Rockin' New Years Eve

My most recent ex-husband was mad for the nation of Denmark. We visited on our honeymoon and I quickly discovered why he was so enchanted with the country. Danes are the most outgoing of the scandanavian people and they love to entertain in their fairyland of a country. The Copenhagen zoo must be seen to be believed, and I've visited every important zoo in the US. Denmark must be seen to be believed.

We spent a couple of weeks touring the country, mostly by train, before taking the ferry to Sweden to investigate the city from which my ancestors escaped, Gothenborg. Copenhagen is a magical place, which we explored from the pension used by itinerant merchant seaman (I have no idea how I found this particular bargain, this was before the days of the Rough Guides.) Some of the best cheap food in the city was to be found in the grand central train station (which is true for a lot of European cities.) I came to prize the open-faced sandwiches known as "smorrebrod" (I don't have the character set to render the diacritical marks correctly, but you get the idea.) Scandanavians make a meal out of these, but you can use the same idea to create canapes which will make a meal with a lot of variety in the course of a cocktail party.

The guts of the method are always the same: start with one of those loaves of cocktail rye squares, the little loaves of rye which are about 2"x2" square. Have a really good mayonnaise on hand (make your own if you have time, it is really worth it. If you have a food processor or a blender, this only takes a minute), some fresh dill, sprouts, parsley and romaine lettuce. The preparation of a good smorrebrod depends on simplicity and fresh ingredients.

A classic smorrebrod canape would be topping one of those cocktail squares with a smear (smorre) of good mayo, a sprig of fresh dill and one perfect shrimp with a grating of lemon zest. You can do the same with a thin shaving of citrus cured gravlax on a sliver of romaine lettuce, a paperthin slice of herbed ham on a smear of honey mustard and topped with a garnish of sieved egg yolk, roast beef sliced thin enough to read the paper through on top of a smear of horseradish sauce and topped with a slice of radish. You get the idea. A good smorrebrod starts with a base of hearty rye, smeared with a flavorful dressing of some kind, covered with a protein prepared very simply and dressed with a garnish. The flavors are simple so the ingredients have to be good.

We, the ex and I, did these (the full sized version open faced sandwiches) a couple of times a year, usually with an aquavit tasting on the side, for the donors to his local chamber music project. The firewater of Scandanavia is potent stuff, but it comes in an astonishing variety of flavors, all of which go well with these little sandwiches. We'd pour a flight of 4-6 aquavits with the smorrebrod. I'd never had aquavit until I went to Scandanavia and have fond memories of discussing the merits of the various brands in broken Danish with the proprietor of a spirits shop in Aarhus (home of Lego. Really. The Legoland Theme Park is there. We didn't go.) I studied Danish by tape on the flight over. It was good enough, but most Danes have more English than you will ever have Danish.

If you want to put together an impromptu party in a hurry, you can get the basics from the deli and seafood counter at your local grocery. It will take you maybe an hour to put these open faced bits together. The aquavit should be chilled and served in tiny aquavit glasses. If you would rather not serve hard spirits (I don't drink them anymore) northern German wines and most German beers go nicely with this menu. The flavors of the food should prevail, so this isn't the place to bring out your most subtle petit syrah or oaky chardonnay. Danish Carlsberg beer (been through the brewery, I'm not a beer drinker, but this is the wine of beers) is also a good pairing. If you want to do this as a brunch (highly recommended) mulled wine, cider or glogg will work nicely.

In the tradition of smorrebrod, if you want to make some lighter sandwiches which are all vegetable (consider the combination of shaved radish and a cornichon on a bit of romaine topped with parsely, for example) use sweet unsalted butter rather than mayonaise, which would overwhelm the topping. You can turn this into nearly anything you want (consider a thin slice of turkey topped with a tarragon mayonaise, for example) which can make as hearty a menu as you want to serve, or as light a set of canapes if you prefer. In the Danish tradition, these are all assembled ahead of time, the oil in the dressing will keep the breads from drying out, but the assembly time is next to nothing if you've chosen your ingredients carefully. A thin slice of cucumber, gashed half way through and twisted to form a figure eight served on a bit of rye with a smear of dilled mayo and a sprig of parsley will delight the Danish eye. And pie hole. Assemble another with a bit of tinned tuna mashed with a plain green, stuffed olive and topped with a couple of capers on a bed of bread and mayo with a dash of lemon zest and sprig of fresh tarragon. I'm not a lover of smoked fish, but if you are, play with herbs and sour cream or cream cheese and have a wonderful time. Put a bed of parsley puree over some cream cheese and go nuts with the smoked trout.

Basically, if you make a party like this, your biggest problem will be your guests asking when your next party is and if they are invited.

That's a pretty nice problem to have.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Pleasures of the East

In comments to the post below, skdadl asked for a kimchi recipe. I've found one that I like, but asian markets are so numerous around here that I don't usually make it from scratch. Here is a good recipe, however.

3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon pickling salt 6 cups water
2 lbs. Chinese (Napa) cabbage, cut into 2-inch squares
6 scallions, cut into 2-inch lengths, then slivered
1 1/2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
4 cloves of garlic, finely minced
2 tablespoons Korean ground dried hot pepper (or other mildly hot ground red pepper)
1 teaspoon sugar

Makes about 1 1/2 Quarts

1. Dissolve the 3 tablespoons salt in the water. Put the cabbage into a large bowl, a crock, or a nonreactive pot, and pour the brine over it. Weight the cabbage down with a plate. Let the cabbage stand for 12 hours.

2. Drain the cabbage, reserving the brine. Mix the cabbage with the remaining ingredients, including the 1 teaspoon salt. Pack the mixture into a 2-quart jar. Pour enough of the reserved brine over the cabbage to cover it. Push a freezer bag into the mouth of the jar, and pour the remaining brine into the bag. Seal the bag. Let the kimchi ferment in a cool place, at a temperature no higher than 68° F, for 3 to 6 days,until the kimchi is as sour as you like.

3. Remove the brine bag, and cap the jar tightly. Store the kimchi in the refrigerator, where it will keep for months.

Noted with Bemusement

This is courtesy of Silviu Dochia at Avian Flu - What we need to know:

Kimchi Sales Rise on Link to Possible Bird Flu Cure

By Elissa Silverman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 31, 2005; Page D01

Moon K. Yoon sensed something was up about two months ago when the 16-ounce jars of kimchi started moving quickly from the shelves of the Lotte Plaza International Supermarket in Fairfax, a sign that interest in the spicy cabbage dish had moved beyond the Korean customers who typically buy it by the gallon.

At the Super H Mart on Lee Highway in Fairfax City, sales of $7.99 bags of freshly made kimchi have increased 55 percent, compared with a year ago, store records showed.

Ho Jin Lee, president of Kim Chee Pride Inc. of Maspeth, N.Y., which supplies kimchi on the East Coast, said sales jumped 20 percent this year.

A sudden new joie d'epice in the American diet?

Try avian flu.

Blame it on the Internet, the anxiety of life in the 21st century, or a volatile combination of the two, but publication of a minor study by a South Korean academic last spring has apparently triggered a minor run on kimchi, a daily staple of the Korean diet that the bland-of-palate are likely to avoid like a global pandemic.

Which presents a potentially difficult choice given the work of Kang Sa-Ouk of Seoul National University, who took 13 chickens infected with avian flu virus and a couple of other diseases, fed them kimchi juice and found that 11 of the birds recovered.

Word of the study has been circulating on the Internet. As fears about bird flu have grown in the recent months, Yoon and operators of other ethnic groceries have gotten more phone calls about kimchi.

So has the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where callers have turned seeking validation of the idea that kimchi may ward off avian flu, spokeswoman Kathy Stover said.

"Although it certainly sounds interesting, NIAID, unfortunately, can't comment on the dish's effectiveness as we have not studied it," Stover said in an e-mail.

Yoon and his fellow grocers have also gotten lots of questions about the dish's taste and its pungent smell. "It's hard for me to explain the taste," Yoon said.

The most common preparation of kimchi for sale in markets begins with sliced Napa cabbage, which is salted, set aside for hours and then rinsed. Most traditional recipes add plenty of crushed garlic, as well as ginger, onion, sliced radish and fish sauce to the cabbage. And lots of hot pepper, though Yoon said that in some "Americanized" versions, the pepper and fish sauce are reduced.

No one quite knows what in kimchi is the magic ingredient, but its increased popularity pleases international food groceries, who believe the exposure might bring more customers to their markets.

I happen to love the stuff, but it is definitely an acquired taste.

Neologisms

THE YEAR IN…
Wordology

2005 WAS A GOOD YEAR for words. Not all of them, of course; like Dodger outfielders or reality-TV stars, some had a better year than others. "Podcast," for example, was named word of the year by the prestigious Oxford American Dictionary, the lexiconic (that's a word we just made up) equivalent of the Oscar for best picture, and "integrity" took home the prize for most-looked-up at dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's website. The American Dialect Society, meanwhile, will select its word of the year next week at its annual meeting. Alas, the ceremony will not be podcast.

It is probably foolish to read too much into all this, as these are only, well, words. But the words we use do, like, totally define us, if we may lapse into the speech patterns of a teenager for a moment to make our point. Words also come in handy for illustrating larger trends.

Runners-up on the Oxford list include "bird flu," "persistent vegetative state" (both are actually phrases, but they're just happy to be nominated) and "Sudoku" (which may also be eligible for the number of the year award). Oxford editors comb the lexisphere (yeah, we made that one up too) in search of new and popular words, which they then consider for inclusion in the latest edition of the dictionary.

Editors at Merriam-Webster simply tabulate the most popular searches at their online dictionary. On the site, if not in Congress, "integrity" has been slowly growing in popularity over the years. Rounding out Merriam-Webster's list are such news-driven inquiries as "refugee," "tsunami," "pandemic" and "insipid" (which spent two months in the Top 50 after Simon Cowell used it on "American Idol.") Whatever it takes, we say, to improve America's vocabulary.

In fact, we'd like to thank all the words for competing this year, all several hundred thousand of them, and to say that they're all winners in our book. Saying words had a good year, we realize, is a little like saying it was a good year for oxygen, or gravity. (Though it is true they both did very well.) But really, words were superlative this year. Overwhelming. Awesome. Outstanding. You get the idea. Words fail us.

