Through the Roof

Oil Rises, Gasoline Surges to a Record as Fuel Supplies Decline

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose and gasoline and heating-oil surged to records on signs that U.S. refineries lack capacity to make enough fuel and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts predicted that oil could touch $105 a barrel.

Crude oil in New York surged to $57.60 a barrel on March 17, the highest since trading began in 1983. Prices are 55 percent higher than a year ago. Oil's average price of $50.03 over the past three months was the highest quarterly price on record. The average was up from $48.27 the previous three months and was the seventh straight quarterly increase.

Other analysts think that Goldman Sachs is being alarmest, but all grant that Goldman's previous reserve of $80/barrel is not incredible.

Blogosphere News

Side dish

...Are the Washington Post's editors brave (or crazy) enough to turn their "Reliable Source" gossip column over to the saucy blogger known as Wonkette? Ana Marie Cox has proclaimed that her strength is humor, not reporting. But we hear she's more than curious about the job that columnist Richard Leiby is vacating. The expletive-loving gadfly made it her business to be in NYC Tuesday for the party celebrating The Post's acquisition of Slate.com. But Post publisher Donald Graham appeared to slip out before she could lob a charm grenade at him. ...

The Babylonian Captivity of the Right

Exposing prolife zealotry

By Robert Kuttner

However, the public response to the Schiavo case tells a more complex story. While most Americans believe in God and attend church, synagogue, or mosque, few welcome the busybody behavior of the religious right, most recently in its morbid embrace of Terri Schiavo.

Too may of us have been through the agony of this kind of decision to want opportunistic politicians or religious crusaders to take it over. The right is at odds with 30 years of delicate progress in dealing with death and dying.

Three decades ago, the medical profession usually insisted that everything possible should be done to prolong life, however cruel, painful, and futile. The pioneers of the hospice movement gradually made inroads in demonstrating that a dying patient could be treated far more humanely via what came to be called ''palliative care." This meant attending to the patient's comfort, respecting the patient's wishes, and permitting strong painkillers that might, in some cases, even hasten death.

During the same period, states began passing living will legislation, giving people the right to stipulate in advance whether they wanted medical heroics in certain circumstances. Leaving aside the more controversial Oregon-style ''right to die" legislation, the living will and hospice movements represented immense progress largely supported by mainline religions. Many of the movement's pioneers were clergymen with ministries tending to the dying and their families. Many of the early direct caregivers in hospices were nuns.

Until the Schiavo case, the ''right-to-life" zealots pretty much left well enough alone when it came to end-of-life care. It's a harder sell to raid a hospice than an abortion clinic. Most Americans of all religious faiths, as well as the unaffiliated, want such decisions kept private.

Terri Schiavo's legacy could be the opposite of what the right intended. Americans are being reminded that the religious right and its politician-allies are zealots not just about abortion; they also want dogma to overrule science when it comes to stem cell research, contraception, and high school biology; they'd intrude on the most painful and intimate of family decisions -- all in the name of their own unchallengeable definition of God's will. Religious upsurge or not, this is not the country most Americans want.

I knew that when this day came, that the media coverage was going to be awful. CNN is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the right wingnuts today.

Hi-Tech Failure

Study Faults Army Vehicle
Use of Transport in Iraq Puts Troops at Risk, Internal Report Says

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 31, 2005; Page A01

The Army has deployed a new troop transport vehicle in Iraq with many defects, putting troops there at unexpected risk from rocket-propelled grenades and raising questions about the vehicle's development and $11 billion cost, according to a detailed critique in a classified Army study obtained by The Washington Post.

The vehicle is known as the Stryker, and 311 of the lightly armored, wheeled vehicles have been ferrying U.S. soldiers around northern Iraq since October 2003. The Army has been ebullient about the vehicle's success there, with Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, telling the House Armed Services Committee last month that "we're absolutely enthusiastic about what the Stryker has done."

But the Army's Dec. 21 report, drawn from confidential interviews with operators of the vehicle in Iraq in the last quarter of 2004, lists a catalogue of complaints about the vehicle, including design flaws, inoperable gear and maintenance problems that are "getting worse not better." Although many soldiers in the field say they like the vehicle, the Army document, titled "Initial Impressions Report -- Operations in Mosul, Iraq," makes clear that the vehicle's military performance has fallen short.

The internal criticism of the vehicle appears likely to fuel new controversy over the Pentagon's decision in 2003 to deploy the Stryker brigade in Iraq just a few months after the end of major combat operations, before the vehicle had been rigorously tested for use across a full spectrum of combat.

The report states, for example, that an armoring shield installed on Stryker vehicles to protect against unanticipated attacks by Iraqi insurgents using low-tech weapons works against half the grenades used to assault it. The shield, installed at a base in Kuwait, is so heavy that tire pressure must be checked three times daily. Nine tires a day are changed after failing, the report says; the Army told The Post the current figure is "11 tire and wheel assemblies daily."

"The additional weight significantly impacts the handling and performance during the rainy season," says the report, which was prepared for the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Mud appeared to cause strain on the engine, the drive shaft and the differentials," none of which was designed to carry the added armor.

Commanders' displays aboard the vehicles are poorly designed and do not work; none of the 100 display units in Iraq are being used because of "design and functionality shortfalls," the report states. The vehicle's computers are too slow and overheat in desert temperatures or freeze up at critical moments, such as "when large units are moving at high speeds simultaneously" and overwhelm its sensors.

The main weapon system, a $157,000 grenade launcher, fails to hit targets when the vehicle is moving, contrary to its design, the report states. Its laser designator, zoom, sensors, stabilizer and rotating speed all need redesign; it does not work at night; and its console display is in black and white although "a typical warning is to watch for a certain color automobile," the report says. Some crews removed part of the launchers because they can swivel dangerously toward the squad leader's position.

The vehicle's seat belts cannot be readily latched when troops are in their armored gear, a circumstance that contributed to the deaths of three soldiers in rollover accidents, according to the report. On the vehicle's outside, some crews have put sand-filled tin cans around a gunner's hatch that the report says is ill-protected.

Eric Miller, senior defense investigator at the independent Project on Government Oversight, which obtained a copy of the internal Army report several weeks ago, said the critique shows that "the Pentagon hasn't yet learned that using the battlefield as a testing ground costs lives, not just spiraling dollars."

Given this litany of complaints, Schoomakers happy talk about the Stryker is just another piece of the DoD's list of lies about how things are going in Iraq. The vehicle sounds like a disaster. It is another one of Rummy's high-tech, fast, light Army debacles.

The NYT opines:

A Science-Fiction Army

Published: March 31, 2005

One frustrating thing about futuristic weapons is that the future does not always turn out the way people expected at the start of the decades it takes to design, develop and produce them. As a result, America's armed forces too often end up with enormous shares of their overall budgets committed to expensive toys that have little practical combat use - at the expense of more prosaic but real needs like enlistment bonuses or better armor for Humvees exposed to rocket-propelled grenades.

That sorry pattern now threatens to play itself out over the Army's stubborn commitment to the ultra-high-technology complex of weapons, robots and communications networks known collectively as Future Combat Systems. The original vision of a light and highly mobile force that could do with less armor because it would have more advanced information about enemy movements is more suitable to battles against recognizable, conventional forces on relatively open terrain than in the new world ushered in by 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

The United States entered that era with Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon wedded to the concept of deploying military forces rapidly, winning swiftly with technological wizardry and then departing just as rapidly. Instead, the Iraq war has turned into an indefinitely prolonged campaign against hit-and-run insurgents who melt in and out of cities and villages and fire rocket-propelled grenades that make armored vehicles a life-and-death need. This kind of combat seems far more likely to characterize America's wars than set-piece battles like those of the 1991 Gulf war or the first three weeks of the Iraq invasion. The Army needs more armor, not less. Greater mobility and highly advanced radio networks are fine, but not at the cost of leaving American soldiers more exposed to lethal dangers.

Growing Stones

Democrats Set to Reject Pick for U.N.
# A unanimous vote against John R. Bolton is likely in a key Senate panel, which could doom the nomination if a Republican joins them.

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Democrats are likely to vote unanimously against John R. Bolton when his nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations comes before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week, according to Democratic and Republican lawmakers and aides.

It would be the first time that committee Democrats unanimously opposed a Bush diplomatic selection, and it could put the nomination in peril if any Republicans defected to vote against Bolton.

But Republicans said they thought the outspoken conservative would win solid GOP support in the committee, including from moderate Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), who voiced reservations about Bolton's nomination to be U.N. ambassador.

Although Democrats have challenged a number of diplomatic nominees, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "they see this nomination as more distasteful, and they're more united," said one Democratic Senate aide.

The split on the panel is one of several signs that the proceedings, set for April 7, could be acrimonious.

Advocates have organized letter and ad campaigns for and against Bolton. Democrats said they intended to investigate Bolton's comments on a variety of issues, an exercise that Republicans said could stretch the hearing into a second day. Republicans said they were concerned that Democrats might attempt to filibuster the nomination if it reached the Senate floor.

Bolton, undersecretary of State for arms control, is controversial because of his criticism of the United Nations and other international institutions and agreements.

On the March

Children 'starving' in new Iraq
More and more children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat

Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says.

Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led invasion - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.

The report was prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

It also expressed concern over North Korea and Sudan's Darfur province.

Jean Ziegler, a UN specialist on hunger who prepared the report, blamed the worsening situation in Iraq on the war led by coalition forces.

He was addressing a meeting of the 53-nation commission, the top UN rights watchdog, which is halfway through its annual six-week session.

When Saddam Hussein was overthrown, about 4% of Iraqi children under five were going hungry; now that figure has almost doubled to 8%, his report says.

Governments must recognise their extra-territorial obligations towards the right to food and should not do anything that might undermine access to it of people living outside their borders, it says.

That point is aimed clearly at the US, but Washington, which has sent a large delegation to the Human Rights Commission, declined to respond to the charges, says the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.

I guess we are bringing American-style free-market democracy to Iraq:

One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.

Regrets

New Torture Memo Implicates Top US General

A newly released memo shows that US General Ricardo Sanchez authorized illegal interrogation techniques in Iraq just months before the Abu Ghraib abuses. Colin Powell, meanwhile, regrets misinforming the UN about Iraq WMDs. Also, imagine

General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the US forces in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, authorized interrogation techniques that included putting prisoners in stressful physical positions and changing sleep patterns, according to an internal US memo obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday. The memo, dating from September 2003, provided a detailed list of 29 techniques used to interrogate Iraqi detainees. And each, disturbingly, came with a creepy title. "We Know All," for example, referred to the practice of convincing prisoners that the interviewer already knows all the answers. "Presence of Military Working Dogs" indicated the use of muzzled military dogs to "exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations." The ACLU claims that at least 12 of the techniques, including the use of dogs, "far exceeded limits established by the Army's own Field Manual" and also violated international standards for handling prisoners.

The memo didn't remain in force for long and was rescinded after a month because of objections raised by military lawyers over its legality. Nevertheless, ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in a statement, "General Sanchez authorized interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards." Sanchez has defended himself by saying that the memo required advance permission for the use of any of the outlined techniques and that he never granted that permission.

The memo, which the ACLU was able to make public only after filing legal papers against the Department of Defense, is the latest piece of information to come forward in the long-running torture scandal that has severely bruised the image of the US abroad. The ACLU is currently involved in a lawsuit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accusing him of partial responsibility for Abu Ghraib and other prison torture incidents.

At the same time, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell has made some surprisingly candid remarks in an interview with Germany's Stern magazine published on Wednesday. "We were sometimes too loud, too direct, perhaps we made too much noise," Powell told the magazine. "That certainly shocked the Europeans sometimes." In the interview, he also expressed regret over the speech he gave at the UN in February 2003 that made the US case for war based on information on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- information that later turned out to be almost entirely false. Powell said he was "furious and angry" that the information turned out to be wrong. "Hundreds of millions followed it on television. I will always stand there as the one who presented it. I have to live with that."

Gee, Colin, I'm sure that your fury and anger will take up a major part of those gazillion bucks a pop speeches that you make these days.

Defects of Character

How to Win Friends in the Mideast

By Rami G. Khouri, Rami G. Khouri is a syndicated columnist. This piece is used by permission of Agence Global.

BEIRUT — The United States recently appointed Karen Hughes and Liz Cheney to revamp two persistently enigmatic and largely failed policies: global public diplomacy and the promotion of democracy throughout the Middle East.

If these two able officials want to do a better job than their predecessors in grasping why this noble American mission to promote freedom is received with such skepticism, scorn and even resistance around the world, and not just in Arab-Islamic lands, here's what they should ponder:

• Style. As that great British thinker Mick Jagger once said: "It's the singer, not the song." Washington's manner is often aggressive and threatening. It uses sanctions and the military and unilaterally lays down the law that others must follow or else they will be considered enemies and thus liable to regime change.

People don't like to be bullied or threatened, even if change would be for their own good.

• Credibility. The U.S. track record has hurt, angered or offended most people in the Middle East. By primarily backing Arab dictators and autocrats or supporting the Israeli position on key issues of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, credibility has been lost.

The priority issue for most Arabs — whether Palestinians, Iraqis or others — is freedom from foreign occupation and subjugation. If Washington uses war and pressure tactics to implement United Nations resolutions in Lebanon and Iraq but does nothing parallel to implement U.N. resolutions calling for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli occupation, it will continue to be greeted with disdainful guffaws in most of the Middle East.

• Consistency. The United States could have promoted freedom and democracy in Iraq without waging war and spending $300 billion, getting more than 1,500 Americans killed and 10,000 injured (and perhaps 100,000 Iraqis killed) and creating a massive anti-American backlash throughout the world.

It could better promote democracy and rally Arab democrats by telling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Zine el Abidine ben Ali that being president without any meaningful legal opposition for more than 20 years is long enough. The U.S. could support term limits for Arab presidents.

• Motive. Perpetually changing the motive for the war in Iraq hurts American credibility. We've been told that invading Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, links with Al Qaeda, imminent threats to the United States, homegrown brutality against the Iraqi people, stopping threats to neighbors and, now, spreading freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. Some of these rationales may one day prove to be correct. In the meantime, the collection of half a dozen is crippling to placing any trust in Washington.

• Context. The Arab states suffer massive internal pressures from issues of population, identity, demography, economy, environment, ideology, crises of citizenship rights versus statehood obligations and secularism versus religiosity, and the perpetual pressure from foreign armies. In this wider context, the issues of freedom and democracy are dwarfed by the more pressing imperatives of stable statehood, liberation from foreign occupation, meeting basic human needs, and stopping foreign armies.

• Legitimacy. There is no global consensus that the United States is mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is the divinely ordained destiny of the United States. There is such a mandate, though, in the charter of the United Nations, in Security Council resolutions to end foreign occupations and international legal conventions — most of which the U.S. resists, ignores or applies very selectively.

No surprise then that virtually the whole world resists the United States.

Shorter Rami Khouri: stop being a selfish, aggressive thug if you want people to like you.

Impending Disaster

Study highlights global decline
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News science reporter

The most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet concludes that human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain future generations.

"If you drive the economy into the red, ultimately there are significant consequences for our capacity to achieve our dreams in terms of poverty reduction and prosperity."

Funny, I haven't seen anything about this in the US press.

UPDATE: Salon has it, courtesy of The Guardian.

Outsourcing

Case Allegedly Shows U.S. Practice of Secret Arrests
# A Yemeni reportedly jailed by Egypt in 2002 apparently has been in covert American custody since, without legal recourse.

By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer

SANA, Yemen — He was writing from prison, but at least he was alive. The smuggled letter from Abdel Salem Hila was the first his family had heard from him since he had vanished 19 months earlier.

It was, in a way, good news.

"I am writing this letter from a dark prison," the letter began. "I don't know why I am imprisoned…. I'm imprisoned in Afghanistan by the Americans."

Hila's family had seen him off in September 2002, when he'd left on a business trip to Egypt. Upon landing in Cairo, Hila checked into a downtown hotel, later placed a nervous telephone call to his family in Yemen — and disappeared.

When Hila turned up again, he was in solitary confinement at the U.S.-run Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The journey was so disorienting, he said, it took him four months to realize what country he was in. He was later moved to the American detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to his letters to family members.

Hila's case is apparently part of a broader pattern of secret "renditions," a process by which U.S. agents covertly force foreign suspects from one country to another outside the bounds of international law. The United States began to use renditions during the Reagan administration, and the practice is believed to have mushroomed after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Some of the cases that have come to light in recent months have included allegations that the CIA turned suspects over to countries where they were interrogated and brutally tortured. Critics say the cases paint a pattern of CIA agents outsourcing torture to foreign governments, including Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The Bush administration denies those charges.

Hila's case, which traces one man's circuitous route to Guantanamo, is different. His disappearance appears to be an example of a foreign government turning over a detainee to the Americans after a brief period of interrogation. Hila's letters indicate that he was arrested by the Egyptians, and that he had spent at most three months in their custody before being turned over to the Americans.

A Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday called Hila's case a "reverse rendition," charging that "Hila was essentially kidnapped off the streets of Cairo and then 'disappeared' in U.S. custody."

Suit by Detainee on Transfer to Syria Finds Support in Jet's Log
By SCOTT SHANE

Published: March 30, 2005

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Ford Fessenden and written by Mr. Shane.

WASHINGTON, March 29 - Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer, is suing the United States, saying American officials grabbed him in 2002 as he changed planes in New York and transported him to Syria where, he says, he was held for 10 months in a dank, tiny cell and brutally beaten with a metal cable.

Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar's account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.

The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.

In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar's lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.

The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar's deportation order was signed.

St. Oscar?

Assassinated Archbishop to Join Beatification Path
# The Vatican says it will open the process for Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who spoke out against the death squads in El Salvador's civil war.

By Chris Kraul and Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writers

ROME — Twenty-five years after Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was cut down by an assassin's bullet, Vatican officials plan to announce that they will open the beatification process for the prelate, a move that would put him closer to sainthood.

Church officials in Rome and El Salvador confirmed that the announcement would be made at a news conference Saturday in the San Salvador cathedral crypt containing Romero's remains. Beatification is a step before sainthood.

The announcement will come during 25th anniversary observances in El Salvador of the March 24, 1980, assassination of Romero. The 60-year-old priest was killed as he celebrated Mass in a chapel at a hospital dedicated to terminally ill cancer patients. His killer, a sniper thought to be a member of a government-sanctioned death squad, has never been brought to trial.

"We are receiving a very special blessing from God that will reverberate throughout the El Salvador that the monsignor loved so much," said Maria Julia Hernandez, legal protection director for the Archbishopric of San Salvador and a former associate of Romero's.

The assassination came at the height of El Salvador's civil war and brought international outrage.

In his homilies, Romero had pushed for an end to killings carried out by government-sponsored death squads and for a nonviolent resolution to the war, which dragged on until 1992.

One of half a dozen priests killed in El Salvador during the conflict, Romero inspired a Hollywood film, tributes in many countries and, within a decade, calls for his elevation to sainthood.

Admirers said Romero's homilies were worthy of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Vatican has been reviewing Romero's life and work since the early 1990s.

It would be the height of irony for this most reactionary of papacies to advance the cause of Romero, the most reluctant of leftists, but leftist and liberation theologian none the less. When it comes time for Rome to make his case, I will be happy to appear to attest to miracles by his intercession: my own Catholicism is due in no small part to his example.

USA Today

Suit by Detainee on Transfer to Syria Finds Support in Jet's Log
By SCOTT SHANE

Published: March 30, 2005

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Ford Fessenden and written by Mr. Shane.

WASHINGTON, March 29 - Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer, is suing the United States, saying American officials grabbed him in 2002 as he changed planes in New York and transported him to Syria where, he says, he was held for 10 months in a dank, tiny cell and brutally beaten with a metal cable.

Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar's account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.

The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.

In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar's lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.

The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar's deportation order was signed.

After seeing a photograph of the plane and hearing its path, Mr. Arar, 35, of Ottawa, said in a telephone interview: "I think that's it. I think you've found the plane that took me."

He added: "Finding this plane is going really to help me. It does remind me of this trip, which is painful, but it should make people understand that this is for real and everything happened the way I said. I hope people will now stop for a moment and think about the morality of this."

Records of the jet's travels also show a trip in December 2003 to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States holds hundreds of detainees, suggesting that it was used by the government on at least one other occasion.

If the plane was used to move Mr. Arar, it is the fourth known to have been used to transport suspected terrorists secretly from one country to detention in another.

Among the three identified in previous news reports is one owned by a company apparently set up by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to The Washington Post. Another, first described by The Chicago Tribune, is an ordinary charter jet that was also used by the Boston Red Sox manager between missions ferrying detainees and their guards to Guantánamo, with the Red Sox logo attached to the fuselage or removed, depending on who was aboard.

Maria LaHood, a lawyer for Mr. Arar, said the new information on the Gulfstream jet lent support to his lawsuit.

"The facts we got from Maher right after he was released are now corroborated by public records," said Ms. LaHood, who works for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group in New York that advocates investigation of human rights abuses. "The more information that comes out, the better for showing that this is an important public issue that can't be kept secret."

She said Mr. Arar and his attorneys believe that American officials wanted him to undergo a more brutal interrogation than would be permitted in the United States in the hope of getting information about Al Qaeda.

After 10 months in a cell he compared to a grave, and 2 more months in a less confined space, Syrian officials freed Mr. Arar in October 2003, saying they had been unable to find any connection to Al Qaeda. The Syrian ambassador to the United States called the release "a gesture of good will toward Canada."

This is my country today. I hate it.

Gray Power

AARP Leads With Wallet In Fight Over Social Security
Bush's Plan Faces Formidable Foe

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 30, 2005; Page A01

In the punch-for-punch debate over Social Security, AARP is working hard to keep the White House on the ropes.

When President Bush arrives in Iowa today to talk up his private-accounts proposal, the senior citizens group plans to counter him with two news conferences, the release of a national poll, full-page newspaper advertisements and commercials on radio and television.

Over this week and last, AARP, the nation's largest lobby, will have spent more than $5 million on ads attacking the president's Social Security plan -- nearly three times as much as all the supporters of his proposal put together. That's just for starters.

Every state that has a swing-vote senator will have AARP forums, which have been drawing about 300 people each. And every time a member of Congress holds a town meeting, AARP volunteers are dispatched there to protest the president's plan for individual accounts.

"We're going to do this as long as it takes," said William D. Novelli, AARP's chief executive. "We will put just about everything we have into it."

No organization has more tools or more money to wage such a battle. So both its friends and adversaries agree: AARP holds the key to how or whether Social Security will be restructured this year. "It will be very difficult to do anything without AARP's support," said Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "And it would be a heck of a lot easier if they came along."

AARP's 35 million membership base is 10 times the size of the National Rifle Association's, and its $800 million budget is five times that of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country's biggest business association. In number of members, AARP is surpassed only by the Roman Catholic Church.

Dayum, I like those numbers. It's nice to have them on our side for a change.

My Fellow American

In the Name of Politics
By JOHN C. DANFORTH

Published: March 30, 2005

St. Louis — BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
....
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.

Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.

During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

I'm willing to debate genuine conservatives, but the radical wing of the party doesn't think that I even get to speak. For the radical right wing, dissent is treason.

I can respect John Danforth, even if we disagree. He and I can be fellow citizens, something the rest of his party will deny.

Inside the Box

Iraq voters under pressure to name leaders

"We're very disappointed," said Hathem Hassan Thani, 31, a political science graduate student at Baghdad University."Some personalities are trying to make the political operation fail, and they don't want to give positions to the Sunni Muslims."

The fledgling 275-member parliament elected Jan. 30 failed to agree on who would be speaker Tuesday, after Sunni Muslim Ghazi al-Yawar, currently the interim president, declined the post.He and interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi stormed out of the session after it was closed to journalists.

"Al-Yawar did not want to lose his credibility as a politician.That's why he didn't come," said Hiba Jameel Mahmoud, 25, another political science student."Maybe we need to hold another election to make sure everybody is participating.

A Shiite-Muslim-dominated list, the United Iraqi Alliance, received almost 50 percent of the Jan. 30 vote to name a new national assembly.Ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq received another 27 percent.Sunni Muslims largely boycotted the vote, but now want to be involved in writing a new constitution.

Deep divides appeared between the assembly's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish members Tuesday morning, even before the session started.Shiites blamed Kurds and al-Yawar for holding up progress of forming a government.

"The Iraqi people are very itchy.The street is very nervous," said Saad Jawar Qindeel, a spokesman for the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two dominant religious-based parties that won the United Iraqi Alliance ticket."There's a lot of talk of people ready to protest."

Negotiations appear to be stalled not only on who is to be speaker, but also in key cabinet posts, including ministers of oil, defense and interior.Members were also originally expected to approve a president, two vice presidents and a prime minister in Tuesday's session.

Insurgents are taking advantage of the indecision in government ranks, said Interior Minister Fallah al-Nakib, who appeared to be lobbying to keep his job at Baghdad's Convention Center, where the National Assembly was meeting.He is also a member of the Iraq National Alliance list led by interim Prime Minister Allawi.

"We don't have a Sunni/Shiite problem, the problem is one of national unity," al-Nakib said."During Arbaeen, terrorists may set off car bombs.But the problem is a national issue."

Shiite Muslims make a pilgrimage to holy sites in southern Iraq during Arbaeen, which starts Wednesday.Already, a car bomb Monday in Musayyib targeted the pilgrims.

"We don't want to see casualties, we want to stop the bloodshed," al-Nakib said.

If Sunnis don't choose representatives for various posts, other elected members will choose for them, said Jalal al-Din al-Saqheer, a conservative Shiite Muslim member who wore the traditional clerical robes to Tuesday's session.

"We have given them many chances, and time is running very close," al-Saqheer said."We are thinking of a mature political process.There are certain time periods we have to look up to."

But other squabbling continues among members of the United Iraqi Alliance and Kurdish leaders as well.For example, Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who is expected to be named president, did not show up to the assembly session.

Neither did many Sunnis, who now want to be involved in the government, said Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a Sunni candidate who is expected to be named to head a committee to write a new constitution.

"They believe the election would be delayed and would not be successful," bin Hussein said in his office, a guest house of former president Saddam Hussein with beautifully manicured grounds and a commanding view of the Tigris River."Now they're willing to recoup.They're saying you can't form a government without us, without Sunni representation."

Other parliament members feel the same way -- an estimated six minister posts have been set aside for Sunnis, along with other key government positions, even though the number of them elected, 17, does not warrant such a large representation.

Security was tight Tuesday, with traffic blocked from getting near the heavily fortified "green zone" where the assembly was held.Mortars hit the first National Assembly meeting on March 16.

Is it getting better yet?

Ordinary Prayer

Appeals Court Grants Additional Review in the Schiavo Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 30, 2005

Filed at 12:40 a.m. ET

ATLANTA (AP) -- A federal appeals court early Wednesday agreed to consider a petition for a new hearing on whether to reconnect Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

The ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals came as the severely brain-damaged woman entered her 13th day without nourishment.

Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, have maintained that Schiavo would want to be kept alive and have asked the courts to intervene. Schiavo's husband, Michael, insists he is carrying out her wishes by having the feeding tube pulled.

Dear Lord,

I thank you for having granted me relatives who are not this delusional. When my time comes, they will let me go to whatever place it is that you have determined is next for us, or no place at all, if that is the judgement of the universe. I am glad to be in their care.

To you who are there and not there, I offer thanks and praise that I am not in the grip of the loonies. And thanks that my wishes be honored when they don't conflict with your own. Thanks and praise to you who allows me to grow up, learn to think and come to a mature faith which doesn't require reading your words like a student of McGuffy's reader.

I pray Mrs. Schiavo is at rest and eternal boils on those who wish to torment her body, for political gain. If you aren't tired of those plagues of locusts things, I can think of someplaces to send them. I have some specific names for the other six plagues, but Sugarland, TX, would be one spot to look at right now with your all-seeing eyes.

Grant me peace and a little income, all-seeing God, in a year which has seen little of either. You've known me for a long time, since "my bones were knitted up," and I haven't asked for much. This year, it might be nice to be able to take a vacation, if that is within your purview. The long years since 1998 when I had the last one did teach me that a couple of weeks off should be part of your institutition. As I recall, you liked that Jubilee/sabbatical idea every seven years. You might tell the creditors to stop calling.

Love,

Melanie

Comfort Food for Pissed Off Liberals

Monster Snack: Open-Faced Calzones with Spinach and Artichokes

1 box chopped spinach, 10 ounces [ed.: use the fresh in the bags on the veg aisle, rather than chopped and drained frozen]
1 loaf ciabatta bread, (flat, rectangular or oval shaped Italian bread, 12 to 14 inches long and 8 inches wide – substitute focaccia loaf if ciabatta is not available to you)
Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
2 cups ricotta cheese
2 cloves garlic, chopped [ed.: use four]
3 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley, a handful
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano or Reggiano, a generous handful
1 can artichokes, drained and sliced
Salt and pepper
2 cups shredded mozzarella or Italian cheese blend available on dairy aisle in sacks
The Big Dipper: Simple Marinara Dipping Sauce, recipe follows, optional

Yield: 2 cups
Prep Time: 2 minutes
Cook Time: 7 minutes
Inactive Prep Time:
Ease of preparation: easy

The marinara is utterly unnecessary, but it is there if you need red sauce in order for a recipe to be Eyetalian. The top half of the recipe is so good and so easy that there is no point in turning the range on. If you are going to make a marinara, make a real one in a big batch and freeze it down.

This is spring food and you can enjoy it now before it becomes painful to turn the oven on this summer. It has to start with very good bread. Brown the bread with some anchovy paste slathered thinly and mashed into the olive oil on top if, like me, you don't love those little fish skeletons but love the flavor.

Spring Fantasy

Iraqi Wrangling May Delay New Constitution and Next Vote
By EDWARD WONG

Published: March 29, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 29 - Iraqi political leaders said today that the delay in forming a new government would probably force them to postpone by half a year the writing of a permanent constitution and the next set of elections. Their comments came as sharp ethnic and sectarian divisions erupted during an assembly meeting, with some members angrily accusing others of betraying the Iraqi people by failing to install a coalition government.

The heated arguments prompted the head of the assembly to ban reporters from the room and call for the assembly to reconvene next weekend, nine weeks after the Jan. 30 elections, in hope that the top members would be ready to fill some key government positions then.

Prominent assembly members said it appeared the deadline for a first draft of the constitution would have to pushed back six months beyond the original deadline of Aug. 15. The delay is allowed under the transitional law if it is proposed by the Iraqi president and if the assembly approves it by a majority vote by Aug. 1. Elections for a full-term government at the end of the year would then also have to be pushed back by half a year, slowing the ambitious American goal of planting democracy here in the heart of the Middle East.

"Realistically, I think it's very difficult," Haichem al-Hassani, a leading Sunni Arab politician and a top candidate for the post of defense minister, said of meeting the Aug. 15 deadline. "I think it's wishful thinking."

Ali al-Dabagh, a prominent member of the main Shiite bloc and an appointee of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, said that "time is too short."

The afternoon meeting of the assembly, which spiraled down into a shouting match, revealed how the bitter negotiations to form a government were poisoning the entire political process and fracturing the major political blocs, already divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.

In Washington, President Bush tried to address growing concerns that a viable democratic future for Iraq was in jeopardy.

"We expect a new government will be chosen soon and that the assembly will vote to confirm it," he told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. "We look forward to working with the government that emerges from this process."

In your dreams, W. Kurdistan is effectively independent already. Sunni on Shia violence is driving those factions apart. Civil war looks increasingly likely.

It Was the Oil

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: That report by investigative journalist Greg Palast, who joins us now in our studio before we move on to protests around the country. Welcome, Greg Palast.

GREG PALAST: For them, you know, it is pushing the Bush policy. But you have to understand that the real levers of power are not in these public jawboning jobs. The real levers of power are behind those closed walls. So Wolfowitz had his power. He now has to take his hands off the levers, and Bolton is now in a position where he is told what to say, and he is not a person setting policy. The neo-cons understand what's happening here, and they are screaming bloody murder. But they’re all being purged. This is a very big change in U.S. policy toward people like Negroponte, who are State Department establishment, oil-friendly, OPEC-friendly, Saudi-friendly.

Video link.

Opportunists

Jesse Jackson joins fight for Schiavo's life
Husband to seek autopsy

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 Posted: 1:12 PM EST (1812 GMT)

PINELLAS PARK, Florida (CNN) -- The Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived Tuesday at Terri Schiavo's hospice and called on Florida lawmakers to have the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube reinserted.

While he has sided with the Schindlers, Jackson said in a statement last week that he had "serious misgivings about the appropriateness of Congress intervening with the legal court process on a specific, individual matter."

Jackson is a publicity whore, and CNN doesn't seem to employ any actual journalists: the issue here isn't the Schiavo or Schindler "sides." Every court which has reviewed this case has found that this is the desire of Mrs. Schiavo herself and consistent with the law in state of Florida.

51% of the Electorate

Robert Scheer:
A Con Job by Pakistan's Pal, George Bush

The announcement Friday that the United States is authorizing the sale to Pakistan of F-16 fighter jets capable of delivering nuclear warheads — and thereby escalating the region's nuclear arms race — is the latest example of how the most important issue on the planet is being bungled by the Bush administration.

