisis of daunting proportions is looming in Fallujah. Residents trapped in their houses have nothing to eat or drink. “There’s no water,” one resident told al-Jazeera. “People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying. People are eating flour because there’s no proper food.”

OK, war isn’t pretty, but at least what’s left of Iraq when we finish our job will have a fresh, new democracy to enjoy, right? That’s the big picture we’re asked to believe in, the context that allows - demands - forgiveness for the occasional American war crime we learn about, and stops us from asking whether the entire game plan isn’t a war crime.

And besides, the other side fights dirty too. I’ll concede a ruthlessness to the insurgents that may well be equal to our own (though lacking tanks, bombers, fighter jets, attack helicopters, etc.), but I won’t concede them stupidity.

The embedded and approving Paul Wood described “the simplicity of combat” we were expecting and hoping for in Fallujah. But why would the enemy oblige us? Scott Ritter called the Fallujah operation “squeezing Jell-O.” As we were shelling civilians, taking out the hospital and leveling the city with Old Testament fury, the insurgents were regrouping and attacking targets in other parts of Iraq.

In other words, this was pointless.

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail reports:

This past Sunday a small Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy was allowed into Fallujah at 4:30pm. I interviewed a member of the convoy today. Speaking on condition of anonymity, (so I'll call her Suthir), the first thing she said to me was, "I need another heart and eyes to bear it because my own are not enough to bear what I saw. Nothing justifies what was done to this city. I didn't see a house or mosque that wasn't destroyed."

"The Americans didn't let us in the places where everyone said there was napalm used," she said, "Julan and those places where the heaviest fighting was, nobody is allowed to go there."

Before Fallujah, before invasion, there was this:

This morning, columnists in major US papers will continue alerting US people to possible wrongs, even crimes, committed by UN officials in the course of the "oil for food" program which coordinated and monitored sales of Iraqi oil, while economic sanctions ravaged Iraq. These economic sanctions constituted the most comprehensive state of siege ever imposed in modern history. It's not likely that Saddam Hussein ever missed a meal, but children, hundreds of thousands of children, suffered gruesomely. Their suffering and death can be likened to child sacrifice, certainly the most egregious instance of child abuse in modern times. They'd committed no crime, yet they were brutally - and lethally - punished for the government of the country into which they were haplessly born. You aren't likely to find this story in the current exposes of UN wrongdoing.

When I try to understand why columnists in far away places wouldn't take on the story of these worthy victims, I try to remember that there are many worthy victims and one person can't undertake care and concern for every devastating, brutal injustice. Pick your battles. But I can't for the life of me understand how a steady stream of columns have appeared on op-ed pages, in the New York Times and other papers, alerting us to possible crimes committed by UN officials in the course of the "oil for food" program while there has been no mention of the crime of child sacrifice in Iraq.

The war crimes started well before the war.

More peaceful, More Free

Bush Dismisses Talk Of Delaying Iraq Vote
He Cites Need to Bring U.S. Forces Home

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 3, 2004; Page A01

President Bush yesterday flatly ruled out any delay in Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30 despite the unrelenting insurgency, rejecting Sunni Muslim boycott threats and framing the vote as a critical step toward bringing U.S. troops home.

In his strongest reaffirmation of the election plan, Bush attempted to end any doubt about whether the vote would go forward after days of debate among Iraqi politicians. Organizations representing the once-powerful Sunni minority have demanded the elections be put off until security is restored, while leaders of the majority Shiites have insisted the balloting proceed.

"The elections should not be postponed," Bush said. "It's time for the Iraqi citizens to go to the polls. And that's why we are very firm on the January 30th date."

Bush acknowledged that the precarious security environment had prompted him to approve Pentagon plans to increase the U.S. troop presence to 150,000 until after the elections. But he promised that "at some point in time, when Iraq is able to defend itself against the terrorists who are trying to destroy democracy -- as I have said many times -- our troops will come home with the honor they have earned."

Declare victory and get out, George. You don't really have another choice.

20 Killed in Attacks Against Police Stations in Baghdad

The Associated Press
Friday, December 3, 2004; 3:32 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents launched two major attacks Friday against police stations in different areas of Baghdad, killing 20 people, including six police officers. One of the attacks was a car bomb, police said.

The attacks occurred in the western Amil district and in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Azamiyah, where police said a car bomb exploded during a clash between Iraqi government security forces and armed rebels around the police station.

Fourteen people were killed and 19 others injured in the Azamiyah blast, according to the Numan hospital. Azamiyah was a major center of support for Saddam Hussein.

Earlier, gunmen stormed a police station in Amil near the road to Baghdad International Airport, killing six police officers, looting weapons and torching two cars, officials said.

Thick black smoke rose from the burning vehicles after the attack in the western Amil district as government forces sealed off the area.

Police Capt. Mohammed al-Jumeili said the insurgents shelled the station with mortars, and then about 15 of them stormed its main courtyard and clashed with police inside. Several officers were wounded, he said.

The "police" might as well have bull's eyes painted on their uniforms and headquarters.

What a lovely season for an election.

U.S. Embassy Bans Use of Airport Road
Employees in Baghdad Will Travel Increasingly Dangerous Route by Helicopter

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 3, 2004; Page A20

BAGHDAD, Dec. 2 -- Citing security concerns, the U.S. Embassy on Thursday banned its employees from using the highway linking the embassy area to the international airport, a 10-mile stretch of road plagued by frequent suicide car-bomb attacks.

The move, which followed similar action by the British this week, reflected the growing difficulty that U.S. forces are having ensuring safe passage along the high-profile route. Precisely because of the road's importance, insurgents have shown increasing boldness and ferocity in targeting vehicles used by U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors.

A large armored bus, nicknamed the Rhino, had been carrying passengers to and from the airport. But it stopped operating last week after being struck by a car bomb. No one on the bus was injured, but its engine was damaged.

An embassy spokesman said Thursday that U.S. personnel who need to travel between the airport and the embassy, which is in the heavily fortified area known as the Green Zone, would be transported by helicopter.

U.S. military commanders here acknowledged frustration at having been unable to secure the highway, but they said it was not for lack of effort. U.S. forces have tried a number of security measures over the past year, only to see insurgents adjust their tactics and pose fresh threats to traffic.

Peace and freedom. They hate our values. Whatever, it is getting people killed.