Anyone who can point me in the direction of a link to instructions on how to play Sudoku gets a kewpie doll.

Special Times

This is celebration food. If you have political issues with veal, scallops of turkey or chicken breast tenders, pounded as thin as possible, will work just great. This serves 6.

WEINER SCHNITZEL WITH SPAETZLE

1 1/2 lbs. veal scallops
1/4 tsp. salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 c. butter
1 lemon, thinly sliced
1 c. all purpose flour
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 c. dried bread crumbs
1/4 c. lemon juice
1/2 c. milk
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. butter
1 tbsp. capers

Spaetzle
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 c. all purpose flour
1/8 tsp. nutmeg

Pound scallops gently to an even 1/8 inch thickness between a couple of pieces of plastic wrap. If you don't own a meat mallet, use the bottom of a heavy bottle.

Combine flour, salt and pepper in a bowl or pie plate; beat eggs with milk in another bowl; put breadcrumbs in a third; dip scallops in flour, then eggs then bread crumbs. Let the coated scallops rest on paper towels for a few minutes before cooking. Melt butter in large skillet until very hot; fry scallops, a few at a time, until golden brown. Remove scallops to a heated platter. Add lemon juice to pan drippings; cool for 2 to 3 minutes. Pour over scallops and garnish with lemon slices and capers.

Spaetzle directions: combine eggs and milk; stir in flour, salt and nutmeg. beating until smooth. Drop dough by teaspoons into boiling water (or pass dough through colander); boil for 2 to 3 minutes. Drain and toss with butter or melt butter in skillet and gently fry spaetzle until brown, about 3 to 4 minutes.

Gourmet shops will sell you a spaetzle cutter (how often are you going to use that?) but the solution I use is to press the dough through a slotted spoon with large holes, rather than a colandar.

Spaetzle are a wizard starch for soaking up the sauce of sauerbraten as well.

It Ain't Over

U.S. Women Accuse a Coach of Harassment

By WINA STURGEON and LYNN ZINSER
Published: December 31, 2005

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 30 - Some members of the United States women's skeleton team, including the 2002 Olympic gold medalist Tristan Gale, have accused Coach Tim Nardiello of a pattern of sexual harassment dating to 2002.

Noelle Pikus-Pace is defending Coach Tim Nardiello against accusations that he sexually harassed other women on the United States skeleton team.

Although Nardiello has denied the accusations, officials at the United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation decided Thursday that he would remain the coach for the Turin Olympics in February but would be asked to resign three days after the Winter Games end.

That decision, announced to the federation's board by the interim executive director, Robie Vaughn, in an e-mail message, further angered the athletes who made the accusations and another coach who said he had witnessed harassing behavior. On Friday, one of those athletes, Felicia Canfield, sent an e-mail message to the board stating that she wanted her complaint to be considered a formal grievance against Nardiello.

In interviews and in e-mail messages sent to the federation and shared with The New York Times, athletes asserted that Nardiello had made sexual advances toward women on the skeleton team, had made sexually explicit comments and had barged into hotel rooms while women were undressing.

Terry Allen, another women's coach, said in an interview that he first told the federation in 2002 about inappropriate behavior he had witnessed between Nardiello and athletes.

Nardiello denied the accusations, dismissing them as complaints from athletes who did not make the Olympic team.

"I would have to say that is absolutely not true, and I would leave any other comments to counsel," Nardiello said in a telephone interview from his home in Lake Placid, N.Y., where the federation is based. He did not provide the name of a lawyer.

Vaughn said the federation was still investigating.

"We'll take this very seriously, and we're looking into it," he said in a telephone interview. "We're pursuing it with all vigor, but being sensitive to the legalities on all sides."

Jim Scherr, the chief executive of the United States Olympic Committee, was alerted to the accusations Friday. In a telephone interview, he promised a prompt investigation.

"These are extremely serious allegations and will be treated as such," Scherr said. "We're going to send someone to interview the athletes, and we will move on this quickly."

The U.S.O.C., which has recently taken a broader role in the affairs of individual sports federations, can go as far as denying an Olympic credential to any member of the American delegation. "Obviously, his appointment to the U.S. bobsled and skeleton team is their issue," Scherr said. "But his appointment to the Olympic team is our issue."

The idiot Times is treating this as another "he said, she said" rather than trying to determine the truth. Here is the kicker quote, however:

"Many times at the start line of a race, waiting for the light to turn green, Tim would look me up and down and comment how good I looked in my speedsuit," Canfield said. "He has even patted my butt. I would have preferred to focus on my race. He has tried to kiss me on the lips, but I have turned my cheek. I, along with a dozen other athletes, have heard Tim say over the radio, 'The only time I want to see your legs spread like that is if I am between them.' "

Yeah, I've worked for assholes like this, some of them fairly recently. You think sexism is over with? Dream on, child. Until bastards like this get kicked in the nuts through their pocketbooks, this kind of crap will continue to happen. The Olympics are weeks away and there is no margin for the athletes to bring this up now unless it is just unbearable. The women aren't going to get anything out of it other than a release from the harassment, which is all they seem to be asking for.

Do you want to talk about the editor who denied me writing assignments when I refused to sleep with him or the supervisor who treated all of his female reports as if they had IQs below room temperature? Then there is the supervisor who walked in my office every morning with questions about what was in my lingerie drawer, the one wanted to know who I was dating and if he'd gotten to third base yet, the one who assumed that because I am blonde that I'm stupid AND easy....

Coulter takes on Kwanzaa, shoots self in foot

Or maybe in the heart, but it's not like it's one of her vital organs.

I know, I know - taking on Ann Coulter has a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel quality, but as long as she's being published, somebody ought to do it. And this one's kinda fun.

First (in my critique, not her column), there's this marvelously racist little carol that she must've made up as her personal interpretation of the Kwanzaa spirit, since she doesn't attribute it to anyone:

(Sing to "Jingle Bells")

Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!

The alleged human being follows up with this:

Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Least-Great Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA's revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani -- the same seven "principles" of Kwanzaa.

With his Kwanzaa greetings, President Bush is saluting the intellectual sibling of the Symbionese Liberation Army, killer of housewives and police.

It might undercut the force of her rant if she shared with her readers that these principles mean: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. So needless to say, she omits that, so the impression left is of twenty-some syllables of Evil from the Heart of Darkest Africa. Oogabooga!

Now the "holiday" concocted by an FBI dupe is honored in a presidential proclamation and public schools across the nation. Bush called Kwanzaa a holiday that promotes "unity" and "faith." Faith in what? Liberals' unbounded capacity to respect any faith but Christianity?

She's got a real bee in her bonnet over the artificial origins of Kwanzaa. Dear Ann: Christmas is a made-up holiday too - just one with a longer pedigree. And regarding our respect for Christianity, where's yours? The desire to forcibly convert Muslims to Christianity...well, a Christianity that people can be forced into is one that bears no relation to the words and actions of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the New Testament. Desiring to trash Christianity for one's geopolitical ends isn't exactly what I'd call showing respect to the faith. So whatever it is that you've got in your eye, Ann, you might want to take it out first.

It was practitioners of that faith who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and civil rights movements. But that's all been washed down the memory hole, along with the true origins of Kwanzaa.

And the practitioners of Christianity she currently is thick with are the practitioners of the anti-gay movement, and the harassers of women who seek abortions. Before that, they were the core of the overt movement opposing equal rights for women in our society, until they realized, ten or twelve years ago, that that was a loser. Nowadays they refuse to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions.

The odd thing is, Coulter is so intent on maligning Kwanzaa that she exonerates the entire black radical movement of the 1960s in order to do so:

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.

In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the '60s the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Karenga's United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American '60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga's United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names.

So: the Black Panthers didn't hate whites, and didn't seek armed revolution. The African-American group that actually did those things, did so at the instigation of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

So if anyone gives you any BS about the black radicalism of the 1960s, that's what you can tell them. And if they ask you how you know, you can say, "Ann Coulter said so in her column." Who'd'a thunk?

She adds:

(That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named "Jamal" currently sit on death row?)

Sorry, Ann, but courtesy of Chuck Shepherd, the runaway winner is still "Wayne":

THE CLASSIC MIDDLE NAME (ALL NEW FOR 2005!) Once again this year, as a public service, we release this crucial homicide data:

Charged with murder, awaiting trial: Darrell Wayne Maness, 19 (Wilmington, N.C.); Timothy Wayne Ebert, 39 (Cleveland, Tex.); John Wayne Blair, 49 (Sevier County, Tenn.); Derek Wayne Jackson, 18 (Norristown, Pa.); Nathaniel Wayne Hart, 34 (Austin, Tex.); Kenneth Wayne Keller, 42, (Denton County, Tex.); Ronald Wayne Lail, 43 (Burke County, N.C.); Timothy Wayne Condrey, 27 (Caroleen, N.C.); Roy Wayne Russell, 45 (Vancouver, Wash.); Jeremy Wayne Hopkins, 22 (Denton, Tex.); Reginald Wayne Thomas, 23 (Huntsville, Tex.); Matthew Wayne Almand, 18 (Melbourne, Fla.)

Convicted of murder, but found insane: Emmanuel Wayne Harris, 28 (Bisbee, Ariz.)

Sentenced for murder: Tyler Wayne Justice (Alice, Tex.); Douglas Wayne Pepper, 44 (Greensboro, N.C.)

Awaiting a retrial after a judge overturned his murder conviction: Donald Wayne Shipe, 37 (Winchester, Va.)

Committed suicide in a murder-suicide: Eric Wayne Jacobs, 27 (Castroville, Tex.); Michael Wayne Baxter, 30 (Edgewater, Md.)

Executed for murder : Dennis Wayne Bagwell, 41; Lonnie Wayne Pursley, 43; Melvin Wayne White, 55 (all from Huntsville, Tex., the state penitentiary)

Died of a drug overdose while serving two life terms for murder: Russell Wayne Wagner, 52 (Jessup, Md.)