Consider this dizzying series of Bush II-era actions:

We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq's long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran.

We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.

We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.

Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president's father in reprisal for Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.

The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan's strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Yet Pakistan's ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How else to explain invading a country — Iraq — that didn't possess nukes, didn't sell nuclear technology to unstable nations and didn't maintain an unholy alliance with Al Qaeda — and then turning around and giving the plum prizes of U.S. military ingenuity to the country that did?

Even as the Bush administration continues to confront Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Islamabad has admitted that Pakistani nuclear weapons trafficker Abdul Qadeer Khan — the father of his nation's nuclear bomb — provided Iran with the centrifuges essential to such a program. Further, new evidence reveals that Khan marketed to Iran and Libya not only the materials needed for a nuclear bomb but the engineering competence to actually make one.

Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insists Khan was running his nuclear smuggling operation under the radar of the military government that brought Musharraf to power. And although this is a highly implausible claim given the reach of the military's power and the scope of the operation, the White House has found it convenient to buy it hook, line and sinker — all the better to remarket Pakistan to the American people as a war-on-terrorism ally.

While Pakistan was receiving such heaping helpings of benefit of the doubt, North Korea became the Bush administration's scapegoat for the rapid nuclear proliferation happening on its watch, according to the Washington Post. "In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya," wrote the Post. "But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction." Sources told the paper that "Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller [of uranium hexafluoride] was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner."

Gotta admit that the Bushies are consistent: from WMDs to Social Security, everything they do is a con job. But the nuclear con job kinda raises the stakes.

Bushworld

This is your new UN ambassador appointee (video file, might be too much for dial up users.) This is Bush internationalism.

Fourth Estate

The National Press Club Welcomes ... Jeff Gannon?

By Joe Strupp

Published: March 28, 2005 Updated 3:50 PM ET

NEW YORK Jeff Gannon is back -- at the National Press Club?

Yes, the same day that the prestigious Washington, D.C., journalism organization plans to present a lunch talk by former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, it will also allow the former White House reporter/sex site operator to be on a panel discussing bloggers and online journalism.

Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, resigned his job with the conservative Talon News last month after it was revealed he had used a pseudonym, had little journalism background, and had ties to male escort Web sites.

Still, Press Club leaders will include Gannon on the panel April 8 that includes Wonkette.com editor Ana Marie Cox, National Journal's John Stanton, and others.

Gannon told E&P; today that he always considered himself a legitimate journalist, and "perhaps their invitation is recognition of that."

Press Club President Rick Dunham, who also covers the White House for BusinessWeek, called Gannon "a figure in the news" who is involved in an important journalistic issue.

"The panel came together because we wanted to discuss some issues that came about from the Gannon case," said Mike Madden, a Gannett News Service reporter and a member of the Press Club's Professional Affairs committee, which is organizing the free event. "So we thought, why not try to get him?"

I consider myself a neurosurgeon, so I guess I should be included on panels at the National Association of Neurosurgeons.

The NPC will be getting a letter from me today. Were I in a better mood, watching the press cheapen itself would be amusing.

And the press is so busy trying to prove that bloggers aren't journalists that they have to drag out a manwhore?

Spying Eyes

Alma Mater As Big Brother

By Katherine Haley Will
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page A15

A proposal by the Education Department would force every college and university in America to report all their students' Social Security numbers and other information about each individual -- including credits earned, degree plan, race and ethnicity, and grants and loans received -- to a national databank. The government will record every student, regardless of whether he or she receives federal aid, in the databank.

The government's plan is to track students individually and in full detail as they complete their post-secondary education. The threat to our students' privacy is of grave concern, and the government has not satisfactorily explained why it wants to collect individual information.

Researchers at the Education Department say this mammoth project would give them better information on graduation rates and what students pay for college. Perhaps this would be interesting information to collect, but at what cost to individual privacy? At what cost in time and effort to the government and the educational institutions? As a college president who has spent her career in higher education, I know that a system is already in place to collect statistics. This system meets the government's need to inform public policy without intruding on students' privacy. Since 1992 every college or university whose students receive federal financial aid has been required to submit summary data on enrollment, student aid, graduation rates and other matters via the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

Under the proposal that will soon be submitted to Congress, instead of aggregate statistics, colleges and universities would be required to feed data on each student to the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. Should an institution refuse, the government could take away federal grants, loans and work-study funds from every student at the college, a penalty that would fall on students in need while leaving more affluent students unaffected.

This is nothing more than a sharp stick in the eye. The gummint doesn't have the ability to actually *DO* anything with this data, but it loves throwing its weight around like this: we CAN make you do this, so we WILL make you do this. The USG in the W era wants to make sure that its horrible feet can be felt everywhere.

UPDATE: In comments, pragmatic_realist says:

As one who lived through the time, I recall vividly the fact that there was one agency vitally interested in my name and status as an enrolled college student: the draft board.

I still remember the heart racing moment of opening the letter re-classifying me 1-A that arrived days after the end of my first semester. It was the common practice to re-classify students even over the Christmas break between semesters.

This may suggest a part of the government's movitive for suddenly needing to keep track of college students by name and address.

Outrage

Here is the National Press Club's idea of hosting a panel on blogging:

Blogger? Journalist?

Now that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can set up shop on the Web, the days when you could tell who was a reporter by looking for a press card stuck in a fedora are long gone. Both journalists and bloggers will debate whether there's a difference between them, on Fri., Apr. 8, at 9:30 a.m. The panel includes Jeff Gannon, whose question at a presidential press conference focused attention on the issue; Ana Marie Cox, editor of Wonkette.com, and Congress Daily's John Stanton. Reserve at 202-662-7501.

Gannon/Guckert and Wonkette representing the blogosphere. Is that the world you want to live in?

Some of us have busted our asses to build our bona fides 7 days a week for over a year. And this is what we get to show for it.

Capitalism

via Susie:

List of Schiavo Donors Will Be Sold by Direct-Marketing Firm
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JOHN SCHWARTZ

WASHINGTON, March 28 - The parents of Terri Schiavo have authorized a conservative direct-mailing firm to sell a list of their financial supporters, making it likely that thousands of strangers moved by her plight will receive a steady stream of solicitations from anti-abortion and conservative groups.

"These compassionate pro-lifers donated toward Bob Schindler's legal battle to keep Terri's estranged husband from removing the feeding tube from Terri," says a description of the list on the Web site of the firm, Response Unlimited, which is asking $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 4,000 e-mail addresses of people who responded last month to an e-mail plea from Ms. Schiavo's father. "These individuals are passionate about the way they value human life, adamantly oppose euthanasia and are pro-life in every sense of the word!"

Privacy experts said the sale of the list was legal and even predictable, if ghoulish.

"I think it's amusing," said Robert Gellman, a privacy and information policy consultant. "I think it's absolutely classic America. Everything is for sale in America, every type of personal information."

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Man's Law, God's Law

Odd little story.

Death Sentence Thrown Out Because of Jury's Bible Reading
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 28, 2005

Filed at 2:45 p.m. ET

DENVER (AP) -- The Colorado Supreme Court threw out the death sentence Monday of a man convicted of raping and killing a cocktail waitress because jurors consulted the Bible during deliberations.

The court said Bible passages, including the verse that commands ``an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,'' could lead jurors to vote for death.

The justices ordered Robert Harlan to serve life in prison without parole for the 1994 slaying of Rhonda Maloney.

Harlan's attorneys challenged the sentence after discovering five jurors had looked up Bible verses, copied some of them down and then talked about them behind closed doors.

Prosecutors said jurors should be allowed to refer to the Bible or other religious texts during deliberations.

Any lawyers or judges want to weigh in on this one?

Iraq Progress?

On Eve of National Assembly, Iraqi Parties Still Lack Consensus
By EDWARD WONG

Published: March 28, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 28 -The country's leading political parties held last-minute talks today before a meeting of the National Assembly scheduled for Tuesday, as a wave of violence in central Iraq that began on Sunday night left at least nine people dead, several of them police officers.

As the 275-member assembly prepared to hold its second meeting, more than two months after general elections, it appeared that the top politicians had failed to reach any deal to install a government.

At best, the assembly is expected to name a speaker and two vice-speakers, said Adnan Pachachi, a leading Sunni Arab politician. But even that looked doubtful on Monday afternoon: The leading candidate for speaker and current interim president, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawer, had turned down the job, said Ahmad Najati, the sheik's personal secretary. The leaders of the top parties were meeting on Monday evening to discuss the issue.

The leading Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, was trying to put forward Fawaz al-Jarba, a Sunni Arab candidate from its group, as a possible alternative. Some politicians have expressed resistance, though, to having a Sunni from the alliance take on the job of assembly speaker, since the alliance already dominates the assembly, having the most seats of any bloc, and is expected to secure the post of prime minister.

This sure doesn't look like progress to me. The political process is grinding to a halt as another wave of violence washes over the country.

Globalization

Gang of Our Own Making
By LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

Mara Salvatrucha is now reported to operate in 31 states and five countries, with 100,000 members across Canada, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. The government says MS-13 is the fastest-growing and most violent gang in the country. It describes MS-13 as having "cells" that smuggle people, guns and contraband across international lines, and some federal officials have mentioned possible ties between MS-13 and Al Qaeda.

While there's no proof that MS-13 has any connection to Al Qaeda, it has something in common with it: American policy played a role in the creation of both groups.

MS-13 is a result of our policy in Central America, specifically the policy that fueled the civil wars that sent more than two million refugees to the United States in the 1980's. Some of their children confronted well-entrenched Mexican-American gangs in the barrios where they landed. For their protection, they created their own groups, emulating the style of older Chicano gangs like 18th Street. MS-13, for instance, was born in the crowded, crack-ridden Mexican and Central-American community of Pico-Union, just west of the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles.

After the Los Angeles riots of 1992, government officials declared the main culprits to be young African-American and Latino gang members. In the mid-90's as many as 40,000 youths accused of being members of MS-13, 18th Street and other gangs were deported every year to Mexico and Central America. Sophisticated, tattooed, English-speaking young men raised and acculturated in the United States were sent to countries with no resources, no jobs and no history with these types of gangs.

Soon the deported members of MS-13 and 18th Street began recruiting among homeless and glue-sniffing youth who had never been to the United States. In a few years, these new members were making their way to the United States, ending up in far-flung corners of the country and recruiting a new generation. When the Department of Homeland Security deports the men it arrested last week, the cycle will start again.

When I was growing up in East L.A. in the 1960's, I was a member of a Chicano street gang. I was shot at a half-dozen times and arrested on several occasions. I understand why a teenager finds joining a gang necessary. But thanks to a few teachers, youth workers and community leaders, I eventually left the gang life.

What would have happened to me if I had been deported to a homeland I barely knew? The gang members at the 1996 meeting I attended were trying to find alternatives to violence and drugs. They wanted to be incorporated into the country, to be allowed to rebuild, to learn skills, to make decisions about bettering their communities and to stop being harassed or beaten by the police and attacked by death squads.

While the meeting ended on a high note, with people applauding and promising changes, in the end little happened. A group of former MS-13 and 18th Street gang youth formed a peace and justice organization called Homies Unidos, but their efforts over the years to obtain jobs, training, tattoo removal and counseling were largely ignored.

Instead, El Salvador instituted a "mano dura," or "firm hand," policy. It became illegal to be a member of a gang, whether a crime was committed or not. Jails became filled with gang youth from Los Angeles. The same policy was instituted in Honduras. According to news reports, these governments were getting advice from American law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department.

Today we're confronted with the same choice: we can continue the repression, arrests and firm-hand policies that only guarantee more violence and more lost youth. Or we can bring gang youth to the table and work to create jobs and training, providing real options for meaningful work and healthy families. In other words, we can help sow the seeds of transformation, eliminating the reasons young people join gangs in the first place.

We have the means to do both. Both have great costs. But one choice will worsen the violence and terror; the other will help bring peace, both in the streets of the United States and in the barrios of America's neighbors.

I'm sure the widening worldwide economic disparity will help this so much.

Just-spring

My forsythia bloomed this morning! You know what this means, don't you? All of you Californians who already have roses in bloom can just be quiet for a minute.

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

e.e. cummings

Soon, the azaleas and the cherry blossoms will burst into view. I can hardly wait. I need spring this year.

Shock and Raw

Via the hardest working website on the internets:

American blitzkrieg

The possibility of democracy in Iraq must not eclipse the tragedy of American lives lost and Iraqis sacrificed in a reckless and needless military venture based on falsehood. None of the Iraqi dead will benefit from a democratic government, nor were they patriots in a struggle for freedom. They were reduced to collateral damage in a war a foreign power decided was needed to eliminate their evil leader.

If a mass murderer was spotted in a huge apartment building filled with innocent men, women and children, the police would never blow up the building in order to capture the culprit. Yet that is precisely what we did in Iraq by destroying a nation and thousands of innocent people of all ages. Couldn't the world's oldest representative democracy come up with a more intelligent and moral strategy than shock and awe (blitzkrieg works better)? Is that what a Christian nation does?

If bin Laden is labeled a Muslim heretic, certainly George Bush must exemplify a failed Christianity and compromised democracy.

Ron and Norma Molen
Salt Lake City

Invisible War

More foreign fighters entering Iraq: US general

Foreign fighters entering Iraq in recent months make up a growing percentage of insurgents battling US troops and the country's fledgling security force, according to a senior US military commander.

In an interview with CNN in Mosul, General John Abizaid - the commander of US Central Command which covers Iraq - said that while most insurgents appear to be Iraqis, "the percentage of foreign fighters over the past several months seems to have increased".

He also said the insurgents' ranks likely include "former Baathist criminals".

"It seems to be pretty well established that they tend to cross over from Syria, although we know that there have been some infiltrations from the Saudi border, there have been some from the Iranian border," General Abizaid said.

"The Syrians are not doing everything we've asked them to do," he said, adding that Syria's intelligence services are not being aggressive enough in dismantling "facilitation cells" inside Syria.

Insurgent attacks

In a separate CNN interview, George Casey, the commanding US general of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, told the news network that current insurgent assaults were running at between 50 and 60 attacks a day.

"They (insurgents) are able to maintain the level of violence between 50 and 60 attacks a day," General Casey said.

"The four provinces where the insurgency is still capable is out west, near Fallujah in Anbar province, in the Baghdad area and Saladdin, which is in the centre of the country, around Saddam's home town, and up north, in the Mosul area," he said.

Juan Cole adds, "By the way, if there are 60 attacks a day, why do I only read about 7 or 8 of them?"

A Nation of Laws

Is No One Accountable?
By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 28, 2005

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

(This was not a boast from the blue. On Saturday, for example, The Times reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Mr. Ali's story is depressingly similar to other accounts pouring in from detainees, human rights groups, intelligence sources and U.S. government investigators. If you pay close attention to what is already known about the sadistic and barbaric treatment of prisoners by the U.S., you can begin to wonder how far we've come from the Middle Ages. The alleged heretics hauled before the Inquisition were not permitted to face their accusers or mount a defense. Innocence was irrelevant. Torture was the preferred method of obtaining confessions.

No charges were ever filed against Mr. Ali, and he was eventually released. But what should be of paramount concern to Americans is this country's precipitous and frightening descent into the hellish zone of lawlessness that the Bush administration, on the one hand, is trying to conceal and, on the other, is defending as absolutely essential to its fight against terror.

The lawsuit against Mr. Rumsfeld was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, a New York-based group, on behalf of Mr. Ali and seven other former detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan who claim to have been tortured by U.S. personnel.

The suit charges that Mr. Rumsfeld personally authorized unlawful interrogation techniques and abdicated his responsibility to stop the torture and other abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody. It contends that the abuse of detainees was widespread and that Mr. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials were well aware of it.

According to the suit, it is unreasonable to believe that Mr. Rumsfeld could have remained in the dark about the rampant mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. It cites a wealth of evidence readily available to the secretary, including the scandalous eruptions at Abu Ghraib prison, the reports of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, myriad newspaper and magazine articles, internal U.S. government reports, and concerns expressed by such reputable groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

(The committee has noted, among other things, that military intelligence estimates suggest that 70 percent to 90 percent of the people detained in Iraq had been seized by mistake.)

Whether this suit will ultimately be successful in holding Mr. Rumsfeld personally accountable is questionable. But if it is thoroughly argued in the courts, it will raise yet another curtain on the stomach-turning practices that have shamed the United States in the eyes of the world.

The primary aim of the lawsuit is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law. "It's that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law," said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First. "The violations here were created by policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law. That needs to be challenged."

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States. Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

Regular commentor paperwight writes:

And Now the Devil Turns Round on Us

Paperwight quotes Robert Bolt's great play, "A Man for All Seasons." That's what I would do.

Spring, Finally

Light posting this morning, Bumpers. I have some income related program activities which are due today. I'll be able to tell you more later in the week, but one of them involves blogging for dollars. Needless to say, I'm intrigued.

I was able to spend most of the day yesterday with my bro and s-i-l and cook Easter dinner for them, for a change. They liked my work. This makes me enormously happy. The bro is a professional chef-turned-IT-professional and I find cooking for him a little intimidating. But he had seconds.

I went to the Easter Vigil Saturday night, so Sunday morning was blog work, knowing that I'd be gone the rest of the day. I hope you were able to spend the day, if it is a holiday for you, with the ones you love.

Transcendence

St Kevin and the Blackbird
by Seamus Heaney

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 palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

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 labour and not to 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.

On This Day

Morning Has Spread Again

Morning has spread again
Through every street,
And we are strange again;
For should we meet
How can I tell you that
Last night you came
Unbidden, in a dream?
And how forget
That we had worn down love good-humouredly,
Talking in fits and starts
As friends, as they will be
Who have let passion die within their hearts.
Now, watching the red east expand,
I wonder love can have already set
In dreams, when we've not met
More times than I can number on one hand.

--Philip Larkin

Resurrections

He did not say: "You will not be assailed, you will not be belaboured, you will not be disquieted," but he said: "You will not be overcome."

Julian of Norwich, "Showings" Ch. 22

Easter

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place

From the Top

Panel Ignored Evidence on Detainee
U.S. Military Intelligence, German Authorities Found No Ties to Terrorists

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 27, 2005; Page A01

A military tribunal determined last fall that Murat Kurnaz, a German national seized in Pakistan in 2001, was a member of al Qaeda and an enemy combatant whom the government could detain indefinitely at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The three military officers on the panel, whose identities are kept secret, said in papers filed in federal court that they reached their conclusion based largely on classified evidence that was too sensitive to release to the public.

In fact, that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.

In recently declassified portions of a January ruling, a federal judge criticized the military panel for ignoring the exculpatory information that dominates Kurnaz's file and for relying instead on a brief, unsupported memo filed shortly before Kurnaz's hearing by an unidentified government official.

Kurnaz has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since at least January 2002.

"The U.S. government has known for almost two years that he's innocent of these charges," said Baher Azmy, Kurnaz's attorney. "That begs a lot of questions about what the purpose of Guantanamo really is. He can't be useful to them. He has no intelligence for them. Why in the world is he still there?"

The Kurnaz case appears to be the first in which classified material considered by a "combatant status review tribunal" has become public. While attorneys for Guantanamo Bay detainees have frequently complained that their clients are being held based on thin evidence, Kurnaz's is the first known case in which a panel appeared to disregard the recommendations of U.S. intelligence agencies and information supplied by allies.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Daryl Borgquist, said the government will not answer questions about the decisions made by the tribunals. "We don't comment on the decisions of the tribunals," he said. "They make the best decision based on what they saw before them at the time."

Insert your name here. This could be you, your mother, your brother.

The oligarchy will tell you what to think and who to believe. Tune in to Fox to get your marching orders.

For Community

http://www.gourmetsleuth.com.

http://www.epicurious.com

Stir together extremely slowly and you will have a great treat.

Home > Recipes
Welsh Rarebit
Recipe courtesy Alton Brown, 2003
Show: Good Eats
Episode: Toast Modern

Alton Brown
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Recipe Summary
Difficulty: Easy
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 10 minutes
Yield: 4 servings as a side dish

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2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup porter beer
3/4 cup heavy cream
6 ounces (approximately 1 1/2 cups) shredded Cheddar
2 drops hot sauce
4 slices toasted rye bread

In a medium saucepan over low heat, melt the butter and whisk in the flour. Cook, whisking constantly for 2 to 3 minutes, being careful not to brown the flour. Whisk in mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper until smooth. Add beer and whisk to combine. Pour in cream and whisk until well combined and smooth. Gradually add cheese, stirring constantly, until cheese melts and sauce is smooth; this will take 4 to 5 minutes. Add hot sauce. Pour over toast and serve immediately.

Garlic Knots

Saw this on Emeril tonight on the Food Network. Yer blog hostess has two passions: potatoes and garlic. These look like a lot of fun.

Garlic Knots

Basic Pizza Dough, recipe follows

1/2 cup unsalted butter
3 tablespoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon coarse sea salt
1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Prepare Basic Pizza Dough as recipe instructs below and set aside to rise.

Yield: dough for 1 (15-inch) pizza or two large cookie sheets of knots.

He's Not Going Away

Hersh speech blasts Bush and war policy

By Amy Feigenbaum
News Editor

Seymour Hersh, one of America's most respected investigative journalists, criticizes contemporary politicians in speeches.

Seymour Hersh confirmed existing worries about Bush's next four years in office during a Tuesday night lecture in the Memorial Chapel.

Hersh forecasted a protracted war in Iraq, an obstinate president who will remain indifferent to anti-war sentiments, and an economic collapse. In his talk "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh criticized both Republicans and Democrats, stressing the need for new faces in Congress.

Hersh is one of America's most renowned investigative journalists, currently writing for The New Yorker on military and security matters. In 2004, Hersh helped expose the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Hersh began his lecture by describing Bush's vision of the war in Iraq and the effects his beliefs will have for the future of US intervention.

"Bush thinks he's doing the right thing in Iraq," Hersh said. "He's completely committed whether it's finishing his father's work, for divine reasons, or manifest destiny. Over 1,500 body bags have come back and another 1,000 or 2,000 body bags wouldn't stop him."

The justification for the U.S. invasion, he said, is not oil or Israel as many have thought; it is Bush's uncompromising beliefs.

"It's really terrifying," Hersh said. "Street marches and demonstrations wouldn't change what he's going to do. Even when Bush was asked by a high ranking government official if the US was losing the war in Iraq, Bush said 'you mean we're not winning?'"

Professor Martha Crenshaw from the Government department questioned Hersh's opinion of Bush.

"None of us know what motivates Bush," Crenshaw said. "There are some, Professor Gergen [at the Kennedy School of Government] at Harvard [who] see Bush as a good leader, someone who is flexible and pragmatic. You get a different picture of the president from different things you read."

According to Hersh, Bush's vision has presented several negative implications for the ear in Iraq. Bush has kept the American people in the dark about what is actually going on. There are no embedded journalists and few reporters in Iraq, which allow military activity to go unchecked.

The administration's use of the word "insurgents" in Iraq gives the wrong impression of militants, making them seem unorganized and barbaric. They in fact should be called "resisters," because they are simply resisting the US occupation.

These resisters are more methodical than Bush or the media have given them credit for.

"[The resisters] are letting the Americans have Baghdad," Hersh said. "Most of the Iraqis left the city before the U.S. invaded. And the attacks that occurred during that time seemed random to us. They were taking down their existing structures systematically."

According to Hersh, the insurgent violence, along with an upcoming presidential election, created the impetus for Abu Ghraib. Bush wanted to gain the most information he could in the shortest amount of time.

"While Americans value privacy, Arabs work on shame," Hersh said. "Men cannot see men naked, it's against the Koran. The photos that were taken could be used as blackmail against these prisoners.

The President and his administration knew what was going on, according to Hersh; they had inspected Abu Ghraib and praised its work.

According to Hersh, the American troops in Abu Ghraib were deeply affected by the torture they inflicted. He compared their actions to those of the US soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which he exposed in 1969.

"I gave them a good boy," Hersh quoted one mother of a soldier involved in the My Lai massacre. "And they gave me back a murderer."

Abu Ghraib is just one example of covert military behavior, Hersh said, but it goes deeper. In recent months, the military has even been hiding where U.S. troops are located. Most troops are being killed in Romady, not Baghdad.

The new plan of attack is to take over one city at a time with the goal of making Iraqis more afraid of U.S. troops than insurgents. The military believes that this is the best way to make Iraqi's safe. The marines, however, do not have the intelligence to make this mission successful and eventually, Hersh said, it will result in a civil war.

On the subject of Afghanistan, Hersh claimed that the violence was completely unnecessary.

"More than 70% of the Taliban didn't want bin Laden as a leader," Hersh said. "Meanwhile, we have declared victory when warlords control the military bases and a mafia society is in control."

Hersh's most recent articles in January 2005 revealed that the U.S. has been conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. While both the Bush administration and the Iranian government have denied these allegations, Hersh claims that the U.S. will not stand for Iran having nuclear power.

"We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's."

Tough Job

For Recruiters, a Hard Toll From a Hard Sell
By DAMIEN CAVE

The Army's recruiters are being challenged with one of the hardest selling jobs the military has asked of them in American history, and many say the demands are taking a toll.

A recruiter in New York said pressure from the Army to meet his recruiting goals during a time of war has given him stomach problems and searing back pain. Suffering from bouts of depression, he said he has considered suicide. Another, in Texas, said he had volunteered many times to go to Iraq rather than face ridicule, rejection and the Army's wrath.

An Army chaplain said he had counseled nearly a dozen recruiters in the past 18 months to help them cope with marital troubles and job-related stress.

"There were a couple of recruiters that felt they were having nervous breakdowns, literally," said Maj. Stephen Nagler, a chaplain who retired in March after serving at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where the New York City recruiting battalion is based.

Two dozen recruiters nationwide were interviewed about their experiences over four months. Ten spoke with The New York Times even after an Army official sent an e-mail message advising all recruiters not to speak to this reporter, who was named. Most asked for anonymity to avoid being disciplined.

A handful who spoke said they were satisfied with their jobs. They said they took pride in seeing awkward, unfocused teenagers transform into confident soldiers and relished an opportunity to contribute to the Army effort.

But most told similar tales: of loving the military, of working hard to complete a seemingly impossible task, of struggling to carry the nation's burden at a time of anxiety and stress.

The careers and self-esteem of recruiters rise and fall on their ability to fulfill a mission, said current and former Army officials and military experts who were also interviewed.

Recruiters said falling short often generates a barrage of angry correspondence, formal reprimands, threats or even demotion.

"The recruiter is stuck in the situation where you're not going to make mission, it just won't happen," the New York recruiter said. "And you're getting chewed out every day for it. It's horrible." He said the assignment was more strenuous than the time he was shot at while deployed in Africa.

New recruiting campaign to appeal to patriotism

By Robert Burns
Associated Press

The Army expects to miss its recruiting goals this month and next and is working on a revised sales pitch appealing to the patriotism of parents, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said Wednesday.

Whether that boosts enlistment numbers or not, Harvey said he sees no chance of a military draft.

“The ‘D’ word is the farthest thing from my mind,” the former defense company executive told a Pentagon news conference, his first since becoming the Army’s top civilian official last November.

Because of the military manpower strains caused by simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some in Congress have raised the possibility of re-instituting the draft, although there is a strong consensus against it among Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the military chiefs.

This is the first time the United States has been in a sustained period of combat since the all-volunteer force was introduced in 1973. The Air Force and Navy, which have relatively smaller roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, have no recruiting problems, but the Army and Marines are hard pressed.

The Army missed its recruiting goal for February by 27 percent, and that was the first time it had missed a monthly goal since May 2000. The last time it missed its full-year goal was 1999.

As of Feb. 28, the regular Army was 6 percent below the number of recruits it had expected to sign up at that point in the recruiting year, the Army Reserve was 10 percent off and the Army National Guard was 25 percent off.

The Army is forecasting that all three elements — active, Guard and Reserve — will fall short of their targets for March and April. That means they will have to make up the lost ground this summer — traditionally the best recruiting season — in order to meet their full-year goals.

Encouraging Suffering

Weighing the Difference Between Treating Pain and Dealing Drugs
By TINA ROSENBERG

Dozens of doctors have been charged with drug trafficking because the D.E.A. felt they were prescribing too many pills. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons warns doctors to think twice before treating pain. "Discuss the risks with your family," it says.

One California doctor who prescribed opioids, Frank Fisher, was charged with five counts of murder - including that of a patient who died as a passenger in a car accident. All charges were dropped. A doctor in Florida, James Graves, is serving 63 years for four counts of manslaughter involving overdoses by people who either abused their prescriptions or mixed their prescribed medicines with other drugs.

Dr. Hurwitz, a crusader for aggressive pain treatment, had a controversial practice. More than 90 percent of his patients were genuine, and many say he was the only doctor who quieted their chronic pain. But his willingness to treat patients other doctors shunned, including drug addicts, also attracted scammers. It is legal to prescribe to addicts who are in pain, and many respected pain doctors believe that in some cases, addiction is caused by untreated pain and ends when the pain is controlled.

Dr. Hurwitz, who was disciplined by medical boards several times, testified that he did dismiss 17 patients he concluded were abusing their prescriptions and was tapering down the dosage for others. But he also said he felt that cutting off patients was tantamount to torture, and he did not do so without strong evidence of bad behavior.

Many of Dr. Hurwitz's colleagues believe that he was far too slow to accept such evidence and that he should not have been practicing medicine. But while he was blind to his patients' deceptions, there has never been any evidence that he was part of their conspiracy. In the prosecutors' post-trial motions, they argue that the conviction should stand even if Dr. Hurwitz believed he was prescribing for a legitimate medical purpose.

His prosecution seems inexplicable except as a signal to other doctors that they can go to prison for life for being duped by their patients. That signal is being heard - the exodus from aggressive treatment of pain is increasing. This might marginally reduce the amount of opioids on the street, but in the process it will sentence hundreds of thousands of people to suffer needlessly.

Bushco wants you broke, bankrupt and in pain. Canada is beginning to look like a necessity rather than an option.

Distracting Ourselves to Death

Schiavo Case Tests Priorities Of GOP

By Shailagh Murray and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 26, 2005; Page A01

A week after their unprecedented intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, Republican congressional leaders find themselves in a moral and political thicket, having advanced the cause as a right-to-life issue -- only to confront polls showing that the public does not see it that way.

"How deep is this Congress going to reach into the personal lives of each and every one of us?" asked Rep. Christopher Shays (Conn.), one of only five Republicans in the House to vote against the Schiavo bill.

Republican lawmakers and others engaged in the debate say an internal party dispute over the Schiavo case has ruptured, at least temporarily, the uneasy alliance between economic and social conservatives that twice helped President Bush get elected.

"Advocates of using federal power to keep this woman alive need to seriously study the polling data that's come out on this," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who has been talking to both social and economic conservatives about the fallout. "I think that a lot of conservative leaders assumed there was broader support for saying that they wanted to have the federal government save this woman's life."

Some Republicans said they do not believe the vote to allow a federal court to examine whether any of Schiavo's constitutional rights had been violated will become a political issue, especially since 47 House Democrats voted for the measure, while 53 voted against.

"It was not a partisan issue. It was one of conscience," said Rep. Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.), the chief deputy whip. "People will remember that the majority attempted to address a very difficult situation and did it with a real seriousness of purpose."

Democrats struggled with their own internal divisions over whether to join Republicans in urging federal courts to consider the Schiavo case -- or to oppose it as a dangerous legislative overreach. The decision of so many Democrats to support Republican action represented a rare moment of detente between the two otherwise warring parties.

Even House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), one of the most partisan politicians in Washington, conceded, "There's been incredible cooperation by the Democrats and Republicans." Aides in both parties say a shared concern about the fate of incapacitated people could lead to bipartisan legislation addressing their rights.

The fracas over congressional involvement has taken many GOP lawmakers by surprise. Most knew little about the case and were acting at the direction of their leaders, who armed them with the simple argument that they just wanted to give Schiavo a final chance, and that they wanted to err on the side of life. But because of the rush to act and the insistent approach of the leadership, Republicans had no debate about whether their vote could be seen as federal intrusion in a family matter, or as a violation of the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches. Both issues are concerns of many voters responding to polls, and of some legislators themselves.

Republican leaders knew from the outset they were entering new and possibly rocky terrain. DeLay said that he told Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) two weeks ago, "We have to do something for Terri Schiavo," but that the chairman was reluctant because, as DeLay recounted, "we don't have a precedent for doing private bills in these matters, and he didn't want to violate that precedent."

The majority leader's response to Sensenbrenner: "Be creative."

One senior GOP lawmaker involved in the negotiations, who did not want to speak for the record, said that DeLay, who is fighting ethics charges on several fronts, faced considerable pressure from Christian conservative groups to respond to pleas by the parents of the brain-damaged woman to intervene before her husband, Michael Schiavo, removed the feeding tube that kept her alive. The lawmaker said that DeLay "wanted to follow through" but added that many House Republicans were dubious and suspected that the leader's ethics problems were a motivating factor.

Ya think?

Image and Likeness

Via Kevin:

Fla. officials' attempt, fail to seize Schiavo

By Carol Marbin Miller

Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI - Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn't to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted - but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Miami Herald has learned.

Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.

For a brief period, local police, who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called a showdown.