When the Transcendent Intrudes

A colleague of mine asked me this afternoon, "How ya doin'?" This particular colleague demands the truth, so I gave it to him, with footnotes. The truth is that I find all of the news so dark, so dangerous, that it is starting to cloud my vision, leaving me freaked out much of the time. So, I'm going to pay attention to some other things a bit.

One of Atrios's guest posters (while Duncan was recently on vacation)
posted a poem the other day, and a long and lyrical comment string resulted which completely changed the tone of the site--remarkable. Those comments threads are a pretty rough place (not a problem we have here) but the transformation was just remarkable to me. Guest poster Hecate posted a love poem by Unamamo. The lyricism which burst forth from the commentors was pure beauty to me, I alternately laughed heartily or my eyes filled up.

So I'm going to leave all the bad news alone tonight, and give you one of my favorite poems. Post favorite poems, poetical thoughts, reactions, whatever appeals to you. This poem is by Wlaslawa Szymborska, winner of the Nobel for literature in 1996. I'm going through my Polish poet phase right now, and the translation is by her fellow poet Adam Czerniawski. It is the title poem from her 1990 collection, People on a Bridge:

For some, this isn't enough.
They even hear the pouring rain,
they feel the cool drops on necks and shoulders,
they look at the bridge and the people
as if they saw themselves there
in the self-same never-finished run
along an endless road eternally to be travelled
and believe in their impudence
that things are really thus.

Fun with spyware: the best things in life are free

Now for that dose of irony I promised you.

I have never considered Slashdot to be an extraordinarily security-savvy site. It's on their radar, for sure. But not like The Register. Those guys are awesome. So I could have been knocked over with a feather when, this afternoon, after a horrid 4 hour meeting, I checked and found that Slashdot had actually posted more security stories than The Register.

It gets better. The hottest story, from my POV, was IT: Anti-Spyware Products Don't Live Up to Promises. It referenced another article, at pcworld.com, entitled Poor Defenders. I found this one fascinating enough to tell my boss about.

Bottom line? The author performed a comparison of eight different anti-spyware products. Seven of them were commercial: MyNetProtector, NoAdware, PAL Spyware Remover, SpyAssault, SpyBlocs, Spyware Stormer, and XoftSpy, at price points between $20 and $40. The eighth was freeware: Spybot Search & Destroy. And Spybot Search & Destroy performed better than every single commercial product in the test.

Sometimes, the best things in life are free.

Microsoft squashes Internet Explorer IFRAME bug

Yup, it's official.

Microsoft has issued a cumulative security patch for Internet Explorer that mitigates the infamous IFRAME vulnerability that the Bofra worm exploits.

A thing to be noted here, it seems to me, is that the loop between publication of a new remote vulnerability in the security community and the weaponization in the form of a worm is tightening. Code Red hit the Internet a month after it's enabling vulnerability was published. Bofra took about a week. And the patch for that vulnerability came out three weeks after Bofra was observed in the wild.

Lessons for the home and small business user?

Close your firewall to all incoming TCP and UDP traffic, except UDP port 53 from your ISP's nameservers only. If you want to run up a website, host it at a professional provider, not at your home or business at the end of a broadband line. You can get burned even if you're running Linux. One of the first incidents I investigated was a TCP port 21 (i.e., ftp) host sweep from a compromised Linux box. Another was a Linux box whose web server had been compromised by a worm.

Turn off all network services (i.e., system services offering contact from the network) you do not absolutely need.

And if you run a Microsoft OS, any Microsoft OS, keep your powder dry and your antivirus signatures current. Use extreme paranoia if at all practical. Automated checking every 15 minutes is not too extreme a measure to take.

"What about spyware?", I hear you ask. Stay tuned. The irony lovers among the Bumpers are in for a treat.

Bird Flu Update

Fears of Global Bird Flu Outbreak Increase
Human Pandemic Would Kill Many Millions, But Crucial Facts Still Missing

By Daniel DeNoon
WebMD Medical News
Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD
on Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Dec. 1, 2004 -- Last fall, a 26-year-old Thai woman spent the night holding her 11-year-old daughter in her arms. The little girl died after catching bird flu from an infected chicken. On Sept. 20, the mother died, too. She was the first known person to catch bird flu from another human being.

"With good surveillance, with antivirals, and easy-to-implement public health methods -- strategies such as closing schools and public places and limiting movement -- we should be able to contain the pandemic at the source, wherever that may be," Longini says. "That would buy time to make vaccine to deal with it if it should spread. Emphasis should be on good surveillance everywhere, especially in Southeast Asia, and quick response with targeted use of antivirals."

This is about as thorough a treatement of the subject as I've seen so far, but there are some assumptions in the last section that I find suspect: given that the area of first outbreak are liable to be remote, and small farmers are hardly likely to be turning in the small flocks on which they make their marginal livings, surveillance of the opening infections is liable to be spotty, at best. I have seen nowhere else any reference to the efficacy of Tamiflu. Longini's assumption that mutation of the virus for human to human transmissibility would probably weaken its virulance, but he has no modeling that would indicate that it would weaken to nothing more than an average flu year. This bears careful watching.

Econoblog

Holes in Welfare Reform

By Mark Greenberg and Jared Bernstein
Thursday, December 2, 2004; Page A35

Why have welfare caseloads kept falling despite the weak labor market? Welfare reform involved a two-pronged approach: expanding supports for low-earning families while making it harder for families that aren't working to get help. Even when the economy was creating large numbers of new jobs, some families were hurt by this strategy, but the overall approach proved a highly potent anti-poverty combination. Recent experience suggests that our current policies may be too pro-cyclical, boosting the economic fortunes of the vulnerable in boom times, but failing to help when jobs are less plentiful.

What should the administration do? First, when employment is falling and poverty is rising, it should stop treating a drop in welfare caseloads as cause for congratulations and start treating it as a sign that the system is failing to respond to increased needs. Second, when the welfare law comes up for reauthorization again next year, the administration should promote changes that reward states for success in promoting employment, not just cutting caseloads. Third, the administration should ensure that Congress maintains funding for the program, because states under fiscal stress will be least likely to extend help to families losing jobs.

Changes outside of welfare could also make a big difference. If the unemployment compensation system reached more people who had lost their jobs, fewer of their families would need welfare. Moving back to full employment and truly tight labor markets would lead to sharp declines in poverty like those in the 1990s. In the meantime, we should recognize that falling welfare caseloads in tandem with rising poverty are a signal that the safety net is failing to do its job.