It May Not Repeat, But It Rhymes

Oh, yes, everything is getting so much better.

2 U.S. Troops, 17 Iraqis Killed
# Military deaths raise toll for year to near that of 2004. Sudan closes its embassy in response to insurgents' abduction of six employees.

From Associated Press

BAGHDAD — Two U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq on Friday, raising the American military death toll to 841 so far this year — five fatalities short of the 2004 toll despite political progress and efforts to quash the insurgency.

Violence continued unabated Friday, with at least 17 Iraqis killed in shootings and mortar attacks around the country and a suicide car bombing in Baghdad. In the most serious incident, police said nine people were killed in a drive-by shooting, apparently because they were drinking alcohol in public.

A senior Sudanese diplomat said his country had closed its embassy in Baghdad in an effort to gain the release of six kidnapped employees, including a diplomat.

"A statement was issued by the Sudanese government to close the embassy in Iraq to win the release of our kidnapped citizens," Charge D'affaires Mohammed Ahmed Khalil told Associated Press. The embassy's 12 employees plan to leave Monday.

Al Qaeda in Iraq on Thursday threatened to kill five Sudanese today unless the diplomatic mission was removed from Iraq.

The Sudanese Foreign Ministry reported Dec. 24 that six of its embassy employees had been kidnapped, including the mission's second secretary, Abdel Moneam Mohammed Tom. It was not clear whether the Al Qaeda statement was referring to the same group.

The American military announced the two new deaths Friday. A bomb killed one soldier Friday when it struck his vehicle in Baghdad; the second soldier was shot in the restive western city of Fallouja.

Their deaths brought the number of U.S. military personnel killed in December to 64. The worst month of the year was January, with 106 fatalities, followed by November with 96 and August with 85.

The United States hopes that as more Iraqi police and troops are trained, they will slowly take over responsibility for security from American troops.

The only reason the idiot media can keep parroting that pueling Pentagon talking point that "we are going to train the Iraqis" to take over is that they don't know shit about training, civil war or politics. This is the idiot media at its most ridiculous. Training a truly sturdy civil guard from scratch takes about five years. When you have every incentive for your protean force to be a fifth column for their own patriots who don't think much of having an occupation force on their shores, you have about zero chance of standing up what is, essentially, a Vichy army. Ask the Brits how well that idea worked out the last time westerners decided that they were going to remake Mesopotamia. With about twice the troop strength we have right now. Go ahead, ask.

Those who fail to even notice history, much less learn from it aren't likely to pick their battles wisely.

Beans for Luck

This is considered a "good luck" dish for New Year in Spain.

Baked White Bean and Rosemary Spread

INGREDIENTS:

* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 1 cup chopped onions
* 1 tablespoon minced garlic
* 1 teaspoon dried rosemary, chopped
* 2 (15 ounce) cans Great Northern beans, rinsed and drained
* 1 1/3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
* 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
* salt to taste
* paprika

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Heat olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Slowly cook and stir onions, garlic and rosemary until soft.
3. In a food processor, blend the onion mixture, great northern beans, white wine vinegar, red pepper and salt until smooth.
4. Transfer the mixture to a greased medium baking dish and garnish with paprika. Bake uncovered in the preheated oven 25 minutes, or until hot and bubbly.

Serve this on crostini, toast points or crackers. Use an attractive baking ramekin and the bubbly mixture will come out of the oven ready to please a hungry crowd.

Ambrosia

This is a cowards' way out, but it is very good if you still have room in your dietary budget for eggs. This is the way I make both omelettes and scrambled eggs. Separating the yolks and whites and beating them separately gives you a very different product than beating them together. Note to the chef: avoid overbeating the whites. You will get a dry, flat product that tastes like plastic.

Puffy Omelet with Canadian Bacon Filling

Ingredients:

4 egg whites
4 egg yolks
3 ounces sliced Canadian-style bacon, cut into thin strips
1/4 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (1 ounce)
1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh basil OR 1/4 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
5 teaspoons butter or margarine
1/2 cup fresh mushrooms
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
1 large tomato, peeled, seeded and chopped

Servings: 2
Minutes of prep time: 30
Nutritional analysis per serving: calories: 390 grams of fat: 28 mg. cholesterol: 606 mg. sodium: 908

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Beat egg yolks until thick and lemon-colored; stir in Canadian-style bacon, cheese, half of the basil, and pepper. Fold yolk mixture into egg whites.

In a 10-inch skillet with oven-proof handle, heat 2 teaspoons of the butter over medium heat till a drop of water sizzles. Spoon egg mixture into skillet, gently smoothing surface. Reduce heat to low; cook for 7 to 8 minutes or until the bottom is golden. Bake in oven for 10-12 minutes or until knife inserted halfway between center and outer edge comes out clean. Meanwhile, in skillet cook mushrooms and green pepper in the remaining hot butter over medium heat 3 minutes or until tender. Add the remaining basil and tomato; cook 5 minutes or till liquid is reduced, stirring occasionally.

Loosen sides of omelet with spatula. Make a shallow cut across omelet, cutting slightly off-center. Spoon filling over larger half. Tip skillet and fold the smaller portion of omelet over larger half. Slip omelet onto a warm serving platter. Serve immediately.

On the side, warmed fresh croissants from the bakery down the street and Citrus Apple Compote:

2 cups peeled and sliced tart apples (about 2 medium)
1 1/2 cups (about 9-ozs.) pitted prunes
1 1/2 cups orange juice
2 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 naval oranges, peeled and cut into segments
2 pink grapefruit peeled and cut into segments
- mint sprigs for garnish

Instructions:
In 2 to 3 quart saucepan combine apples, prunes, and orange juice; bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer until apples are tender but not soft, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in honey, juice and cinnamon. Cool, cover, and chill. Stir in oranges and grapefruit. To serve, spoon fruits with their liquid into serving dishes; garnish with mint sprigs, and top with a little plain yoghurt if you really want to go nuts.

Body and Soul

For New Years morning, this is one of those B&B; recipes I treasure for a crowd:

Beechwood Breakfast Strata presented by Beechwood Inn Bed and Breakfast

The breakfast strata is an excellent dish for anyone who has houseguests because it is prepared the night before and just needs to bake in the morning. Incidentally, it also makes a good supper dish.

8 ounces pork sausage, crumbled
1 pound mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed and thinly sliced
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Seasoned toast points or rounds (about 8 ounces to cover baking dish)
1 1/2 cups 2 percent milk
1/2 pound ricotta cheese, park skim, at room temperature
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
9 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 pounds Monterey Jack cheese, grated
1/4 pound sharp Cheddar cheese, grated
1 cup broccoli, broken into small florets and steamed lightly
2 cups chopped green onions (green part only)

In a skillet over medium heat, brown the sausage for 4 to 6 minutes. Add mushrooms and sauté until wilted, about 3 to 4 minutes. Season with black pepper, if needed. Remove from heat and cool slightly.

Spray a 15X10-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Line pan with seasoned toast points or rounds. In a large mixing bowl, thoroughly combine milk and ricotta cheese. Whisk in flour, baking powder and salt. Add eggs, a little at a time, and whisk until fully incorporated. Stir in the sausage/mushroom mixture, grated cheeses, broccoli and green onions. Pour into the prepared pan and cover tightly with plastic wrap; refrigerate overnight or for at least 12 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove mixture from refrigerator, uncover and bake for about 60 minutes or until golden brown and the center only slightly jiggles and the rest of the mixture is set. Cool for 5 to 10 minutes before serving. Makes 8 servings.

Serve with toast points with caviar if you want to step it up a notch, or this is sublime with a fricassee of mushrooms:

Mushroom Fricassee:

* 3 tablespoons butter
* 1 pound assorted wild mushrooms, such as portabella, oyster,
shiitake and chanterelles, cleaned and coarsely chopped.
* 1 tablespoon minced shallots
* 1 tablespoon minced garlic
* Salt and freshly ground black pepper
* 1/2 cup marsala wine
* 1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme

Heat one tablespoon butter in a large frying pan. Add the mushrooms and cook each type individually. When the mushrooms are cooked, add the shallots and garlic to the pan and cook until tender. Combine all the mushrooms in the pan, season with salt and pepper, add the marsala and thyme and cook until the marsala has reduced to a glaze.

Serve on the side or, even wilder, add it to the egg strata as the middle layer. Your breakfast guests will be moved to speechlessness, this is so good. This replaces potatoes for South Beachers and others on low-carb diets.

Don't expect to hear a lot of conversation, just the sound of cutlery hitting plates. As a good hostess, that is my favorite sound. My second favorite sound is "Would you please pass me the..."

Serve with hearty french rolls, some cheese and unsalted butter. It needs nothing else.

Do It To Me One More Time

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, speaking on the floor of the House to the impeachment of Richard Milhouse Nixon:

James Madison again at the Constitutional Convention: "A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."

The Constitution charges the president with the task of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, and yet the president has counseled his aides to commit perjury, willfully disregarded the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, concealed surreptitious entry, attempted to compromise a federal judge while publicly displaying his cooperation with the processes of criminal justice.

"A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."

If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder. Has the president committed offenses and planned and directed and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? That is the question. We know that. We know the question. We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question. It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."

Criminal Inquiry Opens Into Spying Leak

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 31, 2005

Privacy advocates on Friday said the leak investigation should be set aside, at least for now, in favor of an investigation of the warrantless eavesdropping itself.

"President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistle-blowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law."

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said his group believed "the priority at this point for the Department of Justice should be the appointment of an independent prosecutor to determine whether federal wiretap laws were violated" by the security agency program, not the leak inquiry.

The administration has been sensitive about leaks of closely held information, classified or not, and the Justice Department is also investigating the recent disclosure by The Washington Post that the Central Intelligence Agency operated secret prisons for terrorist suspects in Eastern Europe.

But the most prominent leak investigation during President Bush's five years in office has been the one conducted by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, an independent prosecutor, into the disclosure in 2003 of the secret C.I.A. employment of Valerie Wilson, a covert agency officer. That inquiry resulted in the indictment in October for perjury and obstruction of justice of I. Lewis Libby Jr., then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Fitzgerald investigation also produced subpoenas for several journalists who were asked to testify about their sources. Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, served 85 days in jail for initially refusing to discuss her sources.