In the end, the state agents and the Department of Children and Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

"We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in," said a source with the local police.

"The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene," said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. "When the Sheriff's Department, and our department, told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off."

The incident, known only to a few, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in state law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it.

Totally. Batshit. Effing. Crazy.

Terri Schiavo will spend the rest of her days, however many or few they are, as she has spent the last fifteen years: with no consciousness, feeling, emotion or sense of where she is. Would those of you who think this is wonderful please email me a definition of what it means to be human?

Holy Saturday

God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Brit General Election in Six Weeks: Throw the Gunslinger Out

Via The Agonist:

Blair kept quiet on Wolfowitz candidacy
By FT Reporters
Published: March 25 2005 22:01 | Last updated: March 25 2005 22:01

Tony Blair was sounded out on the candidacy of Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank before the White House announced his nomination but did not share the controversial proposal with cabinet colleagues or fellow European leaders.

The British prime minister was informed about Mr Wolfowitz's possible candidacy and relayed to Washington that he would not oppose him. The issue was raised with Mr Blair when Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, visited London last month, according to two senior US officials close to the proceedings. Mr Blair's discreet support gave President George W. Bush the confidence to know that Mr Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary and an advocate of the war in Iraq, would not face united opposition from the World Bank's European shareholders.

But by honouring Mr Bush's wishes, Mr Blair chose to keep the candidacy from Gordon Brown, the UK chancellor, who is chairman of the International Monetary Fund's governing body and the European finance minister most closely identified with the development agenda.

A Downing Street official said: “We had a number of discussions with a number of different countries over possible candidates over a period of time. Like others, we were first notified of the decision to nominate Paul Wolfowitz on the day of the president's announcement.” Treasury officials declined to comment.

While the details of Ms Rice's private conversations with Mr Blair remain tightly held, officials and diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic have said they were aware of Mr Bush's effort to secure the support of his chief European ally. The UK Treasury, the British foreign office and officials in other European capitals remained in the dark, according to UK officials.

Following a report in the Financial Times on March 1 that Mr Wolfowitz was a leading candidate for the US nomination, a senior UK Treasury official telephoned his US counterpart.

The US Treasury dismissed the story, according to British officials. A British diplomat, who contacted the administration, was told Mr Wolfowitz was not in the running.

So how is Tony not Bush's buttboy?

A Lesson Before Dying

The Terri Schiavo matter is a gift if we look at it with something other than the lens we've given to CNN. Families are having difficult conversations they'd never have otherwise. Living wills are being written. Here is a durable power of attorney form which is accepted in most states. I'll give copies of this to my doctor, my lawyer, my brother.

The WaPo's Jeanne McManus has a reflection on the meaning of life, learned from the dying. Don't forget, life is terminal for all of us.

Lessons For Living From the Dying

By Jeanne McManus
Saturday, March 26, 2005; Page A15

The first time I sat by the side of a deathbed and watched the life drain from a loved one, it changed me forever.

It made me smaller, weaker, a little meaner. The first time, it took courage to cross the threshold of the room, and for hours in advance of my visits I would steel myself for the experience and think of ways to avoid it. But duty and love still kept me moving forward, to the chair by the side of the bed. For a week I watched the breath grow more troubled, then more shallow, then turn into just a small, light puff. And then early one morning it stopped.

In the weeks and years that followed, that experience made me stronger. I could plunge into a hospital room with a take-charge, can-do attitude. Someone who knows me well referred to me on these occasions as the Ice Queen.

With an unflinching tone I could interview doctors and ask unpleasant questions. I could clean up messes. I could call the obituary desk with details. I could deliver a eulogy and only once or twice choke on my own words. I could, with cold-blooded directness, tell other people of the importance of being with a loved one as a life evaporated.

I discovered that there are legions of people who don't "do" hospitals, wakes or funerals. And in dire and certain terms I told them what I thought of this unfortunate position. I discovered another group that "doesn't know what to say" to grieving friends or relatives. For them I provided a script or the barest outline of a note of sympathy.

This doesn't always make me the life of the party.

But the older I get the less likely I am to coddle the living and the more important I find the protocol of the dying. This struck me a few years ago as I took my turn with family and friends when we knew that a loved one had only a day or a few hours left. One by one we sat in the chair by the side of the bed, not knowing if our sick friend even realized that we were there.

Each of us spent our time, our final hours with her, in different ways: prayer, poetry, silence. And when it was my turn to sit bedside in that bleak and sorrowful rotation, I could hear the voices of the others rising up from the kitchen, where, perhaps, a bottle of wine had been opened or the ham that had been brought over by the neighbors was being sliced.

Beyond the solitude and the small perimeter of the sickroom, could my dying friend hear that life was going on? Would this be of comfort? Or one last searing pain? And I decided, if it were me, that I would like them to enjoy the wine, have a sandwich, but please turn down the volume.

I continue to fine-tune my final scene. The more of life that I am given, the more I value it. But the more I value it, the more I think about losing it and the more I try to direct the terms of my departure. I use flip and cynical comments to friends and family about what to do with me, most of my directives involving a wheelbarrow and a steep cliff. On the more serious side, I use the wisdom of lawyers and estate planners to lock my wishes into place.

And the more I watch my loved ones die, some of them after a full life but some as if they were picked off randomly by a sniper in a tower, the more I realize the simplicity of what I want when it's my turn: someone who can forgive me for the complicatedness and messiness of my death and for someone who knows me, loves me and cares about me to be sitting in the chair at the side of my bed. I do not want to be observed by hulking men in suits stalking the halls of power on a weekend, by protesters outside a hospice or by a nation of strangers.

Time spent watching someone die is painful, agonizing and transforming.

Though it would be noble to say otherwise, it's not what you learn about death or about your friend or your parent or your sibling as the life drains from them. It's what you learn about you.

I'm a spiritual director. I sit with people in every state of life. Including dying. It is my job to grow wise. It is rarely easy. But anyone can do it.

Sit in the chair. Hold the hand. Learn how little control we have, and how much the power of love enters in. But love will carry you home. Trust it.

Health in the Body Politic

Sr. Joan Chittester speaks out. This is not news, she's always been outspoken, but her critique today is of the political climate in this country. The National Catholic Reporter is liberal in both its politics and in its theology, and is one of the best religion periodicals in the US.

There's a move in the Senate right now to restrict the right to filibuster during discussions of judicial appointees. If you're tempted to assume that something as remote and obscure as the Senate rules of filibuster have little to do with the likes of us, think again.

From where I stand, Byrd's warning is a statesman's call to state, church and educational institutions, however much power they have, to beware the power to suppress thought, to dampen speech. In the end, all that a move like that can really do is to destroy the very intellectual energy such institutions need to survive their own inevitable intellectual inertia.

Judicial Process

Why Schiavo's Parents Didn't Have a Case

By Andrew Cohen, Andrew Cohen is CBS News' legal analyst.

The Schindlers lost their case and their cause — and soon probably their daughter — because in the end they were making claims the legal system has never been able or willing to recognize. They lost because they long ago ran out of good arguments to make — those arguments having been reasonably rejected by state judge after judge — and thus were left with only lame ones. And they lost because in every case someone has to win and someone has to lose. That's the way it works in our system of government. It isn't pretty, and sometimes it's unfair. But it's reality.

Especially during this final round of review, orchestrated by Congress' extraordinary attempt at a "do-over" for the couple, Schiavo's parents lost appeal after appeal specifically because they were asking the federal courts to declare that their constitutional rights had been violated by the Florida state court rulings in the case. They were arguing, in other words, thanks in part to their custom-made congressional legislation, that the federal Constitution gave them the right as losers in state court to get a new, full-blown trial in federal court.

If you ponder that notion you will realize just how astounding it is. If accepted, it would have meant the end of state courts as we know them. No decision at the state level ever would be final, because every losing litigant at the state court level would be able to walk into federal court and declare a federal constitutional violation. State court trials thus would become like practice sessions and the federal courts, which are supposed to be of "limited jurisdiction," resolving only certain kinds of disputes, would become free-for-alls.

It's true that there are many federal claims that run concurrent with state law. And sometimes, in rare cases, it is necessary for the federal courts to look behind the curtain of a state court ruling. And sometimes it is required. In capital cases, for example, the law requires a federal review of a state court death penalty conviction. In such cases, the government is seeking to kill someone on behalf of the people. In the Schiavo case, a private guardian (a husband) was seeking permission to fulfill his wife's wishes, as determined by the state court of Florida. Yes, there is a difference, one that has been recognized in law and tradition.

If we were to open the doors of federal courts to every losing side in a guardianship case, or a child custody case, or any other matter traditionally left to state courts, we would be changing the very nature of the balance between federal power and states' rights. And we would be doing so at the request of politicians who have spent a generation trumpeting states' rights over the intrusion of federal power.

So how has the federal judiciary reacted to this terrible idea? Predictably, those judges haven't been crazy about it. The federal trial judge in this latest case, U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore, specifically rejected it. The argument by Schiavo's parents, he wrote, "effectively ignores the role of the presiding judge as judicial fact-finder and decision-maker under the Florida statutory scheme …. [Michael Schiavo] is correct that no federal constitutional right is implicated when a judge merely grants relief to a litigant in accordance with the law he is sworn to uphold and follow."

It is no wonder that the federal appeals court refused to reverse Whittemore's ruling. And it is no wonder that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court decided for a fourth time to stay out of the case. This harsh reality won't make it any easier for the Schindlers, but government cannot run on passion or emotion or sympathy. As the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote: "There is no denying the absolute tragedy that has befallen Mrs. Schiavo…. In the end, and no matter how much we wish Mrs. Schiavo had never suffered such a horrible accident, we are a nation of laws."

What the judges are saying is that the Congress passed a bad law. This is the reason that Bush's upcoming judicial appointments are so important: an independent judiciary is all that stands between us and the tyranny of the majority in a government controlled by one party. I'll be covering those appointments with much greater focus in the coming weeks--more about that later, but here is a link to one of the organizations keeping very careful watch on the process.

The Other War We're Losing

Pentagon Sees Aggressive Antidrug Effort in Afghanistan
By THOM SHANKER

The Drug Enforcement Administration is already conducting missions with Afghan law enforcement officers. The State Department, in coordination with the government in Kabul, is in charge of American efforts to eradicate poppies and pay farmers to cultivate other crops. Britain has been assigned command of the coalition's military counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.

But Pentagon officials and American military officers express frustration at the results thus far.

"When we started developing this interagency plan, everybody knew the narcotics numbers would be bad," said one senior Pentagon official. But when the Central Intelligence Agency and the United Nations released reports on Afghan poppy cultivation for 2004 - the United Nations said Afghanistan was now responsible for 87 percent of the world's illicit opium production - "they were beyond most people's worst nightmares," the official added.

One military officer who has served in Afghanistan gave a more pointed assessment: "What will be history's judgment on our nation-building mission in Afghanistan if the nation we leave behind is Colombia" of the 1990's?The Drug Enforcement Administration is already conducting missions with Afghan law enforcement officers. The State Department, in coordination with the government in Kabul, is in charge of American efforts to eradicate poppies and pay farmers to cultivate other crops. Britain has been assigned command of the coalition's military counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.

But Pentagon officials and American military officers express frustration at the results thus far.

"When we started developing this interagency plan, everybody knew the narcotics numbers would be bad," said one senior Pentagon official. But when the Central Intelligence Agency and the United Nations released reports on Afghan poppy cultivation for 2004 - the United Nations said Afghanistan was now responsible for 87 percent of the world's illicit opium production - "they were beyond most people's worst nightmares," the official added.

One military officer who has served in Afghanistan gave a more pointed assessment: "What will be history's judgment on our nation-building mission in Afghanistan if the nation we leave behind is Colombia" of the 1990's?

Once again, I note the complete and utter incompetence of the Department of Defense.

Projection

America's Dangerous Mideast Assumptions: the View From Damascus
# Syria sees Washington's policies as driven by fallacies and misinformation.

By Bouthaina Shaaban, Bouthaina Shaaban is Syria's minister for emigrant affairs.

DAMASCUS, Syria — I recently picked up a newspaper and saw the following headline: "Rice Promises That Washington Will Build a Different Kind of Middle East." Unsure what this could possibly mean, I looked closer at Condoleezza Rice's remarks to U.S. troops in Kabul, Afghanistan, to see if I could learn what this new Middle East was going to be.

"A different kind of broader Middle East that's going to be stable and democratic," was what she described that day, "where our children will one day not have to worry about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led those people to fly those airplanes into those buildings on September 11th."

So let me get this straight. Rice believes that our region harbors "ideologies of hatred" and that it is populated by "those people." Those terrorists.

This absurd generalization embodies the fallacy that underlies the entire U.S. "war on terrorism," which has severely damaged America's reputation and credibility around the world and which has led to the disastrous policies that will harm relations between the U.S. and the Arab world for decades to come.

To suggest that a group of extremists is representative of the people of the Middle East is outrageous. It's as if someone were to suggest that the criminals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are representative of American people and American values. It's like considering the criminals of massacres such as Sabra and Chatila, or Deir Yasin, as representative of their people and their religious values.

The other dangerous idea in Rice's remarks is that the attacks of Sept. 11 are a reasonable justification for the wrongheaded U.S. policy in the Middle East. That's ridiculous. Americans should be aware by now — but I don't think they are — that the events of Sept. 11 have weighed heavily on Arabs and Muslims just as they have on the people of the United States. The terrorists of Al Qaeda have targeted Arabs and Muslims repeatedly. They are, therefore, our enemies just as they are your enemies. So why should we be punished for their crimes?

I'm afraid that Americans don't know what's really going on in the Middle East today. Apparently it doesn't come through from your "embedded journalism." What is happening today is that Palestinian groups are being dismembered, the Lebanese resistance is being disarmed and the Syrian government is being demonized — all while Israel continues to occupy the Arab lands it has held since 1967 in violation of all U.N. resolutions calling for its withdrawal. Israeli extremists are seizing Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. An apartheid wall is being constructed that will separate tens of thousands of Palestinians from their cities and villages.

Here's something else that's happening: Syria's secular heritage and its long-standing tradition of religious coexistence are being threatened; the statements of many U.S. officials seem to indicate that the destabilization we're already seeing in the region could soon be extended into both Syria and Lebanon.

But why? Syria has never threatened the United States. Still, it is the target of the "ideological enmity" of members of Congress who support Israel's refusal to end the occupation of the Golan Heights and its continuous rejection of Syria's calls for a comprehensive and just peace.

Acting on the basis of a mythology which is at odds with reality leads to disaster.

Governments and Rights

A Thin View of 'Life'

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A19

How has Terri Schiavo's care been financed? The available information suggests that some of the money came from one of those much-derided medical malpractice lawsuits and that the drugs she needs have been paid for by Medicaid.

The irony has not been lost on Democrats. Just a few days after most Republicans in both houses of Congress had supported cuts in federal funding of Medicaid, here they were erring "on the side of life" in a single case. The same issue has come up here in Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush, a strong supporter of keeping Schiavo alive, has been proposing cuts in Medicaid spending.

Republicans cry foul when any link is made between the Schiavo question and the Medicaid question. "The fact that they're tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality," harrumphed Dan Allen, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Forgive me, Mr. Allen, I know you're just doing your job, but what's disconnected from reality is refusing to accept the idea that health care is about life issues and money issues.

People who lack access to health care because they can't afford insurance often die earlier than they have to -- with absolutely no national publicity and with no members of Congress rising up at midnight to pass bills on their behalf. What is the point of standing up for life in an individual case but not confronting the cost of choosing life for all who are threatened within the health care system or by their lack of access to it?

What does it mean to be pro-life? As far as I can tell, most of those who would keep Schiavo alive favor the death penalty. Most favored allowing the assault weapons ban to expire and oppose other forms of gun control. The president makes an excellent point when he says we "ought to err on the side of life." It's a shame how rarely that principle is put into practice.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Is it time for another revolution?

"Good" Friday

Every year for Lent I take up T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." This year, the passage that caught in my throat changed:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

I can't imagine what it cost him to write that.

Voice of the People

From lorraine's diary at dKos, she writes of hearing a speech by Sy Hersch yesterday:

There was nobody in Baghdad to fight us.

There is a separate wing for women prisoners. They send messages out--please come and kill me, I've been defiled.

Every war has been like this. It is the nature of war and rape and pillage are its handmaidens.

What's Good About This Friday

Today is Good Friday, a strange day, and it should stay strange, I wouldn't want it otherwise. It is a day to think on life and death. I use this day every year to meditate on the prayer of Oscar Romero, martyred this day 25 years ago as he celebrated Mass on the altar of his cathedral in El Salvador. He said:

It helps, now and then, to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen.

I have three pieces of paper taped up on the shelves above my monitor. This is one of them. I read it every day.

Good Friday

Billmon returns, sorta:

But as I’ve noted before, blogging is a strange drug. When you’re clean, it’s not too hard to stay clean. But once you start using the stuff again . . . man, the monkey can get his claws in your back pretty damn fast. So one post led to another, and then another. And, well, pretty soon I was back freebasing.

You see, futility does have its advantages.

Exactly. You do what you can, you do what you are called to do and can't do otherwise. Yes, it costs and it isn't easy, and there you are, spending your energy on a seemingly pointless and ignoble task. Prophets are always without honor in their own lands. It has never been otherwise.

Democracy, Not Sexy, No Whiskey

Forming Iraq govt could take another week; fighting rips Fallujah
(AFP)

25 March 2005

BAGHDAD - Shiite and Kurdish figures delayed the second session of Iraq’s elected parliament until at least Monday and warned that bargaining over the formation of a government could drag on for another week.

As the political drama played itself out, Iraqi troops battled insurgents in their former stronghold of Fallujah and five Iraqi policemen and soldiers died in a friendly-fire incident on Thursday.

US ambassador to Bulgaria, James Pardew, on Thursday also asked that Bulgaria’s parliament not set a definite date for the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, a parliament spokesman in Sofia said.

The request came a day after the Bulgarian defense ministry said it would pull its 450 troops out of Iraq by the end of the year.

“The request ... was to not necessarily set a deadline for withdrawal of Bulgarian contingent from Iraq,” spokesman Borislav Velikov told journalists after talks with Pardew.

Pardew also called for Bulgaria “to take into account the concrete circumstances and conditions in Iraq and the progress towards democratization after the new Iraqi parliament adopts a constitution,” Velikov added.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the head of an information watchdog said Friday he expected to gain access to secret advice on the legality of the Iraq war that the government received in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner who oversees the operation of the recently promulgated Freedom of Information Act, said he must decide whether the public was best served by keeping the document secret.

Hopes in Iraq of clinching a government nearly two months after its epic election were dented as the election-winning Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), announced it would not reconvene the 275-member parliament until at least Monday.

Political leaders cautioned that a government might not be reached until the end of the month.

Having worked in the unions with nothing more than Roberts Rules, I can tell you that self-governance is a tortured process that doesn't always yield anything. That said, the means is the way to the ends. Do it the other way around and what you get is oligarchy. That's the easy way out.

Into the Future

That's it for today, Bumpers. This one has been very complicated and included more veterinary features (and, no, we aren't done yet, thanks for asking, [$$$ is heading into scary territory]) and a lot of running. There are some new deals in the works and much back and forth today, with a lot of new things to think about.

PBS Newshour is weighing in on the blogs, CNN is threatening to revamp their daily schedule to include thrice daily blog reports, this is all dizzying. Here's tonight's discussion question: citizen journalism, or the Public Medium as I've coined it--where do you think we're going? Where would you like to go? What unfulfilled potentials for the medium do you see? (I actually have an essay on the latter I have to write on another errand. I'll share it if it comes out well.)

Unsavory Nation

US handling of terror suspects questioned
Ex-envoy says dozens are sent to Uzbekistan and at risk of torture

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | March 24, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan says that over the past three years, the United States has routinely handed over dozens of low-level terrorism suspects to Uzbekistan, an authoritarian regime that systematically uses torture to obtain terrorist confessions during interrogations.

The former ambassador, Craig Murray, also contends that the CIA and the British intelligence agency MI6 routinely cited information in their regular intelligence briefings that has been passed on by Uzbek authorities and was almost certainly obtained under torture.

Murray's assertions, made in a telephone interview with the Globe and in a series of confidential memos to the British Foreign Office, raise questions about the close cooperation between the United States and war-on-terror allies such as Uzbekistan. The State Department's annual human rights reports detail how Uzbek authorities routinely use torture to elicit confessions, allegedly burning one man on his genitals, killing another with a pair of pliers, and apparently boiling two prisoners alive.

''We should cease all cooperation with the Uzbek Security Services -- they are beyond the pale," Murray wrote in a July 2004 memo to the foreign office. The memo appeared on the website of an Uzbek democracy group and Murray confirmed for the Globe its authenticity.

US officials including CIA Director Porter Goss have contended they do not turn suspects over to countries that use torture without receiving diplomatic assurances that the suspect will not be mistreated.

A spokesman for the CIA said the agency ''does not knowingly receive any intelligence information that was alleged to have been derived from individuals who are tortured."

Murray, however, said that the CIA's head of mission told his deputy that the agency knew that the intelligence was probably obtained under torture but ''they didn't see that as a problem."

A CIA spokesman in Washington said no such meeting or conversation ever took place.

Murray, who retired early last month from the foreign service, has captivated British newspaper readers since the government launched an investigation into allegations of financial and sexual improprieties which he contends was meant to silence him. (He was eventually cleared of all charges except leaking confidential material to the press, according to a Foreign Office spokesman.)

But American newspapers have rarely written of Murray, who is now running an underfunded campaign to unseat British foreign secretary Jack Straw.

They did it to David Kelly, too. He killed himself. Murray wants to get even.

The CIA's credibility, never very good, has sunk to new lows under Goss.

Looter in Chief

SEC may sue Perle over Hollinger

By OTIS BILODEAU AND PETER ROBISON

Thursday, March 24, 2005 Page B3

Bloomberg, with files from staff

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has warned former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle that it may sue him for his role in the alleged looting of Hollinger International Inc., the Chicago-based media company once controlled by Richard Perle.

Mr. Perle, 63, a Hollinger director, said in a telephone interview that he received and responded to a so-called Wells notice, a formal warning that the agency's enforcement staff has determined that evidence of wrongdoing is sufficient to bring a civil lawsuit.

The enforcement staff, which has reviewed Mr. Perle's response, plans to urge the SEC's commissioners to authorize a suit against him, according to people familiar with the matter.

"We did receive a notice some months ago and we responded at some length," said Mr. Perle, who was the leading architect of U.S. nuclear arms-control policy as assistant secretary of defence from 1981 to 1987, during the administration of president Ronald Reagan. In the 2000 presidential campaign, Mr. Perle was foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush.

If the SEC proceeds with a suit against Mr. Perle, it will mark one of the first times that the regulator has targeted a corporate director of a major company for allegedly failing to protect shareholder interests.

Mr. Perle played a key role on Hollinger International's board as a member of its executive committee with Lord Black and his long-time deputy David Radler. The committee approved a number of controversial transactions that enriched Lord Black and Mr. Radler and are the target of a number of criminal and civil investigations in the United States and Canada.

I've been waiting on this one for well over a year.

End of an Era

MPT to cancel 'Wall St. Week' after 35 years
Audience, sponsors lost since firing of Rukeyser

After struggling for three years to regain the audience and underwriters it lost since firing star Louis Rukeyser, Maryland Public Television will announce today that it is canceling one of the longest-running national franchises in TV history, Wall Street Week.

The final episode of the 35-year-old, landmark PBS series - produced at MPT's Owings Mills studio and considered the prototype for financial advice programming (including entire cable channels) - will air at 8:30 p.m. June 24.

For 32 years, the imposing Rukeyser presided over the hourlong Friday-night program interspersing financial insights with wry puns and idiosyncratic musings on the market. After MPT dismissed him in 2002, in a public squabble that included Rukeyser criticizing the station on-air, the show's hosting duties were taken over by Geoffrey Colvin, editorial director of Fortune magazine, and former Fox News Channel correspondent Karen Gibes.

Within a month, Rukeyser, a Princeton University graduate, began leading a CNBC financial show - which, in defiance of PBS, was picked up by 160 public television stations. The new MPT version, called Wall Street Week with Fortune, never regained its momentum, and underwriting dollars dwindled.

"Who would have ever thought that could happen - that MPT would cancel Wall Street Week?" said Douglas Gomery, a professor and media economist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "Along with Sesame Street, it was one of the first shows on PBS, a landmark series. But I guess once Rukeyser left, it was inevitable.

"Louis Rukeyser was the franchise - proof that the star system worked even for PBS. Do a survey, see how many people can even name the hosts today."

I can't. I'm sorry to see the old franchise end, but when MPT fired Rukeyser, I followed him over to his new show at CNBC. Because of his charm and ease, he overcame my fear of money and taught me virtually everything I know about investing and equity markets, which launched me into deeper study of economics (thanks to Max and Angry Bear.) Friday night is my big TV night because of PBS, and now I've added CNBC to see Lou.

The Few, the Old, the Decrepit

Army Orders Further Involuntary Troop Call-Up

Wed Mar 23, 6:13 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army is ordering more people to serve in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) involuntarily from a seldom-used personnel pool as part of a mobilization that began last summer.

They are part of the Army's Individual Ready Reserve, made up of soldiers who have completed their volunteer active-duty service commitment but remain eligible to be called back into uniform for years after returning to civilian life.

The Army, straining to maintain troop levels in Iraq, last June said it would summon more than 5,600 people on the IRR in an effort to have about 4,400 soldiers fit for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan after granting exemption requests for medical reasons and other hardships.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart said on Wednesday the Army has now increased the number of IRR soldiers it needs to about 4,650, which means a total of about 6,100 will get mobilization orders.

The IRR differs from the part-time Army Reserve and Army National Guard, whose soldiers train regularly as part of units. People on the IRR have no such training requirements.

Hart also said 370 IRR soldiers had not reported to the Army by the date ordered and have not requested an exemption from service or a delay in reporting. Hart said none have been declared absent without leave, or AWOL, and the Army was trying to determine whether all of them actually had received their mobilization orders.

"We're giving them all ample opportunity to comply with their orders," Hart said.

The Army has approved 1,866 requests for exemptions or delays in reporting, Hart said.

Think the military isn't in trouble? I don't care what Richard Myers says to Congress, when you're calling up old, out of shape guys, you are in a world of hurt.

In the Ruins

The list of atrocities is so long that it becomes easy to forget. I thank Katrina vanden Heuvel for this reminder

Cultural Barbarism
03/23/2005 @ 2:45pm

The sterile term "collateral damage" justifiably brings to mind the human tragedy of war. But the devastating and wanton damage inflicted on the ancient city of Babylon by US-led military forces gives another meaning to the term. In this case, we are witnessing violence against one of the world's greatest cultural treasures. Babylon's destruction, according to The Guardian, "must rank as one of the most reckless acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory." When Camp Babylon was established by US-led international forces in April 2003, leading archeologists and international experts on ancient civilizations warned of potential peril and damage. It was "tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," according to a damning report issued in January by the British Museum.

The overall situation in Iraq is overwhelmingly a human tragedy but that does not exempt the US authorities, who set up Camp Babylon, from the consequences of what The Guardian called an act of "cultural barbarism"--carried out in their name by a subsidiary of Halliburton. There must be a full investigation of the damage caused, and Halliburton should be made to offer whatever compensation is possible for the wanton destruction of the world's cultural treasure.

I had hoped to see the ruins of Babylon one day. Doesn't look like there is much left to see.

Hypocrisy Now

In a fit of Holy Week generosity, I'm going to excerpt the good part of Friedman's Op-Ed and exclude the embarrassing, self-referential part. He actually manages to get mostly out of his own head for a half of the thing and I guess I should reward good behavior.

George W. to George W.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: March 24, 2005

Of all the stories about the abuse of prisoners of war by American soldiers and C.I.A. agents, surely none was more troubling and important than the March 16 report by my Times colleagues Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt that at least 26 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 - in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide.

You have to stop and think about this: We killed 26 of our prisoners of war. In 18 cases, people have been recommended for prosecution or action by their supervising agencies, and eight other cases are still under investigation. That is simply appalling. Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, reported Jehl and Schmitt - "showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift."

Yes, I know war is hell and ugliness abounds in every corner. I also understand that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we are up against a vicious enemy, which, if it had the power, would do great harm to our country. You do not deal with such people with kid gloves. But killing prisoners of war, presumably in the act of torture, is an inexcusable outrage. The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty. This administration is for "ownership" of everything except responsibility.

President Bush just appointed Karen Hughes, his former media adviser, to head up yet another U.S. campaign to improve America's image in the Arab world. I have a suggestion: Just find out who were the cabinet, C.I.A. and military officers on whose watch these 26 homicides occurred and fire them. That will do more to improve America's image in the Arab-Muslim world than any ad campaign, which will be useless if this sort of prisoner abuse is shrugged off. Republicans in Congress went into overdrive to protect the sanctity of Terri Schiavo's life. But they were mute when it came to the sanctity of life for prisoners in our custody. Such hypocrisy is not going to win any P.R. battles.

Theocracy Now

DeLay, Deny and Demagogue
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: March 24, 2005

The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as the movie "Weekend at Bernie's," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Ms. Schiavo's condition by video.

As one disgusted Times reader suggested in an e-mail: "Americans ought to send Bill Frist their requests: 'Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and tell us if that mole on my mother's cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?'"

Jeb, keeping up with the '08 competition, vainly tried to get Florida to declare Ms. Schiavo a ward of the state.

Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual privacy and states rights when their personal ambitions come into play. The first time they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to give to a federal court, it was Bush v. Gore. This time, it's Bush v. Constitution.

While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry favor with red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be enacted, at least some Floridian House members decided to put up a fight, though they knew they couldn't win.

The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation of powers. They just believe in their own power. First they tried to circumvent the Florida courts; now they're trying to pack the federal bench with conservatives and even blow up the filibuster rule. But they may yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal courts rebuffed them in the Schiavo case.

The "base" may love this kind of garbage, but alienating the other 80 percent of the electorate isn't going to play well down the road. That said, one correspondent said, "Do you really think anybody is going to remember this in six months?" Good point.

Abuse in the System

Army Documents Shed Light on CIA 'Ghosting'
Systematic Concealment Of Detainees Is Found

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 24, 2005; Page A15

Senior defense officials have described the CIA practice of hiding unregistered detainees at Abu Ghraib prison as ad hoc and unauthorized, but a review of Army documents shows that the agency's "ghosting" program was systematic and known to three senior intelligence officials in Iraq.

Army and Pentagon investigations have acknowledged a limited amount of ghosting, but more than a dozen documents and investigative statements obtained by The Washington Post show that unregistered CIA detainees were brought to Abu Ghraib several times a week in late 2003, and that they were hidden in a special row of cells. Military police soldiers came up with a rough system to keep track of such detainees with single-digit identification numbers, while others were dropped off unnamed, unannounced and unaccounted for.

The documents show that the highest-ranking general in Iraq at the time acknowledged that his top intelligence officer was aware the CIA was using Abu Ghraib's cells, a policy the general abruptly stopped when questions arose.

CIA operatives began looking for a central place to put detainees captured during secret missions in Iraq in mid-2003, and an early choice was the high-security Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport, where CIA officers hoped to deposit a few of their prisoners without registering their names. Lt. Col. Ronald G. Chew, the military police commander there, told Army investigators later that he "argued against the practice" and turned the operatives away.

Instead, according to the documents, the CIA quickly looked to Abu Ghraib, then a dusty and decrepit compound outside Baghdad that was slated to be transformed into the central U.S. detention center for the war.

According to statements investigators took from soldiers and officers who worked at the prison, a stream of ghost detainees began arriving in September 2003, after military intelligence officers and the CIA came to an arrangement that kept the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations from knowing the detainees existed. The investigative documents show that Col. Thomas M. Pappas and Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the top two military intelligence officers at the prison, took part in discussions with the CIA on how to handle agency detainees.

Pappas and Jordan are still under investigation, and Army officials said they believe a decision about whether to discipline them could come by the end of the month.

Keeping ghost detainees was harshly criticized by Army investigators who looked into abuse at the prison, and human rights groups condemn the practice. The Red Cross regularly inspects prisons and is supposed to have access to all inmates to ensure their rights are protected.

Seems like something more than a few bad apples.

Blogging at the Roof of the World

Via JSLB at The Agonist:

Nepal scribes evade censors with blogs

New Delhi, March 23 (Reuters): Journalists in Nepal are going hi-tech to sidestep tight censorship imposed after last month’s royal coup.

Outspoken web logs, or blogs, are springing up and being widely quoted and linked to in the “blogosphere” — the mushrooming cyberworld rapidly establishing a place for itself as an alternative source of news and information.

“I feel that our very own survival, intellectually and mentally, depends on freedom,” says Dinesh Wagle, a newspaper journalist who runs United We Blog! (www.blog.com.np).

“I don’t want to live like a dead soul. So these days I am blogging for a peaceful and democratic Nepal,” he said in an e-mail interview. King Gyanendra seized power on February 1, arresting government and political leaders, rights activists and journalists.

He also banned media criticism of his move, which he said was aimed at ending a nine-year Maoist revolt that has killed 11,000 people and shattered the tourism and aid-dependent economy.