Rising poverty and falling caseloads are also the warning signs of a seriously damaged economy. More signs:

U.S. Factory Orders, Jobless Claims Up
By REUTERS

Published: December 2, 2004

Filed at 10:46 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Booming orders for new military aircraft boosted overall orders to U.S. factories by 0.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted $371.51 billion in October, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, though demand was flat when defense was excluded.

Separately, the Labor Department said new applications for jobless pay jumped by a surprising 25,000 last week to 349,000. The data comes just before Friday's intensely awaited monthly report on job creation in November, but analysts noted the monthly survey was completed well before the rise in claims.

The October increase in factory orders topped Wall Street economists' forecasts for a smaller 0.3 percent gain. While orders for quickly used nondurables like paper products climbed 2.4 percent, demand for more costly and longer-lasting durables tumbled by a revised 1.1 percent instead of the 0.4 percent decrease previously reported.

The headline is misleading: non-defense factory orders are flat. We'll have a better sense of the overall ecnomic picture tomorrow, but the news that jobless claims are up is very bad: typically, this time of the year sees significant temporary hiring in the retail sector.

Discrimination

The Exposer put up a truly frightening post last night:

Yesterday, my wife went looking for work at various retailers around town, hoping to make some extra green for the holiday season. She's been off the market for the last 4+ years raising our son, and I've been with my current employer for that same period of time, so neither of us has any recent experience on the job-seeking scene. Thus we were surprised to discover a new trend in the kind of questions being asked on applications. It seems that certain employers are attempting to determine the political and religious preferences of applicants.

And even if it is entirely true that such questions are ignored in evaluating suitability for employment, the message is clear. My spouse answered the questions based on what she thought the employer wanted to hear, rather than her actual beliefs - she responded "yes" to the God question, "yes" to the political leaders question, and said her values were more "traditional". And though these were all lies, she likely just increased her chances of getting a job. After all, when was the last time you heard of a company hiring applicants specifically because they didn't believe in God, didn't support our political leaders, and were avidly Progressive?

This is blatantly against the law. Calling employment law specialists: this looks like a lovely pro bono opportunity.

My Lord, the amount of truly alarming stuff out there today is really off the meter.

Wha?

Successful at incompetence

By Paul Craig Roberts

Web only

Is the Bush administration competent? There is enough information at hand on which to base an objective opinion.

On the eve of President Bush's second term, the U.S. economy has fewer jobs than when Bush was inaugurated four years ago.

During Bush's first term, the U.S. economy was unable to create jobs in both export and import-competitive sectors. The formerly powerful U.S. jobs machine has been allowed to run down to the point that jobs can only be created in nontradable domestic services.

The service jobs that have been created are too few in number to offset the loss of manufacturing and knowledge jobs. Unemployed manufacturing workers, U.S. software engineers, computer programmers and IT workers number in the hundreds of thousands.

During Bush's first term, the value of the U.S. dollar declined dramatically in relation to other traded currencies. The extraordinary diminution in the dollar's exchange value threatens its role as the world's reserve currency. If the dollar loses its place as reserve currency, there will be catastrophic consequences for U.S. living standards and superpower status.

The decline in the dollar's exchange value has failed to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, because the Bush administration permits China to peg its currency to the dollar. As the dollar declines, China's currency declines with it, thus maintaining China's advantage in U.S. markets, while China gains greater advantage in all other markets. Because China pegs its currency to the dollar, the dollar's decline has not reduced the advantage of outsourcing to China.

The ink in the federal budget is as red as that in the trade account. A country with a $440 billion budget deficit and a $600 billion trade deficit is not financially positioned to start a war in the Middle East. Instead of dealing with serious economic problems at home, Bush marched off to a gratuitous war.

Bush's invasion of Iraq is one of the greatest strategic blunders in history. The Bush administration assumed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a "cakewalk," because the indigenous population would welcome and support Americans as liberators.

The reality is that all available U.S. troops are tied down by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents who have the support of the Iraqi people. The United States is so short of military manpower that it has been forced to call up the reserves and the National Guard, to keep troops deployed who have served their time in uniform and, now, to call up men in their 50s who have not been in uniform for 20 years.

Bush's invasion has turned not only Iraqis but all of the Middle East against the United States. Where there were no terrorists and no support for terrorists, there are now tens of thousands of terrorists. America's puppet regimes in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are endangered by the anti-Americanism that is engulfing the Middle East.

Like Hitler at Stalingrad, Bush cannot recognize the danger. Unable to occupy Iraq, Bush plans to expand the war to Iran and Syria. The identical Bush officials who lied about Iraq having nuclear weapons or weapons programs now lie about Iran having nuclear weapons or weapons programs.

Immune to evidence, the Bush administration is delusional and capable of horrendous miscalculation. The flowers with which the U.S. Department of Defense said our troops would be greeted in Iraq turned out to be bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.

On Nov. 22, the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, reported that its doctors have treated 20,802 U.S. troops from Iraq. Few of the injured have been able to return to their units.

That is twice the casualty figure reported by the Pentagon and comprises 15 percent of the U.S. army in Iraq. In exchange, since the invasion, the United States has killed some 100,000 Iraqi civilians and perhaps 2,000 insurgents.

The ultimate test of competence is the ability to admit mistakes. This the Bush administration cannot do. Steadfastly denying any mistake, Bush is promoting those responsible for the Iraq carnage to higher office. Will four more years of Bush terminate America's superpower status?

When Bush attacked Iraq, he jettisoned a half-century of American foreign policy. He unilaterally threw diplomacy and allies out the door to invade a country that had done nothing to the United States despite suffering a decade of American bombing and embargoes that, according to the United Nations, killed 500,000 Iraqi children.

Indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians and torture in U.S. military prisons have destroyed the virtuous image that Bush claims for U.S. aggression.

Not content to cause turmoil in the Middle East, the Bush administration is arrogantly and foolishly stirring the pot in Ukraine, interfering in an election in Russia's sphere of influence. In just four years, Bush has created a new image of America as a reckless hypocrite that lectures others about democracy, while engaging in electoral fraud in Ohio and Florida, and imposing a puppet government on Iraq at the point of bayonets.

With the Washington Times doing my job for me, perhaps I can just take the rest of the day off.

But, seriously, Mr. Roberts, where the hell were you before the election?

Collateral Damage

Via Juan Cole:

Iraq's civilian dead get no hearing in the United States

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Evidence is mounting that America's war in Iraq has killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and perhaps well over 100,000. Yet this carnage is systematically ignored in the United States, where the media and government portray a war in which there are no civilian deaths, because there are no Iraqi civilians, only insurgents.