There are several laws that can be invoked against a government employee who knowingly reveals classified information. One statute applies specifically to the N.S.A., a mammoth code-breaking and eavesdropping agency based at Fort Meade, Md., prohibiting the disclosure of information about "communications intelligence activities" that is "in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States."

Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit law firm that defends whistle-blowers, said his group would not object to a limited investigation of the leak of classified information. "But if they do a blanket witch hunt, which I fear," he said, "it would trample all over good government laws" intended to protect government workers who expose wrongdoing.

"The whole reason we have whistle-blower laws is so that government workers can act as the public's eyes and ears to expose illegality or abuse of power," Mr. Devine said.
....
Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit law firm that defends whistle-blowers, said his group would not object to a limited investigation of the leak of classified information. "But if they do a blanket witch hunt, which I fear," he said, "it would trample all over good government laws" intended to protect government workers who expose wrongdoing.

"The whole reason we have whistle-blower laws is so that government workers can act as the public's eyes and ears to expose illegality or abuse of power," Mr. Devine said.

The administration first learned that The New York Times had obtained information about the secret eavesdropping program more than a year ago and expressed concern to editors that its disclosure could jeopardize terrorism investigations. The newspaper withheld the article at the time, and the government did not open a leak investigation at that time, presumably because such an inquiry might itself disclose the program.

The newspaper did additional reporting and eventually decided to publish the article despite the continuing objections of President Bush and other top officials.

While President Bush has focused his ire on whoever leaked the information, Vice President Cheney, in remarks to reporters on Dec. 20, was critical of The Times as well. Reiterating that the administration had asked the newspaper not to publish the article, Mr. Cheney said: "Eventually they ran it. I think that's unfortunate. I think it damages national security."

A Justice Department official, asked whether the investigation would examine the newspaper's publication of the information in addition to any government employees who might have leaked it, said he could not comment on any aspect of the investigation.

Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, declined to comment on the leak investigation.

Earlier this week, a top F.B.I. official sent a letter to agents working in counterterrorism and intelligence to warn them that despite the public acknowledgment of the spy agency's program by the president and other high officials, it remained classified and should not be discussed.

John Miller, a spokesman for the bureau, said the letter was sent by Gary M. Bald, executive assistant director for counterterrorism and counterintelligence, after agents received inquiries from local officials and others and sought guidance on how to respond.

Bill Keller is a spineless weenie who refused to run the story for a year and the kinds of names I would call Pinch Sulzberger, well, you've heard them all before if you have a family member in the merchant marine. Shane, Lichtblau and all others journos (with the exception of Bart Gellman at the WaPo) need a balls implant.

When a spy agency program is wildly illegal (hint: NYT, you might want to pay attention to that) disclosing it to the press is an act of heroism. Of course, the so-called Fouth Estate have left the heroism business up to the grunts in Iraq, and we wouldn't even be there if the Times hadn't folded its cards and walked away from that sordid piece of business.

When Pinch Sulzberger and the Times begin to act like something other than a stenography service for Little Scottie and the rest of the Admin Apologists, I'm sure you'll catch it here, but I doubt I'll have to devote scarce resoureces to the story anytime soon. No wonder I have plenty of time to post recipes and things: the msm don't report news, so there is little to comment on. At least if I post Emeril recipes, you get something to eat.

Time

I've quoted T. S. Eliot here often enough, one of my favorite poets, because this is a blog, and I write about what strikes my nerves, as do the other writers here. I'm sitting and thinking tonight about time present, time past and time future as we prepare to change the year, flip our calendar pages and perform what ever rituals seem appropriate to mark this passage of time.

If you think about it, nearly all human rituals and ceremonies mark the passage of time. Religious services carve out the meaning of the week to week. Our big civil and religious ceremonies spell out the time between elections or seasons, and we use the civil and religious ceremonies of civic and life events to say, "yes, I was there." This is an interesting piece of anthropology, it is a way of marking our territory in time rather than place. I haven't done a lot of research, but we might be the only animals which do this.

The last year was a hard one: I endured extended unemployment and lost two very close friends. I'm grateful to be coming into the new year with hope, and I couldn't have said that two months ago. If another blogger hadn't paid my electric bill back in March, I don't know what would have happened. Well, yes, I do: I would have had the lights and the computer and the hot water and the furnace turned off on a very cold day, and I have been through all of that before.

Through all of it, when the chips were down, you all turned up. You put a little in the tip jar when you could, you sent encouraging emails when you couldn't.

Thank you. As we head into a new year which, I hope, will be better and different from the last two, thank you.

I do not understand those blogs, particularly on the right, which don't have comments. I don't think a blog without comments can be properly understood as a blog. Even the WaPo "gets" this and has comments on all their blogs. As Theresa Nielsen Hayden famously said, if you aren't reading comments, you don't really get the blog.

Thank you commentors, thank you co-bloggers, and thank you lurkers. All of us have a roll to play in making a blog a blog and this has been a tough and tender year for all of us.

Thank you.

Melanie

BURNT NORTON (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Return to Delphi

Yes, my one trip to Greece left a very strong culinary impression on me. This will serve 4.

CHICKEN WITH SPINACH AND FETA CHEESE

2 lbs. chicken breasts, pounded thin
10 oz. spinach, cooked in lemon and olive oil
8 oz. Feta cheese, crumbled
2 eggs, beaten
Seasoned bread crumbs
2 c. sliced mushrooms
1 tbsp. flour
1/2 c. dry white wine
2 c. chicken broth
Lemon juice to taste

Place spinach and Feta cheese on thin chicken breasts. Roll and secure with toothpicks. Dredge in eggs and seasoned bread crumbs. Brown in frying pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Gravy: Saute 2 cups mushrooms in butter. Add 1 tablespoon flour. Cook and mix well. Add 1/2 cup dry white wine, 2 cups chicken broth, and lemon. Cook for 3 minutes. Pour over heated chicken.

Serve this with orzo in browned butter sauce and avgolemono soup. The only thing (the only thing) I miss about my last "straight" gig was that it was around the corner from DC's justifiably famous Greek Deli, which makes the best avgolemono soup outside of Athens, and I ate it at least three times a week. Now I have to make my own. BTW, up until the point where you add the eggs, it can be frozen, so make a big batch to freeze in serving size containers and you'll have Greek penicillin to chase the colds away all winter long.

Bubbly With....

I'm not much of a champagne drinker, but I discovered champagne cocktails this year (they are hot in DC this year) and I like them as a change of pace from my usual chardonnay. The WaPo did a feature on them in the Wednesday food section this week and I offer them here in time for your New Year revelry. Don't spend a lot of money on champagne that you are planning to mix. Cava's Spanish Friexenet is a decent choice.

Champagne Cocktail

Makes 1 serving

Veteran bartender Joe Armenti at 2941 Restaurant in Falls Church doesn't fool around. He likes the classic version of this drink.

Place 1 sugar cube soaked with 3 drops Angostura bitters in a flute and add champagne (be careful -- it will foam).

The Bleu Sky

Makes 1 serving

Bartender Tim Stover of IndeBleu likes to use Gruet, a champagne from New Mexico, in this signature drink.

Pour 1/4 ounce Grand Marnier in flute, add champagne, float 1/4 ounce Blue Curacao on top.

Pom Royale

Makes 1 serving

Poste Moderne Brasserie bartender Gina Chersevani likes to use either Domaine St. Michelle or Paul Louis Blanc de Blanc for this drink.

Fill flute three-fourths full with champagne and add a splash of blueberry pomegranate juice. Top with fresh blueberries or lemon twist.

Poinsettia Fizz

Makes 1 serving

David Murphy of Degrees bar in the Ritz-Carlton, Georgetown, created this sign-of-the-seasons cocktail.

Pour 1 ounce cranberry juice and 1/2 ounce Grand Marnier in a flute, then top off with champagne.

Mexican Riviera

Makes 1 serving

Champagne is the crowning flourish to this rosy margarita at Zengo.

Pour 1 ounce tequila, 2 ounces sour mix and 2 tablespoons fresh raspberry puree in a flute. Top with 1-ounce float of champagne.

Cherry Sparkler

Makes 1 serving

This rosy drink is the number two seller at Bar Rouge, says lounge manager Mike Hill. "It's a good cocktail to sip with food because it's mostly champagne."

Put a maraschino cherry in the bottom of the flute. Pour in 1/2 ounce orange-flavored vodka (the bar uses Stoli O) and a dash of peach schnapps, then fill with champagne.

Blue Nirvana

Makes 1 serving

The signature blue drink at Topaz. (If you don't have Blue Curacao, a splash of Grand Marnier works well, although without the color.)

Pour 1 ounce citrus-flavored vodka, 1 ounce Blue Curacao and a splash of sour mix in a flute, then fill with champagne.

Easy Fun

GREEN ONION-PARMESAN POPOVERS

These popovers are like individual Yorkshire puddings. To make a dozen large popovers, just double the recipe and use two pans.

3 tablespoons plus 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
2/3 cup plus 1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
8 large eggs, room temperature
2 2/3 cups whole milk, room temperature
3 large green onions, finely chopped
2 2/3 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Preheat oven to 375°F. Brush twelve 1/3-cup (standard) nonstick muffin cups or six 1-cup (large) nonstick muffin cups with 3 tablespoons melted butter; dust with 2/3 cup cheese. Beat eggs to blend in large bowl. Beat in milk and green onions, then remaining 1/2 cup melted butter. Blend flour, salt, and remaining 1/2 cup cheese in medium bowl; gradually whisk into egg mixture (some small lumps may remain).

Divide batter among muffin cups. Bake popovers without opening oven until puffed and crusty brown, about 38 minutes for small and 48 minutes for large; turn out of pan and serve hot.

Makes 12 small or 6 large.

This are super on the side for meat roasts, roast poultry, soup, stew, you name it. This is a really versatile dish.

Pot, Kettle

"The president last week denounced the leak of information about the program in strong language, saying: "My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.""

The shameful act that is getting people killed is the war Bush lied us into.

Not that your lackey media can connect the damned dots.