But United We Blog! and another popular blog, the anonymous Radio Free Nepal (freenepal.blogspot.com), publish interviews with arrested political leaders and news about anti-king protests that the mainstream media cannot.

“I am blogging the truth as I see and as I think,” says the print journalist running Radio Free Nepal.

“I am telling my audience there are pro-monarch rallies and the true story behind them (compulsory participation) ... and also that there is not much participation in anti-monarch rallies, along with my feelings that there should be democracy and the king should step down,” he said by e-mail.

Wagle, who coordinates the art and style section for Kantipur, the leading Nepali language daily, is a former information technology reporter. He has his own website (www.wagle.com.np) and along with several friends and colleagues has been blogging since 2003. But United We Blog! turned political after Gyanendra seized power.

Just like Wagle, I've been blogging the resistance since 2003. Good on you, brother.

Ain't I An American?

CampusProgress's Elana Berkowitz interviewsSeymour Hersh:

I read somewhere that when your My Lai story was first published there was an opinion poll that showed more than half of Americans didn’t think it should have been published. How did you respond to that?

Bush has called me a liar in print a couple of times, and people get mad at me. There’s a couple of guys at the Pentagon who scream and rant and rave about me publicly. I’m just as mainstream as them for trying to go after them. I am just as much of an American.

Inflation, Anyone?

Consumer Prices Increase Fuels Inflation Fears

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; 1:10 PM

Rising prices for gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas pushed U.S. consumer inflation up in February to its fastest rate in four months, the government reported today.

The figures followed the Federal Reserve's warning yesterday that inflation pressures had picked up recently, a signal that the central bank might have to push interest rates up more aggressively in coming months to keep inflation under control.

Consumer prices have risen faster than wages for most workers during the past year, which means average weekly earnings have fallen on an inflation-adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported.

The consumer price index, the department's widely followed measure of inflation, rose 0.4 percent last month, up from a 0.1 percent increase in January, primarily because of a 2 percent gain in energy prices.

The CPI rose 3 percent during the 12 months that ended in February, driven in part by a 10.4 percent increase in energy prices.

The inflation figures "suggest that the Fed is right to be more concerned," said Paul Ashworth, senior international economist for Capital Economics Ltd., a research firm in London.

Meanwhile, oil and gasoline prices have jumped since last month. U.S. benchmark crude scheduled for May delivery has traded above $56 a barrel in recent days, up from around $46 a barrel in early February, according to the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Waiting on the consumer confidence numbers...

Promoting Raptors

Canadians watch circling hawks

CAROL GOAR

Racking his brain to think of something positive to say about the nominations of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, Paul Heinbecker ventured: "At least it gets them out of government."

Heinbecker, Canada's former ambassador to the U.N., usually is more diplomatic than that.

But, like much of the international community, he is reeling from President George Bush's decision to name two of the hardest-line hawks in Washington to pivotal roles in the world's leading multilateral institutions.

As undersecretary of state, Bolton was withering in his criticism of the U.N. Yet he is to be America's 25th envoy to the organization.

As deputy defence secretary, Wolfowitz was the principal architect of the war in Iraq. Yet he is slated to head a 184-nation agency mandated to fight global poverty.

One provocative appointment might have been an aberration. Two constitute a strategy.

There are three prevailing theories about what Bush hopes to accomplish:

The first, to which Heinbecker subscribes, is that the president seeks to build on his record in Iraq. Bush regards the toppling of Saddam Hussein as proof America is capable of spreading democracy throughout the world.

By putting two strong proponents of the war in Iraq in key international positions, he is signalling his intention to push ahead vigorously in his second term.

"It's easier to understand intellectually than viscerally," Heinbecker admitted. "I find American triumphalism ill-placed and ill-timed."

The second view, popular in conservative circles, is that Bush thinks the United Nations, World Bank and other global organizations need a shake-up. They are bloated, poorly run and full of muddle-headed idealists.

By bringing in Bolton and Wolfowitz, he aims to impose some American-style discipline. The two may not win any congeniality awards, but they'll clean things up.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hailed Bolton as a man who "knows how to get things done." Bush praised Wolfowitz for his management of the Pentagon.

The third and bleakest hypothesis is that Bush intends to destroy the U.N. and other multilateral decision-making bodies from within.

By appointing unilateralists such as Bolton and Wolfowitz to these organizations, the White House is giving them a stark choice: Become foreign policy instruments of the U.S. or fade into irrelevance.

"We are drifting into the sort of situation in which the League of Nations died in the '20s," predicted Manfred Bienefeld, who teaches international development at Carleton University. "It's very worrisome."

I can understand why the Canadians are concerned but I think taking a look at the Bush/Cheney/Negraponte/Wolfowitz track record will immediately notice that they are spectacularly incompetent. They may have all kinds of evil intent, but no demonstrated capacity to actually do anything about it.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

From Dan Froomkin's "Live Chat" at the WaPo:

Carrboro, N.C.: Dan, when is the press going to drop the absurd "town-hall meeting" or "town-hall style meeting" moniker for Bush's Social Security roadshows?

Dan Froomkin: As far as I can tell, no. As political scientist Jeffrey Tulis put it in an essay on the other site I work for, NiemanWatchdog.org: "Certainly, in the past, presidential advance teams have on occasion taken steps to assure friendly audiences. It has not been uncommon for presidents to seek invitations to speak at friendly venues. But systematically screening audiences for an array of speaking tours in the pursuit of a national domestic policy campaign may be a new phenomenon, and one that the president should be asked to defend and justify in terms of his constitutional obligations."

Um, congressional oversite, anyone?

More Incompetence

Who's Minding the Store?

Published: March 23, 2005

Don't be fooled by the location of the United States Treasury, right next door to the White House. The department has suffered a steady diminution of prestige and influence during the Bush administration, starting with the unceremonious firing of its first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, less than two years into the job, in part for suggesting that deficits do, in fact, matter.

Things have been downhill ever since. Last December, Republican power brokers made no bones about wanting to oust the current Treasury secretary, John Snow, only to find that the administration couldn't entice anyone better to take the job. Of course, it is always difficult to lure people with Hamiltonian intellect, expertise and reputation away from the private sector. But Mr. Bush has a particularly hard time doing so.

The reason in large measure is that from the start of his administration, tax policy and economic policy - the purview of the Treasury - have been handmaids to politics and ideology emanating from the White House. Without the clear-cut opportunity to drive policy making, the best and the brightest aren't exactly clamoring for jobs at Treasury. And Mr. Snow is still in his post, reprising his first-term performance as cheerleader for Mr. Bush's tax cuts in his current role as salesperson for Mr. Bush's misbegotten plan to privatize Social Security.

Meanwhile, vacancies are piling up. The post of deputy secretary, the No. 2 job, has been vacant for nearly two months, and the first-choice candidate recently removed his name from consideration. The post of under secretary for domestic finance, the Treasury's main liaison with Wall Street and the person responsible for issuance of the federal debt, has been open all year. The job of assistant secretary for tax policy has also gone unfilled this year, a disturbing absence at a timewhen the president is calling for comprehensive tax reform. And on Monday, the under secretary for international affairs, the person who coordinates with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and steps in when a country like Argentina or Brazil teeters on collapse, announced his resignation effective April 22.

The United States faces unprecedented financial risks, uncertainties and challenges, right now. The interplay of our federal budget deficit with our record deficits in trade and global transactions has become the focus of the international financial community, with repercussions for the dollar, inflation, interest rates and economic growth.

The clear lack of a deep bench from which to fill vacancies is cause for alarm, as is the extent to which our complex economic problems are beyond the ken of a mostly political, loyalist band of policy makers. That alarm, insistent though not yet overwhelming, would quickly reach deafening proportions if the United States were forced to respond to a sudden, destabilizing event like 9/11 without a credible Treasury team.

We are standing at the brink of an economic apocalypse and this is the kind of leadership we have. This is scary.

What are YOU Eating?

Syngenta Says It Sold Wrong Biotech Corn

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; Page E01

Swiss biotech firm Syngenta AG said yesterday that over a four-year period it inadvertently sold U.S. farmers an unapproved strain of genetically modified corn seed that may have also entered the food supply and international export channels.

Syngenta, as well as three federal regulatory agencies investigating the sales, cautioned that the mistake posed no health risks because the unapproved strain is virtually identical, genetically, to an approved strain of corn seed that the company markets.

The firm said the amount of unapproved corn planted from 2001 until it discovered and reported the mistake to regulators last December was "very little," amounting to 37,000 acres out of the 320 million acres planted during that period across the United States.

Despite the small amount of corn involved, as well as the lack of public health risk, industry observers said Syngenta's problems would likely stoke long-simmering concerns over the biotech industry's ability to control the technology.

"Although I'm glad there was no risk to human health, this situation proves again that this technology is hard to control and there must be better oversight of the industry," said Greg Jaffe, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "This situation certainly doesn't give any assurances to consumers."

Jaffe said he was particularly concerned that the company was selling the unapproved seeds for four years without knowing it.

How the hell are we supposed to even know what we're eating anymore? These frankenfoods are simply unneccessary. Ever since the Borlaug revolution we've had more than sufficient seed stock and capability to feed the entire planet. What we don't have is the interest and will to change inequities in distribution.

Dumbing it Down

Study: Media Self-Censored Some Iraq Coverage

By Joe Strupp

Published: March 19, 2005 12:05 PM ET

NEW YORK Many media outlets self-censored their reporting on the Iraq invasion because of concerns about public reaction to graphic images and content, according to a survey of more than 200 journalists by American University's School of Communications.

"There is an unspoken rule against publishing images that would be extremely horrifying such as a bloody stump on an amputee or a mangled corpse," one respondent wrote. Added another: "Several photos, especially one of a very young, naked, dead boy, stirred controversy before we decided to post them."

This is our vigorous press life. No wonder that we have yet to see a picture from the desolation of Fallujah, of an American coffin, of a dead civilian. You have to go to the foreign press for the facts.

President Pedant

A Tale of Two Ranches

ANDRES MARTINEZ

It'll be sad, really, watching Jorge and Vicente go through the motions today. Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox will "summit" at the Crawford ranch, talk about the glories of NAFTA and pledge to toughen border security. They'll even have Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin around to ease the awkwardness and help them avoid lingering on what might have been between two amigos.

Four years ago, it was a different ranch, a different era. Bush hadn't been in office even a month before he rushed down to Fox's place in Guanajuato. The two newly elected ranch-owning conservatives hit it off. Fox gave Bush a pair of boots and introduced him to his mother. Bush, the former border governor, agreed it was a "new day" in Mexican-American relations, and the two leaders kicked off ambitious negotiations aimed at overhauling U.S. immigration policy.

But even back then, in Guanajuato, there was a foreshadowing of things to come, of an American president's inability to focus on his old neighborhood. On the day of Bush's visit, U.S. warplanes struck Iraqi radar installations. Mexico couldn't even have the day to itself.

Too bad, because the opportunity for a new Mexico-U.S. partnership was real. Having vanquished the long-ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution in the 2000 election, Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive, desired change. Our "distant neighbor," to recall the title of Alan Riding's 1985 book, suddenly wanted to be our best friend.

Fast-forward four years, and the two countries have little to show for that initial euphoria. There is no immigration accord, no partnership to promote democracy and human rights throughout the hemisphere, no comprehensive energy deal to pierce Mexico's self-defeating barriers to foreign investment and lessen American reliance on Mideast oil. Bush, in the end, never even deigned to pay a state visit to Mexico City. He was too busy, if not in a snit over Mexico's refusal to back the war in Iraq in the U.N. Security Council.

So here we are, talking only about such absurdities as whether Al Qaeda could exploit the border's porousness. There is something about that 2,000-mile, often illusory line that makes politicians say the loopiest things. GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, for instance, recently chastened Mexico City for "turning a blind eye" to the fact that its citizens cross illegally into the United States. As if Washington could do anything if Americans decided to leave en masse, without proper papers, for Canada. For his part, Fox is out of line when he decries U.S. efforts to erect walls and make it harder for people to cross — that is Washington's prerogative.

The Bush administration will soon regret not having capitalized on the opportunity for U.S.-Mexico change. Fox will be out of office by the end of next year and his successor — possibly Mexico City's leftist mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — will no doubt be far less eager to improve ties with Washington. Indeed, the return of anti-American populism is the latest hemispheric fad.

In fairness, Washington is not solely responsible for the souring of cross-border expectations. Fox's politically motivated drive to speak for his country's diaspora north of the Rio Grande — including an estimated 6 million illegal Mexican workers, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study released Monday — backfired here.

Bush's never-acted-on immigration reform should not have become a bilateral issue. Finding a way to legalize the status of needed but undocumented workers in this country is, at heart, a domestic policy matter, not a diplomatic one. Allowing the Mexican government to act as immigration reform's chief lobbyist in Washington, which it essentially did, was counterproductive, a gift to nativist anti- immigrant groups. Once Bush's lack of backbone on the immigration issue became clear, farm groups, the Chamber of Commerce and labor unions should have led this fight. Fox seems to recognize this now. He said last week that his administration is no longer going to try to sell any change in U.S. immigration policy to the Congress.

Truth is, Fox has little to peddle these days except nostalgia for a gathering at a different ranch, in a different time.

I wonder how much Fox and Martin can stand these little set pieces where they get to be hectored by our small brained executive. After having spent four years watching the Boy King treat every press event with a foreign leader as an opportunity to lecture them like an undergrad teaching assistant, today's little event will be another opportunity for embarrassment. He'll run his little talking points for kindergarteners and they'll pretend he's actually talking to grown-ups and then go home and tell their people that something important happened. I'm sure they'll love being told about the wonder and blessing of freedom and democracy. What could they possibly know about that?

Summit meeting? My a**. The president of little accomplishment hasn't gotten that desire to be a TA out of his system yet.

"The Culture of Life"

Target of Opportunism

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; Page A15

For Tom DeLay, Terri Schiavo came along just in the nick of time. "One thing that God brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," DeLay told a group of Christian conservatives last Friday.

And what, exactly, is going on in the United States? "Attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," DeLay told his flock. So God has now thrown in with DeLay in his efforts to pack the House ethics committee with his allies so that he no longer need be the subject of the scrutiny and censure of his peers.

I don't think this is what Martin Buber meant when he referred to an "I-Thou" relationship with the Lord, but I could be mistaken.

For Bill Frist, Terri Schiavo came along at an opportune moment. After inspecting some videotapes made by her parents, the doctor announced that the examinations by court-appointed physicians were erroneous in concluding that Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for the past 15 years. He may also have concluded that if getting the jump on the 2008 Republican presidential field required issuing a preposterous diagnosis, that was a small price to pay. Frist isn't running for Neurologist in Chief, after all.

For George W. Bush, too, Terri Schiavo came along at a propitious time. All is not well in Bushland. The more the American people hear about the president's Social Security scheme, the more they reject it -- lately by margins approaching 2 to 1. The Bush bills that have been moving through Congress -- tightening up bankruptcy regulations, authorizing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, limiting consumer lawsuits -- do nothing for the Christian conservatives who helped reelect him. Indeed, the whole Bush economic agenda threatens social conservatives of modest means, as it does anyone of modest means. If signing a bill in his pajamas meant he could rekindle their support, why, that was worth even interrupting his sleep.

At its topmost ranks, and not only there, the party of Lincoln has become the party of Elmer Gantry. It peddles miracle cures and elixirs of life, to the benefit of the preachers, not the patients. When it comes to promoting real cures, today's Republicans are nowhere to be found. The Medicaid cuts pushed by the White House and passed by House Republicans last week would, if enacted into law, shorten the lives of numerous poor Americans living in conscious, not vegetative states. But that's a topic of no demonstrable interest to Christian conservatives, though I've yet to come across the biblical passage that exempts them from such concerns.

Bush, Frist, DeLay and the Republican apparat have behaved throughout this episode as if the political advantage clearly belonged to those who satisfied the most die-hard elements of the Christian right. But if polling conducted Sunday by ABC News is even remotely accurate, the Republicans may be badly mistaken. By 63 percent to 28 percent, the public supported the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, and fully 70 percent opposed the federal government's intervention. Those rejecting the Republican leadership's position included even Republicans (by a 58 to 39 percent margin) and evangelicals (by a 50 to 44 percent margin).

In their haste to curry favor with the Christian right, the Republican leaders have run roughshod over some very deeply rooted American -- and conservative -- beliefs. Americans tend to believe in their doctors, and in the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. They believe in spheres of privacy where the state cannot intrude. There's no more distinctly American belief than the right to be left alone by government. Liberals and conservatives differ over which great causes compel a suspension of that right, but both sides of the spectrum acknowledge it axiomatically.

That places a special burden on advocates for governmental activism in the United States. At a minimum, the consequences that the government's intervention will have on private lives -- and on the principle of the private life -- need to be weighed. And by intervening by fiat in the Schiavo tragedy, at the last minute, from on high, with no serious inspection of the particulars of the case and to clear political ends, the Republicans failed that test abysmally. In that sense, the Schiavo affair looks like their equivalent of what court-ordered busing was to liberals: an act of social engineering that runs counter to Americans' desire for control over their own, and their families', lives.

For 30 years, the Repubs have been trying to dictate when life begins. Now, they want to decide when it ends, and even what "life" means. That hubristic overreach ought to earn a slap-back.

Home Team

My local NPR outlet tells me that the new local baseball franchise, the Nationals, are looking for a new stadium announcer and that 20 people are under consideration. How much do you want to bet that none of them are women?

IRS Harrassment

3/22/2005 - IRS hits church over Sen. Kerry visit

A Florida church’s tax-exempt status is in jeopardy as the IRS has launched a probe into a visit by former candidate John Kerry last fall, the (registration-restricted) Miami Herald reports Tuesday. Some wonder if the probe is politically motivated. Excerpts follow.

The probe is related to an appearance last October by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and several black leaders, including U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek of Miami, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The reason for the investigation, an IRS official wrote in a 10-page letter obtained by The Herald, is that “a reasonable belief exists that Friendship Missionary Baptist Church has engaged in political activities that could jeopardize its tax-exempt status as a church.'’

Rev. Gaston Smith took a break from the revelry and worship of Palm Sunday services to inform the congregation about the inquiry. He said visits by political candidates are nothing new, and that the 75-year-old church did not violate U.S. tax code, as suggested in the letter. He has hired former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis to defend the church in the inquiry.

‘’This is not about politics. It’s about principles,'’ Smith said. Silence fell over the congregation as he spoke.

The inquiry raises serious questions about whether the predominantly black church can keep its tax-exempt status. If it fails, members and contributors could not deduct tithes and other gifts, upon which churches heavily rely to operate.

Both men predicted Friendship, 740 NW 58th St., would prevail.

Addressing the congregation, Lewis said that after being contacted by Smith, it took him ‘’about a second'’ to take the case. He said he took the case pro bono…

It is not clear whose complaint triggered the IRS investigation, nor is it known if other churches are under investigation related to the 2004 campaign cycle…

Meek, the statewide chairman of Kerry’s failed presidential campaign, said the complaints came from outsider groups that may specifically be targeting black churches. He said two other Miami-area churches received inquiry notices last year, but declined to name them or discuss the probes.

‘’I would like for these groups to show their face. What they’re doing is launching complaints against African-American churches in Florida, which is very unfortunate, and in some cases embarrassing for the institution,'’ Meek said.

Hmm. Looks like highly selective enforcement. I know for a fact that there were Catholic priests who told their flocks that it would be a sin not to vote for Bush.

Trashing Science

For Bush, science is a dirty word

In America's right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism

Tristram Hunt
Tuesday March 22, 2005
The Guardian

Given the cultural influence of the White House, it is no surprise this disregard for science is trickling down into civil society. In some school districts, the study of evolution is now in danger of extinction. A New York Times survey revealed that not only was it being replaced in certain curricula by creationism, but even where it was on the syllabus some teachers were too afraid to teach "the E word" for fear of evangelical reaction.

In many classrooms, the teaching of evolution is hampered by the teachers themselves - circumstantial evidence suggests that about a third of American biology teachers support the unscientific theories of "intelligent design". With the successful assault on evolution behind them, evangelicals are starting to train their sights on the earth sciences of geology and physics.

Meanwhile, in a belated attempt to stem the steady collapse in foreign students and scientists entering the US, the state department has begun to revise its onerous visa requirements. However, it will take more than a few shifts in security clearance to reverse the first enrolment decrease since the 1970s.

More broadly, science is playing a diminishing role within public debate. America is experiencing a range of irregular weather patterns from unprecedented rainfall in California to powerful storm cycles across Florida. The suggestion that such extreme weather - along with hotter summers and wetter winters - might just have something to do with climate change is rarely entertained. Instead, the Bush administration continues to befuddle the science (despite a consensus within the US National Academy of Sciences that human activity is causing climate change), and so quietly sanctions the culture of excess.

Just as it cut taxes during war, this presidency sees no need to foster resource conservation in the face of global warming. On the contrary, average house sizes are mushrooming while gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles are frankly passe. In American cities, the three-tonne Hummer is a regular sight, with a "drive-thru" at Starbucks starting to resemble a security sweep outside Falluja.

The talk of the Chicago Auto Show was the International CXT. Part of a new generation of extreme trucks, the CXT is nine feet high, weighs seven tonnes, costs $90,000 and does 7-10 miles to the gallon. TV stars Jay Leno and Ashton Kutcher are already proud owners. It won't be long before it hits Main Street.

Rather than attempting to mitigate climate change trends, the White House seems intent on encouraging them. Its most recent budget proposal cuts funds for the EPA while increasing resources for the truly baloney science of missile defence. The Orwellian Clear Skies Act lets industry polluters off the hook while its truth-speak twin, the Healthy Forests Initiative, encourages more logging and road-building in national forests.

Even if the department of homeland security starts to let foreign scientists back in, many have to be asking: given such official disdain, is there any point doing the science?

I'm starting to wonder what's going to be left of this country by the time Bush is through with it.

Out of the Mainstream

The press, the polls and Terri Schiavo

ABC News had to go and ruin everything by commissioning a poll to find out exactly what Americans think about Congress' unprecedented intervention into the Terri Schiavo saga. Up until yesterday morning, reporters and pundits, always nervous about labeling the GOP Congress as being out of the mainstream, had done their best to tip toe around existing polling data that showed Americans supported, by an overwhelming majority, Michael Schiavo in his attempt to remove the feeding tube from his wife.

At least the Washington Post finally ended its silence on the polling issue, with today’s A6 article, "Analysts: GOP May Be Out of Step With Public." Notice two things about that story, though. First, the Post reports in the lead that Americans are "divided" about the Schiavo case, suggesting some kind of public opinion tug-of-war. Not true. To date, every single poll commissioned has come back with the same result: Americans, by margins that range from 20 to 30 to even 40 percent, support Michael Schiavo's decision to remove his wife's feeding tube. How is that "divided?" Second, notice how the Post has to rely on "analysts" to read the polling data. The Post's reporters shouldn't need an analyst to tell them the obvious: When nearly 70 percent of the American public disagrees with you, you're out of step with the mainstream.

A friend of mine once showed me an exercise he learned from a media consultant: he handed me the front pages of the day's WaPo and NYT and a pen and told me to circle all of the stories whose headlines either stated or implied a conflict. A couple of minutes later, I discovered that I had circled 3/4 of the stories. That's what the WaPo poll story is doing, implying a conflict where none exists. They do this all the time and the "he said/she said" dueling quotes which obscure the truth is one of the most common tools.

CNN is doing it today with the "dueling diagnoses" in the Schiavo case. Here's the truth: between 3/4 and all of her cerebral cortex has been destroyed. There is no chance of recovery.

Get Congress Out of My Family

Robert Scheer:
Life, Death and Cynical Grandstanding

Despite the shrill howls of outrage that have been inciting politicians from talk radio, 70% of Americans polled nationally by ABC News called congressional intervention in the Schiavo case inappropriate, with 58% holding that view "strongly."

It seems obvious that such a delicate life-and-death case should not be decided by radio shock jocks hunting for ratings, embattled politicians looking for wedge issues or even majority rule — in this case the 63% of Americans polled who believe that Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. Instead, it is family members, doctors and, when needed as an impartial arbitrator, the courts that must carefully and dispassionately weigh the extremely complex medical, ethical and legal issues involved.

Which, in fact, is exactly what happened in the Schiavo case. Impartial doctors and judges methodically examined Schiavo and the legal case, respectively, for seven years, consistently backing the guardianship rights of Schiavo's husband and his decision to end artificial life-support treatments that kept her alive in what the Florida courts concluded is "a persistent vegetative state … with no hope of a medical cure."

Further, the federal courts already had the power to act if they believed a fundamental right had been abrogated. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal to intervene — as it had done in 2001 and earlier this year. But that didn't stop the Christian right and the politicians in its thrall from seizing on the Schiavos' plight to advance their "right to life" agenda. If only this agenda were consistent. For example, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush refused to review cases involving mentally retarded death row inmates. Nor can I remember any time Congress rushed back from a vacation to deal with real-time incidents of genocide in the Balkans, Rwanda or Sudan. This is selective compassion of the most pandering sort.

In the end, it is not about who is right in the depressingly ugly battle between Schiavo's parents on one side and her husband on the other. Those of us who have dealt with the slow death of a beloved relative in the hospital are all too familiar with the pain in facing the myriad decisions that can tear us apart.

What this case is really about is keeping politics and state-endorsed religion out of our private lives. Many seniors like me now must dread that our most personal and painful private matters might be turned into political footballs by those cravenly seeking approval from certain voting blocs, or that we could be imprisoned against our wishes inside a dead body because of somebody else's religious beliefs. This is why seniors polled by ABC were the most likely of any age group to support the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube.

The one bright spot in this sad story is that millions of Americans are now talking about how they want to be cared for medically and are writing or reviewing living wills.

As the polls show, while our Beltway politicians are making fools of themselves, those of us in the real world are trying to ensure that our most private moments are not turned into a humiliating circus.

A little discussion of the right to privacy, family grandstanding and the role of the press is in order, too. Cable TV coverage has been ghoulish and unneccesary.

Huh?

You are going to have to 'splain this to me, Lucy. What exactly has anybody "won" if Terri Schiavo continues to live without consciousness on the end of a feeding tube for the next 20 years? How does this serve "life?" What is "the culture of life" if it means this kind of cruelty, anyway? Why would I want this for myself or anyone I love?

He Dances

"This has nothing to do with the sanctity of life"
The Rev. John Paris, professor of bioethics, says Terri Schiavo has the moral and legal right to die, and only the Christian right is keeping her alive.

Why is the case bizarre?

Again, this issue is not new. Every court, every jurisdiction that has heard it, agrees. So you'd think this issue would have ended. I thought it ended when we took it to the Supreme Court in 1990. But I hadn't anticipated the power of the Christian right. They elected him [George Bush]. And now he dances.

Sleaze-o-cons

Contemplate this: if the neo-cons have cut Brooksie loose, are they winning or dying?

Masters of Sleaze
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: March 22, 2005

Down in the depths of the netherworld, where Tammany Hall grafters and Chicago ward heelers gather amid spittoons and brass railings, a reverential silence now spreads across the communion. The sleazemasters of old look back into the land of the mortals and they see greatness in the form of Jack Abramoff.

Only a genius like Abramoff could make money lobbying against an Indian tribe's casino and then turn around and make money defending that tribe against himself. Only a giant like Abramoff would have the guts to use one tribe's casino money to finance a Focus on the Family crusade against gambling in order to shut down a rival tribe's casino.

Only an artist like Abramoff could suggest to a tribe that it pay him by taking out life insurance policies on its eldest members. Then when the elders dropped off they could funnel the insurance money through a private school and into his pockets.

This is sleaze of a high order. And yet according to reports in The Washington Post and elsewhere, Abramoff accomplished it all.

Yet it's important to remember this: A genius like Abramoff doesn't spring fully formed on his own. Just as Michelangelo emerged in the ferment of Renaissance Italy, so did Abramoff emerge from his own circle of creativity and encouragement.

Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, a new cadre of daring and original thinkers arose. These bold innovators had a key insight: that you no longer had to choose between being an activist and a lobbyist. You could be both. You could harness the power of K Street to promote the goals of Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich. And best of all, you could get rich while doing it!

Before long, ringleader Grover Norquist and his buddies were signing lobbying deals with the Seychelles and the Northern Mariana Islands and talking up their interests at weekly conservative strategy sessions - what could be more vital to the future of freedom than the commercial interests of these two fine locales?

Before long, folks like Norquist and Abramoff were talking up the virtues of international sons of liberty like Angola's Jonas Savimbi and Congo's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko - all while receiving compensation from these upstanding gentlemen, according to The Legal Times. Only a reactionary could have been so discomfited by Savimbi's little cannibalism problem as to think this was not a daring contribution to the cause of Reaganism.

Soon the creative revolutionaries were blending the high-toned forms of the think tank with the low-toned scams of the buckraker. Ed Buckham, Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, helped run the U.S. Family Network, which supported the American family by accepting large donations and leasing skyboxes at the MCI Center, according to Roll Call. Michael Scanlon, DeLay's former spokesman, organized a think tank called the American International Center, located in a house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., which was occupied, according to Andrew Ferguson's devastating compendium in The Weekly Standard, by a former "lifeguard of the year" and a former yoga instructor.

Ralph Reed, meanwhile, smashed the tired old categories that used to separate social conservatives from corporate consultants. Reed signed on with Channel One, Verizon, Enron and Microsoft to shore up the moral foundations of our great nation. Reed so strongly opposes gambling as a matter of principle that he bravely accepted $4 million through Abramoff from casino-rich Indian tribes to gin up a grass-roots campaign.

As time went by, the spectacular devolution of morals accelerated. Many of the young innovators were behaving like people who, having read Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative," embraced the conservative part while discarding the conscience part.

Abramoff's and Scanlon's Indian-gaming scandal will go down as the movement's crowning achievement, more shameless than anything the others would do, but still the culmination of the trends building since 1995. It perfectly embodied their creed and philosophy: "I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!!" as Abramoff wrote to Reed.

They made at least $66 million.

This is a major accomplishment. And remember: Abramoff didn't do it on his own.

It took a village. The sleazo-cons thought they could take over K Street to advance their agenda. As it transpired, K Street took over them.

Remarkable.

As If It Mattered

An Indecent Administration Rolls On
# Once again, Bush scorns international humanitarian standards. This time he's fighting to save capital punishment.
By Mike Farrell, Mike Farrell is president of Death Penalty Focus, which seeks to abolish capital punishment.

Instead of abiding by the law and notifying detained noncitizens of their right to contact their consul, we try them and lock them up. And sometimes we kill them.

Does that sound decent?

It didn't to Mexico, which has banned capital punishment. Finding a number of its citizens on death row in the United States — and finding itself ignored in its request that we honor our agreement — Mexico sued the U.S. in the International Court of Justice, saying that we had no right to put their citizens to death while denying them their protection under the protocol.

And — surprise! — it won. The World Court ruled that the United States must "revisit" at least the 51 cases in which the defendants ended up on death row.

Stalwart champion of international law that he is, an apparently chastened and embarrassed President Bush at first told Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales that ignoring yet another "quaint" international agreement might be too much and that we should reexamine the 51 death row cases.

After all, as the U.S. solicitor general noted, compliance with the Vienna Convention "serves to protect the interests of U.S. citizens abroad, promotes the effective conduct of foreign relations and underscores the United States' commitment in the international community to the rule of law."

In other words, it's the decent thing to do.

Yet scarcely a week later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent off a pungent memo to the United Nations announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the optional protocol.

What's behind this most recent back of the hand to the international community?

For one, Bush and his advisors don't appreciate international laws that complicate their lives. (Note, for example, their attitude toward the Geneva Convention. And the Kyoto treaty, the land mine treaty and the International Criminal Court.) Apparently they don't like to be told they're wrong.

But more than that, they're trying to protect our death penalty, a creaky system already teetering on the brink of collapse. Shot through with failure, exposed as entrapping the innocent, the mentally ill and those with drunk, drug-abusing, sleeping or simply incompetent lawyers, capital punishment has been wounded by U.S. Supreme Court rulings recognizing "evolving standards that mark the progress of a maturing society."

Worse, the high court recently cited "international standards" when eliminating our right to kill the mentally retarded and, last month, juveniles. Making it harder to kill foreigners, then, could be a crippling blow.

So, when the rulings go against us we take our ball and go home. Smart? No. Fair? Hardly. Decent? Doesn't seem so, but how can we know when the decency police are so busy with Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth?

History gets written by the winner, Mike.

Pick Your Jaw Off the Floor and Call Your Senators

Just when your jaw has hit the floor so many times over Bush appointments, comes a new reason to get a house with a basement. Via NewsHog:

Trophy Hunting Advocate Named Acting Director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

03/18/2005

WASHINGTON – Today, The HSUS expressed its strong disappointment that Interior Secretary Gale Norton has named Matthew J. Hogan to be acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service should police trophy hunters and others who seek to harm wildlife," added Pacelle. "They should not act as a procurement agency for people who simply wish to shoot rare animals as a means of improving their standing in the competitive world of trophy hunting."

Dick Cheney likes those "hunting parks" where the trapped animals are fish in a barrel and he doesn't have to do anything other than reload. This isn't hunting, it's massacre as blood sport.