American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion. In late October, the British medical journal Lancet published a study of civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began. The sample survey documented an extra 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths compared to the death rate in the preceding year, when Saddam Hussein was still in power - and this estimate did not even count excess deaths in Fallujah, which was deemed too dangerous to include.

The study also noted that the majority of deaths resulted from violence, and that a high proportion of the violent deaths were due to U.S. aerial bombing. The epidemiologists acknowledged the uncertainties of these estimates, but presented enough data to warrant an urgent follow-up investigation and reconsideration by the Bush administration and the U.S. military of aerial bombing of Iraq's urban areas.

America's public reaction has been as remarkable as the Lancet study, for the reaction has been no reaction. On Oct. 29 the vaunted New York Times ran a single story of 770 words on page 8 of the paper. The Times reporter apparently did not interview a single Bush administration or U.S. military official. No follow-up stories or editorials appeared, and no Times reporters assessed the story on the ground. Coverage in other U.S. papers was similarly meager. The Washington Post, also on Oct. 29, carried a single 758-word story on page 16.

Recent reporting on the bombing of Fallujah has also been an exercise in self-denial. On Nov. 6, The New York Times wrote that "warplanes pounded rebel positions" in Fallujah, without noting that "rebel positions" were actually in civilian neighborhoods. Another story in The Times on Nov. 12, citing "military officials," dutifully reported: "Since the assault began on Monday, about 600 rebels have been killed, along with 18 American and 5 Iraqi soldiers." The issue of civilian deaths was not even raised.

Violence is only one reason for the increase in civilian deaths in Iraq. Children in urban war zones die in vast numbers from diarrhea, respiratory infections and other causes, owing to unsafe drinking water, lack of refrigerated foods, and acute shortages of blood and basic medicines in clinics and hospitals (that is, if civilians even dare to leave their houses for medical care). The Red Crescent and other relief agencies were unable to relieve Fallujah's civilian population.

On Nov. 14, the front page of The New York Times led with the following description: "Army tanks and fighting vehicles blasted their way into the last main rebel stronghold in Fallujah at sundown on Saturday after American warplanes and artillery prepared the way with a savage barrage on the district. Earlier in the afternoon, 10 separate plumes of smoke rose from Southern Fallujah, as it etched against the desert sky, and probably exclaimed catastrophe for the insurgents."

There is, once again, virtually no mention of the catastrophe for civilians etched against that desert sky. There is a hint, though, in a brief mention in the middle of the story of a father looking over his wounded sons in a hospital and declaring: "Now Americans are shooting randomly at anything that moves."

A few days later, a U.S. television film crew was in a bombed-out mosque with American marines. While the cameras were rolling, a marine turned to an unarmed and wounded Iraqi lying on the ground and shot the man in the head. (Reportedly, there were a few other such cases of outright murder.) But the American media more or less brushed aside this shocking incident, too. The Wall Street Journal actually wrote an editorial on Nov. 18 that criticized the critics, noting that whatever the U.S. did, its enemies in Iraq did worse, as if this excused American abuses.

It does not. The U.S. is killing massive numbers of Iraqi civilians, embittering the population and many in the Islamic world, and laying the ground for escalating violence and death. No number of slaughtered Iraqis will bring peace. The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril.

This is making me nuts. Our media and most of the public act as if American actions are somehow free of moral taint by simply being American. The rest of the planet has fallen out of love with the myth of American exceptionalism, American cluelessness simply puts us at further risk. Juan notes in the essay preceding his link to Sach's op-ed:

There are, by the way, 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and by the time world population levels off at around 9 billion mid-century, it may be the biggest religion in the world, outstripping Christianity, for reasons of demographic growth. The US can't afford to have that many people angry at it and plotting its demise.

Our media won't tell you, but the "Battle for Fallujah" has left the city uninhabitable, the ancient city is nothing more than a ruin, its citizens refugees or dispersed to live with family in other cities, taking with them the stories of American atrocities.

That Americans still back the utter pointlessness of all this slaughter makes us a pariah in the eyes of the rest of the world. Ask Coke and Disney about the economic consequences.

Whine, No Cheese

Abu Ghraib, Caribbean Style

Published: December 1, 2004

Ever since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the Bush administration has claimed that the abuses depicted in those horrible photos were an isolated problem that was immediately fixed. The White House has repeatedly proclaimed its respect for the Geneva Conventions, international law and American statutes governing the treatment of prisoners.

An article in The Times on Tuesday by Neil A. Lewis showed how hollow those assurances are. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, where the United States warehouses men captured in Afghanistan, have been subject to unremitting abuse that is sometimes "tantamount to torture." This continued well after the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light, and it may still be going on.

The Red Cross said it first complained about Guantánamo in January 2003. It found mistreatment similar to that at Abu Ghraib, including beatings, prolonged isolation, sexual humiliation and prolonged "stress positions" for prisoners. But the Red Cross found a new, disturbing practice at Guantánamo: the use of medical personnel to help interrogators get information.

The Red Cross reported the same level of abuse in the spring of 2003. By this June, it said, the regime was "more refined and repressive." The Red Cross did say fearful Guantánamo prisoners complained less frequently in 2004 than in 2003 about female interrogators who exposed their breasts, kissed prisoners, touched them sexually and showed them pornography. But it's hard to see that as progress.

The administration's response to the Red Cross report was unsurprising. The military brushed off the Red Cross's complaints when they were made, just as it did at Abu Ghraib. Yesterday, Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the Red Cross had "their point of view," which was not shared by the Bush administration. The Red Cross's point of view, however, is reflected in the Geneva Conventions and in American law. The recent debate over prisoner abuse has not been brought to the courts, but the Supreme Court has ruled that Mr. Bush cannot suspend due process for prisoners of his choosing.

The White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department clearly have no intention of addressing the abuse. Indeed, Mr. Bush has nominated one of the architects of the administration's prisoner policy, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. The general who set up the system at Guantánamo is now in charge of prisons in Iraq.

Only Congress can hold the administration accountable and begin to repair the damage to American values and America's image caused by the mistreatment of prisoners. Republican and Democratic senators - like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin - have tried hard to investigate prisoner abuse. But Republican leaders have ignored the issue. Senator John Kerry never even raised it during the campaign.