Weekend Plans Open Thread

So, the big holiday weekend is upon us. Have you got plans? I normally have a sedate New Year's eve. My town throws itself a party and I may wander down the street to hear some of the music and see what the neighbors are up to. The local restaurants usually put out trucks with interesting streetfood and that's always kind of fun. Are you throwing a party? Going to one? Going out for the evening?

My wiki partner DemfromCT at The Next Hurrah has a bookclub starting on Sunday and I haven't started reading Chris Mooney's "The Republican War on Science" yet, so I'll guess that I'm going to be home reading mostly tomorrow night to get ready for the first book club meeting.

Way Too Good To Check

I love the WaPo's Gene Robinson. He manages to say some pretty profound things without ever getting pompous or self referential (which is the reason David Broder's end of the year round up didn't get posted here: he managed to do both at once this week.) Today Robinson is just having a little fun courtesy of press sloppiness.

We're All Going To Die!
And Other Stories 'Too Good to Check'

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, December 30, 2005; Page A27

I prefer tallying the best stories of the year -- the most stunning, the most surprising, the stories you can hardly believe you're reading. Of course, the reason for disbelief is that they're not, strictly speaking, true. They belong to the category journalists have known since time immemorial as "too good to check." The phrase is self-explanatory: A reporter hears something utterly incredible, spends a glorious hour or so regaling colleagues with the tale, and then reluctantly sits down and dials the phone. One call, maybe two, and the whole story falls apart. You establish, say, that the vice president was definitely in Washington on a particular day -- which means that the tipster was wrong and it couldn't have been the Veep in the middle of that bar fight in Cheyenne.

Sometimes, though, the facts seem so plausible and the sources so credible that the story initially checks out, so everybody runs with it. Weeks or months later, after overlooked facts are noticed and common sense belatedly applied, the "too good to check" diagnosis is made retrospectively.

Hurricane Katrina was a trove of "too good" stories. For example, take the reports of a shocking, deadly shooting rampage by young thugs in what was left of New Orleans. The mayhem was front-page news. But later, when the dead were recovered and autopsied, authorities found no spike in homicides the week after Katrina hit.

Same with the reports that miscreants were shooting at rescue helicopters. People who had spent days stranded on roofs or in attics explained later that they were firing to attract the helicopter pilots' attention, not scare them away.

Science, as usual, provided a bounty of "too good to check" material. I'm not sure any newspaper or magazine actually ran my ultimate headline about the avian flu scare -- "We're All Going to Die!" -- but that was the general tone of the coverage. It turns out, though, that the H5N1 influenza virus stubbornly refuses to learn how to pass from human to human. Yes, there will be a flu pandemic someday. No, someday doesn't necessarily mean now.

Then there was South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk, who announced in May that he had produced custom-cloned stem cells for 11 human subjects. Soon, stories reported, doctors would be able to engineer specific medical treatments for any individual, the way Bones used to do on "Star Trek." But now it turns out that Hwang fabricated his data. Those lovely bespoke stem cells never existed.

My personal favorite "too good" story of the year didn't fool the newspapers, but it made a big splash on the Internet, which may just be the ideal medium for cultivating believable untruths. With no irony and just the right hint of paranoia, a Web site elaborately "revealed" why comedian Dave Chappelle fled to South Africa just as he was about to cash in on a $50 million television contract.

The site claimed that a cabal of eminences calling themselves the "Dark Crusaders" -- the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse L. Jackson and Louis Farrakhan; entertainers Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey; and the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television, Robert L. Johnson -- decided that Chappelle's racially charged humor was demeaning to the African American community, so they threatened and harassed him out of town.

The whole thing was soon revealed to be pure, unadulterated fiction. It looks as if it might have been a "viral marketing" campaign to generate buzz for two of Chappelle's comedy sidekicks, but the only thing that's really clear is that the story was false.

As the new year dawns, President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress are telling us the nation can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq, tens of billions more on pork-barrel projects, additional tens of billions on Gulf Coast reconstruction -- and still keep cutting taxes with a chainsaw, to the benefit of the wealthiest Americans.

And we all just go with the story. Waaaaaay too good to check.

Leak Hunting

Justice Dept. Opens Inquiry Into Leak of Domestic Spying

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 30, 2005

Filed at 11:36 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush's secret domestic spying program, Justice officials said Friday.

The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, said the inquiry will focus on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Times revealed the existence of the program two weeks ago in a front-page story that acknowledged the news had been withheld from publication for a year, partly at the request of the administration and partly because the newspaper wanted more time to confirm various aspects of the program.

The story unleashed a firestorm of criticism of the administration. Some critics accused the president of breaking the law by authorizing intercepts of conversations -- without prior court approval or oversight -- of people inside the United States and abroad who had suspected ties to al-Qaida or its affiliates.

The surveillance program, which Bush acknowledged authorizing, bypassed a nearly 30-year-old secret court established to oversee highly sensitive investigations involving espionage and terrorism.

Administration officials insisted that Bush has the power to conduct the warrantless surveillance under the Constitution's war powers provision. They also argued that Congress gave Bush the power to conduct such a secret program when it authorized the use of military force against terrorism in a resolution adopted within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Justice Department's investigation was being initiated after the agency received a request for the probe from the NSA.

The administration's legal interpretation of the president's powers allowed the government to avoid requirements under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The act established procedures that an 11-member court used in 2004 to oversee nearly 1,800 government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage.

Congressional leaders have said they were not briefed four years ago, when the secret program began, as thoroughly as the administration has since contended.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said in an article printed last week on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that Congress explicitly denied a White House request for war-making authority in the United States.

I'm not a betting woman, but the odds of this going anywhere are pretty lousy.

Let's see if Arlen Specter's bipartisan committee investigation has any better luck.

The New Iraq

Attacks Halt Production At Iraq's Largest Refinery
International Team to Probe Complaints of Election Fraud

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Salih Saif Aldin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 30, 2005; A14

BAGHDAD, Dec. 29 -- Under a mounting insurgent offensive against Iraq's gasoline supply, the country's largest fuel refinery sat idle Thursday. Gas station owners in surrounding communities in northern Iraq hung up their dry nozzles. A police chief put out a no-patrol order to his men to conserve fuel. And Nouri Ahmed Azaid put off his wedding.

In Iraq, convoys of cars draped with wreaths, their horns honking and side windows sprouting relatives with video cameras, are as much a post-wedding ritual as the honeymoon. But Azaid said, "I suspended my wedding party, because there is no fuel to drive around."

Azaid lives in Baiji, a town north of Baghdad that is home to Iraq's largest refinery and a frequent target of insurgent attacks. On Thursday, authorities confirmed that the refinery had been closed since Dec. 21 by a concerted insurgent campaign against gasoline distributors and filling stations.

The confirmation came on a day when U.S. and other international mediators helped stave off an early crisis in Iraq's efforts to assemble a new government, announcing the appointment of a multinational team to investigate complaints of fraud in Dec. 15 national elections. Sunni Arab and secular parties had said earlier Thursday that they would boycott talks on forming a coalition government without such an investigation.

The investigative team includes two representatives of the Arab League, a former member of the Canadian Parliament and a European academic, authorities said. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Iraqi candidates welcomed the team's creation and the willingness of Iraq's election commission to accept it. U.S. officials said the team had the blessing of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The day's political brinkmanship, fuel shortages and violence highlighted the complex political, economic and security tangles facing U.S. and Iraqi leaders as they try to move toward a stable government and sustainable economy.

Insurgents, apparently hoping to pick a cause popular with Iraqis, launched their offensive on gas stations this month after Iraq raised fuel prices eightfold. The International Monetary Fund mandated the reduction of government gasoline subsidies as a condition for forgiving some of Iraq's multibillion-dollar foreign debt.

The United States and Iraq have been trying desperately to rebuild Iraq's energy sector as the foundation for other reconstruction work here. Although Iraq has one of the world's largest oil reserves, inadequate refining systems mean it must spend $500,000 a month importing fuel.

As a result, Iraqis already faced a choice between waiting for hours at gas stations or paying higher prices to buy gasoline on the black market. This week, insurgent attacks and heavy storms in the south brought oil production to some of its lowest levels since the war began in 2003, analysts told the Dow Jones news service.

The day after the government announced the gasoline price increases, Hawas Jamil Saaed said he arrived at the station he owns in Baiji to find a letter warning all fuel tankers to stay off the road. The next day, he said, insurgents backed up the warning by stopping three tankers, pulling the drivers out and setting the rigs on fire.

Gas station owners and many tanker drivers heeded the warning. In Baghdad, Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad confirmed that the Baiji refinery had closed "because drivers of trucks distributing oil products from the refinery across Iraq have received death threats from terrorists." Jihad said he believed a solution would be found soon.

My, this is all going so well.

Un-freakin'-believable

Tropical Storm Zeta is here to say that this incredible tropical season ain't over.

Fish Eggs

You might be the guest rather than the host at a holiday party this weekend. Do you know how to eat caviar, if it is offered?

If caviar is passed to you in a bowl or crock with its own spoon, serve a teaspoonful onto your plate. As the following accompaniments are offered, use the individual serving spoon in each to take small amount of minced onion and sieved egg whites and yolks, as well as a few lemon slices and a couple of toast points. Assemble a canape to your taste with a knife, then use your fingers to lift it to your mouth.

If you're at a cocktail party or reception, where prepared caviar canapes are being passed on trays, simply lift one off the plate and pop it into your mouth.

When served caviar as an hors d'oeuvre, no matter how much you might be tempted by its luscious flavor, it's considered bad form to eat more than an ample serving of about two ounces, or about two spoonfuls.

At $35-100 an ounce, that's letting you get away with somebody's paycheck.

But it is awfully good. Read all about caviar if you would like to know more. This is a precious good and needs to be handled carefully.

For Luck

Black Eye Peas are a New Year meal tradition in some parts of the American south. Here is one popular way to prepare them.

This serves four.