UPDATE: Once your jaw is off the floor, consider this:

Data on Fla. Panthers Faulty and Incomplete, Wildlife Agency Says

Associated Press
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page A15

Criticized by a whistle-blower, the Fish and Wildlife Service conceded yesterday that it bungled some of the science used in protecting Florida's endangered panthers.

The agency acknowledged three violations of a 2000 law that is intended to ensure the quality of data the government uses. The infractions involved the issuing of documents based on faulty assumptions about the habitat of one of the world's rarest animals, agency officials said.

Steve Williams, who resigned last week as director, reached the new conclusions as one of his last actions at the agency, based on a review by three senior Interior Department officials.

Dan Ashe, the service's top science adviser and a member of the review panel, said the agency relied too much on data collected only in late-morning hours to establish the panthers' home range. Panthers are most active at dawn and dusk. The agency said it now would protect more varieties of habitat but not more acreage.

"I think the service was slow in responding to the changing science," Ashe said. "Those documents did not represent a complete and accurate picture of Florida panther habitat needs." Officials stopped short of saying they had vindicated Andrew Eller, a Fish and Wildlife biologist fired in November who filed a whistle-blower complaint that the agency used faulty science to approve development in panther habitats.

Eller and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group, challenged Fish and Wildlife in a petition last May under the Data Quality Act.

Agency officials earlier said Eller was consistently late in completing his work and engaged in unprofessional exchanges with the public. Eller described his firing as politically motivated.

The government created the 26,000-acre Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in 1989.

The breeding population is thought to be below 50, the minimum needed to sustain the population.

They don't vote. They never contribute. Next question?

The Big Why

Polls Show Most Americans Say Bush Handling Iraq Poorly
Surveys Also Find Most Americans Agree U.S. Troops Need To Remain In Iraq

POSTED: 9:56 pm EST March 20, 2005
UPDATED: 10:20 pm EST March 20, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Recent public opinion on Iraq suggests two basic findings: Most people are generally unhappy with President Bush's handling of Iraq and they are resigned to the importance of seeing the commitment through.

# Some other results from recent polls on Iraq: Six in 10 think the president does not have a clear plan for bringing the Iraq situation to a successful conclusion.
# Two-thirds say the level of casualties in Iraq has been unacceptable, when comparing the goals of the war to the costs.
# A solid majority, about 55 percent, have said for months that U.S. troops must stay until the situation is stable.
# People are closely divided on whether the war was a mistake, according to several polls.
# A majority of people think Iraq aided al-Qaida before the war and had weapons of mass destruction - two opinions that have been widely debated.
# People are closely divided on whether the war in Iraq helped or hurt in the war on terrorism.

These findings come from polls by ABC-The Washington Post, The Associated Press-Ipsos, CNN-USA Today-Gallup and the Pew Research Center. The polls of about 1,000 adults each were taken in late February or early March and each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

I find it vanishingly impossible to know what "seeing it through" means under the circumstance. We're undermanned and heading for defeat. What does the US consumer want that to look like? Declare victory and get out?

Five Questions and Answers

Bumpers are many things: wise, witty, reflective, articulate. But they are not self-disciplined. Seven five questions interviews have now been sent out. This is the thread for replies. I'll warn you: the questions got harder as I went along. I knew I could do five sets, but those of you who added to the list got harder questions.

UPDATE: Lauren at feministe has just sent me a five question interview. She asks complicated questions, so this is going to take a little time. I'll try to post the questions and my answers later tonight.

Violation of Ethics and Law

The Midnight Coup

Republican leaders, eyeing an opportunity to appease their radical right-wing constituents, convened Congress over the weekend to shamelessly interject the federal government into the wrenching Schiavo family dispute. They brushed aside our federalist system of government, which assigns the resolution of such disputes to state law, and state judges. Even President Bush flew back from his ranch to Washington on Sunday to be in on what amounts to a constitutional coup d'etat.

Conservatives are the historical defenders of states' rights, and the supposed proponents of keeping big government out of people's lives, but this case once again shows that some social conservatives are happy to see the federal government acquire Stalinist proportions when imposing their morality on the rest of the country. So breathtaking was this attempted usurpation of power, wresting jurisdiction over a right-to-die case away from Florida's judiciary, that Republican leaders in the end had to agree to limit this legislation's applicability to the Schiavo case.

In other words, according to the bill passed by the Senate Sunday afternoon, and which the House passed after midnight, among all the cases of patients in a persistent vegetative state nationwide, Terri Schiavo's case is the only one in which parents are able to have a federal court review state court rulings on the fate of their loved one.

Last Friday, after years of litigation and medical evaluations, the Florida judge presiding over the case ordered the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube, pursuant to her husband's wishes.

House and Senate committees outrageously tried to intervene then by issuing subpoenas to the Schiavos and Terri's doctors, and by asking federal courts to order the feeding tube reinstated. But since this was not a case within federal jurisdiction, their efforts failed. Hence the effort to wrest jurisdiction the old-fashioned way, by passing a law.

Congress does act in other extraordinary cases on behalf of a specific individual, such as when it grants someone U.S. citizenship. But here, Congress is breaking new ground, trying to overturn a judicial decision by altering the Constitution's federalist scheme. This is the family law equivalent of the constitutionally banned "bill of attainder," legislation that seeks to convict someone of a crime.
....
This case, headed like a bullet to the Supreme Court, must have most of the justices wishing for a Kevlar vest. The case is a marker for other battles — about medical assistance in ending a terminally ill life, as in the much-fought Oregon law and a similar proposal working its way through the California Legislature. About the rights of gay couples to assume spousal rights in medical decisions. Most painfully, about abortion.

Federal judges, regarded with contempt by moral conservatives on other issues, are being dragged into another swamp. No decision they make in the Schiavo case and those certain to follow can be the right one.

The bill is unconstitutional on its face, this is a (pardon the expression) no brainer. It is a gross violation of the separation of powers and state's rights. Until the federal judge announces his decision, we won't know if he made the face denial, which he was within his rights to do, though it is unlikely he would have gone through with the hearing if he were of a mind to issue a face denial.

Schooling Wolfie

EU fury grows at Wolfowitz appointment
By Geoffrey Lean

20 March 2005

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, has been summoned to Brussels to explain to an angry Europe how he would run the World Bank, in an escalation of the international row over his nomination to head the world's most important development body.

European countries are furious both at President George Bush's naming of an enemy of multilateralism and by the unilateral way it was done, and are considering whether to block it. But there are strong indications that, although Tony Blair knew of the appointment in advance, he did not inform his Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn.

The summons - officially described as an "invitation" - was issued by Louis Michel, the new EU Development Commissioner, while he was attending a summit of G8 environment and development ministers in Derbyshire on Friday. His demand was welcomed by many EU governments, but Mr Wolfowitz, who has stressed his willingness to "listen" to his critics, has yet to respond.

A spokesman for Mr Michel said that Mr Wolfowitz was being asked to present his "vision for development and the role of the World Bank",, which provides more than $20bn (£10.4bn) in funds to developing countries each year.

By tradition the US effectively appoints the president of the World Bank, while Europe chooses the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its sister institution, even though the appointments are formally made by the institutions' boards. Until five years ago nominations were nodded through, but the US then blocked the European nomination for the IMF, creating a precedent. And just 10 days ago Mr Blair's Commission for Africa concluded that the practice should be replaced by an open competition to find the best candidate.
....
Most experts believe that, Europe will agree Mr Wolfowitz's appointment, rather than risk a prolonged row that might damage the bank.

But anger is rising both at the nomination itself and Mr Bush's arrogance in making it, after initial soundings had met with widespread opposition around the world. One senior British figure privately described it as an "abuse" of power by Mr Bush last week.

I'm wondering if we'll even want to live here anymore once Bush is done with our country.

The F Word

Tristero has returned to address the Schiavo matter:

Well, it happened.

Think fascism can't happen here? It already has. That's right. It already has. Today was just the first, truly normative display of the amount of control this fascist regime has. One party, fully in power that can, on a whim, overturn any law of the land. Without limit or control.

The Contrarian

AFP sues Google
By John Oates
Published Monday 21st March 2005 09:03 GMT

Agence France Presse is suing Google for linking to its news stories.

AFP sells stories and photos to newspapers and other news sources. Some of its content is available through its clunky website.

Legal eagles: do you spot a trend here?

Foreshadowing

The Hughes Doctrine
By BOB MANN

Published: March 21, 2005

SO what can we expect from Karen P. Hughes if she is confirmed as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs? What steps will President Bush's confidante take to rehabilitate America's image in the Arab world and around the globe?

While reporters and Congressional staffers are combing Ms. Hughes's public statements, interviews and speeches in advance of her confirmation hearings, I accidentally stumbled into a little research project of my own. In my garage.

Back in 1976, Karen Hughes - then Karen Parfitt - was my star journalism student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. At the end of the term, I did what I've traditionally done with work from some of my best students: I stuffed some of it into a cardboard box. (That box has now been stored in attics, garages and basements around the nation.)

During her years as a national figure, never have I explored that tattered old box or elected to write about Karen Hughes. In fact, the box probably would have gone untouched had the recent death of my father not moved me to go rummaging through materials I had stashed away years ago.

And what did I find? Well, first there was a 29-year-old, critter-friendly, half-eaten grade sheet, which lists Karen Parfitt as seated between Molly Sawyer and Marianne Seiler. Karen was in a late Thursday afternoon deadline reporting lab of only six students. The time slot wasn't popular with students who liked long weekends.

The yellowed grade sheet indicates the future Ms. Hughes made a B+ on that initial deadline undertaking, an exercise in which I barked out facts that students nervously tried to convert into a news article while I paced among them, ranting and raving in tough city-editor fashion.

Most students pounded feverishly, some of them panicked, on old Royal typewriters, but not Ms. Hughes.

From day one, she got my attention with her intense focus. Her steel-blue eyes shut out the rest of class and concentrated only on her words. Always, she finished first, ripping out her copy and cockily presenting it to me. I loved it.

I asked those lab students on that first day in the spring of 1976 to write a short biography and to discuss their ambitions. Ms. Hughes, then 19, typed out:

"The most important issue facing America is the question of her foreign policy. I have lived in other countries and seen anti-American feelings growing as totalitarian governments or a loss of democracy begin to sweep their country.

"I think America is in danger both internally from the dissentions of her own people on foreign policy and externally from the strong governments in the world which are not democratic."

As a journalism student in the heart of Texas, Karen Hughes was composing what has become the Bush doctrine. Perhaps her portfolio is not so "new."

Excuses

45 dead in Iraq unrest on 2nd anniversary of US-led invasion
(AFP)

21 March 2005

MOSUL - At least 45 people died in violence in Iraq, including a US soldier, as Washington defended its decision to lead an invasion exactly two years ago amid protests around the world.

With talks on a new governing coalition still dragging on seven weeks since landmark January elections, Iraq was plunged into a diplomatic crisis with neighbouring Jordan as the two countries recalled their respective envoys following accusations of a Jordanian’s involvement in a deadly suicide bombing.

Insurgents struck around Iraq hitting the fledgling security forces hard at a time when the US government is channelling all its resources into training and equipping them to pave the way for the exit of US-led troops.

In the main northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber with a fake badge slipped Sunday into a building housing the provincial anti-corruption department and blew himself up inside the office of its chief, General Walid Kachmoula, killing him and two of his guards.

Attackers struck again hours later opening fire on the procession bearing Kachmoula’s coffin as it made its way to the cemetery, killing two people and wounding 14, hospital sources said.

Separately, two unidentified bodies shot in the chest and head were found in the city, which has become a new front for the insurgency since November.

In another flashpoint town, gunmen attacked a police station in Baquba killing at least four police and wounding two as a truck bomb rammed into the entrance of an Iraqi army barrack wounding 17 people, a police official said.

Four insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.

In the capital, 24 Iraqi insurgents were killed and six coalition soldiers wounded in a firefight, the US military said.

In the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, a US soldier was killed and three others wounded when a roadside bomb hit their patrol, the US military said.

Despite the continuing high casualty toll from insurgent violence two years after Washington hailed Iraq’s liberation, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that major progress had nonetheless been achieved.

“It’s a wonderful thing to see 25 million Iraqis liberated, to see their economy improve as it has been, to see their political process move toward democracy,” Rumsfeld told Fox News.

Please note that all that voting still hasn't resulted in a government, and that the occupier is the de facto government. There is a whole lot more to democracy than a vote. Just ask the Afghans.

No Takers

From Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in the WaPo:

No Bids for Moran?

We prepared a special Loop Alert on Friday for readers who wanted to have lunch with Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (R-Va.). Their dreams could come true on eBay, where a seller was offering a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a sit-down, face-to-face lunch with a congressman" who has introduced many historic bills.

The lunch with Moran was selling for a minimum bid of only $125. The bidding was to close on Wednesday.

But then the site was taken down. Unclear why. Perhaps word had gotten out and someone objected? Or perhaps it was because, after a couple of days, no one had bid?

I will say this for the ethics-challenged congressman, he did show up at my subway stop to ask for my vote. His last challenger did not.

Moving Pictures

Abuse taped, as 'explosive' as Abu Ghraib
By John Sheed
March 21, 2005
From: AAP

VIDEO footage of US military treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay will reveal many cases of substantial abuse as "explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib", a lawyer said today.
Adelaide lawyer Stephen Kenny, who represented Australian David Hicks during the early part of his detention at the military prison in Cuba, told a law conference today that 500 hours of videotape of prisoners at the US base existed.

The full story of abuse at Guantanamo Bay would not be told until the tapes were released, he said.

"I believe that these videos, if they are ever released, will be as explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib," Mr Kenny told the LawAsia Downunder conference.

Abu Ghraib is the prison outside Baghdad from where pictures emerged of US guards abusing prisoners while some of them were forced into humiliating, sexually suggestive poses.

The US military videotaped the actions of the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) responsible for prisoner control at Guantanamo Bay, Mr kenny said.

Evidence of the violence used by the IRF came to light when a member of the US military, whom Mr Kenny identified as Specialist Baker, applied for a medical discharge after being involved in a training session.

"He was dressed in an orange jump suit and the IRF squad was instructed that he was a detainee who had abused a guard and was to be moved to another cell.

"What happened to him only came to light in Specialist Baker's later hearing for a medical discharge from the military for the brain damage he suffered in the beating he received at the hands of that trainee squad."

Read this from last June.

Bush Oil

Iraq invasion may be remembered as start of the age of oil scarcity
Production tumbles in post-Hussein era as more countries vie for shrinking supplies

Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Instead of inaugurating a new age of cheap oil, the Iraq war may become known as the beginning of an era of scarcity.

Two years ago, it seemed likely that Iraq, with the world's third-largest petroleum reserves, would become a hypercharged gusher once U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein. But chaos and guerrilla sabotage have slowed the flow of oil to a comparative trickle.

The price of crude on global markets hit an all-time record Friday, and oil experts say U.S. consumers are likely to keep feeling the pinch.

"Global supply hasn't kept up, and it isn't likely to in the near future, and one of the causes is Iraq," said John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York.

The war coincided with the start of a sharp rise in oil imports by booming China and India, and experts say this alignment of factors may keep prices permanently high.

Iraq's oil production averaged about 3 million barrels a day before the war and now lags below 2 million, while prewar projections had pegged production to have hit at least 4 million by now. This missing production would have covered much of the annual growth in global oil demand, which is expected to increase by 1.8 million barrels a day this year, to 84.3 million barrels.

"If it weren't for the insurgency, Iraq would produce at least another million barrels day -- and maybe two," said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington. "Iraq is very much missing from the market, and it's one of the reasons why prices have risen so much."

Iraq has earned only about $31 billion from oil exports in the two years since the U.S. invasion, far below the prewar predictions by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who claimed that Iraqi oil would generate $50 billion to $100 billion in the same period.

Foreign oil companies have withdrawn almost all their staff from Iraq because of the dangers. "The risk to operate there is a very serious risk, and it's not about to go away," Lichtblau said. "People are killed and kidnapped, and those pipelines are being blown up a week after they're repaired, again and again."

What's gas going for where you live? I need to fill up today and the price at the Exxon across the street last night was $2.20, I haven't checked it this morning.

Olden Days

That Scalia Charm

Published: March 21, 2005

Some court-watchers say Justice Antonin Scalia is on a "charm offensive" to become the next chief justice. Then he must have been taking the day off when he gave a speech last week and lashed out at the Supreme Court's recent ruling striking down the death penalty for juveniles, and at the idea of a "living Constitution." There is nothing charming about his view that judges have no business considering the constitutionality of aspects of the death penalty, or that the Constitution should be frozen in time.

Justice Scalia dissented bitterly in this month's juvenile death penalty case. Reasonable minds may ask, as he did, whether the majority opinion relied too heavily on the norms of international law in deciding what punishment does not meet modern standards of decency. But Justice Scalia disagreed not merely with the majority's conclusion that offenders cannot be executed for crimes committed when they were under the age of 18, but with the very fact that the court was even considering the question. "By what conceivable warrant can nine lawyers presume to be the authoritative conscience of the nation?" he asked.

In his speech last week at the Woodrow Wilson Center, he continued on the same theme. He attacked the idea of a "living Constitution," one that evolves with modern sensibilities, which the Supreme Court has long recognized in its jurisprudence, and of "evolving notions of decency," a standard the court uses to interpret the Eighth Amendment prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishments" in cases like those involving the death penalty.

In drafting the Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, the Founders chose to use broad phrases that necessarily require interpretation. Since its landmark 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison, the court has held that it is the final word on the Constitution's meaning. In the recent juvenile death penalty case, the court was doing its job of determining what one such phrase, "cruel and unusual punishment," means today.

The implications of Justice Scalia's remarks are sweeping. Many of the most central principles of American constitutional law - from the right to a court-appointed lawyer to the right to buy contraception - have emerged from the court's evolving sense of the meaning of constitutional clauses. Justice Scalia seems to be suggesting that many, or perhaps all, of these rights should exist only at the whim of legislatures.

One of these mornings, Americans will wake up and realize that they've left the nutjobs in charge. Scalia thinks he can undo history and sweep us back to 1789, when women didn't vote and a black man was 3/5 human. Welcome to those days, Tony, but I don't want to live in your world.

Bed Bugs

Here's a wrinkle I hadn't thought of. Time to move to foam pillows. Down comforters should be off limits, too. Tell your friends and family.

Feather pillows may carry Asian bird flu

07.03.05

Poultry feathers imported from China to make products such as pillows could carry the avian flu virus, says a British microbiologist who is urging the British Government to consider banning them.

Imports of Chinese poultry meat already are banned in Britain, but duck, chicken and turkey feathers are still being brought in, Professor Hugh Pennington told BBC Radio. He said the virus could survive in faecal material on feathers.

"I think there is a case for looking very seriously at feather imports and saying, well, is it wise to be bringing in feathers from countries where this bird flu virus is now pretty well out of control?" he was quoted as saying.

"The risk is a real one that we might be importing the avian flu virus along with the feathers," Professor Pennington said.

"It may not be very easy for the feathers to be infectious to people, but they could certainly be infectious to birds and, of course, not just chickens but pretty well any species of birds."

We don't really know much about the disease vectors for this bug. I'm planning to buy new bedding this spring and this needs to be taken into account.

Justin Raimondo, Call Your Office

No time for rejoicing as Iraq toll keeps climbing
By Frank Walker and agencies
March 20, 2005
The Sun-Herald

Two years after the invasion of Iraq the rate of US soldiers being killed is averaging 18 a week, almost double the rate in the first year after the war.

The country is far more dangerous than 12 months ago, say security experts, and reconstruction has slowed to a crawl.

Between 40,000 and 50,000 US military personnel are in Iraq despite serious medical conditions that should have ruled them out of combat, according to the National Gulf War Resource Centre. The GI Rights Hotline, which counsels troops, says it fielded 32,000 calls last year from soldiers seeking an exit from the military, or suffering from post-combat stress.

Others vote with their feet. Last year the Pentagon admitted that 5500 of its forces had gone AWL, although it claims many returned to their units after resolving personal crises.

At the same time that Kevin Benderman's unit was called up for a second tour in Iraq with the US Third Infantry Division, two soldiers tried to kill themselves and another had a relative shoot him in the leg. Seventeen went AWL or ran off to Canada, and Sergeant Benderman, whose family has sent a son to every war since the American revolution, defied his genes and nine years of military training and followed his conscience.
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As the division packed its gear to leave Fort Stewart, Georgia, Sergeant Benderman applied for a discharge as a conscientious objector - an act seen as a betrayal by many in his unit.

Although they may not be part of any organised anti-war movement, the conscientious objectors, runaways and other irregular protesters suggest that, two years on, the Iraq mission is taking a heavy toll.

The Antiwar movement is organizing even as you read this. I'm part of it, so are you, the people who are learning the truth.

Vanishing Benefits

Gambling on Luck-Based Benefits
# The dangerous new deal: Take that long-awaited vacation and you may not have time left in the bank for getting sick.

By Joe Robinson, Joe Robinson is author of "Work to Live."

Even if you can't make it to the local craps tables or you've spent your budget for Lotto tickets this week, chances are you're still doing your part for the new Roulette Economy, thanks to an in-cubicle gaming program sweeping the American workplace.

It's called the paid time-off bank, or PTO, and it's symptomatic of a workplace — not to mention society — that increasingly resembles a casino.

Paid time-off banks combine sick leave and vacation days, creating what at first looks like a jackpot — extra vacation days and more flexibility. But the winnings are subject to the vagaries of chance — your health — and corporate sleight of hand. Once your sick days are used up, further absences not covered by short-term disability come out of your holiday hide.

After her company switched to a paid time-off bank, Sherri Landrum, a medical assistant in Denver, discovered the exciting world of luck-based benefits. Last January, the single mother of nine had to have emergency foot surgery. The procedure and prolonged recovery quickly burned through her sick days, wiped out her vacation time and finally hammered her pocketbook. "Half the time I was off, I didn't get paid for," she said. "I couldn't pay my bills, and I'm still not caught up a year later."

Like Landrum, more and more American workers who have used up their puny sick-day allotment will have to decide whether to stumble to work sick or stay home and burn up vacation days. Or worry that if they roll the dice and take time off, it could jeopardize a paycheck if a health emergency hits. It adds another layer of guilt to gobs already there in taking a vacation, making it seem selfish to squander days that might be needed if you or a family member get sick.

All-in-one-leave banks have stormed through offices like rhinoviruses. The number of companies offering them swelled from 20% in 2000 to 67% today, according to CCH Inc., a human resources firm in Chicago. The epidemic comes as the number of sick-leave days continues to decline or vanish. Just three years ago, the average sick leave provided by companies with sick-leave policies for employees was 9.3 days. Now it's 6.9 days, plunging to 5 for most paid time-off sick-leave plans.

Those statistics are a shrinking fig leaf on a thornier issue: Nearly half of U.S. workers don't get any paid sick leave — for low-wage earners, it's 75%. Unlike 139 other nations, the U.S. doesn't guarantee paid sick leave. Let the pneumonias and hernias fall where they may.

Slashed sick leave is part of a broad assault on labor — roundly ignored in the last election — across a downsized workplace as the burden of risk shifts from employers to employees, who, if anyone's listening out there, are livid about it, whether Republican or Democrat or independent. Companies are cutting or eliminating vacation leave (nearly a third of American women don't get any; a quarter of men), pensions, health insurance and ergonomics rules. Meanwhile, the Economist reports that corporate profits in the U.S. are higher than they've been in 75 years as benefits — including sick leave — shrink.

Only one segment of wage earners has not had benefits slashed. "Professionals, managers and CEOs have great benefits," said Robert Drago, a Penn State economist and work-life expert. "For some reason, they no longer believe they have to treat employees on the front lines with dignity and benefits."

I've never had a paid vacation in my life, but this is good to know about while I'm job hunting. In the public sector, particularly non-profits, the lack of pay is normally compensated by better benefits.

How is it where you work? Has your employer gone to the time off bank?

Trouble in Blighty

MI6 chief told PM: Americans ‘fixed’ case for war
Nick Fielding

THE HEAD of MI6 told Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed” by the Americans to suit the policy, according to a BBC documentary that will reignite its battle with the government.

Blair followed the US lead by failing to reveal publicly doubts about the quality of intelligence that he had requested to support the case for war, the programme claims.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a select group of ministers on America’s determination to press ahead with the war nine months before hostilities began.

After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was “inevitable”. Dearlove said “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by George W Bush’s administration.

The allegations against Blair just weeks before a general election are likely to reopen the feud between the government and the BBC that came to a head over the death of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector. It led to the resignations of Gavyn Davies, its chairman, and Greg Dyke, its director-general.

The documentary — to be shown on BBC1’s Panorama tonight — reveals that Britain and America were anxious to present a united front on Iraq despite a paucity of new data on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It quotes from a leaked memo on the presentation of intelligence sent by Peter Ricketts, political director of the Foreign Office, to Jack Straw, foreign secretary, in March 2002.

The memo says: “There is more work to ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with the US. But even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years.”

The programme argues that Blair had signed up to follow Bush’s plans for regime change in Iraq as early as April 2002. It quotes Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as leader of the Commons over Iraq, arguing that the threat of WMD was not Blair’s true reason for going to war.

Cook says: “What was propelling the prime minister was a determination that he would be the closest ally to George Bush and they would prove to the United States administration that Britain was their closest ally. His problem is that George Bush’s motivation was regime change. It was not disarmament. Tony Blair knew perfectly well what he was doing.

That by election campaign is going to be fun to watch.

Dumbed-Down

State of Journalism Lamented in New Book
March 17, 2005 3:01 PM EST

NEW YORK - Tom Fenton couldn't be more surprised by his new calling at age 74: activist.

A veteran foreign correspondent recently retired from CBS News after 34 years, Fenton now is sounding off about TV's neglect of global news, and the resulting benightedness of the audience he says TV journalism has so ill-served.

He has compiled his concerns in a new book, "Bad News - The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News, and the Danger To Us All" (ReganBooks).

Its central thesis: The fall of communism coincided with growing concentration of U.S. media ownership. The nation became complacent about external threats, and less vigilant. So did news media, as their corporate bosses found it hard to justify the expense of pricey foreign bureaus and legions of correspondents stationed around the globe - especially when wall-to-wall coverage of a domestic spectacle like the O.J. Simpson trial attracted far more eyeballs than a complex story from a faraway land.

In that decade leading up to 9/11, Fenton argues, the news media abdicated its responsibilities.
....
Duly amused, does the audience feel shortchanged?

"No," concedes Fenton, "because we have dumbed down the viewers, so they don't even know what they're missing. We have trained them to accept the coverage they're getting. We've got to sell foreign news, we've got to get people interested again."

With that in mind, "Bad News" isn't so much a media-bashing book as a highly readable crash course in stuff you didn't know you never knew - a sort of "Global Affairs for Dummies."

"I want readers to be surprised at what they don't know, through no fault of their own," says Fenton. "Most Americans get their primary news, God help them, from television. We've got to do something about TV news."

But what? For one thing, Fenton proposes that journalists form a pressure group to shame the media stewards into fulfilling their public trust - "a lobby for better news."

"We need to get the debate going, to get people to start thinking about the news they're missing, and how important it is," he says. "We in the media have less credibility now than at any time I can think of, and the country is so polarized, I can't believe it! But the real story of the news isn't what's left and what's right - it's what's left out."

If you want to know what's going on in Iraq, you have to read the foreign press, domestic coverage is self-censored. Nobody reads the papers anymore, we've become a passive society of infotainment consumers with a lackey press corps.

Watch What He Does

From today's Le Monde:

Choice of Wolfowitz Shows Bush's Disregard for Europe

Choosing the neoconservative architect of the Iraq War to run the World Bank shows how little Bush's recent overtures to Europe really mean.

March 20, 2005

Suffice it to say, for most of the world, the appointment of Mr. Wolfowitz appears only as the most recent manifestation of American arrogance. This is all the more true since, in the area of development or the fight against poverty, the portfolio of the World Bank, Mr. Bush's candidate can boast of no particular experience.

It is therefore not astonishing that this decision is being interpreted as more proof of the indifference and cynicism of the United States, vis-a-vis the poorer countries. Even the Anglo-Saxon press showed its surprise. The New York Times entitled its leading article, "Why Wolfowitz?" The Financial Times, which is not exactly an anti-American publication, carried a severe leading article. The article, which refers to the Wolfowitz selection as, "a sad choice," starts by comparing the U.S. president with the French Bourbons and affirms that he, "learns nothing and forgets nothing."

The nomination on March 7 of another archconservative for U.S. ambassador to the U.S., John Bolton, reinforces the idea that the deeds of President Bush with respect to the rest of the world do not correspond to his reassuring words.

Mr. Bush's re-election of has thus not heralded the end of unilateralism. And if Europeans veto the designation of Mr. Wolfowitz, as they could and as many would like, then they will be responsible for a new crisis with the United States. In short, Mr. Bush's initiative makes it more the improvement of trans-Atlantic relations more difficult.

"Old Europe" knows when it is being dissed.

Succeed at Any Price

The Difference Between Steroids and Ritalin Is . . .
By KATE ZERNIKE

Published: March 20, 2005

AT the Congressional hearings last week investigating steroids and baseball, players were scolded not just for taking substances that are unsafe, but for doing something immoral. Those who use performance enhancing substances were called cheaters, cowards, bad examples for the nation's children.

But if baseball players are cheating, is everyone else, too?

After all, Americans are relying more and more on a growing array of performance enhancing drugs. Lawyers take the anti-sleep drug Provigil to finish that all-night brief, in hopes of concentrating better. Classical musicians take beta blockers, which banish jitters, before a big recital.Is the student who swallows a Ritalin before taking the SAT unethical if the pill gives her an unfair advantage over other students? If a golfer pops a beta blocker before a tournament, is he eliminating a crucial part of competition - battling nerves and a chance of choking?

Beyond baseball and steroids, where do you draw the line on the use of performance-enhancing drugs? President Bush said in his 2004 State of the Union speech that steroid use in baseball "sends the wrong message: that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character."

That is easy to say about steroids. After all, the mystique of the major leagues requires that home run records be set without the help of artificial enhancements. And major league players have some responsibility not to encourage teenagers to use a harmful substance.

When it comes to other drugs, and other kinds of endeavors, the lines aren't so clear. Bioethicists, who don't even all agree about whether taking steroids is wrong, are even less clear about everything else.

Some say the use of performance-enhanced drugs simply reflects progress - better living through chemistry - and to be human is to strive to be better.

"We've gotten very used to already assisting ourselves in other ways," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "No one's going to say, 'Don't drink coffee before the SAT.' No one's going to say, 'Don't smoke cigarettes before the SAT.' And most of the drugs we're talking about are far less harmful than nicotine."

But others lament that a performance-enhanced society is giving in to a culture that prizes the achievement over the journey. Many Americans already get that message from a young age, said Denise Clark Pope, author of "Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students."

When surveys ask students which is more important, to be honorable and get a low grade or to cheat and get a high grade, she said, more students choose the A. "The parents will say 'no, no, no,' but the message they're sending says the opposite."

The use of performance enhancing drugs reflects a society where stress and striving have become the national pastime. Ms. Pope calls it the "credentialism society," exemplified in her book through a high school student who describes life as a quest to get the best grades, so you can get into the best college, so you can get into the best graduate school, so you can get the highest-paying job, which brings you happiness.

That last paragraph contains the fatal flaw of our culture and equates material success with happy and considers an education a commodity used to purchase material success. The idea that happiness is a state of being unrelated to external circumstance is vanishing from the culture as a spiritual value. Because happiness is treated as an entitlement in our culture, we are doomed to mid-life crises, when our life experience teaches us that we aren't getting all the happiness we're entitled to.

The Rule of Law

'One huge US jail'

Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark investigate on the ground and talk to former prisoners

Saturday March 19, 2005
The Guardian

Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away his new friends.

Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.

Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.

When we landed in Kabul, Afghanistan was blue with a bruising cold. We were heading for the former al-Qaida strongholds in the south-east that were rumoured to be the focus of the new US network. How should we prepare, we asked local UN staff. "Don't go," they said. None the less, we were able to find a driver, a Pashtun translator and a boxful of clementines, and set off on a five-and-a-half-hour trip south through the snow to Gardez, a market town dominated by two rapidly expanding US military bases.

There we met Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding from the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women's and children's rights were protected. He was delighted to see foreigners in town. At his office in central Gardez, Bidar showed us a wall of files. "All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US military," he said. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who've been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails." He pulled out a handful of files: "People who have been arrested say they've been brutalised - the tactics used are beyond belief." The jails are closed to outside observers, making it impossible to test the truth of the claims.

Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a $100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people have simply disappeared.

Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed "Camp Slappy" by former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a major "collection centre" at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and another, known as the "Salt Pit", in an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment.

Anyone who has got in the way of the prison transports has been met with brutal force. Bidar directed us to a small Shia neighbourhood on the edge of town where a multiple killing was still under investigation. Inside a frozen courtyard, a former policeman, Said Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches. On May 1 2004, he was manning a checkpoint when a car careened through. "Inside were men dressed like Arabs, but they were western men," he said. "They had prisoners in the car." Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to stop. "The western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack helicopters hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police station. One screamed past me. I saw its fiery tail and blacked out."