Congress should demand that the Central Intelligence Agency stop stonewalling on the release of its inspector general's report on the role of intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib. During confirmation hearings, the Senate Judiciary Committee should press Mr. Gonzales about why he signed off on two legal opinions that justified torture and claimed that Mr. Bush could suspend the Geneva Conventions whenever he liked. They should ask what he intends to do about fixing the problem.

Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, should resume his valuable hearings on prisoner abuse. Ideally, he would finally ask the Senate leadership to create a investigative committee with subpoena powers to impose accountability on high-ranking generals and civilian officials.

Dear New York Times,

You managed to disappear this story off of your A section for, oh, about six months, and now you are blaming John Kerry? Excuse me?

Is it Sen. Kerry's fault that we don't have an independent press functioning in this country? Why are you expecting the politicians to do YOUR job?

And you wonder why I dropped my subscription to your rag...

Always,
Melanie

See more at Human Rights First website, End Torture Now.

HIV may have taken a haymaker

Melanie wrote ...

I'll be looking for some good news stories as we approach the holidays. People ARE doing good things and I want to hear about it. If you find stories like this, send a link in comments or email. If you have amusing stories, that would be lovely, too. I know I'm not smiling nearly enough.

Hokay, Melanie. You ask, I deliver.

You have heard about that cute little Ebola vaccine the lads at NIAID whomped up last year? It was supposed to use a "prime-boost" model, but the booster, an adenovirus with a tinkered-with genome that contained genetic material which expressed itself as Ebola surface glycoproteins, was good enough just by itself. At least in monkeys. Eight monkeys, one shot each. 28 days later, they challenged the test animals with the Real Thing. Nobody so much as caught a sniffle. It's in human safety trials right now.

The team that cooked it up has a SARS vaccine candidate out the door. And they've got Lassa Fever in their crosshairs.

Well, there was something muuuuuch more practical that was pointed to on Slashdot today. Assuming it pans out. The article is in WebMD.

Human Test: Novel Vaccine Stops HIV

Treatment Turns On Anti-HIV Immunity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check

By Daniel DeNoon
WebMD Medical News

Reviewed By Charlotte Grayson, MD
on Monday, November 29, 2004

Nov. 29, 2004 -- It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients' T-cell counts stopped dropping.

The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.

"The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection," Andrieu and colleagues write. "The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance of ... [T-]cell counts observed at one year after immunization are particularly promising."

The researchers warn that their study is only proof of principle. It's still not clear which patients do best with the vaccine, although there's evidence that vaccination should be given as soon after HIV infection as possible. Only clinical trials comparing people who get the vaccine to those who don't can show whether this vaccine really is an effective AIDS therapy.

Similar approaches are being explored for the treatment of cancer and long-term viral infections such as hepatitis C.

Richard III

There is a balance in nature which I respect, hurricanes and forest fires have a place to play on a grander scale than the ones we know about. With that thought in mind, I have been pondering this statement by Michael Scheurer, the CIA agent known as Anonymous, I saved it onto my task bar weeks ago, pondering. Mr. Scheurer said of Usama bin Laden:

"Until we respect him, sir, we are probably going to die in numbers that are unecessary."

We need to think about that, we on the left. The cowboy dialogue on the right fails to take into account the imagination of people like bin Laden. We are in a war of imaginations, not of ideologies.

The new century is begging for analogies, for poetry and rhetoric. That is what we on the left have to offer. We've never forgotten the human imagination is bigger than all of us, while the consumerism of the right wants to make us into ants.

Time to get busy, even as the shopping season hits full swing.

There is a tide in the affairs of men...

World Press Review

We are multiply-blessed this evening because I forgot to post eclaire's translation of Sunday's Le Monde on Monday. Here it is now, even more worth reading after Bush's visit to Canada.

eclaire writes:

Interesting article in today's "LeMonde" regarding Iraq granting oil exploration contracts.

To paraphrase, Iraq has granted the first petroleum contracts since the fall of Saddam Hussein, to about 10 medium-sized foreign companies, whose names were not revealed. These are to explore the vast reserves of Roumailla in the south and Kirkouk in the north. Because of the legal status of the interim government, the contracts had to be smallish, three to five million each. Large contracts cannot be granted until after the elections take place. (light bulb goes on over head: my comment).

Iraq's petroleum minister, Thamer Abbas Ghadbane, ensconced in his office in one of the best-protected buildings in Bagdad, has been working away in secret to devise a plan to explore and exploit the enormous petroleum reserves in Iraq. The first phase creates a department to manage the reserves. The second phase calls in small and medium-sized companies to undertake exploration of the reserves.

Through partnering with the smaller companies, the major petroleum companies are quietly advancing their chess pieces into the "game". Although Russian Lukoil had signed a contract with the former government the explore the West Qurma region, that had been terminated in 2002. Other companies, such as Total, ENI, and Repsol, had negotiated but not finalized contracts with the former government. Russian, Chinese and French oil companies will not have priority with the newly-elected Iraqi government, when elections do occur, since they were not coalition members. US and Great Britain's petroleum companies will be preferred.

I'm using the French transliteration of the Iraqi names, since I don't have a glossary. I think they are understandable, however.

Hope your Thanksgiving was refreshing.

It was, eclaire, but it was also girding my loins for the shopping season. I don't knit, I don't sew and I don't think that my relations and friends would appreciate having a data base developed in their name.

Holiday List of Blogs

I want to introduce some new friends, who will be added to the blogroll over the weekend, I hope.

I don't visit dKos as much as I used to--the tone seems to have slipped and coarsened-- so I was very happy to learn that some of my favorite former guest posters have formed a group blog, Liberal Street Fighter. The list of writers includes a number of my personal favorites: Meteor Blades, theoria, paper_tigress, a gilas girl, marisacat, madmaninthemarketplace. The list of talent is very deep, and I don't mean to dis any of the other writers, this was the group who got to be my friends, and, perhaps, some of yours. The new blog is attractive, uses Expression Engine as a platform (you have to log in to comment, the usual routine) and is easy to use.

My other discovery in the last week is the home of therealcervantes at Stayin' Alive. The pseudonymous blogger is a professional in the sociology of health, health systems and epidemiology, a seriously smart writer who takes on difficult topics for the lay reader and makes them clear. I admire the blogger for taking on a difficult subject and doing it with both clarity and style. Cervantes is using blogger at the moment, and already protesting to the management about the clumsy comments system there. Hint: I stopped registering at blogger comments sites and just sign my handle and leave an HTML sig link back to my site at the end of the comment.

Both of these have already gotten bookmarks and I look forward to visiting the sites each day. The writing is that good.