2 lb. black eye peas
1 tsp. baking soda
1 lb. country ribs
1 tbsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. red pepper
1 lg. onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic

Soak black eye peas overnight. Drain. Wash peas and cover with water and baking soda. Bring to a good boil. Drain. In heavy pot, brown country ribs, onion and garlic. When ribs are golden brown, add peas, salt, sugar and red pepper. Cover with hot water out of kettle. Bring to a fast boil. Reduce heat and simmer on low for 2 hours.

Serve these with collards and Southern style potato salad. Just for New Year's, substitute champagne for sweet tea.

Escape

We've covered Clostridium difficile earlier and it is something of a surprise to see it on the front page of the WaPo. I've been reading about the possible rebound effects of some antibiotics and "the purple pill" for a while. It looks like it is entrenched now.

Stomach Bug Mutates Into Medical Mystery
Antibiotics, Heartburn Drugs Suspected

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005; Page A01

First came stomach cramps, which left Christina Shultz doubled over and weeping in pain. Then came nausea and fatigue -- so overwhelming she couldn't get out of bed for days. Just when she thought things couldn't get worse, the nastiest diarrhea of her life hit -- repeatedly forcing her into the hospital.

Doctors finally discovered that the 35-year-old Hilliard, Ohio, woman had an intestinal bug that used to be found almost exclusively among older, sicker patients in hospitals and was usually easily cured with a dose of antibiotics. But after months of treatment, Shultz is still incapacitated.

"It's been a nightmare," said Shultz, a mother of two young children. "I just want my life back."

Shultz is one of a growing number of young, otherwise healthy Americans who are being stricken by the bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile -- or C. diff -- which appears to be spreading rapidly around the country and causing unusually severe, sometimes fatal illness.

That is raising alarm among health officials, who are concerned that many cases may be misdiagnosed and are puzzled as to what is causing the microbe to become so much more common and dangerous.

"It's a new phenomenon. It's just emerging," said L. Clifford McDonald of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. "We're very concerned. We know it's happening, but we're really not sure why it's happening or where this is going."

It may, however, be the latest example of a common, relatively benign bug that has mutated because of the overuse of antibiotics.

"This may well be another consequence of our use of antibiotics," said John G. Bartlett, an infectious-disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "It's another example of an organism that all of a sudden has gotten a lot meaner and nastier."

In addition, new evidence released last week suggests that the enormous popularity of powerful new heartburn drugs may also be playing a role.

The antibiotics Flagyl (metronidazole) and vancomycin still cure many patients, but others develop stubborn infections like Shultz's that take over their lives. Some resort to having their colon removed to end the debilitating diarrhea. A small but disturbingly high number have died, including an otherwise healthy pregnant woman who succumbed earlier this year in Pennsylvania after miscarrying twins.

The infection usually hits people who are taking antibiotics for other reasons, but a handful of cases have been reported among people who were taking nothing, another unexpected and troubling turn in the germ's behavior.

C.difficile used to be what is called a "nosocomial" infection, one that you caught in the hospital. Antibiotic resistance is one of the factors which have released it "into the wild" as the epidemiologists say. I've been tracking news reports of people who haven't been in hospitals in decades and still have come down with it. As if there weren't enough bad actors being cooked up by Mother Nature, we've created a few more by overuse of drugs and this is one.

It's interesting to a news geek like me that Dave Brown, the WaPo's med/sci reporter and an MD him self, isn't the reporter on this story.

The So-Called Fourth Estate

Because they are freaking cowards, that's why:

Some Veteran Journalists Say 'Times' And 'Post' Should Have Disclosed Meeting with Bush on Controversial Stories

By Joe Strupp

Published: December 27, 2005 1:50 PM ET

NEW YORK Word that members of the Bush administration met with editors of two major newspapers in an effort to stop the publication of news articles in recent weeks drew little surprise from veteran Washington journalists, who said such White House pressure has appeared during past decades.

What concerned some, however, was that The New York Times and The Washington Post did not disclose those meetings when they eventually published the articles involved.

"What strikes me is that neither of the papers have reported it," said John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder. "They agreed to go into it on White House ground rules that the meetings would be off the record. I don't know why the papers accepted that condition."

Andy Alexander, Washington bureau chief for Cox Newspapers, agreed. "You should report it with the story," he said. "It gets into the agreement you have with the White House as to what you can report."

For Jack Germond, a former Washington reporter with The Washington Star and The Sun of Baltimore, it is part of the news. "I was surprised they didn't report it in this case," he said of The Post and Times examples. "Why not report it? It is part of the story. You can agree not to discuss the details of the conversation with the president. But the fact that you have such a meeting is not off the record."

The first incident at issue is a Dec. 5 meeting between Bush and Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., Executive Editor Bill Keller, and Times D.C. Bureau Chief Phil Taubman. According to Newsweek, Bush called that meeting in an effort to get the Times to hold off on a story about the president authorizing secret eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without court orders. That story eventually ran on Dec. 16.

Although the Times revealed in that story that it had held the information for more than a year, it did not disclose the Bush meeting and has yet to confirm it.

The second incident involved a reported meeting between Bush and Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., before the Post's Nov. 2 story by Dana Priest on secret CIA prisons. Post writer Howard Kurtz revealed the meeting in a story Monday, but did not indicate when it occurred. In that story, Downie confirmed only that Post officials met with "senior administration officials." Priest's story also did not indicate any administration effort to stop the story.

"In general, readers ought to understand, and we ought to be as transparent as we can, about the process," Knight Ridder Washington editor Clark Hoyt said when asked about the papers' failing to report the meetings. "But I don't know what the ground rules on these particular meetings were."

Tom Wicker, a former Times Washington correspondent and bureau chief, said any presidential or administrative intervention is news, and should be reported. "Particularly if it is someone with a political interest trying to intervene," he said.

Neither Downie nor Keller immediately returned calls Tuesday morning.

Both have pools behind their homes and territory to defend that doesn't look in the least bit like your life or mine, Don't expect either of these papers to defend your rights or mine. We are on our own and the big three papers have sold out for access and easy money. Think Fox TV cares about you? Whoo, what are you smokin'?

Democracy: Down the Swirly

Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor
Anti-Terror Effort Continues to Grow

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005; Page A01

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by members of Congress.

Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush's personal commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been key to resisting any pressure to change course.

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

The administration's decisions to rely on a small circle of lawyers for legal interpretations that justify the CIA's covert programs and not to consult widely with Congress on them have also helped insulate the efforts from the growing furor, said several sources who have been involved.

And your broad swath of Americans don't give a good d'damn as we slide into dictator status. As long as you've got your TiVo, the mass of this country doesn't know enough about the Constitution to give a good g'damn. Fox and CNN certainly aren't going to tell you that there is a constitutional crisis underway. That might mess with their numbers for Brit Hume or Anderson Cooper. Whatever the successor program is to Monday Night Football will draw bigger Nielson's, anyway.

Joe Sixpack doesn't read the New York Times, or care. And Dana Priest doesn't notice.

The Fickle Finger of Fate

These are so good that they will make you hug yourself. Serve to family and friends at will over this holiday weekend. Throw them up on the balcony, if they have flu.

Pistolettes Ala Grecque

A hot Cajun sandwich with a savory Greek twist. Pistolette rolls are palm-sized, brown and serve bread rolls. If you can't find them at your local market, use a good French type bread roll.
1 (10 ounce) package frozen chopped spinach, cooked and squeezed dry
1 tablespoon bacon drippings
1/2 small onion, chopped (1/4 cup)
1 small garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled (or cheese of your choice)
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1/4 cup half-and-half (milk may be substituted)
3 slices lean bacon, cooked crisp and crumbled
12 pistolettes bread rolls
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup water
vegetable oil, for deep-frying (optional)
12 servings Change size or US/metric
Change to: servings US Metric
30 minutes 15 mins prep

1. Chop cooked and drained spinach in food processor; set aside.
2. Heat bacon drippings in heavy skillet and saute onion until tender; add garlic and cook 2 minutes.
3. Add spinach, pine nuts and feta cheese. Season with salt, white pepper and cayenne. Stir well and heat through.
4. In a separate skillet, melt butter over medium heat.
5. Gradually add flour, stirring constantly. Slowly add half-and-half and continue cooking until bubbly; taking care not to allow mixture to brown.
6. Add spinach mixture, stir and heat until well blended.
7. Add bacon pieces and remove from heat.
8. To prepare Pistolettes, cut off one end, about 1/2-inch thick, and set aside.
9. Poke a hole in the cut end of the roll using your finger or the handle of a wooden spoon.
10. Be careful not to push the handle through the far side, causing a hole in the roll because the filling will fall out.
11. Slowly and gently rotate the handle, pushing the inside walls of the bread toward the outside, forming a hollow shell for the filling.
12. Spoon the spinach mixture into the opening, gently pushing down with the wooden handle. Mix the remaining flour and water until a soft paste-like consistency forms.
13. Use this "paste" to glue the end slice to the filled Pistolette.
14. Stuffed Pistolettes may be baked at 400F until golden brown, or dropped into cooking oil heated to 350F until browned.
15. Drain fried pistolettes on paper towels; serve hot.

Amaze your friends.

Leading Indicators

Home Sales Drop to Lowest Level in 8 Months

By VIKAS BAJAJ
Published: December 29, 2005

Existing home sales dropped to their lowest level in eight months in November and the total number of homes for sale rose, an industry group reported today, suggesting that the housing market was continuing its slow but steady slowdown.

Sales fell 1.7 percent last month, to an annual pace of 6.97 million, after dropping 2.7 percent in October, the National Association of Realtors said. The number of homes on the market rose 1.2 percent, to 2.9 million, enough to keep the market supplied for five months at the current pace of sales.

Rising mortgage rates appear to be weighing on the nation's long housing boom, though they have done little damage thus far, given that sales and prices remain near record highs. The median price - half the homes sold for more and half for less - was up 13.2 percent, to $215,000, from a year ago.

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate itself is near historical lows at 6.26 percent last week, down slightly from earlier this month but up from 5.53 percent in June, according to Freddie Mac. Mortgage applications for home purchases were down an average of 2.3 percent in the last four weeks, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

"We will see a slowdown in housing but the slowdown is not going to be severe," said Anthony Chan, an economist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. "We have every reason to believe that we are very close to the end" of the peak.