He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he said, "an American woman appeared. She said the US was sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a mission. She gave me $500." Sardar showed us into another room in his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. "Five dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports," he says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead.

In his builders' merchant's shop, Mohammed Timouri describes how he lost his son. "Ismail was a part-time taxi driver, waiting to go to college," he says, handing us a photograph of a beardless, short-haired 19-year-old held aloft in a coffin at his funeral last March. "A convoy delivering prisoners from a facility in Jalalabad to one in Kabul became snarled up in traffic. A US soldier jumped down and lifted a woman out of the way. She screamed. Ismail stepped forward to explain she was a conservative person, wearing a burka. The soldier dropped the woman and shot Ismail in front of a crowd of 20 people."

Mohammed received a letter from the Afghan police: "We apologise to you," the police chief wrote. "An innocent was killed by Americans." The US army declined to comment on Ismail's death or on a second fatal shooting by another prison transport at the same crossroads later that month. It also refused to comment on an incident outside Kabul when a prison patrol reportedly cleared a crowd of children by throwing a grenade into their midst. However, we have since heard that the CIA's inspector general is investigating at least eight serious incidents, including two deaths in custody, following complaints by agents about the activities of their military colleagues.

This is the militarized, dystopian world of the neocons making. This is the freedom and democracy we are thrusting on the world. The Bill of Rights and due process don't seem to have much to do with it.

Ponder that while imagining what a state of martial law might look like in our own country and note what kind of treatment you'll get if you dissent from the Bush regime:

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri:
Charge Him or Release Him
by Jacob G. Hornberger, March 16, 2005

It is important to note that determining whether a suspected terrorist is a criminal defendant or an “enemy combatant” is totally subjective and is made on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis by the Pentagon and the president. They claim that because the nation is “at war,” there should be no federal court interference with their determination.

The law is what George Bush says it is.

One Half of a Man

via Juan Cole:

Iraq's Jaafari aims for Sharia rule
From correspondents in Berlin
March 20, 2005
From: Agence France-Presse

IRAQ'S frontrunning Shiite candidate for prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, said in an interview he aimed to introduce sharia Islamic law and federalism and confirmed Saddam Hussein would be judged by the end of the year.
"It's understandable in a country where the majority of people are Muslim," Mr Jaafari said of the Sharia law, in an interview conducted in Baghdad due to appear in Tuesday's edition of German magazine Der Spiegel.

"Iraq should become a Muslim country but without falling under the influence of Iran or Saudi Arabia," he said.
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"Everyone will have the same rights, even members of the many minor religious communities," he said, explaining there would be multiple forms of jurisprudence.

He also said women would be under no legal obligation to wear a veil.

"They will make their own decisions," the Shiite candidate said.

According to results of a poll released yesterday, most Iraqis are deeply attached to their Islamic identity but do not want a strict application of sharia law, as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia or Iran.

About 48 per cent of those interviewed agreed that "religion has a special role to play in the government", while 46 per cent supported a separation of state and mosque.

The poll was based on some 2000 interviews covering 15 of 18 provinces by an Iraqi firm employed by the right-wing US International Republican Institute.

I wonder how Iraq's women will feel about having their testimony in court be equal to one half of a man and how they will like the new divorce laws.

Inside the Empire

British troops 'were supplied with blank ammunition'
Report reveals devastating logistical failures, as anti-war protesters march in London
By Andrew Johnson, Jonathan Thompson and Severin Carrell

20 March 2005

British troops in Iraq have been supplied with blank rounds instead of live ammunition, one of a catalogue of failures during the occupation that have put their lives at risk, according to a hard-hitting report to be published this week.

Inability to provide body armour and medical supplies in sufficient quantities are also understood to be among logistical shortcomings identified by the influential Commons Defence Select Committee. News of its findings came as tens of thousands of protesters marched through central London yesterday on the second anniversary of the invasion, calling for the Government to withdraw British troops from Iraq.

Demonstrators delivered a black cardboard coffin, symbolising civilian victims in Iraq, to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square before marching on to a public rally in Trafalgar Square. The organisers, the Stop the War Coalition, said more than 100,000 took part, but police estimates were nearer 45,000. There were simultaneous anti-war marches in European cities including Rome, Athens, Oslo and Stockholm.

An audit of the cost of the war by The Independent on Sunday shows 110 British lives have been lost in Iraq, including 86 military personnel. Another 2,937 have been medically evacuated, of whom 824 were suffering mental illness.

In Iraq, violence continued yesterday, with five policemen killed in two attacks. A suicide bomber who tried to attack a US military convoy set off his explosives prematurely, and no one else was hurt. In addition to the security threat, documents seen by the IoS showed police were being hamstrung in their fight against violent crime by the decision of US intelligence and military police to release suspects if they promised to inform on insurgents.

The Commons committee report on "post-conflict operations" in Iraq, to be published on Thursday, paints a picture of shambolic organisation since the war. It praises the Army's professionalism during the fighting, but says "woeful intelligence" left soldiers expecting garlands of flowers. Instead, they found themselves facing a hostile people hardened by a bombing campaign against them.

There was also a failure to realise how quickly occupation would turn to peace-keeping, and then to civilian policing - a role for which most soldiers were ill-prepared.

Occupation is a terribly pesky game. Ask the Brits.

Bombing people into submission rarely works.

Oh, support the troops. They didn't ask to be there. So while they are raping the population and shooting the dogs, we should wholeheartedly support them. That's what my gubbmint says

For Your Dining and Dancing Pleasure

The Talk Shows

Sunday, March 20, 2005; Page A04

Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:

FOX NEWS SUNDAY (WTTG), 9 a.m.: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.).

THIS WEEK (ABC, WJLA), 9 a.m.: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); Gerry Adams, leader of Northern Ireland's Sinn Fein party; and Rumsfeld.

FACE THE NATION (CBS, WUSA), 10:30 a.m.: Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman; Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.); and Robert D. Manfred Jr., executive vice president of Major League Baseball.

MEET THE PRESS (NBC, WRC), 10:30 a.m.: Myers.

LATE EDITION (CNN), noon: Sens. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.); Lt. Gen. R. Steven Whitcomb; Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari; retired Gen. George A. Joulwan; retired Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong; and retired Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd.

Chat away.

On C-Span

Every year, thousands of families find themselves in the same tragic situation as that of Terri Schiavo's. In none of these cases has Congress intervened, this is a f%^king travesty. Hell, my best friend's wife had to turn off his ventilator a few years ago after a catastrophic stroke. This is politics, pure and simple, the right to life crowd playing to their base.

Yes, my advanced medical directive is up to date, but I have to give a copy to my new MD. My family and executor know my wishes. Do yours?

The Congressional bill is an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder. The Constitution forbids Congress from passing legislation which effects one individual.

Fscking miscarriage of legislation. If you were in Terri Schiavo's shoes what would you want?

NNNOOOOO!

Don't deposit Wolfowitz with us, plead World Bank workers

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday March 19, 2005
The Guardian

Washington's nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as the World Bank's next president has triggered an outcry among the bank's staff, who have demanded the right to have a say in his confirmation, it emerged yesterday.

The staff association has met the bank's executives to voice its concerns after it was swamped with complaints from employees over the selection of Mr Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary and one of the architects of the Iraq war.

One bank employee said yesterday: "When you work for the bank you have to be a compromise-seeker. Everyone sees him as a divisive figure."

In an email to members, the staff association's chairwoman, Alison Cave, said: "While recognising that the selection and confirmation of the next World Bank president is the prerogative of the shareholders, staff are asking that their views be taken into consideration and taken seriously by the decision-makers."

"The staff association is preparing to act as a conduit for these views, and the executive committee is urgently considering the most effective way to help staff be heard."

Staff representatives met the outgoing bank president, James Wolfensohn, on Thursday to express the level of alarm. A bank official said: "There have been wild emails about petitions and rallies, but the association has assured us it definitively is not going to involved in any of that."

Mr Wolfowitz's relationship with a member of World Bank staff, Shaha Ali Riza, a Tunisian-born British citizen who works as a communications adviser for the Middle East and North Africa department, also appears to have become an issue.

Ms Riza, a divorcee like Mr Wolfowitz, does not work directly for the bank president's office and their relationship would not be prohibited by the banks internal guidelines.

But one official said yesterday: "It should be covered [by World Bank rules], because the bank president does have a lot of power." A colleague of Ms Riza said: "There's no obvious reason she should lose her job just because her boyfriend is made president." Ms Riza did not return calls yesterday.

Who knew? He's a lover, not a fighter.

Reporting In

I'm working on the five questions for our now seven answerers. Since I want a unique set for each of you, this will take some time and I expect to email them to you tomorrow.

I've had more social life this week than in the last six months and I rather like it; first dinner with big Tino on Thursday and now a very pleasant lunch with Rox Populi. What's she like, you cry. Very much like her writing. Direct, funny and very, very smart. The range of subjects on which she can speak knowledgably is astonishing, a regular Rennaisance woman. We talked about blogging, of course (what makes us do it?) and lots and lots of politics. Our political worldviews are different, I'm much further left, but we are of one mind on the incredible damage the Repubs are committing on the Republic. It was a pleasure to get to know her, and I dare say we'll meet again on some panels around town. Inevitably, the lefty Beltway bloggers will develop our own insiders. That's great for information sharing but the dangers of group-think enter in then.

Five Questions

The five question meme is back again. We had fun with this a year ago, and we all know each other better now. I got the chance to know a number of people with it last year, including the blogger who is my current SO. It's one of the things that kicked off the relationship.

Here's the deal: for the first five of you who sign up in comments, I'll design a five question interview. You agree to post the questions and your answers on your blog, or in comments, if you have no blog (I'll open a special thread for your replies.) It'll probably be tomorrow before I have the questions ready. Make sure your email address is available with your request.

Now, I have to get ready for a lunch date with Rox Populi.

Seduction of the Body Politic

Nothing 'New' in This War

By Andrew J. Bacevich
Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A25

The conflict in Iraq derives from a specific estimate of U.S. military capabilities, fostered by hawks such as Rumsfeld but casually endorsed by far too many Americans. According to that estimate, a combination of matchless technology and professionalism enabled the United States in the heady aftermath of the Cold War to devise a radically new way of war. Armed force in American hands had become both effective and economical -- not a bludgeon, as in days of old, but a scalpel. So, at least, we convinced ourselves.

In Iraq, this assessment and the expectations to which it gave rise have been found wanting. Rather than demonstrating a novel approach to war, combat there has become distressingly familiar.

Whereas technology was supposed to render the battlefield transparent, the "fog of war" settled over Iraq like a suffocating blanket. Never have U.S. forces fought in such ignorance of the enemy's purpose, strength, leadership and order of battle. George Armstrong Custer knew more about the warriors he faced in 1876 than U.S. commanders today know about their adversaries.

Whereas precision weapons were supposedly making error, waste and collateral damage a thing of the past, the fight to control Iraqi cities has given the past a new life. Comparisons between the "liberation" of Fallujah and the Marines' assault on Hue in 1968 are only too apt. In both cases, victory was gained the old-fashioned way: through brute force.

Toppling Saddam Hussein opened a Pandora's box of unanticipated complications. Whether it was attacks on oil pipelines or insurgents infiltrating into the new Iraqi security forces, events time and again caught U.S. officials flat-footed. Even success proves transitory, with yesterday's apparent accomplishment becoming unglued today.

To which anyone with even a passing knowledge of history would reply: of course. This is what war has always been -- grueling, filthy, confusing, replete with accidents and miscues that victimize the innocent, giving rise to unforeseen consequences and loose ends. What qualifies as truly perplexing is not that the conflict in Iraq has reaffirmed this reality but that so many Americans, seduced by claims that this nation could bend war to our purposes, indulged in the fantasy that it would be otherwise.

Well, now we know better. But let this be said: If our experience in Iraq demolishes once and for all the martial illusions to which the current generation of Americans has proven susceptible, then the United States may yet derive some benefit from this costly misadventure.

Yes, the people allowed themselves to be seduced, but the media played a significant role in that seduction. That said, Bush appealed to the basest part of the American character, secure in the knowledge that this always works. Professor Bacevich's critique is right on.

The Real Iraq Agenda

Here is the Windows Media video of Greg Palast's scoop on the BBC's "Newsnight" from Thursday. Thanks to Tom at Information Clearing House.

Yawn

Another great technology ruined.

More PR Than No-Holds-Barred On Bosses' Corporate Blogs

By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A01

The soul-baring, anything-goes, free-for-all phenomenon called the Web log has come to this:

"This is the first of many commentaries I will make on this forum," wrote General Motors Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz in January when he first started his blog, fastlane.gmblogs.com, "and I'd like to begin with, surprise, some product talk -- specifically, Saturn products."

Web logs -- or blogs -- started as a way to talk about new technologies, vent about life and interact in a no-holds-barred forum. Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful.

"Looking back before the dust settles on 2004, it was a great year of building momentum for BCA [Boeing Commercial Airplanes]. Our orders went up, with 272 in '04 compared to 239 in '03. It was a super year for widebodies for us," wrote Randolph S. Baseler, Boeing Co.'s vice president of marketing, on Jan. 17 in his first entry at boeing.com/randy.

With blogs like that, who needs news releases? Some Internet watchers wonder if a blog that sounds like nothing more than a corporate press room is worth the effort.

"Repositing marketing materials on a blog is a waste of time," said Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog." "I would advise them to just stop right now. Those materials already exist. The blog that is powerful is when it is real."

Ideally, blogs can provide companies with a connection they don't otherwise have with the public, employees and clients. But it may take some time before executives figure out how to best use them.

"Success in blogging is exactly the same as success in conversation, where if you stay on message, you're being a bore," said David Weinberger, a research fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It's very hard to wean yourself. You stay on message then congratulate yourself for staying on message. Then what you do is alienate readers."

I have a great blog strategy for any corporate or non-profit clients who would like to try it, and it looks nothing like any of this. There is a great deal of difference between having a conversation and giving a speech.

Saturday Cat Blogging

Cat porn from Max Sawicky. Go ahead and look. You know you want to.

(Link fixed.)

Friday Funny

As you know, I don't send you over to specific blogposts very often, but this is worthy of your Friday night. As you remember, I work American Street on Sundays, but I check in with the colleagues frequently during the week, I'm proud to work with these people. Friday at the Street is humor day, and comic genius tbogg has a send up of Lileks today that had me in hysterics. Go read.

Sleepy Bumper

Well, Bumpers, this has been a more eventful than usual kind of Bump day. In the final analysis, I didn't get invited to a spot with the responding bloggers at the Brookings panel next week, but the Blog PAC has noticed that getting organized made a very definite impression on the presenter. The name of this blog community is now well known in some parts of DC and we'll get our act together faster next time. Other bloggers have been in touch all day and have been, as usual, very supportive. I'm pleased to receive their votes of confidence for my work. Those folks over on my blogroll are there because I respect their work.

The bottom line: I'm pooped. I had to multitask today in ways I haven't before and I'm not good at it. Unless I run into something which is begging to be blogged, I'm taking the night off. My sleep schedule is all screwed up because I went out last night, got in late and overslept this morning. Gotta back to my schedule.

UPDATE: Gilliard and some of the other Blog PAC'ers aren't letting this go and keeping up the campaign. Brookings' Patrick Gavin's contact info is in the post on Brookings below. If his voicemail and email boxes are full when he comes in on Monday, we won't know a thing about it, will we? Laura Rozen and Ruy Texieira are great writers, but they aren't partisans and bloggers raised up from the grass roots, they are Washington insiders. I'm Inside the Beltway, but not Inside Washington. I'm skeptical about everything, there is no conventional wisdom in this house. I'm especially skeptical about religion, by the way. Doubt has a very important role to play in the life of faith.

Bush Is a Loser at Logic but a Winner in D.C.

By Arianna Huffington, Arianna Huffington's latest book is "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America" (Miramax, 2004).

I just got back from a trip to the Happiest Place on Earth. Didn't ride the teacups, though, because I wasn't in Disneyland, but in Washington, D.C., where everyone is walking on air, swept away by the Beltway's latest consensus: President Bush was right on Iraq. And, as a result, Tomorrowland in the Middle East will feature an E-ticket ride on the Matterhorn of freedom and democracy.

The political and cultural establishment has gone positively Goofy over this notion. In the corridors of power, Republicans are high-fiving, and Democrats are nodding in agreement and patting themselves on the back for how graciously they've been able to accept the fact that they were wrong.

The groupthink in the nation's capital would be the envy of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.

How did this cozy unanimity come to pass? Is it something in the water, I wondered, perhaps as a result of Bush gutting the EPA? But then I thought back to my time at Cambridge, when I took a course in elementary logic, and studied the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle.

For those of you in need of a refresher on the concept, here's an example: "All oaks are trees. All elms are trees. Therefore, all oaks are elms."

See how easily you can go from point A to point Z, jumping over all the important steps between?

So: We invaded Iraq. Change is afoot in the Middle East. Therefore, the Middle East is changing because we invaded Iraq.

See how simple it is? And how illogical?

The Bush White House has been masterful at this infantile reasoning: America is free and democratic. Terrorists attacked America. Therefore, terrorists hate freedom and democracy.

And that's all anyone needs to know.

What makes this particularly seductive is the historical longing of Americans for political consensus. In this country, where the European idea of a loyal opposition never took hold, Democrats are all too eager to suspend disbelief and go along with the fairy tale Bush is telling about freedom and democracy on the march, and the happily-ever-after future of the Middle East.

But flip the page on this "once upon a time" fantasy and what's revealed is a very ugly war story — a bloody narrative about which we hear shockingly little.

I sincerely doubt the people of Iraq are going to bed with visions of Thomas Jefferson dancing in their heads. Not when their days are filled with random bombings and checkpoint shootings and kidnappings that have become commonplace.

As much as I hate to rain on the president's democracy parade, the fact remains: Holding an election is not the same thing as establishing a democracy. Just ask the people of Russia. Or Haiti. Or Africa. Indeed, there have been more than 50 elections in Africa over the last decade and a half, but the continent couldn't be realistically described as a hotbed of political freedom.

The truth is the vast majority of Arabs remain skeptical of U.S. motives. And can we really blame them? After all, it wasn't that long ago that Dick Cheney was opposing the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Donald Rumsfeld was cutting deals with Saddam Hussein, and the CIA was overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, and installing the shah.

Flip on CNN and see if you can find out what is going on in Iraq today and you are going to get wall-to-wall Terri Schiavo, which is a tragedy for the family and friends but of no larger significance for the rest of us. Have you gotten your advanced medical directive written yet?

At any rate, the treatment that this story has gotten over the last week is all out of proportion with its significance.

More Free

The Iraq War Has Only Set Back Middle East Reform

NPR.org, March 14, 2005

Shibley Telhami, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

Recent debate about hopeful signs of change in the Middle East has blurred the role of the Iraq war in the region. It's true that U.S. advocacy of democracy cannot be ignored by regional governments and that some moves in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are in part related to the new American posture. But the effect of the Iraq war itself has been mostly negative.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's decision to allow more competitive presidential elections could lead to important change. But on the even of the Iraq war the government renewed emergency laws governing Egypt for three more years. This is the reality that people feel today.

I rather think that Telhami has a better handle on this than does W.

Cost of Doing Business

Wal-Mart Settles Immigrant Case

By Lara Jakes Jordan
Associated Press Writer
Friday, March 18, 2005; 1:35 PM

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has agreed to pay $11 million to settle federal allegations it used hundreds of illegal immigrants to clean its stores, authorities said Friday.

Additionally, 12 businesses that provided contract janitor services to Wal-Mart will pay $4 million in fines and plead guilty to criminal immigration charges, officials said.

The case against Wal-Mart marks a record dollar amount for a civil immigration settlement, said Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It also "requires Wal-Mart to create an internal program to ensure future compliance with immigration laws by Wal-Mart contractors and by Wal-Mart itself," Garcia said Friday in announcing the settlement.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams told The Associated Press the company is "ready to put it behind us and move forward."

Though Wal-Mart does not face criminal charges, "we acknowledge that we should have had better safeguards in place to ensure our contractors were hiring only legal workers," Williams said. "That's why we're agreeing to pay the $11 million.

"It is a lot of money, but I think that is because it is designed to get attention and remind businesses everywhere that they have a duty to ensure their outside contractors are following federal immigration laws."

In two separate investigations, authorities arrested 352 illegal immigrants contracted as janitors at Wal-Mart stores -- about a third of whom have since been deported to their home countries. Many of the workers worked seven days or nights a week without overtime pay or injury compensation, attorneys said. Those who worked nights were often locked in the store until the morning.

Wal-Mart Stores, based in Bentonville, Ark., had sales last year of $288.19 billion.

Nobody has even tried to lay a glove on Wal-mart before now, in spite of all the press exposing their both illegal and immoral treatment of their workers. This is very good news.

Bump Pressure

Okay. We need to put a little pressure on Brookings to get me publicized for the event. Call or email Patrick Gavin at Brookings, 202-797-6310 (direct) or [email protected]

Thanks, Sean-Paul, and best wishes for the back surgery.

Check the Label

The Red in Red, White and Blue

By Al Kamen
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page A21

The U.S. Agency for International Development is moving smartly on its "branding" campaign, which is designed to make absolutely sure that people receiving U.S. aid know who it's from.

Nongovernmental groups operating overseas in nasty places are not too happy with putting the USAID logo on their cars, comparing it to a bull's-eye for bad guys to shoot at. The agency says it will allow exemptions in some cases.

Meanwhile, though, folks at the agency have hats and lovely lapel pins they are to wear proudly to let everyone know where they work. There are great T-shirts, polo shirts, baggage tags and other items -- and a 94-page manual explaining how this is to work.

The United States, it seems, is not the only country working to improve its "branding" programs. The lapel pins -- "USAID" and "From the American People" -- have a little tag on each plastic envelope that says "Made in China."

The white baseball-cap tags say the same, with a China label inside that also alerts us to "hand wash only" -- though machine washing is not a huge danger in the Third World.

Who knew this was a Sino-American project? Will this confuse recipients? Should we just declare China a permanent subcontractor?

Kinda puts a whole new light on "outsourcing." I think I'm going to send this to Lou Dobbs.

Taking it Seriously

Let's make a little noise, shall we. The Agonist's Sean Paul Kelly brings this to our attention.

Brookings Institution is holding a panel discussion next week on us "new media" types. Who are the invited bloggers?

Daniel Drezner
www.danieldrezner.com

Josh Trevino
www.redstate.org

The panel itself is the usual suspects:

Moderator:
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Senior Fellow, Brookings; Columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

Panelists:
Jodie T. Allen
Senior Editor, Pew Research Center
Ana Marie Cox
Wonkette.com
Ellen Ratner
White House Correspondent, Talk Radio News Service
Jack Shafer
Editor-at-Large, Slate
Andrew Sullivan
AndrewSullivan.com; Senior Editor The New Republic, Columnist, Time Magazine

Do you see the problem?

Sean Paul also reveals that the Brookings booker lied to him:

This is what one of Digby’s readers wrote to the Brookings Institution:

This week Sean-Paul tried to contact all of the bloggers asking them if they had indeed been invited to SIT on the panel. Six of the eight bloggers in question replied that they had not, in fact, been invited to sit on the panel. The other two were unavailable for comment. Only one said he had been invited, and that was only to live-blog the event. Yesterday, March 17, Sean-Paul called Patrick Gavin at the Brookings Institute and asked him if he invited those same bloggers he said that he had, in his own reply. After much hemming and hawing Mr. Gavin said he had indeed invited many liberal bloggers to sit on the panel but was unsure which ones. After more questions he could name only two: Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

Markos' wife is dealing with a death in the family, Josh is getting married this weekend.

Call Patrick Gavin at Brookings and raise a stink. 202-797-6310, or 202-797-6105. You might mention that I'm right here in DC and available for their event.

You might mention that there are other female political (rather than gossip) bloggers besides Wonkette. Ana Marie does a fine job at what she does, but politics and public policy ain't it. Grrrr.....

I think I have a little more gravitas than Wonkette.

The Liberal Coalition

Don't hand religion to the right

The secular left must stop sniping and realise it has Christian allies

Giles Fraser and William Whyte
Friday March 18, 2005
The Guardian

For decades, the political class on this side of the Atlantic has prided itself on the absence of religious culture wars. The obsession with abortion, gay marriage and obscenity, the alliance between the secular and religious right - these are peculiarly American pathologies. It couldn't happen here. After all, we're just not religious enough.

Except it does seem to be happening here. In making abortion an election issue, Michael Howard has prompted the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, pointedly to warn against assuming "that Catholics would be more in support of the Labour party". Elsewhere, the Christian right targets the BBC, and the Church of England is being colonised by homophobic evangelicals with broad smiles and loads of PR savvy. No wonder the cogs are whirring at Conservative central office on how best to exploit the voting power of religion.

In contrast, the left continues to push religion away. They "don't do God", in Alastair Campbell's famous phrase. Even those politicians of the left who "do God" privately have to be effectively outed, as Ruth Kelly was over her membership of Opus Dei. It never used to be like this. There has long been an affinity between the church and the left. The Liberal party was sustained by the so-called nonconformist conscience and the Labour party famously derived more from Methodism than Marx - Keir Hardie once describing socialism as "the embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system". Later both CND and the anti-apartheid movement were inspired by Christian socialism.

Even comparatively recently things were looking up for the religious left. Tony Blair is a member of the Christian socialist movement and in Rowan Williams the Church of England has a self-confessed "bearded lefty" at the top. Yet instead of a renaissance there has been a decline. The Archbishop of Canterbury is now a virtual prisoner of the religious right. And Labour Christians seem silent and impotent. How did we get to here?

In the first place, the religious left has found itself constantly challenged by the secular left. Whilst the religious right and neo-conservatives have worked together, progressives have split and split again. Blair is too embarrassed to talk the language of faith because he knows it would alienate his allies. Some object to religion on principle. Others insist that a Christian response is inevitably intolerant, exclusive, even racist. So left secularists welcomed Jubilee 2000 but ignored the fact that the Jubilee is a biblical concept.

But progressive Christians also seem incapable of confronting the religious right on its own terms. Jesus offered a political manifesto that emphasised non-violence, social justice and the redistribution of wealth - yet all this is drowned out by those who use the text to justify a narrow, authoritarian and morally judgmental form of social respectability. The irony is that the religious right and the secular left have effectively joined forces to promote the idea that the Bible is reactionary. For the secular left, the more the Bible can be described in this way, the easier it is to rubbish. Thus the religious right is free to claim a monopoly on Christianity. And the Christian left, hounded from both sides, finds itself shouted into silence.

Does this matter? Well, yes. Religion isn't going away; if anything, it is making a comeback. Nearly three-quarters of the population declared themselves Christian in the 2001 census. The old belief that religion would wither and die has beenexposed as simplistic. In this environment, the secular left needs to suspend worn-out hostilities and realise that many people of faith are fellow travellers in the fight for social justice. Otherwise, the coalition of Christian and secular conservatives will grow stronger. That will further damage the church, turning it into an intolerant sect. But it will also undermine progressive politics.

All of which requires a new courage from the Christian left. They need to toughen up, get organised and invoke the spirit of millions of Christians, from St Francis to Donald Soper, who have fought against injustice throughout the ages. Twenty years ago, Faith in the City was a prophetic call to Britain: condemning the selfishness of Thatcherism and the greed of 1980s Britain. The current campaign, Make Poverty History, is a similarly significant moment.

But the present situation also demands a reassessment by the secular left of the religious left. Because only the religious left is capable of challenging the religious right with the language of faith. The secular left, in short, needs to stop sniping and start making new friends. In America, the Christian right and the neocons have grown strong by working together. Now so must we.

What have I been saying for YEARS? Wingnuttery isn't confined to this side of the Atlantic and even the Canadians are figuring out that they have to get on board.

Pop Culture

Wolfowitz reaches out to Bono

George W. Bush's nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank has critics concerned that the neo-con architect of the Iraq war will use the World Bank as just another weapon in the war on terrorism. But Wolfowitz is showing that he knows a thing or two about diplomacy, too: In the last two days, he has checked in with numerous foreign officials, the leaders of international development agencies -- and Bono.

The word from the Bono side of the conversation was a little less effusive. The government relations director for Debt, AIDS, Trade and Africa, a lobbying group Bono helped to found, told Reuters: "Bono thought it was important that he put forward the issues that are critical to the World Bank, like debt cancellation, aid effectiveness and a real focus on poverty reduction."

Irony is not dead. I don't *think* that Salon just makes s$%t up, but I'm finding it hard to believe that Wolfie even knows who Bono is...

Blood and Oil

Via Juan Cole, Greg Palast lands a hit on the BBC:

The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.

"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."

I think we can retire our tinfoil hats now.

The Agenda

In Blow to Bush, Senators Reject Cuts to Medicaid
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: March 18, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 17 - President Bush's plans to reduce the explosive growth of Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, ran into a roadblock on Thursday when the Senate voted to strip its 2006 budget of all proposed Medicaid cuts. But in a surprise move, the Senate voted to approve $34 billion more in tax cuts than Mr. Bush requested.

"It provided a huge amount of tax cuts," said Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and one of a handful of members of his party to vote against the tax cuts. "We didn't know what we were doing."

The senators agreed, 52 to 48, to strike language calling for $14 billion in Medicaid spending cuts over the next five years. Instead, they decided to create a commission to study the program and recommend changes, reporting back in one year.

The Medicaid vote, a rebuke to both the White House and the Senate leadership, put the House and Senate on a collision course. It came just hours before the House, by a vote of 218 to 214, approved its own $2.57 trillion budget resolution that included $69 billion in cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicaid.

The Senate late Thursday night passed its budget for $2.6 trillion, by a vote of 51 to 49.

With the two chambers so far apart on spending reductions, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa, warned that reconciling the two documents would prove difficult.

"We have arguably our work cut out for us now," Mr. Nussle said.

He characterized the Medicaid vote as a setback for Mr. Bush's domestic agenda, suggesting that "the momentum" of the entire package, including spending control, Social Security and tax code changes, was now at stake.

"If the Senate is not going to follow in the first item on the president's agenda," he said, "then that is, I think, a signal that the president needs to receive and react to immediately."

It was going to come to fisticuffs eventually. Bush's plans aren't all that popular and the congresscritters are going to have to stand for re-election.

Requiem for a Fighter

George F. Kennan, 1904-2005
The Cold War's Outsider Strategist

By J.Y. Smith
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page A01

George F. Kennan, a diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who formulated the basic foreign policy followed by the United States in the Cold War, died last night at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.

A Foreign Service officer from 1926 to 1953, Mr. Kennan also was a student of Russian history, a keen and intuitive observer of people and events and a gifted writer. In his years in the State Department, he was recognized as the government's leading authority on the Soviet Union, and his views resonated in the corridors of authority with rare power and clarity.

His great moment as a policymaker came in 1946. While serving in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he wrote a cable that outlined positions that guided Washington's dealings with the Kremlin until the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly half a century later.

Known as the Long Telegram, it said that Soviet expansion must be halted and spelled out how that could be done. Moscow is "impervious to the logic of reason," Mr. Kennan said, but "it is highly sensitive to the logic of force." It did not state, however, that war was inevitable. The policy should have a military element, Mr. Kennan maintained, but it should consist primarily of economic and political pressure.

"My reputation was made," he rejoiced in his memoirs. "My voice now carried."

In 1947, he restated the principles in an article in Foreign Affairs that was signed "X" -- the identity of the author soon was disclosed -- and gave the policy the name by which it has been known ever since: containment.

By confronting "the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world," he wrote, the United States would "promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."

The Long Telegram and "X" article provided the rationale for Cold War initiatives ranging from the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 to the decision to commit U.S. forces to the war in Southeast Asia in 1965. Containment underwent numerous permutations over time but never lost its vitality. It guided U.S. policy in Iran, the Philippines and the Far East. In the 1980s, it was transformed by the Reagan administration into an effort to roll back Soviet power through an arms buildup.

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said Mr. Kennan came "as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

In 1950, Mr. Kennan took a leave of absence from the State Department to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Except for a brief period in 1952, when he was ambassador to Moscow, and from 1961 to 1963, when he was ambassador to Yugoslavia, he spent the rest of his life in Princeton.

Despite his influence, Mr. Kennan was never really comfortable in government or with the give-and-take process by which policy is made. He always regarded himself as an outsider. It grated on him when his advice was not heeded, more so because it often turned out that he had been more right than wrong. He had little patience with critics.

His confidence in his own intellect was such that he sometimes declined to explain himself to politicians. For example, he refused to lobby for the Marshall Plan, the aid program that revived the economy of Western Europe after World War II. He was a diplomat, he said, not a salesman.

Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow when Mr. Kennan was minister-counselor of the U.S. Embassy, remarked that he was "a man who understood Russia but not the United States."

Just go read his books and you will come to know one of the giants of the last century, whose influence is still felt today. You could love Kennan's work or hate it, but you couldn't be neutral. He was the first and the last of the real cold warriors and Harriman wasn't wrong.

The US will continue to live a more or less charmed existence as long as we have minds like this in public service. When he was wrong he took his lumps, but, God, what a mind. When genius like this exiles itself to the academy or industry, we become a much poorer public common. What was great about him was his willingness to further the public dialogue.