Also to be added to the blogroll this weekend is a veteran blog, The Left Coaster, because I find I'm reading it every day. The writers are smart, pull together a lot of information, and aren't afraid of nuance at all. They aren't afraid of being conflicted, of not having it all worked out yet. I respect that. Every understanding I've ever come to in my middle years is provisional and awaits correction by further information. Each of the writers has enough personal courage to try things out and change if further information makes change a necessity. It's also a purdy site.

Go, enjoy. This is a holiday gift for you, Christian readers can consider it a stocking stuffer.

And for your dancing and dining pleasure, a recipe for hot cider after shopping in the cold and wind this evening (we're told to expect our first snow tonight):

For every 16 ounces of unfiltered apple cider in a sauce pan, add
1 clove
1 stick cinnamon
1 pebble of allspice

Heat the cider to just below a simmer, it should steam but not simmer. Add the spices and let it reduce for 10 minutes. Serve hot in mugs prepared with a slice of lemon in the bottom, microwaved for 30 seconds on high. Distribute the spices among the mugs, you can strain them with your teeth. This is a good drink on a cold day, a very good warmer from within.

Over the weekend, I'll introduce you to gloegg, the holiday wine punch of the Swedes. It is warm, elegant and deadly.

Religion as Product

Note to Religion Editors: Public Doubts Darwin, Evolution, Poll Finds

By E&P; Staff

Published: November 30, 2004 12:01 PM ET

NEW YORK As the press considers increasing its "faith-based" reporting, one thing journalists should keep in mind is that, contrary to most assumptions, large numbers of American remain wary of evolution and continue to see God's hand fully directing the origin of the species.

Newport, in his weekly report, cited two possible reasons for these findings: Most Americans have not been regularly exposed to scientific study on these matters; or many Americans know about Darwin's theory, but feel it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. "Indeed, about a third of Americans are biblical literalists," he writes.

Frightening. One of the things this demonstrates is that both our public education and our religious education systems are utterly failing. Fundamentalist Christians, who are a minority in the faith and some conservative evangelicals are the only flavors which promote a literal reading of the Bible. If a third of the public are biblical literalists, the Main Line churches as well as Roman Catholicism (to a degree: RCs are notoriously unfamiliar with their Bibles) are failing as religious educators. The official teacing of Catholicism and all of the Main Line all accept the theory of evolution.

Dehumanization

Report: Pentagon wants 10,000 more troops in Iraq
Abizaid says forces OK, but US Army planners worry about replacements.
by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Faced with the problem of protecting upcoming elections and securing former insurgent stronghold, the US military tells NBC it will need between 10,000 and 11,000 more troops in Iraq. NBC-TV reported Monday night that this will "temporarily" bring the total number of US forces in Iraq to 150,000. As a result many soldiers and marines who were scheduled to leave Iraq this month will have to stay longer, while other troops will be sent to Iraq earlier than scheduled.

NBC-TV also reports on the difficulties these 10,000 new troops would have in order to protect all 9000 polling places in Iraq.

In an interview with USA Today on Monday, Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of US Central Command and the top solider in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that US forces are not stretched too thin around the world, and warned countries like Iran and North Korea not to think they could take advantage of the situation. But in an opinion piece for Knight Ridder, senior military correspondent Joseph Galloway says Army planners tell him that, "Army and Marine commanders already have used up most of their bag of tricks to find troops for the usual rotations to Iraq."

The Baltimore Sun reports that the Army is hard pressed to find enough officers for staff jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan and will double the length of their tours in those countries from 179 days at present to a full 12 months. Other extraordinary steps ordered or under consideration include pulling officers out of military schools or delaying entry into such programs. They could also curtail family oriented programs such as the one that allows soldiers to extend their tours at a stateside base so their children can finish their senior year in high school. The Army is struggling to fill hundreds of staff jobs for majors and lieutenant colonels in war zone headquarters and in the past month began stripping majors and lieutenant colonels from their Pentagon billets and ordering them to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday on the new kind of training that those enlisted in the Army receive, including those who are in non-combat jobs. Basically, the Times reports, the idea of a non-combat job is not longer relevant in the kind of wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the recruits, it wasn't exactly what they expected when a bus deposited them at the gate nine weeks ago. The plan for many had been to learn an Army trade, to make an important contribution and still keep a safe distance from enemy lines. Instead, before they knew it, they were learning to avoid landmines, survive an ambush and spot roadside bombs disguised as cans of Coke. 'They go from being a high school kid to a soldier on the ground in Iraq, and if they get ambushed, they have to know hand-to-hand combat,' said retired Army Gen. Randall L. Rigby, a former deputy commandant in charge of training. 'The old chestnut that only the infantry takes the blows is gone.'

One of the biggest problems the military faces, Mr. Galloway reported in his piece above, is how to keep enough soldiers in places like Fallujah in order to prevent insurgents from coming back, while still pressuring them in other places in Iraq. There is also some confusion over the number of daily attacks since US troops entered Fallujah, with interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi saying the attacks have dropped to about 50 a day, with other sources, like Galloway, saying they have doubled to more than 100 a day.

Regardless of the number of daily attacks, the number of US troops killed in Iraq in a single month is approaching the highest total since March 2003. The death of three more US soldiers who died in attacks Monday, the total for November stood at 134. The highest previous total, 135, came last April, when fighting flared in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Fallujah.

I'll believe KR's Joe Galloway a whole lot faster than I'll believe John Abazaid. What's the deal with the senior commanders? Are they all just careerists that play Bush's game and don't care that they are sending our troops into a meatgrinder? How could anyone with any human feeling whatever do what they are doing to our forces and to the Iraqi people?

And then there is what they are doing to us stateside: turning us into a bunch of jingoist, ignorant fratboy cowards just like the icon at the head of it all.

Jerk

Missile pitch stuns Martin
Controversial defence scheme raised in talks
But leaders rebuild relationship between countries

TIM HARPER AND SUSAN DELACOURT
STAFF REPORTERS

OTTAWA—George W. Bush has further fuelled a Canadian controversy with an aggressive pitch for Ottawa's participation in a continental ballistic missile defence program, something Prime Minister Paul Martin had sought to avoid during the U.S. president's first visit to the nation's capital.

It was a harshly discordant note in a day when the two leaders, showing genuine comfort with each other, spoke often about what Martin called the "unshakeable friendship between our two countries."