But concerns about the health of housing, and as a result the broader economy, will mount if the inventory of homes on the market climbs in the coming months. The number of homes on the market was up 14.3 percent from November 2004.

Real estate agents and other housing experts have said recently that it is taking longer to sell homes in several of the hottest housing markets on both coasts and sellers have been forced to reduce asking prices. New home builders, which make up about 15 percent of the national housing market, have said they are offering more incentives to convince vacillating buyers.

The impact of even a moderate slowing will be broadly felt, economists say, because access to cheaper mortgages has bolstered consumer spending on all manner of other goods from furniture to electronics. As it becomes harder to borrow against sharply rising home values, retail stores and other businesses will also take a hit.

The market seems to have slowed a little around here: I notice that "for sale" signs now take about a week to be topped with an "under contract" sign. Six months ago, the two would go up together as an advert for the realtor. I read in the popular press that there was competition between contracts before the MLS listing was even signed for properties in an upper middle class price range. Not that I have any illusion that I know what that means around here anymore. Comps to my 2 bedroom, bath and a half condo are pushing close to the half million mark. For 900 square feet. Location, location, location: it's a mile to the subway and there is a direct bus.

Long-Term Thinking & Progressive Idea Building

This in-between week, bridging Christmas Day and New Year's Day, is the kind of reflective down period that's perfect for doing long-range, big-picture thinking, the kind of creative work in liberated space that gives rise to quality ideas.

This week, as I look at 2006 and beyond (with an eye toward 2008; the next Democratic Primary is coming around the corner in an era when election cycles shrink and campaigns become ever longer), here is my end-of-year idea for Bumpers of all ages, and those around who who share the Bump spirit, ethos and worldview:

The column collective.

The concept is simple: conservatives have had considerable success with think tanks, and while progressives are catching up, there is something to be said for a more grass roots kind of activism/idea promotion/message furthering. The column collective seeks to address this need.

No op-ed editor at a major metro daily newspaper would accept multiple columns from the same author within 4-6 months, unless that columnist is, of course, a major syndicated columnist who appears weekly in the op-ed pages of that paper.

So how do we repeatedly broadcast the messages people out there need to hear? How can we promote a sensible progressive agenda from political and cultural standpoints? How can matters of religion, ideology and policy find the right voices and the right points of emphasis? These are big issues that require constancy of expression and specificity in their explanation. If we want Campaign 2008 to nourish and improve the country; if we want religion and religious leaders to be life-giving, not life-squelching; and if we want real problems to be talked about instead of bread-and-circus fare, we need to establish and sustain a robust, reasoned voice that continually finds op-ed pages and other outlets that can supplement and enhance our blog presence here.

The process by which we do that in a "column collective" involves a few basic components:

1) Gather a bunch of people who have fairly identical views and goals.

2) Then define/identify the specific issues on which your group can speak with the same literary/editorial voice. In other words, if some progressives don't like talking about religion, create two smaller, more cohesive column collectives to address the specific issues/subsets of issues that everyone can agree on.

3) Have your collective start writing op-ed columns for publication in your local paper. The collective dynamic comes into play here: for each column, attribute a different name/author, and have that person prepare to defend the column in negotiations with the op-ed editor/s at your local paper. This way, your collective--if its columns are written well enough, and differentiated enough in content to create distinct voices within your shared overall worldview--could generate a published column perhaps every two weeks.

The key in all this, of course, is to craft columns in such a way that a larger Bump-style ethos can find its way into columns on a vast range of issues and current events, particularly the kinds of local events that an op-ed editor will want to put in a hometown paper. Editors like it if a national story or broad-based issue can be put into a localized and perhaps poignant context. Being passionate, but not shrill or off-putting, will get you and your collective's voice inside the door.

I, alone, can only write two columns a year in the Seattle Times, perhaps three in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. But if I can get a column collective off the ground with my progressive friends, "I" will be able to get perhaps 20 columns published in Seattle papers, because "I" will be united with like-minded folks who will all be espousing the same life-affirming views and policy recommendations. My views will attain greater visibility and scope because my views will be linked with the opinions of others who have the same frustrations and yearnings for the world and 21st Century America.

The column collective: its core principles are basic, and its potential to create a consistent media voice for Bumpers--and those who share the Bumper mission--is vast. Put the column collective into practice, so that your ideas (and Melanie's... and mine... and Chuck's... and Charles'... and RT's...and Pogge's... and Rich's... and Mike's) can spread across the country in 2006, 2007, 2008, and on into a new presidency that might be shaped for the better because we started the hard work now.

Boding for the Future

Cardozo School of Law professor Marci Hamilton has an excellent column on The Year in Review in Law and Religion in 2005. She makes ten observations about the year just past and what they might mean for the future. A very salient observation:

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement for family reasons, a move that opened the door for the President to attempt to push the Court to shift directions with respect to abortion and the Establishment Clause. Within hours of O'Connor's resignation, the Becket Fund issued a press release expressing its delight that she would be stepping down, because of her views on the Establishment Clause.

O'Connor, for whom I served as a law clerk, was the swing vote on many cases and introduced what is in my view -- and that of many other commentators -- the best modern innovation in the area, the "endorsement test," which prohibits the government from endorsing any one religious viewpoint, because endorsement excludes other citizens. This element of the doctrine takes into account the tremendous diversity among religious faiths in the United State.

But if Judge Samuel Alito, nominated to fill her position, is confirmed to the Court, he is likely to push the Court away from any meaningful separation of church and state, and toward what I would call the equality theory, which requires that religious groups are treated at least as well as other groups and in favor of government expression that supports Christianity. There is a clear choice: inclusion of all believers or exclusion, and Alito may well push the jurisprudence toward the latter. That would mean reversing some of the progress for which O'Connor deserves credit in this area.

A Gutsy Paper

Reporters Had Predicted a Hurricane Disaster
# It's an emotional time for a journalist who wrote in 2002 about a city's vulnerability.

James Rainey

NEW ORLEANS — More than three years before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, newspaper reporters Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid wrote a series that predicted what would happen when the city took a direct hit from a major hurricane.

"Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable," one of the stories in the New Orleans Times-Picayune said. "But there wouldn't be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins."

The 2002 series, "Washing Away," foretold mass deaths, stranded residents, failed evacuation plans and enormous obstacles to rebuilding.

Schleifstein, a 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner for his part in a project on threats to the world's fisheries and an environmental specialist, pushed for years to get his paper to write about the potential for disaster. Some of his colleagues said he was an alarmist. One predicted the hurricane project would amount to nothing more than "disaster porn."
....
The soft-spoken journalist, known by his colleagues as "Schleffy," has trouble assessing his emotions now.

"In some ways I'm angry," Schleifstein said. "We all didn't do enough. I didn't do enough. The newspaper didn't do enough. The city definitely didn't do enough…. As much as a lot of people listened, a lot of people didn't listen or pay attention to what could happen."

You didn't have to be a climatologist or a hydrologist to know that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Quite frankly, it appears to me that it was only the Bush administration that didn't have a clue.

Dark Matter

The Mounting Powers of Secrecy

Published: December 29, 2005

The open government law that guaranteed greater freedom of information to the public will soon be 40 years old and desperately in need of legislative overhaul, thanks to the Bush administration. The White House's sweeping enlargement of agency powers has already nearly doubled the rate of newly classified documents to 15 million a year. At the same time, the administration has choked back the annual volume of documents declassified for public access, from 200 million in 1998 to 44 million lately.

At the heart of this thickening veil are direct presidential orders and former Attorney General John Ashcroft's blanket assurance of legal defense to any agency erring on the side of secrecy in sealing off documents. This reversed the Clinton administration's "presumption of disclosure" when it came to public requests. The 9/11 commission has already pointed out that this general retreat from the intent of the law hardly discourages terrorists; in fact, it was the government's internal failure to share information that contributed to that tragedy.

Innocuous White House press pool reports are now subject to classification, while historians complain of yearlong delays before academic requests are even acknowledged, never mind fulfilled. Environmentalists can't see routine dam and river drainage maps in the name of homeland security. Attempts by firearm agents to keep data on illegal gun traffic from those filing public lawsuits have now been ruled improper twice by the courts.

A turnaround is urgently needed, including penalties for delays, which now can run into years, and an independent watchdog working for the public. Bipartisan interest in reform is stirring, and in an attempt to head off Congressional involvement, President Bush recently ordered better information access at federal agencies. But his order's details are pro forma public relations, at best, and no match for legislation proposed by Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, and Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. They would push the disclosure pendulum back toward center and put muscle back in the law for the public.

Imperial secrecy is now the order of the day. Is this the kind of country we want to live in? Jeez, when you have a reactionary like Cornyn co-sponsoring a bill with the likes of Leahy and Waxman, there is a sea-change underway.

The Measure of Freedom

Via Suburban Guerrilla:

In New National Ad, ACLU Calls for Investigation Into President’s Illegal Surveillance of U.S. Citizens (12/29/2005)

NEW YORK – In a full-page advertisement in today's New York Times, the American Civil Liberties Union intensified its call for a special counsel to be appointed to determine whether President George W. Bush violated federal wiretapping laws by authorizing illegal surveillance.

The ACLU said President Bush's actions were a clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was passed by Congress in response to revelations that former President Nixon was using "national security" claims to spy on American citizens he considered his "enemies."

"President Nixon was not above the law and neither is President Bush," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "President Bush cannot use a claim of seeking to preserve our nation to undermine the rules that serve as our foundation. The Attorney General, who may have been involved with the formulation of this policy, must appoint a special counsel to let justice be served."

The advertisement, as well as a similar ACLU ad that ran last Thursday, was spurred by revelations earlier this month that Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct electronic surveillance of people within the United States, including U.S. citizens, without a warrant.

The text of today's advertisement compares the words of President Nixon and President Bush, both of whom denied allegations of illegal spying. Next to the image of Nixon, the advertisement says: "He lied to the American people and broke the law." Below that is an image of President Bush, with the words, "So did he."

Join the ACLU on this link. If you don't have that card in your wallet, you aren't a true patriot.