Open Thread

That's it for today, kids. I've got some errands to run downtown and then I'm meeting a friend for dinner. You should find enough here to keep you occupied for the evening and I'm going to try to have a social life. But it will be with another blogger.

Are you doing anything special for St. Pat's?

World Image

CIA's Assurances On Transferred Suspects Doubted
Prisoners Say Countries Break No-Torture Pledges

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 17, 2005; Page A01

The system the CIA relies on to ensure that the suspected terrorists it transfers to other countries will not be tortured has been ineffective and virtually impossible to monitor, according to current and former intelligence officers and lawyers, as well as counterterrorism officials who have participated in or reviewed the practice.

To comply with anti-torture laws that bar sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured, the CIA's office of general counsel requires a verbal assurance from each nation that detainees will be treated humanely, according to several recently retired CIA officials familiar with such transfers, known as renditions.

But the effectiveness of the assurances and the legality of the rendition practice are increasingly being questioned by rights groups and others, as freed detainees have alleged that they were mistreated by interrogators after the CIA secretly delivered them to countries with well-documented records of abuse.

President Bush weighed in on the matter for the first time yesterday, defending renditions as vital to the nation's defense.

In "the post-9/11 world, the United States must make sure we protect our people and our friends from attack," he said at a news conference. "And one way to do so is to arrest people and send them back to their country of origin with the promise that they won't be tortured. That's the promise we receive. This country does not believe in torture. We do believe in protecting ourselves." One CIA officer involved with renditions, however, called the assurances from other countries "a farce."

Another U.S. government official who visited several foreign prisons where suspects were rendered by the CIA after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said: "It's beyond that. It's widely understood that interrogation practices that would be illegal in the U.S. are being used."

Hmmm, leaking like a sieve. This sounds like a beginning rather than an end.

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According to my visitor logs, 67% of you are still using Internet Explorer for your visits here. My guess is that this means that you are visiting from your workplace which is a Windows environment and you don't have much choice. But, tell me, what browser are you using at home?

Along the Plate

I wish I'd told you how to corn a beef brisket last month when you could have done something about it. There is no comparison between the homemade and the thing that comes in the Wilson plastic wrap today.

Well, it can't be helped. If you are going to go for one of the commercial corned beef briskets today, soak it in ice water for an hour before you roast it. It will get most of the nasty chemicals out.

Instead of plain boiled cabbage and potatoes, make these to serve on the side. Click on the link to see the picture.

POTATO AND CABBAGE BUNDLES
Active time: 1 1/2 hr Start to finish: 2 1/4 hr

1 medium onion, halved lengthwise, then sliced crosswise (1 cup)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 large head leafy green cabbage (3 lb)
1 teaspoon minced garlic
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2/3 cup water
2 lb large boiling potatoes
1 cup well-shaken buttermilk
3 oz extra-sharp white Cheddar, coarsely grated (1 cup)
2 tablespoons drained bottled horseradish
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter
3/4 cup coarse fresh bread crumbs from a country-style loaf

Makes 4 to 6 main-course servings.

I'd sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.

You're In The Army Now

US Army asks for enlistment extension as recruitment numbers fall

WASHINGTON : The US Army asked Congress to allow it to extend enlistment contracts signed by soldiers by two years as top defense officials warned that key recruitment targets for the year could be missed. the

The request came as House of Representatives put its stamp of approval on an 81.4-billion-dollar supplemental spending bill that contains new benefits for US soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the new money notwithstanding, Army Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Franklin Hagenbeck told a House subcommittee that yearly recruitment goals for the Army reserve and the National Guard were "at risk."

"In the manning area, we need Congress to change the maximum enlistment time from six years to eight years in order to help stabilize the force for longer periods of time," Hagenbeck went on to say.

The appeal coincided with the release of a new congressional report that showed that the intensifying anti-American insurgency in Iraq and continued violence in Afghanistan were followed by a distinct drop in the number of volunteers willing to serve in the branches of the military that see the most combat.

The Army reserve and Army National Guard respectively met only 87 percent and 80 percent of their overall recruiting goals in the first quarter of fiscal 2005, according to the study by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The Air Force Reserve attained 91 percent of its target, the Air National Guard 71 percent and the Navy Reserve 77 percent.

The shortfalls could potentially have a noticeable effect on units operating in Iraq and Afghanistan because, according to defense officials, reservists and guardsmen make up about 46 percent of the total force deployed there.

Recruitment problems are beginning to dog even active duty units that have not experienced them in a long time.

The Marine Corps, whose reputation for efficiency and toughness has always helped it attract ambitious young men and women, missed its goal by 84 recruits in January and another 192 in February for the first time in 10 years, the GAO report said.

"There is no disputing the fact that the force is facing challenges," acknowledged Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Charles Abell.

Two years? This allows the government to void the contracts it writes with enlistees at will and re-write them. This is going to help enlistment?

Hey, kid. Sign a contract that our side can re-write whenever we want to in our favor. Just sign the deal, we'll let you go when we're done with you.

Hey, moms and dads. The Army will take your kid and let you have him back when they say so. Such a deal.

Lord of the Flies

Why graft thrives in postconflict zones
A report issued Wednesday said Iraq could become 'the biggest corruption scandal in history.'

By Mark Rice-Oxley | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

LONDON – Five Polish peacekeepers are arrested for allegedly taking $90,000 worth of bribes in Iraq. Several Sri Lankan officials are suspended for mishandling tsunami aid. US audits show large financial discrepancies in Iraq. Reports of aid abuse taunt Indonesia.

Two of the world's biggest-ever reconstruction projects - Iraq and post-tsunami Asia - are facing major tests of credibility, as billions of dollars of aid and reconstruction money pour in.
And according to a major report released Wednesday by Transparency International (TI), an international organization that focuses on issues of corruption, the omens are not good.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to Cambodia and Bosnia, from the wrecked coasts of Asia to the kleptocratic carve-up in some African countries, crisis zones are proving to be fertile soil for corruption, the report argues.

"Many postconflict countries figure among the most corrupt in the world," says Philippe le Billon of the University of British Columbia, Canada, in the TI report. "Corruption often predates hostilities and in many cases it features among the factors that triggered political unrest or facilitated conflict escalation."

The report cites weak government, haphazard law and order, armed factions that need appeasing, and a scramble for rich resources as factors that render a country prone to corruption.

Nations that face security threats are even more vulnerable, since they require protection money and may not be able to keep monitors safe.

Bosnia is a good example. During the breakdown of communism in the late 1980s, factions scrambled for assets by plundering state companies, a situation exacerbated by the 1992-1995 war.

Wartime sanctioned nefarious activity. Criminal gangs became cherished paramilitary groups; black markets flourished; underworld players became rich and powerful. After peace was declared in 1995, the world community was wary of upsetting the status quo. It's still unclear how much of the $5 billion spent on aid after the war ended up in the pockets of shady characters.

"These elements were either part of the ruling political parties, or criminal elements that were financing the ruling political parties," says James Lyon, an analyst in Belgrade with the International Crisis Group.

In Iraq, allegations range from petty bribery to large-scale embezzlement, expropriation, profiteering and nepotism. The TI report says it could become "the biggest corruption scandal in history."

"I can see all sorts of levels of corruption in Iraq," says report contributor Reinoud Leenders, "starting from petty officials asking for bribes to process a passport, way up to contractors delivering shoddy work and the kind of high-level corruption involving ministers and high officials handing out contracts to their friends and clients."

The recent elections may help, he adds, but already he notes a tendency for political bargaining indicative of "dividing up the cake of state resources."

But it is not just about Iraqis dividing up the cake. US audits of its own spending have found repeated shortcomings, including a lack of competitive bidding for contracts worth billions of dollars, payment of contracts without adequate certification that work had been done, and in some cases, outright theft.

A January report by special inspector Stuart Bowen found that $8.8 billion dollars had been disbursed from Iraqi oil revenue by US administrators to Iraqi ministries without proper accounting.

And earlier this week, it emerged that the Pentagon's auditing agency found that Halliburton, the Houston oil services giant formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, overcharged by more than $108 million on a contract.

Wanna find flies? Look at where the garbage is.

Breathing Room

I'm going to try a grand experiment. I've already put up four stories and threads for today.

I'm going to try to sleep in in the morning and not get up before eight. I haven't done this in years, but I'm so tired and written-out that I have to make the attempt. I see no days off the blog for me before the month of May and I need to craft mini-breaks in here along the way. Consider this an attempt.

Oz, or, Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

Senate Votes to Allow Drilling in Arctic Reserve
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: March 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 16 - President Bush's long-stalled plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling cleared a major hurdle on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, when the Senate voted to include the proposal in its budget, a maneuver that smoothes the way for Congress to approve drilling later this year.

By a vote of 51 to 49, Republicans defeated an effort by Democrats to eliminate the drilling language from the budget. The vote does not ensure that drilling will be approved. But if the budget is adopted, Senate rules would allow the passage of a measure opening the refuge with a simple majority of 51 votes, escaping the threat of a filibuster, which has killed it in the past.

The vote was a major turning point in one of the most contentious energy debates in Washington at a time when Senate Republicans, using the power of a newly expanded majority, have been pushing through bills that businesses had sought. In another victory for the White House, the Senate also narrowly beat back an effort by Democrats and moderate Republicans to make it harder to extend Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the next five years.

Drilling in the Alaskan Arctic is a central component of President Bush's energy policy. In a statement issued after the vote, Mr. Bush praised the Senate and also called on Congress to enact a comprehensive energy bill, which has stalled over Arctic oil exploration in the past.

"This project will keep our economy growing by creating jobs and ensuring that businesses can expand," Mr. Bush said, "and it will make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy."

Yeah, "Bushjobs" good for about ten years at minimum wage. There is about 6 months worth of oil in that fragile tundra. Why not fix the real problem, consumption, instead of propping it up with false solutions? This will do nothing to stem the oil shock, due in the next couple of years.

Foreign sources of energy? Will this do anything to stem our oil and electricty purchases from, em, Canada? No?

Miserable Failure

Bush: No Timetable for Troops Coming Home
Bush Declines to Set a Timetable for Bringing American Forces Home From Iraq

WASHINGTON Mar 16, 2005 — President Bush said Wednesday he understands the desire of U.S. coalition partners to withdraw troops from Iraq, but he declined to set a timetable for bringing American forces home and said he hoped others would also stay the course.

"Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself," Bush told reporters.

Myers: U.S. Weighs Long-Term Afghan Bases

Wed Mar 16,12:45 PM ET

By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan - America's top general said Wednesday that Afghanistan (news - web sites) is secure and the United States is considering keeping long-term bases here as it repositions its military forces around the world.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Taliban religious militia was "essentially in disarray" since failing to disrupt Afghanistan's landmark presidential election last year.

He stressed that a hard core was likely to fight on and Afghanistan remained "a target" for al-Qaida, but he said a reconciliation drive aimed at "non-criminal" Taliban could further weaken the militia.

"Security is very good throughout the country, exceptionally good," Myers told reporters at Kabul airport after talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. commanders.

Myers said no decision had been reached on whether to seek permanent bases on Afghan soil. "But clearly we've developed good relationships and good partnerships in this part of the world, not only in Afghanistan," he said, also mentioning existing U.S. bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

"That'll all be considered as we go forward with the whole global basing construct," he said. "Clearly the United States has an interest in the long-term security and stability in Afghanistan, so we'll be discussing that future relationship."

The Afghan government has said it is seeking a "strategic partnership" with the United States spanning economic and political ties as well as military. It has yet to say whether that would include permanent U.S. bases in the country, which neighbors Iran (news - web sites), Pakistan and oil-rich Central Asia.

Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, who served until Tuesday as the No. 2 U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told The Associated Press last month that the sprawling Soviet-era base at Bagram, north of the capital, "is a place where we see a long-term presence of coalition and, frankly, U.S. capabilities."

Three years after driving out the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) and his al-Qaida network, the U.S. military has about 17,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and operates air bases at Bagram, Kandahar in the south and Jalalabad in the east.

Myers and Wolfowitz may have dreams of empire in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but the fact is that they are losing both theaters. What does a failed empire look like?

Damage

Wolfowitz nomination a shock for Europe

By Edward Alden, Christopher Swann and Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: March 16 2005 20:46 | Last updated: March 16 2005 20:46

President George W. Bush's decision on Wednesday to nominate Paul Wolfowitz as the next president of the World Bank marks the second shock this month to Europeans who thought Mr Bush would present a kinder, gentler face to the world in his second term.

Instead, along with the nomination last week of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, Mr Bush has put forward two men who have been the most passionate advocates for the view that if the US leads, the rest of the world will follow and fall into line.

"Wolfowitz has been seen as a symbol of the go-it-alone approach of the Bush administration," said Devesh Kapur, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the official history of the World Bank. "Along with the nomination of Bolton, the US is putting the biggest sceptics of multilateralism in charge."

Mr Wolfowitz, deputy secretary in the Pentagon for the past four years, was among the earliest and strongest administration advocates for the war to oust Saddam Hussein. His name has become synonymous with the neoconservative argument that US security is reinforced not by a balance of power but by the use of military power to spread democratic ideals abroad.

With the successful elections in Iraq in January, and the possibility of democratic reforms in Lebanon and Egypt, his claims that the war could trigger a broader transformation in the region look more plausible than they did several months ago.

But critics will still point to the numerous lapses in judgment along the way. Mr Wolfowitz was among prominent members of the administration who engaged in a campaign two years ago to assure Americans that the financial costs of invading Iraq would be slight. These assurances were delivered against expert advice.

"There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people," Mr Wolfowitz told a House of Representatives hearing on March 27 2003.

"On a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50bn and $100bn over the course of the next two or three years," he said. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

In the two years since the invasion, Iraq's oil revenues have totalled $25bn (€18.6bn, £13bn), despite soaring world prices. The cost of the war and reconstruction has exceeded $200bn so far.

The appointment will also raise questions about development credentials.

While Mr Wolfowitz's career included a stint as ambassador to Indonesia, his focus has long been on military affairs and he is not seen as an expert on development issues or international finance.

Oxfam, the aid agency, said: "It is vital that whoever becomes the new World Bank president ensures that the Bank is focused on reducing poverty."

Some non-governmental groups fear Mr Wolfowitz will have a different focus, seeking to enlist the bank in the larger project of building US security by spreading democracy. "There will be concern about the possibility of introducing the war on terror into the projects and policies of the World Bank," said Manish Bapna, executive-director of the Bank Information Center.

This is such an about-face for the central bank for world development that it is hard to underestimate. Wolfowitz has no credentials in this area other than his contempt for it. He is a triumphalist neocon whose credentials so far lie in the area of being smart and wrong (Iraq.) Expect a strong challenge from the international board of governers, who have to vote to seat him. They aren't that stupid. As much as I disliked Jim Wolfensohn, at least he was a banker and understood banking. Wolfowitz is just another technocrat ideologue with a limited worldview and a porfolio to do unlimited damage.

Sunlight: The Best Disinfectent

Congress' Big Stick

Federal marshals tagging baseball players with subpoenas wasn't what we expected when big league baseball promised to return to Washington after a 33-year absence. Nor was the prospect of sluggers invoking the 5th Amendment as interrogators demand that they testify about steroid use.

Baseball has only itself to blame for its ugly predicament. Fans should be speculating on whether Barry Bonds can catch Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, but because Major League Baseball long resisted calls to retool its toothless drug policy, fans instead are stuck watching ESPN reports that look like they belong on Court TV.

Where is Congress's investigation of detainee abuse? Of contractor overcharges?

Putting Mark McGuire on the stand just masks all of that other stuff.

It is well to ask, "Why do the Repubs govern by secrecy?" Ya hide what you don't want other people to see.

Those who have become afraid of the daylight ought not to be in charge.

Imagination

I'm musing this evening on relationships, meat space and "virtual" (whatever the hell that means) after getting off the phone from a long phone call with Suburban Guerrilla. No, we haven't met yet, but we've spent so many hours on the phone that I know she's a sister, even if we haven't broken bread yet.

pogge and I rarely speak on the phone, we do most of our business by email, but we have met and carnivored together. He's a very good friend. But you know that.

The BF and I IM nearly daily when he isn't on the road for business, and talk on the phone regularly, but the relationship began in email and grew there. I'll see him when business allows in May. Is this frustrating? Yes. You work with what you've got.

I moderate an email list in which the regulars have been in communication with the group and each other for 10 years. We all know each other in some dimensions but not others.

I'm musing, as I said. What do you think about all of these newly generated relationships? You've probably got a bunch of them, too.

I'm in better touch with the rest of my family than I was when the phone was the primary mode of communication and it is changing my family (in ways that are mostly good.) How about you?

Bump is a blog, we're all writing to each other. How does that change things?

I'm too tired to think much about this tonight, but I'm putting it out there now because I want to take these questions to bed with me. When I'm chewing on something, I need to sleep on it. Sometimes for more than one night, but sleep is the magic that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care and gives us the mental space to let our imaginations run. Play this exercise out with me.

The Curtain Opens...

Many Scientists Fear Bird Flu Cases Exceed Data
# Minimal reports from Laos and Cambodia and unreliable test results elsewhere suggest that the virus' progress has been underestimated.

By Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — After more than a year of watching patients sicken and die of bird flu, Dr. Tran Tinh Hien of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases here thought he understood the illness.

Then last month, he learned of an unsettling study. Japanese researchers retested samples from 30 Vietnamese patients whose lab tests showed no signs of the disease. They discovered that seven had actually been infected.

"We are especially worried, because it may mean we missed some patients," said Tran, the hospital's deputy director.

Tran is part of a growing consensus that the extent of human bird flu infection in Southeast Asia may have been significantly underestimated.

In the last few months, scientists have begun to believe that the inaccuracy of laboratory tests, the wide variation of symptoms and the inability of public health agencies to combat the disease may have created the erroneous perception that bird flu is still rare among humans.

The number of infections is key. The more there are, the greater the chance the virus will mutate into a form that can easily be passed between people, who would have little immunity to the new disease. Scientists believe that nearly all infections so far have been caused by contact with sick or dead poultry.

Officially, the tally doesn't sound alarming. The virus has killed 14 people since December and 46 over the last 15 months. All but one of them were from Vietnam and Thailand. Altogether, there are 69 lab-confirmed cases, according to the World Health Organization.

Yet doctors and public health officials point to a glaring oddity in the statistics that underscores the belief that the case count is too low to be true.

Vietnam and Thailand have reported the overwhelming majority of recent cases. Yet Laos, which is sandwiched between the countries, has reported no cases among people or birds this year. Cambodia, which is also flanked by Vietnam and Thailand, has confirmed only a single human case.

"People are not trying to cover it up, but given how widespread the infection is in poultry in Southeast Asia, it's hard to believe people have gotten ill in only [three] countries," said Jeremy Farrar, a University of Oxford flu researcher at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

Philippe Buchy, head of virology at the Pasteur Institute, the only testing center in Cambodia, said, "The best way not to find something is not to look for it."

The Phillipines reported its first confirmed cases in birds today and have isolated two provinces. It's break out time, boys and girls.

Uh Oh

Scores died in U.S. custody in war zones
Unclear how many deaths attributable to U.S. personnel abuse
The Associated Press
Updated: 10:49 a.m. ET March 16, 2005

WASHINGTON - At least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel.

The figure, far higher than any previously disclosed, includes cases investigated by the Army, Navy, CIA and Justice Department. Some 65,000 prisoners have been taken during the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although most have been freed.

The Pentagon has never provided comprehensive information on how many prisoners taken during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have died, and the 108 figure is based on information supplied by Army, Navy and other government officials. It includes deaths attributed to natural causes.

ACLU: Hold someone accountable
To human rights groups, the deaths form a clear pattern.

“Despite the military’s own reports of deaths and abuses of detainees in U.S. custody, it is astonishing that our government can still pretend that what is happening is the work of a few rogue soldiers,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. “No one at the highest levels of our government has yet been held accountable for the torture and abuse, and that is unacceptable.”

Giant Middle Digit

Geraldine Sealey in Salon's War Room

From the Pentagon to the World Bank

He was in, then he was out. But now Paul Wolfowitz, top Bush administration neo-con and deputy defense secretary, has been named President Bush's choice to head the World Bank, the biggest and most influential development institution in the world. (Perhaps it was that fawning David Brooks column that put Wolfowitz over the top!)

The last person to make the transition from the Pentagon to the World Bank was another architect of a controversial war, Robert McNamara, who ran the Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara's tenure was seen by many as a way of making up for the carnage of Vietnam. Wolfowitz, of course, is not remorseful about Iraq. But Europeans fear his tenure at the Bank could prove similar to McNamara's in another way -- that he would funnel aid to nations based more on their support of U.S. policy than their neediness.

George W. Bush, pissing off the world since 2001.

Peak Oil Prices

Oil Hits New High on Fuel-Supply Report

By Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 16, 2005; 12:28 PM

The price of crude oil reached an all-time high today on a report from the Department of Energy that U.S. supplies of gasoline and heating oil fell sharply last week.

The spike, to $56.25 per barrel, set a new record for intra-day trade prices in crude oil futures contracts. The previous record was $55.67 set in October.

It also sparked another sell-off of stocks on Wall Street.

The crude price figure is not adjusted for inflation. The inflation-adjusted record is close to $90 per barrel, set in 1980.

The continuing surge in prices is, nevertheless, being reflected in everyday prices at the pump, which are averaging $2 per gallon for regular nationally, with the country going into the heavy driving vacation season.

The increase came despite an announcement from OPEC that it would boost production quotas by about 500,000 barrels a day, an announcement that was apparently dismissed by traders because the oil cartel's production is already above that level by about 200,000 barrels, meaning that no extra oil will be produced.

Anybody know what the dollar is doing this afternoon? I just got in and haven't had a chance to check Bloomberg yet.

Playing Catch-up

A little tech news:

IE7 details leak onto web
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Wednesday 16th March 2005 10:58 GMT

Details of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0 are starting to emerge, and if the rumours are true, IE 7.0 will have tabbed browsing, a built-in news-aggregator, and could be integrated with Microsoft's currently-in-beta anti-spyware product.

IE 7.0 is due to begin beta testing this summer.

I'm off to monthly spiritual directors' peer group meeting. Back in a few hours.

New Quiz

You're Pale Fire!

by Vladimir Nabokov

You're really into poetry and the interpretation thereof. Along the road of life, you have had several identity crises which make it very unclear who you are, let alone how to interpret poetry. You probably came from a foreign country, but then again you seem foreign to everyone in ways unrelated to immigration. Most people think you're quite funny, but maybe you're just sick. Talking to you ends up being much like playing a round of the popular board game Clue.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Apocalypse When?

Flirting With Deficit Disasters

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, March 16, 2005; Page A23

What's truly unfortunate about Bush's privatization road show is that it has distracted him and the nation from the financial threats that loom just over the horizon. Those dangers were highlighted in frightening analyses made this month by investor Warren Buffett and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Though the two differ about precisely what may lie ahead, they agree that unless the United States puts its financial house in order, it faces real trouble.

Buffett's comments came in his annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., released March 5. Every year, Buffett's letter offers blunt economic analysis, and it has become a kind of cult object for his devotees. But this year's version was enough to give you indigestion after devouring the sage's favorite meal of a T-bone steak and double hash browns at Gorat's in Omaha. Indeed, it was downright scary in its comments about the dangers posed by America's trade deficit.

Buffett has argued since 2003 that this huge trade deficit will eventually bring a sharp decline in the dollar, and he has tried to protect his company's shareholders against that dollar crash by speculating in foreign currencies. But this year, with the trade deficit having ballooned to a record $618 billion in 2004, Buffett's tone is almost apocalyptic.

"The evidence grows that our trade policies will put unremitting pressure on the dollar for many years to come," Buffett writes. "The decline in its value has already been substantial, but it is nevertheless likely to continue. Without policy changes, currency markets could even become disorderly and generate spillover effects, both political and financial." That's careful language, but what Buffett is saying is that America is risking a financial crash -- a bursting bubble -- if political leaders don't do something about the trade deficit.

Buffett phrases his analysis in his usual homespun metaphors. By buying more abroad than we produce at home, "We are like a family that consistently overspends its income," he writes; we are financing this self-indulgence only by writing IOUs that are claims on our future income. Rather than an "ownership society," we are creating a "sharecropper's society" that, by Buffett's calculation, will owe the world $11 trillion by 2015 if we continue on the current course. Servicing that debt would cost $550 billion annually, a payment to the rest of the world that "would undoubtedly produce significant political unrest in the U.S.," Buffett fears.

Greenspan focuses on the other looming financial disaster, the federal budget deficit. In a March 10 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, he warned that the deficit "will rise significantly as the baby boomers start to retire in 2008." And he offered a stark warning that this rising deficit could eventually threaten U.S. financial markets: "Our fiscal prospects are, in my judgment, a significant obstacle to long-term stability because the budget deficit is not readily subject to correction by market forces that stabilize other imbalances." In other words, politicians have to solve this problem; the markets can't.

I should note that Greenspan disagrees with Buffett about the trade deficit. The Fed chairman thinks that over time a declining dollar and other adjustments will reduce U.S. demand for expensive imports. There's no sign that this gradual market adjustment is happening, however. Despite a falling dollar, the trade deficit increased in January to $58.3 billion, the second-highest monthly total ever.

Our wisest economic thinkers are sounding the alarm bells, but where are the political leaders? Where, in particular, is President Bush? After Sept. 11, 2001, he showed that he could rally the country to deal with a deadly threat to its security. He faces that challenge again in dealing with the nation's financial imbalances. Bush should put the distraction of his privatization plan behind him and focus on the economic crises that are here and now. Time to step up, Mr. President.

Ignatius is playing patty-cake with the truth. Bush is an incompetent financial manager. Period. Check out Robert Samuelson's Newsweek column from last weekend. As I said to a reader yesterday, my only question now is what gets us first, Avian Influenza or financial collapse.

Subverting the Dominant Link Heirarchy

Helen Cobban's Just World News is one of the places I go for reliable news from the ME. Add that link to your bookmarks and read yesterday's entry with sorrow

Anyway, friends, please join in remembering the victims of these incidents from recent weeks:

And if the US occupation forces can't (or won't) do the job of assuring the basic physical security of Iraqi families-- who can?

Here's the real news, with context you don't get from the MSM. Thank God for blogs and for great souls like Helena.

American Idol

2 Years After Invasion, Poll Data Mixed
Doubts About War, Optimism for Iraqis

By Dan Balz and Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 16, 2005; Page A01

Two years after President Bush led the country to war in Iraq, Americans appear to be of two minds about the situation in the Middle East: A majority say they believe the Iraqis are better off today than they were before the conflict began -- but they also say the war was not worth fighting in the first place, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The January elections in Iraq have helped to shift public opinion in a positive direction about the future of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, with a clear majority of Americans (56 percent) saying they are now confident that Iraqi leaders can create a stable government -- a dramatic turnaround since just before the elections.

The poll also shows that more Americans believe the war has improved the chances of democracy spreading in the Middle East than believe it has diminished those prospects.

Despite the optimism about the future, the poll suggests there has been little change in the negative public opinion about the decision to go to war. Fifty-three percent of Americans said the war was not worth fighting, 57 percent said they disapprove of the president's handling of Iraq, and 70 percent said the number of U.S. casualties, including more than 1,500 deaths, is an unacceptable price.

The mixed assessment of the situation in Iraq comes near the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion. It offers a benchmark for measuring the shifts in public opinion that have occurred since Bush launched the war despite opposition from much of the rest of the world.

Along with judgments about the war in Iraq, the poll found little appetite for military action against other states Bush has targeted for criticism, including Iran and North Korea. But with Iraq moving toward greater self-governance, Bush does not appear to be under great pressure to remove U.S. forces immediately -- despite criticism of how he has handled the situation there.

The poll also comes in the midst of encouraging signs throughout the Middle East, with tensions between Israelis and Palestinians reduced, popular support and international pressure for an end to Syria's occupation of Lebanon, and tentative steps toward democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Bush has reaped some of the credit for the changes underway in the region, having made the promotion of democracy there and elsewhere the central theme of his second-term foreign policy agenda.

Over the past two years, Americans rallied around Bush in the initial stages of the war but grew increasingly disillusioned as stepped-up insurgent attacks a year ago turned the conflict bloodier. Today, Americans offer a more nuanced assessment of the experience there and its impact both on the United States and the Middle East. Deep partisan divisions remain, with Republicans positive about the decision to go to war and Democrats strongly negative.

What Baltz and Morin miss is that it is in no small degree their own employer's relentless chearleading in the run up to and lousy coverage after "major military operations" which has misled people into supporting this abomination. Crappy news coverage in this country means that those supporting (whatever that means) this war are completely clueless about the war crimes in Fallujah and Ramadiyah, the systematic abuse of Abu Ghraib and the American Gulag, the things you won't see on CNN or Fox.

War is Murder

U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: March 16, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 15 - At least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials.

The number of confirmed or suspected cases is much higher than any accounting the military has previously reported. A Pentagon report sent to Congress last week cited only six prisoner deaths caused by abuse, but that partial tally was limited to what the author, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy, called "closed, substantiated abuse cases" as of last September.

The new figure of 26 was provided by the Army and Navy this week after repeated inquiries. In 18 cases reviewed by the Army and Navy, investigators have now closed their inquiries and have recommended them for prosecution or referred them to other agencies for action, Army and Navy officials said. Eight cases are still under investigation but are listed by the Army as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides, the officials said.

Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, officials said, showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift.

Among the cases are at least four involving Central Intelligence Agency employees that are being reviewed by the Justice Department for possible prosecution. They include a killing in Afghanistan in June 2003 for which David Passaro, a contract worker for the C.I.A., is now facing trial in federal court in North Carolina.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the number of criminal homicides and renewed their call for a Sept. 11-style inquiry into detention operations and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. "This number to me is quite astounding," said James D. Ross, senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York. "This just reflects an overall failure to take seriously the abuses that have occurred."

Pentagon and Army officials rebutted that accusation. Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that he was not aware that the Defense Department had previously accounted publicly for criminal homicides among the detainee deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, but insisted that military authorities were vigorously pursuing each case.

"I have not seen the numbers collected in the way you described them, but obviously one criminal homicide is one too many," said Mr. Di Rita, who noted that American forces had held more than 50,000 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past three years.

Army officials said the killings took place both inside and outside detention areas, including at the point of capture in often violent battlefield conditions. "The Army will investigate every detainee death both inside and outside detention facilities," said Col. Joseph Curtin, a senior Army spokesman. "Simply put, detainee abuse is not tolerated, and the Army will hold soldiers accountable. We are taking action to prosecute those suspected of abuse while taking steps now to train soldiers how to avoid such situations in the future."

In his report last week, Admiral Church concluded that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan had been the result primarily of a breakdown of discipline, not flawed policies or misguided direction from commanders or Pentagon officials. But he cautioned that his conclusions were "based primarily on the information available to us as of Sept. 30, 2004," and added, "Should additional information become available, our conclusions would have to be considered in light of that information."

In addition to the criminal homicides, 11 cases involving prisoner deaths at the hands of American troops are now listed as justifiable homicides that should not be prosecuted, Army officials said. Those cases included killings caused by soldiers in suppressing prisoner riots in Iraq, they said. Other prisoners have died in captivity of natural causes, the military has found.

Why does a little nerve in my gut tell me that this is the tip of the iceberg? The cowboy culture of our Army and Marines tells me that this is common and a tiny minority of the true cases will ever be prosecuted.

Politics and the Home Front

Via The Center for American Progress blog, Think Progress:

Deconstructing John Bolton

CONDI’S CLAIM: “John played a key diplomatic role in our sensitive negotiations with Libya when that nation made the wise choice to give up its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.”
FACT: According to Newsweek, talks with Libya “succeeded only after the British managed to sideline the Bush administration’s top arms-control official, John Bolton. … [A]fter a tense session in London, the British complained that Bolton was obstructing talks. Washington agreed to keep Bolton at home. The assurances that Libya sought were quietly given.”
FACT: Bolton opposed the very strategy eventually used to encourage Libya to disarm. “In a 2000 law review article he warned that the effort to isolate Libya via prosecution of the terrorists it sponsors and the UN sanctions ‘marks the final collapse of United States policy against Libyan terrorism.’”

CONDI’S CLAIM: “John helped build a coalition of more than 60 countries to help combat the spread of WMD through the President’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI).”
FACT: According to the Arms Control Association, “The initiative does not empower countries to do anything that they previously could not do. Most importantly, PSI does not grant governments any new legal authority to conduct interdictions in international waters or airspace.”
FACT: Critics say the initiative has yielded no major successes. Though some point to Libya as evidence of a PSI breakthrough, a “closer examination of the record shows PSI played no role in Libya’s decision to disarm.”
FACT: The legitimacy of the PSI has been undermined by the administration’s refusal to press the Senate to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty – negotiated more than 20 years ago – has been ratified by 145 nations, including the other members of the Proliferation Security Initiative (who insist that it provides the only legitimate international framework for the initiative). Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly criticized the administration for failing to push senators to ratify the treaty.

I'll leave the links over at Think Progess and you can click on over and add to the comments there, if you are so inclined. CAP has a big presser next week on healthcare and I'm going. These folks are a serious resource for progressive public policy wonks and I want to work for them. Showing up with a laptop and some good questions at these events is one way to get there.