The president paid tribute to Martin for Canada's contribution in Afghanistan and Haiti and its help in reconstructing Iraq as the two men sought to rebuild a relationship that soured under former prime minister Jean Chrétien.

But Bush surprised Martin and Canadian officials by raising the missile defence plan — something not on the official agenda.

The president talked about the future of NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defence Command) and the continental defence plan in a private meeting with Martin, then talked about it publicly as the two men met reporters following a working lunch at the Lester B. Pearson building here yesterday. Martin, according to his advisers, told Bush there was a debate on the missile shield program in this country and the Prime Minister had made a commitment to consult Parliament before making a decision on Canadian participation.

"We talked about the future of NORAD and how that organization can best meet emerging threats and safeguard our continent against attack from ballistic missiles," Bush said, as Martin stood silently beside him and thousands protested Bush's visit outside the building.

Martin reminded Bush in their private meeting that he is the leader of a minority government and that under a formal agreement forged with his opposition counterparts last month, he is committed to holding a vote in the Commons on missile defence.

Both the NDP and the Bloc Québécois are adamantly opposed to Canada's participation in the missile defence shield and the Conservatives want more information before they will support it.

'Lefty' Layton trades jabs with president

SUSAN DELACOURT AND BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH
STAFF REPORTERS

OTTAWA—For six minutes last night, while the top layer of Canada's political class schmoozed with cocktails and canapés, New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton told President George W. Bush why a lot of Canadians don't like the idea of a missile-defence shield over North America.

Bush was not moved.

If there were no such thing as North Korea or Iran, Bush reportedly said, then there would be no need for missile defence. He seemed to like Layton's spunk, however.

As Bush started to slide away, to shake more hands among the three dozen or so high-ranking guests invited to the private reception at last night's gala dinner, he smiled and told Layton: "Every country needs a good lefty. ... We even have some in our country."

Layton spoke to the Star last night after what he described as a direct, amiable but ultimately "disturbing" conversation with Bush, which was followed up by longer chats at the private reception with the outgoing and incoming U.S. secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. In all, Layton had about half an hour with top U.S. politicians.

He was gratified he got a chance to help explain to Americans what the protests in Ottawa were about yesterday, but he also knows he didn't make a dent in their determination to go ahead with the plan.

"He's a very determined man."
....
Former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who didn't enjoy particularly friendly relations with Bush or Martin in his final year in office, was among the luminaries in the crowd of about 700 guests. Bush slid right past Chrétien as he entered the hall, pausing to shake hands with someone else at the table, but not the former prime minister.

That last bit of childishness seems consistent with W's behavior at the opening of the Clinton library. He's a small, vindicative, immature man. A Big Man knows that leadership is magnanimous and tolerant. He's not a leader, he's a bully.

People of Salt and Light

HIV/AIDS, Avian flu, economic disasters and war are all undeniable parts of our reality today. I have a responsibility to tell the truth about all these things, as I am able to find it. But the relentless pounding of this dark news takes a toll on me. I don't want to take a hiatus, like yankeedoodle, but I also need some relief.

I'll be looking for some good news stories as we approach the holidays. People ARE doing good things and I want to hear about it. If you find stories like this, send a link in comments or email. If you have amusing stories, that would be lovely, too. I know I'm not smiling nearly enough.

This is the time of year to renew our commitments to each other to live the Beatitudes and the great commandment of Micah 6:8. A time to look around at all of those around you and remember that if the world "God" means anything at all, it is about love and about them every bit as much as it is about you.

As we enter the season of preparation and waiting which is Advent, and the time of hope and light at Hanukkah, let us remember to be lamps to each other.

I ask God to make ye lamps ignited by the great Light, so that ye may stand with all power, meekness, humbleness, sacrifice and self-resignation and thus become examples for the people and pure types for the world, be salt of the earth, stars of guidance, great trees with broad foliage and excellent fruits of fragrant scent, growing by the bounty of the cloud of the Kingdom of El-Abha.

from The Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas (Baha'i text)

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Free Trade

Bush to Canada: go f**k yourself.

Bush, in Canada, Defends Foreign Policy

By Dana Milbank and Doug Struck
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 1, 2004; Page A01

Bush's visit to the Canadian capital was intended to mend relations frayed by the war in Iraq. But as antiwar demonstrators clashed with riot police outside Parliament, Bush replied with defiance when asked at a news conference whether he was responsible for a rift between Canada and the United States.

He added: "I made some decisions, obviously, that some in Canada didn't agree with, like, for example, removing Saddam Hussein and enforcing the demands of the United Nations Security Council."

The White House had said in advance that it expected no diplomatic breakthroughs on the two-day trip, which will take Bush to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Wednesday to thank residents for accepting U.S. aircraft stranded after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush gave no ground publicly on trade disputes over beef and lumber and received no public commitment of further Canadian help in Iraq. A communique issued Tuesday by the two leaders did not mention Iraq.

"We discussed a number of contentious issues," said Martin, who listed disagreements over Canadian cattle and softwood lumber. "I expressed our frustration."

The prime minister urged an end to American "time delays," saying the U.S. ban on certain Canadian cattle products because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, "has been studied to death."

Bush said he had asked for an expedited decision on whether to lift the ban. But a senior administration official, briefing reporters later on condition of anonymity, said a decision on beef was months away and the lumber dispute was "eternal."

More on this later today after I've had a chance to look at the Canadian papers and the CBC.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one who arrived at this conclusion. Writing in the Financial Times, James Harding reports from Ottawa:

Jovial Bush tries for fresh start with Canadians
By James Harding in Ottawa
Published: December 1 2004 02:00 | Last updated: December 1 2004 02:00

President George W. Bush stopped for a day of neighbourly diplomacy in Canada yesterday. He thanked those "Canadian people who came out to wave - with all five fingers" along his route into Ottawa. Then he delivered the verbal equivalent of a single-fingered rebuff to his many critics north of the border.

"I haven't seen the polls you look at," Mr Bush said, when asked about his unpopularity among Canadians. "We just had a poll in our country," Mr Bush continued with a faint smile, "where people decided that the foreign policy of the Bush administration ought to be - stay in place for four more years."

In today's White House Briefing, Dan Froomkin has a read-around of the Canadian press on Bush's visit with excerpts. That's handy.

Extinction

As soon as I saw the words "Developers applaud the plan," I knew everything I needed to know. More Bush environmental depredation.

Salmon and Steelhead May Lose Protections
The administration proposes to roll back 'critical habitat' for the ever-declining fish by up to 90%. Developers applaud the plan.

By Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer

The

Bush administration on Tuesday proposed dramatically rolling back protections for salmon and steelhead trout streams from Southern California to the Canadian border, saying the rare and endangered fish are sufficiently protected in other ways.

The revised plan, which was prompted by a lawsuit from the National Assn. of Homebuilders, could exclude 80% to 90% of the "critical habitat" that the National Marine Fisheries Service designated four years ago as necessary to keep West Coast salmon and steelhead populations from going extinct and to allow their depleted populations to recover.

Streams and rivers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County and at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County would be withdrawn as protected habitat because the military argued that the protections would delay training exercises and space launches and diminish military readiness.

In addition, streams that run through millions of acres of national forests stretching from northwestern California through western Oregon and Washington would be excluded as critical habitat for the fish. Federal officials said they did not want to impose another layer of restrictions on areas already subject to protections for the northern spotted owl.

The new plan also drops protections on private land where developers have struck conservation deals with government officials.

By removing all of these areas, "We would get down to excluding around 90% of the critical habitat that had been [previously] identified," said Jim Lecky, an assistant regional administrator for the Fisheries Service.

The new plan, released late Tuesday, was immediately applauded as "a very large improvement" by Christopher Galik, an environmental policy analyst for the National Assn. of Homebuilders.

But environmentalists and fishermen said it failed to meet the agency's own scientific criteria for what is needed for the once-abundant fish to return to healthy population levels.

"None of this is defensible," said Chris Frissell, a fisheries biologist with the Pacific Rivers Council. "There is no way it would come anywhere close to helping these fish recover."

....
The Fisheries Service in 2000 designated large areas of the Pacific Coast from Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County to the tip of Washington state as critical habitat for the ever-declining salmon and steelhead. It extended into the northern reaches of California's Central Valley and included vast areas of the Columbia and Snake river valleys that stretch into Idaho.

Homebuilders feared the habitat restrictions would stall, change or cancel streamside projects. Timber companies worried that the restrictions would curb plans for logging roads and harvesting practices that can muddy streams. Farmers were concerned that they would be prohibited from siphoning water from rivers and streams used by the fish.

The National Assn. of Homebuilders led a list of groups that sued, arguing that the designations were excessive, unduly vague and lacked a required analysis of economic impact.

The federal government withdrew the critical habitat designation for 19 types of salmon and steelhead.

On Tuesday, it reissued substantially modified designations after taking into account the economic costs of its first plan, which federal officials said could run about $220 million a year in the Pacific Northwest and $100 million to $200 million a year in California.

"Clearly, there were some areas where the economic costs of the critical habitat clearly outweighed the biological benefit," Lecky said. Other areas were eliminated, he said, because better mapping and more accurate data allowed federal officials to more precisely pinpoint which streams were used by the fish.

Nicole Cordan, policy and legal director of Save Our Wild Salmon, called the plan "ridiculous" on its face, predicting that eliminating 90% of protected habitat would fail to meet the biological needs of salmon and the legal tests of the Endangered Species Act.

The proposal, she said, falls in line with other administration positions, including one announced Tuesday stating that federal dams do not jeopardize salmon by blocking their migration to and from the ocean.

Salmon, which live as juveniles in rivers and streams, spend most of their adult lives in the ocean and then return to fresh water to spawn.

The Fisheries Service ruled out demolishing eight dams on the lower reaches of the Columbia and Snake rivers, even as a last resort. Instead, it said the endangered fish could be protected by continuing to truck fish around the dams and building a new type of weir that works like a water slide to allow juvenile fish to slide around the obstructions on their way to the ocean.

The administration's plan, which must be approved by a federal judge, is estimated to cost about $600 million a year.

Earlier this year, the administration proposed counting millions of hatchery-raised fish that are released into the wild as wild fish, undercutting the need to keep fish born in the wild on the list of endangered species.

Federal officials next year will review the status of 26 species of wild salmon that are supplemented with hatchery fish to determine if they should remain protected as endangered or threatened species.

All these actions, Cordan said, "are typical of this administration — ignore science, ignore sound economics and ignore the law."

I wonder how many species will go extinct under this administration. I wonder how history will look at that.

Iraq Log

Here is the BBC Iraq Log, not a blog, per se, but not old media, either. They have invited a crew of "ordinary Iraqis" to write in on a daily basis. For those of us who have been reading Where is Raed? and Riverbend on a regular basis, it isn't news, but for the news consumer who normally gets information from Big Media like the Beeb, this will be a breath of fresh air.

World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day: US Women with HIV Lack Access to Health Care

On this World AIDS Day, December 1, one in five women with HIV in the United States has no health insurance. Half of the estimated 460,000 women and men who need lifesaving antiretroviral drugs are not getting them, according to a recent report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This World AIDS Day, we would like to remind people that the epidemic in the United States is not over," Dr. Smith said. "Access to health care must improve in this country for people with HIV/AIDS, especially African-American women."

You may recall that President Bush was surprised to learn, by way of a question in his first and only post-election news conference, that African-American women are the fastest growing population with HIV/AIDS in this country.

Around the world, women are now the majority of AIDS patients. Here is NPR's package for today's grim reminder. There will be more throughout the day. This pandemic is still in its early stages--it's effects in Africa, for example, are off the radar in the US, but the economic effects are dragging that continent back a century as workers and parents in their prime disappear.

Do any of the Big Three (or Four) national papers have an AIDS story on their front page today? Google is wearing a red ribbon today. So am I.

The WaPo editorializes:

Even so, the new emphasis on women may turn out to be an error. In a world of scarce resources, it makes sense to focus prevention efforts on high-risk groups: men who have sex with men, drug users, sex workers, truck drivers. It's not just that these groups are most at risk of infection; it's that they often do the most to spread it. A sex worker, for instance, can infect hundreds of people in the course of a month; targeting a prevention message at that worker is vastly more effective than targeting it at a faithful teenage bride, however awful her predicament. A central problem in AIDS prevention strategies is that high-risk groups are stigmatized, and hence often ignored; there's a great reluctance to put scarce money where it's most likely to be effective. By focusing its latest report on "Women and AIDS," UNAIDS is doing nothing to combat this tendency.

Right. Remove the resources from those most effected because they are so marginalized, which is why they were infected in the first place.

Ten years ago next month, I learned of the death of my professional mentor, the man who showed me how the levers of power worked and how to use them. Bruce, you are still missed. I've changed careers twice but never forgotten your llessons. They still work.