Speaking of laptops, the BF, an IT pro, programmer and web designer, says "gotta getta Dell." I think they are pretty but look fragile. Any of you have a thought? I have to make a decision this weekend if I'm going to buy by mail. I *insist* on Win2kPro, which means a custom install, Dell defaults to XP Pro, and I just don't like it, feels funky.

Eddie, by the way, is going to lose most of his teeth (he has a really crappy owner who has been poor too long) but should be okay in the long run, soft food means he doesn't really need teeth. No cancer. Got the biopsy results tonight. He's going to need steroids to reduce the inflammation and a lot of help with antibiotics for weeks, but the grinding the pills into babyfood junior meats seems to work quite well. I add a spritz of Bovril to give it a good strong smell that covers the smell of the meds. This works and avoids the fight of "pilling the cat."

Yes, I'm fully familiar with The New Natural Cat and Eddie's immune system is being supported by some of the things I learned there. He's going to be fine and the vet techs love him. Who wouldn't? Even feeling poorly, he's the most affectionate cat who has ever owned me. He's my little orange bucket of love.

Making Us Sick

Via the hardest working bloggers in the 'sphere:

Post-9/11 secrecy produces some undesirable results

Mon Mar 14,10:04 AM ET

Op/Ed - USATODAY.com

In Fall River, Mass., last year, the mayor wanted to find out more about a plan to store liquid natural gas in his city. The substance, if released, can cause a catastrophic explosion, and he wanted to be sure that safeguards were adequate to protect the public.

A 1966 federal law is supposed guarantee access to that information. But so far, he and other residents have received nothing but documents blacked out to the point of uselessness. The citizens of Fall River, it seems, will just have to take their chances.

Welcome to the world of post-9/11 secrecy, where bureaucrats are turning the notion of open government on its head. Federal, state and local officials are clamping down on information that would have been accessible just four years ago.

Some information that previously was open no doubt needs to be classified now. Terrorism alters perspectives. But the terrorist threat also has provided cover for bureaucrats who instinctively opt for secrecy and public officials who would prefer to keep the public in the dark to avoid accountability.

The numbers alone should persuade even the most ardent defender of secret government that something is amiss.

In 2004, the government created 16 million new secrets, 75% more than in the year ending in September 2001. Sixteen million! And each new "classification decision" can involve many documents.

That level of secrecy itself poses a security threat. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which works to open records, said the system is so busy classifying that it can no longer "tell the real threat from the decoys."

Consider this silliness:

In 1999, the government declassified most of a 1975 U.S. spy agency biography of then-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (news - web sites). Last year, in answer to a related request, bureaucrats re-released the same document. But this time, they blacked out portions they had declassified five years earlier.

One of the secrets? Pinochet "drinks scotch and pisco sours." Shhh! Don't tell.

It would be easy to laugh, if so much of what's hidden weren't so serious.

Last year, the Senate intelligence committee released scathing findings on the nation's faulty prewar Iraq (news - web sites) intelligence. Initially, the CIA (news - web sites) wanted to keep half the report secret.

After senators balked, the agency backed off, a little. Lines, paragraphs and entire pages still were hidden when the report came out.

While I will concede some privacy for some national security issues, years of working with people who are trying to heal their lives has taught me that secrets are toxic. Our government is toxic and our society is toxic.

Coalition of the Withdrawing

I've been waiting for this for a while. The Sgrena/Calipari affair moved the announcement date up.

Italy to Start Withdrawing Troops From Iraq in September
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 15, 2005
Filed at 3:26 p.m. ET

ROME (AP) -- Premier Silvio Berlusconi, facing rising opposition to the war in Iraq and public outcry over the deadly U.S. shooting of an Italian agent in Baghdad, announced Tuesday that Italy will start withdrawing its 3,000 troops from Iraq beginning in September.

While taping a state TV talk show to air later Tuesday, Berlusconi said, ``In September we will begin a progressive reduction of the number of our soldiers in Iraq.''

Withdrawing Italian troops ``will depend on the capability of the Iraqi government to give itself structures for acceptable security,'' the ANSA news agency quoted Berlusconi as saying. ``I've spoken about it with (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair, and it's the public opinion of our countries that expects this decision.''

In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, ``We certainly appreciate the contributions of the Italians. They have served and sacrificed alongside Iraqis and alongside other coalition forces.''

Italian government officials had already indicated that Rome would consider withdrawing troops if Iraq could handle its own security. Last fall, Italy's defense minister said coalition troops in Iraq could be gradually cut after Iraq's elections in January, but he did not cite a timetable.

Opposition to the war and to Italy's involvement in Iraq is strong here. Berlusconi faced renewed pressure to pull troops out after the March 4 killing in Baghdad of an Italian intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari, as he escorted a recently released hostage to freedom.

Berlusconi has powerful tools to survive the next general election--he's one of the largest media moguls in the world--but he'd be denied their power completely if Italians were still taking bullets on the ground in Iraq come next spring. I haven't been studying Italian politics (Gianni, can you fill me in?), but I know that Berlusconi is vulnerable if the right challenger comes along.

Bankers' Relief

Robert Scheer: The Bankruptcy Bill: a Tutorial in Greed
# Lesson No. 1 -- Campaign cash is worth more than family values.

Because they keep revamping and expanding the SAT, I'll propose a new economics puzzler for the test makers' consideration.

Question: What is the difference between a loan shark and a banker?

Answer: Not much. The former uses hired thugs to enforce repayment from the debtors; the latter employs the feds as paid muscle.
......
So why gut the bankruptcy law now? Greed, pure and simple. And, pathetically, this bankers' dream is becoming a reality through the support of Republicans who have decided, as they often do with social issues, to selectively pick and choose when to follow the teachings of the Bible.

A key sponsor of the bill, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), actively opposes abortion and same-sex marriage on biblical grounds yet believes the Good Book's clear definition and condemnation of usury is irrelevant. The Old Testament, revered by Jews, Muslims and Christians alike, mandates debt forgiveness after seven years, as was pointed out earlier this month by an organization of Christian lawyers in a letter to Grassley.

"I can't listen to Christian lawyers," said the senator, "because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population."

Sadly, when it comes to serving the prerogatives of banks, you can forget about those family values that folks such as Grassley prattle on about. The bill he wrote placed mothers and their children behind credit card companies in the line for a bankrupt ex-husband's paycheck, for example, which is positively Dickensian. Expected to sail through the House and onto the president's desk in the next few weeks, the bill turns the federal government into a guardian angel of an industry gone mad, placing no significant restriction on soaring interest rates and proliferating fees.

One extremely modest amendment that was rejected by the Senate would have blocked creditors from recovering debts from military personnel if the loans had annual rates higher than 36%. Also killed were sensible amendments designed to protect those ruined by a medical emergency, identity theft, dependent-caregiver expenses or loss of income due to being called to full-time military duty through the National Guard or the Reserve.

In the end, these individuals are simply not powerful enough to earn the protection of our by-the-powerful, for-the-powerful government. Creditors can scam consumers, Enron can burn California, Halliburton can gouge the Pentagon, the rich can enjoy obscene tax cuts, our "conservative" president can run up the deficit like a drunken sailor — and none of it seems to faze our elected leaders. For them, "fiscal responsibility" is just a high-minded prescription appropriate only for the commoners.

Think of it as economic rape.

Intel Collapse

3/14/2005
Former UN weapons inspector, who worked with CIA, sees ‘terminally ill’ intel operation
Former UN weapons inspector, who worked with CIA, hits neocon ‘brownshirts’

By Larisa Alexandrovna | RAW STORY Staff

In part one of Raw Story’s exclusive interview with former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the discussion focused on Iraq, Iran, and touched briefly on the probability of Russia’s unsecured nuclear materials.

Ritter: The system is broken. America is going through one of these closed loops.

Edge of the Cliff

Bottom Dollar
The greenback's fall is stoking fears of a global crisis. Behind the slide: a world economy wildly out of balance
Illustration by Viktor Koen for Newsweek

By Robert J. Samuelson
Newsweek

March 21 issue - There's been plenty of good news of late about the U.S. economy, so let's start with that: employment is expanding (2.4 million new payroll jobs in the last year); inflation remains low (less than a 2 percent rate in the past quarter); the stock market is higher (up 11 percent on the Dow from its November low), and business investment is impressive (rising at a 14 percent rate in late 2004). Indeed, the recent news has been so good—a major exception being $50-a-barrel oil—that we're hearing again of the "Goldilocks" economy, which grows fast enough to increase jobs and slow enough to muffle inflation. But beyond all the upbeat indicators lurks a potentially frightening problem that unsettles even the wisest and most seasoned economic observers. It's not government budget deficits, a possible housing bubble or even $2-a-gallon gasoline. It's the dollar.

If you've been following closely, you know that the dollar has been declining steadily against many foreign currencies. From recent highs—reached in mid-2001 or early 2002—the dollar has dropped 38 percent against the euro, 23 percent against the yen and 25 percent against the Canadian dollar. And most economists expect the slide to continue. By the year-end, the euro may rise to $1.45 from $1.34 and the yen to 97 from 104 (that's 97 yen to the dollar), says economist Nariman Behravesh of Global Insight. But, of course, you probably haven't been following closely. For most Americans, the subject of the dollar—its value on foreign-exchange markets—is a yawner. A depreciating dollar makes foreign vacations more expensive, puts pressure on the prices of imported cars and shoes and (the good part) improves the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers. Normally, these matters aren't high on our "must know" list. But now is not normal.

The significance of the dropping dollar is that it's actually a symptom of a larger and more troubling development. For 15 years the American economy has been the engine for the world economy through ever-increasing trade and current-account deficits (the current account includes other overseas payments like travel and tourism). In 2004, the U.S. current-account deficit is estimated to have reached $650 billion, a record 5.6 percent of the economy (GDP). Other countries' economies benefit from sending their goods to eager American buyers, and the United States in turn sends massive amounts of dollars abroad to pay for those goods. The trouble is that there are now more dollars than foreigners want to hold. If there's a glut of anything—apples, computer chips, Beanie Babies—prices go down. So when surplus dollars are sold for euros, yen or pounds, then the dollar drops in value against those currencies.

If you sense a contradiction, you're right; and there's the dilemma. The world economy can't get along without our massive trade deficits—and perhaps can't get along with them, either. Americans' consumption binge is propping up global trade and employment, but it's also threatening a financial upheaval that could hurt global trade and employment. With their export earnings, foreigners have bought huge amounts of U.S. stocks, bonds and other investments: at the end of 2003, $1.8 trillion of corporate bonds and $1.5 trillion of stocks. The doomsday scenario, considered unlikely by most economists but not impossible, is that a crash of the dollar would trigger a broader panic. Foreigners would sell their U.S. stocks and bonds, driving down those markets and bringing massive losses to everyone. They would sell because a dropping dollar would make their American investments worth less in their own currencies. Consumer and business confidence would drop; a recession in the United States and abroad might follow.
....
The real issue is whether the present pattern of global economic growth is inherently unstable—and whether it can be easily corrected. America's huge and expanding trade deficits have served as a narcotic for the rest of the world. As with all narcotics, resulting highs have been artificial and, to some extent, delusional to both the dealer and the addicts. The question now is whether everyone can go straight, before the addiction becomes self-destructive. It is whether the Asians can curb their export dependence; whether the Europeans can revitalize their economies; whether the Americans can control their overconsumption. The dollar's fluctuations and frailties are mainly the outward manifestations of this larger predicament. To paraphrase former Treasury secretary John Connally: the dollar may be America's currency, but it's the world's problem.

Samuelson is unnecessarily US-centric, but not wrong.

Lies from the Top

Excess Fuel Billing by Halliburton in Iraq Is Put at $108 Million
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: March 15, 2005

Excess billing for postwar fuel imports to Iraq by the Halliburton Company totaled more than $108 million, according to a report by Pentagon auditors that was completed last fall but has never been officially released to the public or to Congress.

In one case, according to the report, the company claimed that it had paid more than $27 million to transport liquefied petroleum gas it had purchased in Kuwait for just $82,000 - a fee the auditors tartly dismissed as "illogical."

The fuels report, by the Defense Contract Audit Agency, was one of nine audits involving a subsidiary of Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root, that were completed in October 2004, in the month before the American presidential elections. But the administration has kept all of them confidential despite repeated requests from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

Excerpts were released yesterday by the office of Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, minority leader of the House Committee on Government Reform, which said it had obtained the audit through "unofficial channels."

Vice President Dick Cheney formerly headed Halliburton, a conglomerate based in Texas. Allegations of profiteering by the company - hotly disputed by Halliburton and administration officials - were raised in the presidential campaign.

"The facts show that KBR delivered fuel crucial to the Iraqi people when failure was not an option," said Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, in an e-mail message. "We will continue to work with the Army to prove, once and for all, that KBR delivered these vital services for the Iraqi people at a fair and reasonable cost given the circumstances."

KBR has received more than $10 billion in contracts for work in Iraq, including oil-field repairs, fuel imports and, in a huge separate agreement, provision of housing, meals and other support to the military.

In a letter sent to President Bush yesterday, Mr. Waxman and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, minority leader of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, asked for an explanation of why the auditing reports had not been released to Congress and demanded stronger efforts to reclaim funds from Halliburton.

Allegations of overcharging for the fuel imports have swirled from the initial days of the occupation, but in this latest audit the scale of officially disputed charges is higher than previously reported. In December 2003, the same Pentagon auditing agency announced that a preliminary study had discovered $61 million in unreasonable fuel bills up to that point.

The later audit describes "unreasonable" and "questionable" billing of $108 million of total billings of $875 million under an initial "task order" to Kellogg, Brown & Root to import fuels into Iraq.

Pentagon Data on Iraq Security Forces Unreliable -GAO

Mon Mar 14, 5:35 PM EST

By Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon (news - web sites) told Congress on Monday that there are 142,472 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces, but a Capitol Hill watchdog agency said data on the forces was unreliable and it was difficult to gauge whether billions of U.S. dollars were being used effectively.

"Data on the status of Iraqi security forces is unreliable and provides limited information on their capabilities," Joseph Christoff, of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), told a House of Representatives Government Reform subcommittee.

Christoff also said Pentagon intelligence data showed an escalating insurgency, as "each monthly peak in the number of violent incidents is followed by a higher average number of attacks in subsequent months."

Rear Adm. William Sullivan, who provided the Pentagon figures to the committee, acknowledged they included some Iraqi police who may have left their post or were absent without leave. He also said the Pentagon is trying to develop a way to measure how ready the Iraqi forces are for combat or various types of security duty.

Assessing the readiness of Iraqis to take over the role of U.S. forces in countering the insurgency has become a crucial factor in judging when the United States will be able to start withdrawing from Iraq (news - web sites).

The administration has spent about $5.8 billion to develop Iraq's security forces. President Bush (news - web sites) is seeking another $5.7 billion in an $81.9 billion emergency spending bill that Congress is considering for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites).

"Without reliable information, Congress may find it difficult to judge how federal funds are achieving a goal of transferring security responsibilities to the Iraqis," Christoff told the panel.

The U.S. goal is to train and equip about 271,000 Iraqi security forces, police and military combined, by July 2006.

The Pentagon has been forced to scale back its estimates of ready forces from about 206,000 as it became apparent many were not combat-ready, particularly after the November offensive in Fallujah.

"This is like fantasy land. This is as fictive as the weapons of mass destruction," Rep. Dennis Kucinich (news - web sites), an Ohio Democrat, told Sullivan of the Pentagon's figures. "I'm embarrassed for you that you would come to a congressional committee with this kind of a phony report."

Everything we're told about this f&*king rathole our money is being poured down is just made up. Iraqi lives and American are being spent for a fabric of lies.

Sleeping with the Enemy

The $600 Billion Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 15, 2005

The argument over Social Security privatization isn't about rival views on how to secure the program's future - even the administration admits that private accounts would do nothing to help the system's finances. It's a debate about what kind of society America should be.
.....
Let's start with the case of the bogus $600 billion.

In his Jan. 15 radio address, President Bush made a startling claim: "According to the Social Security trustees, waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security." The $600 billion cost of each year's delay has become a standard administration talking point, repeated by countless conservative pundits - who have apparently not looked at what the trustees actually said.

In fact, the trustees never said that waiting a year to "fix" Social Security costs $600 billion. Mr. Bush was grossly misrepresenting the meaning of a technical discussion of accounting issues (it's on Page 58 of the 2004 trustees' report), which has nothing to do with the cost of delaying changes in the retirement program.

The same type of "infinite horizon" calculation applied to the Bush tax cuts says that their costs rise by $1 trillion a year. That's not a useful measure of the cost of not repealing those cuts immediately.

So anyone who repeats the $600 billion line is helping to spread a lie. That's why it was disturbing to read a news report about the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who must know better, doing just that at a pro-privatization rally.
....
But in his latest radio address, Mr. Bush - correctly, this time - attributed the $600 billion figure to a "Democrat leader." He was referring to Senator Joseph Lieberman, who, for some reason, repeated the party line - the Republican party line - the previous Sunday.

My guess is that Mr. Lieberman thought he was being centrist and bipartisan, reaching out to Republicans by showing that he shares their concerns. At a time when the Democrats can say, without exaggeration, that their opponents are making a dishonest case for policies that will increase the risks facing families, Mr. Lieberman gave the administration cover by endorsing its fake numbers.

The push to privatize Social Security will probably fail all the same - but such attempts at accommodation may limit the Democrats' political gain.

Meanwhile, the party missed a big opportunity to make its case against increasing families' risk by acquiescing to the credit card industry's demand for harsher bankruptcy laws.

As it happens, Mr. Lieberman stated clearly what was wrong with the bankruptcy bill: "It failed to close troubling loopholes that protect wealthy debtors, and yet it deals harshly with average Americans facing unforeseen medical expenses or a sudden military deployment," making it unfair to "working Americans who find themselves in dire financial straits through no fault of their own." A stand against the bill would have merged populism with patriotism, highlighting Democrats' differences with Republicans' vision of America.

But many Democrats chose not to take that stand. And Mr. Lieberman was among them: his vote against the bill was an empty gesture. On the only vote that opponents of the bill had a chance of winning - a motion to cut off further discussion - he sided with the credit card companies. To be fair, so did 13 other Democrats. But none of the others tried to have it both ways.

It isn't always bad politics to say things that aren't true and claim to support things you actually oppose: just look at who's running the country. But Democrats who engage in these tactics right now create big problems for a party that has been given a special chance - maybe its last chance - to remind the country of what Democrats stand for, and why.

And this is another reason why Joe must go. What does he stand for?

The Security State

Va. Defense Facility Locked Down
Similar Incident at Pentagon Spurs Queries About Coordination

By Jamie Stockwell and Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page A01

A sensor at a Department of Defense mailroom in Fairfax County signaled the presence of a suspicious biological substance yesterday, forcing hundreds of workers to remain inside three buildings for almost six hours.

The lockdown came just hours after the mail facility at the Pentagon, about four miles away in Arlington, was evacuated and closed. The Pentagon took that action yesterday morning after tests conducted last week came back positive for anthrax, officials said. Later tests at the Pentagon were negative.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the Fairfax fire department initially said the events at the Pentagon and in the Baileys Crossroads section of Fairfax were unrelated. But last night, a Virginia official said the events might be linked. In addition, emergency officials responding to the Fairfax incident said they were not aware of the Pentagon evacuation, causing Virginia's top homeland security official to say that coordination by the Defense Department would have to be reviewed.

Authorities said that there is no imminent danger to the public, that Defense Department mail is irradiated and that new detection systems worked. But state and local officials remained concerned that 3 1/2 years after the attack on the Pentagon and anthrax mailings that affected local postal facilities, coordination did not work smoothly yesterday.

"Clearly, the big question that's got to be answered is when did the DOD make the notification and did they make all appropriate notifications to make sure all federal, state and local players were aware of the problem?" said George W. Foresman, homeland security adviser to Gov. Mark R. Warner (D).

As many as 800 people, a majority of whom work as government contractors, were kept inside their buildings on Leesburg Pike in Baileys Crossroads after a sensor was activated about 2:30 p.m., a fire department official said.

This is what life is like when Bushco rules. Welcome to the New World Order. It's not really about safety, it is about control. Just so's you know.

State Corporatism, V.1.0

Administration Rejects Ruling On PR Videos
GAO Called Tapes Illegal Propaganda

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page A21

The Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office, said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government's role in producing them.

That message, in memos sent Friday to federal agency heads and general counsels, contradicts a Feb. 17 memo from Comptroller General David M. Walker. Walker wrote that such stories -- designed to resemble independently reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them without editing -- violate provisions in annual appropriations laws that ban covert propaganda.

The legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert,' regardless of whether the content of the message is 'propaganda,' " Bradbury wrote. "Our view is that the prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency."

The existence of the memos was reported Sunday by the New York Times.

The law is what Bush says it is. Hoo boy, have we arrived at fascism by the main gate, or what?

A Meatless Hit and Carnivore Variation

A quick, meatless hit.

ARUGULA AND FONTINA FRITTATA

1 garlic clove, halved
1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
5 oz baby arugula (7 cups packed)
6 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 lb Fontina, rind discarded and cheese cut into 1/2-inch cubes
Preheat broiler.

Cook garlic in oil in a 10-inch well-seasoned cast-iron or other ovenproof skillet over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until golden, about 2 minutes. Discard garlic and add arugula, then cook, stirring frequently, until wilted, 1 to 2 minutes.

Whisk together eggs, salt, and pepper until combined, then pour over arugula in skillet and cook, undisturbed, over moderate heat until almost set, 5 to 6 minutes. Sprinkle cheese evenly on top and broil 4 to 5 inches from heat until eggs are just set and cheese is melted, 1 to 2 minutes.

Serve by cutting into slices like a pizza. On the side, roast potatoes as in the previous entry, a salad of sliced grapes and cubes of gruyere cheese tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette or plain old english muffins with marmalade. This is a sturdy recipe that will tolerate infinite variation.

Substitute feta cheese for the finish over wilted spinach. Serve with pine nuts and fresh oregano.

Or

Heat minced slices of serranno ham in a pan and pour on the eggs. Top with fresh Mexican white cheese, broil until it starts to brown, and serve hot with a lot of toasted good bread.

Ahh.

Perfect Potatoes

These are as gorgeous as they are delicious. The perfect snack as well as the perfect side to, well, everything. And the way they make the house smell is pure food porn.

Oven Fried with Crisp Sage Leaves

For 3

2 Small baking potatoes
1 tbsp extravirgin olive oil
1/2 tsp kosher salt
12 sage leaves

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Cut each potato lengthwise into 6 equal slices. Place them in a large bowl, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and toss them to coat well. Remove potato slices from bowl. Reserve oil/salt and set aside. Arrange the potato slices on a baking sheet in a single layer.

Bake at 400 for 40 minutes or until golden brown on the bottom and remove from oven.

Add sage leaves to reserved oil and salt. Gently rub sage leaves along the bottom of the bowl, coating both sides with oil and salt. Lift each slice of potato from the cookie sheet with a spatula. Lay 1 sage leaf on the cookie sheet and cover with a potato slice. Repeat with the remaining sage leaves and potato slices. Cover each potato slice with one more sage leaf and a spritz of olive oil.

Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and bake at 400 degrees again after you've turned them over. Serve immediately.

This is show food, but also gut tasty, a super side dish to roasts. Serve it with turkey or pork and your guests will be calling you to get the recipe. I kid thee not.
Use Yukon Gold potatoes, and they'll eschew a second helping of the main course for more potatoes (so make more, you silly.)

St. Pat's Dinner

I'm going to make this for St. Patrick's Day (and probably for several days that follow, given the quantity.) The recipe is from Epicurious and if you haven't yet discovered this resource for cooks, you are in for one big treat. The recipes are compiled from the likes of Bon Appetit and Gourmet, so they are well tested. Every recipe I've used from this source has been a pleasant surprise. I did a tomato-less spinach-ricotta lasagna last year for my annual peer group luncheon that was a hit out of the park.

Anyway, St. Pat's dinner (and a ton of leftovers)

BEEF AND GUINNESS PIE
Irish stouts produce a thick head when poured, so chill the can or bottle well before measuring to reduce the foam.

Makes 4 main-course servings.

The reviewers' notes which followed this recipe were all raves but most noted that doubling the quantity of Guinness was an improvement, and many added veggies and potatoes as in a traditional beef stew. Some added only some hearty mushrooms, like cremini or portabello, lightly sauteed, 15 minutes before finishing cooking. I will skip the puff pastry and serve this over egg noodles, and I'll probably make it in the crockpot (if I have lots of time) or in the Roemertopf (if I don't.) If you don't own a Roemertopf, you owe yourself one. It revolutionized my dinner parties. This stew will take less than an hour in it and the beef will be moist and flavorful.

Several of the reviewers topped the casseroles with mashed potatoes and butter for a crisp shepherd's pie. That's not one of my favorite things, but I would definitely go with the puff pastry if I were serving this for company, it's an elegant finish.

I'll make a salad of wild field greens with bleu cheese vinaigrette and walnuts and serve myself Irish soda bread, of course. There is a new bakery in town dedicated to artisanal breads (some of the local fine dining establishments are using it) and I'll make an early stop there on Thursday. Simple, hearty comfort food for a cold March in the mid-atlantic.

Sick Call

That's it, kids. I'm done for the day. I'm still fighting this rotten cold and exhausted from the constant coughing and sneezing. I will be looking for recipes this evening, however, and if I find anything that looks toothsome, I'll share.

Anybody got any favorite homemade cold remedies that, like, work? I'm really, really tired of this.

Wingnuts Overturning Science

Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page A01

WICHITA – Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.

The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.

The growing trend has alarmed scientists and educators who consider it a masked effort to replace science with theology. But 80 years after the Scopes "monkey" trial -- in which a Tennessee man was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolution -- it is the anti-evolutionary scientists and Christian activists who say they are the ones being persecuted, by a liberal establishment.

They are acting now because they feel emboldened by the country's conservative currents and by President Bush, who angered many scientists and teachers by declaring that the jury is still out on evolution. Sharing strong convictions, deep pockets and impressive political credentials -- if not always the same goals -- the activists are building a sizable network.

In Seattle, the nonprofit Discovery Institute spends more than $1 million a year for research, polls and media pieces supporting intelligent design. In Fort Lauderdale, Christian evangelist James Kennedy established a Creation Studies Institute. In Virginia, Liberty University is sponsoring the Creation Mega Conference with a Kentucky group called Answers in Genesis, which raised $9 million in 2003.

At the state and local level, from South Carolina to California, these advocates are using lawsuits and school board debates to counter evolutionary theory. Alabama and Georgia legislators recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio have approved new rules allowing that. And a school board member in a Tennessee county wants stickers pasted on textbooks that say evolution remains unproven.

A prominent effort is underway in Kansas, where the state Board of Education intends to revise teaching standards. That would be progress, Southern Baptist minister Terry Fox said, because "most people in Kansas don't think we came from monkeys."

The movement is "steadily growing," said Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution. "The energy level is new. The religious right has had an effect nationally. Now, by golly, they want to call in the chits."

I'm certain that the rest of the planet looks at us right now and cannot help but conclude that we've had a massive, society-wide mental breakdown.

The All Spin Zone

Brand USA is in trouble, so take a lesson from Big Mac

Instead of changing his foreign policy, President Bush is changing the story

Naomi Klein
Monday March 14, 2005
The Guardian

The Bush administration has long been enamoured of the idea that it can solve complex policy challenges by borrowing cutting-edge communications tools from its heroes in the corporate world. The Irish rock star Bono has recently been winning unlikely fans in the White House by framing world poverty as an opportunity for US politicians to become better marketers. "Brand USA is in trouble ... it's a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to redescribe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values".

The Bush administration wholeheartedly agrees, as evidenced by the orgy of redescription that now passes for American foreign policy. Faced with an Arab world enraged by the US occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the solution is not to change these brutal policies: it is to "change the story".

Brand USA's latest story was launched on January 30, the day of the Iraqi elections, complete with a catchy tag line ("purple power"), instantly iconic imagery (purple fingers) and, of course, a new narrative about America's role in the world, helpfully told and retold by the White House's unofficial brand manager, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi 'insurgents' trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi 'stooges' to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with US help, against the wishes of Iraqi Ba'athist fascists and jihadists."

This new story is so contagious, we are told, that it has set off a domino effect akin to the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism. (Although in the "Arabian spring" the only wall in sight - Israel's apartheid wall - pointedly stays up.) As with all branding campaigns, the power is in the repetition, not in the details. Obvious non sequiturs (is Bush taking credit for Arafat's death?) and screeching hypocrisies (occupiers against occupation!) just mean it's time to tell the story again, only louder and more slowly, obnoxious-tourist style. Even so, with Bush now claiming that "Iran and other nations have an example in Iraq", it seems worth focusing on the reality of the Iraqi example.

The state of emergency was just renewed for its fifth month and Human Rights Watch reports that torture is "systematic" in Iraqi jails. The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena's double nightmare provides a window into the pincer of terror in which average Iraqis are trapped: daily life is a navigation between the fear of being kidnapped or killed by fellow Iraqis and the fear of being gunned down at a US checkpoint.

Meanwhile, the ongoing wrangling over who will form Iraq's next government, despite the United Iraqi Alliance being the clear winner, points to an electoral system designed by Washington that is less than democratic. Terrified at the prospect of an Iraq ruled by the majority of Iraqis, the former chief US envoy, Paul Bremer, wrote election rules that gave the US-friendly Kurds 27% of the seats in the national assembly, even though they make up just 15% of the population.

Skewing matters further, the US-authored interim constitution requires that all major decisions have the support of two-thirds or, in some cases, three-quarters of the assembly - an absurdly high figure that gives the Kurds the power to block any call for foreign troop withdrawal, any attempt to roll back Bremer's economic orders, and any part of a new constitution.

Iraqi Kurds have a legitimate claim to independence, as well as very real fears of being ethnically targeted. But through its alliance with the Kurds, the Bush administration has effectively given itself a veto over Iraq's democracy - and it appears to be using it to secure a contingency plan should Iraqis demand an end to occupation.

Talks to form a government are stalled over the Kurdish demand for control over Kirkuk. If they get it, Kirkuk's huge oil fields would fall under Kurdish control. That means that if foreign troops are kicked out of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan can be broken off and Washington will still end up with a dependent, oil-rich regime - even if it's smaller than the one originally envisioned by the war's architects.

Meanwhile, Bush's freedom triumphalism glossed over the fact that, in the two years since the invasion, the power of political Islam has increased exponentially, while Iraq's deep secular traditions have been greatly eroded. In part, this has to do with the deadly decision to "embed" secularism and women's rights in the military invasion. Whenever Bremer needed a good-news hit, he had his picture taken at a newly opened women's centre, handily equating feminism with the hated occupation. (The women's centres are now mostly closed, and hundreds of Iraqis who worked with the coalition in local councils have been executed.) But the problem for secularism is not just guilt by association. It's also that the Bush definition of liberation robs democratic forces of their most potent tools.

The only idea that has ever stood up to kings, tyrants and mullahs in the Middle East is the promise of economic justice, brought about through nationalist and socialist policies of agrarian reform and state control over oil. But there is no room for such ideas in the Bush narrative, in which free people are only free to choose so-called free trade. That leaves democrats with little to offer, but empty talk of "human rights" - a weedy weapon against the powerful swords of ethnic glory and eternal salvation.

But we shouldn't be surprised that the Bush administration, despite telling stories about its commitment to freedom, continues to actively sabotage democracy in the very countries it claims to have liberated. Rumour has it McDonald's also continues to serve Big Macs.

I'm listening to the Condi press conference at which she's announcing the appointment of Karen Hughes to the State Department. Naomi Klein calls it:
these people are all about the PR. No substance, all surface. This is the ultimate post-modern presidency.

UPDATE:

Questions for Karen Hughes

George W. Bush's media advisor, confidante and alter ego will return to Washington soon -- apparently to become the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. If that's the job Bush picks for Karen Hughes, she'll have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And if that's the case, we've got a few questions we'd like to see Hughes answer under oath -- and not just the one about how, exactly, her experience as a TV news reporter in Texas prepares her for the job of rebuilding the image of the United States in the Middle East.

5. You know the president better than just about anyone. What was that bulge on his back?

Clueless

Support for Bush on Social Security Wanes, Poll Finds
Post-ABC News Survey Shows Barely One-Third of Americans Approve of President's Plan

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; 7:21 AM

Barely a third of the public approves of the way President Bush is dealing with Social Security and a majority says the more they hear about Bush's plan to reform the giant retirement system, the less they like it, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Bush's overall job approval rating stood at 50 percent, unchanged from last month and nearly exactly where it was a year ago. Currently, 48 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing as president.

But on Social Security, the president's popularity continues to decline. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they approved of the way Bush is handling Social Security, down three points since January and the lowest level of support for Bush on this issue ever recorded in Post-ABC polls.

Bush has made Social Security reform the cornerstone of his domestic policy agenda. But his efforts to win public support for his proposals to change the system appear to be having just the opposite effect, according to the poll.

Nearly six in 10--58 percent--say they are more inclined to oppose administration's reform plans as they learn more about it. Only a third say they are more receptive to Bush's proposals as more details become available.