Scamming

Anybody who has studied the malpractice insurance marketplace for about ten minutes could tell you this:

Calculating Malpractice Claims
Study by Consumers Group Suggests Insurers Set Premiums Based on Market, Not Their Losses

By Dean Starkman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 29, 2005; Page D01

The insurance industry has long argued that huge losses from malpractice suits -- now running more than $7 billion a year -- have forced it to hike malpractice premiums, which more than doubled last year in some cities and for some specialties.

But a new study by a consumer group shows that losses reported to state regulators -- the figures often cited by the industry -- were much larger than losses actually paid during a nine-year period.

The study, by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a Santa Monica, Calif., advocacy group, found that from 1986 to 1994 the industry reported to regulators losses of $39.6 billion but actually paid only $26.7 billion, 31 percent less. The losses were overstated in each of the nine years.

The study examined a period that ended a decade ago to compare losses insurers reported to regulators as "incurred" with the amount actually paid after malpractice claims had made their way through the court system -- a process that can take nine or 10 years. By that measure, 1994 is the most recent year for which industry-wide data were available.

What insurers initially report to regulators as "losses" actually are only estimates of what claims will cost once they are settled. Insurers don't pay every claim or loss they report, since some turn out to have no merit and others are more or less expensive than first believed. That is particularly true for claims involving litigation, which can take a long time and be hard to predict. But insurers use those estimates to help set premiums for the coming year. So prices can go up, even if the losses eventually turn out to be smaller.

The study's authors say it demonstrates that losses used to justify big premium hikes have been overstated. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is funded in part by tort lawyers who sue doctors and hospitals in malpractice cases, as well as sue corporations in product liability cases.

"We're not saying they shouldn't use estimates, but it's how far off they are," said Harvey Rosenfield, a lawyer for the foundation. "It's out of the ballpark, not even close."

Malpractice "insurers" regularly play the markets with their profits and then jack up premiums when they lose. This is not new news but the press rediscovers it every five years or so.

Like the rest of the MSM, the WashPo manages to forget this in between election cycles so that they can let the Republicans beat it to death as if it were a real issue. After the first of the year, the Rs will ratchet up the "malpractice scream" again, and the WaPo will forget, just like they always have before.

Looting, A Corporate Policy

In Enron Case, a Guilty Plea but No Certainties

By KURT EICHENWALD
Published: December 29, 2005

At a top-level Enron management meeting in September 2001, a red-faced Richard A. Causey, the chief accounting officer, pounded the table after hearing his colleagues label the company's accounting practices as "aggressive." According to executives in the room, Mr. Causey fumed that he considered such criticism a personal affront, adding that he would stake his career on the propriety of Enron's accounting.

Yesterday, more than four years later, Mr. Causey entered a Houston courtroom and pleaded guilty to a single count of securities fraud, admitting that the way Enron accounted for its financial performance presented a false portrait to investors for at least two years. [Page C1.]

This tale of two Richards - one steadfastly defending Enron's accounting decisions, the other admitting criminal liability in a fraud - is at the heart of the prosecution of Enron's former chief executives, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling. And in this dichotomy lies the issues and evidence that could determine whether the two remaining defendants go free or spend much of the rest of their lives in prison.

At this point, no one, not even the lawyers involved in the case, can be sure which of the two Richards may appear on the stand - or even if a third may appear, one who admits limited criminal liability but continues to deny broader allegations. That partly explains why, even as prosecutors were heralding Mr. Causey's admission of guilt, lawyers for the remaining defendants continued to hold him close by celebrating his integrity.

"He is one of the most honest and decent men you can ever get to know," said Daniel Petrocelli, Mr. Skilling's lead lawyer. The prosecutors, Mr. Petrocelli added, "broke an innocent man."

Mr. Causey has never been a top-billed player in the Enron drama. But despite his low profile, the government and the defense always considered him someone who could play the role of a major witness once the top officers go to court. That is because Mr. Causey, as chief accounting officer, attended many of the top-level meetings where decisions were made that are at the center of the criminal case.

"One of the most honest and decent men you can ever get to know" sitting on top of one of the most widespread criminal enterprises in the last century and, I'm sure, he didn't know a bit about it, just another victim of a game played by others. Yeah, right.

I've been a small business person for about 20 years. If I wanted to cheat on my taxes, I know about how much work I would have to do to do so. I don't want to do that much work, nor do I want to cheat on my taxes. Shading a decimel point for an SEC filing is pretty easy. Anybody remember pets.com?

If Mr. Causey wants to play the "I didn't know" game, he's going to have a hard time getting past my accountant.

Before Dinner

After Charles has scared us all to death and SENT US BACK TO OUR A/V FILES for updating, and if you haven't done this you deserve what happens to your computer,

a light moment, with snails.

I love snails, served in their shells with garlic butter. I love damn near anything served with garlic butter, but snails are almost the perfect blank slate, scarf them up out of their shells and let the juice run. To eat these properly, you'll need lobster bibs, a set of those thingies that hold snail shells in place, some good seafood forks and those lobster plates that you can pick up for next to nothing. What you need for snails are room for sauces.

The Industry is ahead of you.

Click and order, and enjoy.

New Year

2005 sucked for me, too. Friends died, I was out of work for most of the year, it doesn't get much worse while I can still draw breath. The five hundred resumes I sent out got no answer because I'm over 50.

The Good News: Bump picked up some energetic new contributors, including Charles Roten's expert commentary on cybersecurity. Got a wireless node in the house? You had better be paying attention.

And I got a job.

I feel great peace on this holiday eve because of you, the Bump posters and commentors. We've been through a lot in the last two years and we'll get through more in the future, we have a track record.

Happy New Year, Bumpers. We've been together since November 15, 2003, and we're still around, sharing our news, our recipes and our hard stuff. Most of the credit goes to you.

And I'll give you some religion, food and politics to play with.

Into 2006, I remain
Melanie

0-day Windows Metafile image file vulnerability currently being exploited in the wild.

Sigh. Here we go again.

Remotely exploitable OS vulnerability, generic Microsoft Windows.

• Affected Products
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 , All Editions
  • Microsoft Windows XP, All Editions, Service Packs 1 and 2

• The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system running
  Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

Risk: System compromise (nature not specified).

• Exploit code published. See reference FrSIRT: Exploit: Picture/Fax Viewer Metafile Overflow.
• Exploit has been weaponized. See references Secunia Advisory 18255, isc.sans.org Story 972, and isc.sans.org Story 975.
• The vulnerability is reportedly already being actively exploited. See references Secunia Advisory 18255, FrSIRT Advisory 2005-3086, and isc.sans.org Story 972 and isc.sans.org Story 975.
• This vulnerability is being exploited by multiple email transmitted viruses. These infectors attempt to drop Trojan payloads. See references Symantec Advisory: Trojan.Infticker, Symantec Advisory: Bloodhound.Exploit.56, and Trend Micro Advisory: TROJ_WMFIOO.A.
• This vulnerability is being exploited by multiple malicious web sites. See references isc.sans.org Story 975 and Websense Security Labs Alert 385.

Mitigation:

• No patch or upgrade mitigation currently known.
• Workarounds:


• Make sure antivirus signatures are at most recent version.


• Do not open or preview untrusted ".wmf" files. See reference F-Secure December 2005 Blog entry 753.


• Avoid use of Microsoft Internet Explorer whenever possible in favor of another product, such as Firefox or Opera.


• Set security level to "High" in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

References:
Secunia Advisory 18255
FrSIRT Advisory 2005-3086
FrSIRT: Exploit: Picture/Fax Viewer Metafile Overflow
Websense Security Labs Alert 385
isc.sans.org Story 972
isc.sans.org Story 975
Bugtraq ID 16074
Symantec Advisory: Trojan.Infticker
Symantec Advisory: Bloodhound.Exploit.56
Trend Micro Advisory: TROJ_WMFIOO.A
F-Secure December 2005 Blog entry 752
F-Secure December 2005 Blog entry 753

Note that exploitation of this vulnerability can take place via multiple vectors. One is email viruses of more or less classical type, as I have already mentioned. Another is malicious websites, because the root cause is a flaw in the rendering of Windows Meta File (WMF) images.

The antivirus vendors are at work as I write this to get signature files out to plug the email-virus vector for this exploit. Symantec has already weighed in. Trend Micro is expected to do so momentarily.

So the very first thing you should do is update your A/V signatures. Keep checking them until your A/V software vendor gets with the program.

The trojans dropped from attacks using the email virus vector are, as of this writing, older ones that existing antivirus signatures should detect during a full system scan. That will change fast. Because what we are seeing right now is the very first wave of attacks, with improvised tools. Soon, the trojans will be purpose-written and will be able to evade detection for a time, until the A/V vendors catch up.

If you spend some quality time among the references, you will note that this can burn you even if you are using Firefox, if you are not cautious. But with IE, if you visit a malicious web site and the payload gets through, you're simply dead and buried. Yet another reason to leave Microsoft Internet Explorer in the dustbin until you absolutely positively must use IE and nothing else.

More about the web vector: From the F-Secure blog: The original site is dead, but new ones have sprung up

• unionseek [dot] com (dead)
• Crackz [dot] ws
• www.tfcco [dot] com
• Iframeurl [dot] biz
• beehappyy [dot] biz

This gets even better, from a diagnostic perspective. Since I started writing this post, the isc.sans.org Story 975 reference has been updated and revised. They have now referenced a Windows Media file movie of an actual exploitation taking place. To quote the authors:

Don't go to any of the URLs visible in the movie unless you know what you are doing (or feel like spending the next hours reinstalling your PC).

More tasty goodness care of the good people at the SANS Internet Storm Center site.

Update 23:00 UTC: The vulnerability seems to be within SHIMGVW.DLL. Unregistering this DLL (type REGSVR32 /U SHIMGVW.DLL at the command prompt or in the "Start->Run" Window, then reboot) will resolve most of the vulnerability, but will also break your Windows "Picture and Fax Viewer", as well as any ability of programs like "Paint" and "Explorer" to display thumbnails of any picture and real (benign) WMF files.

Update 23:19 UTC: Not that we didn't have enough "good" news already, but if you are relying on perimeter filters to block files with WMF extension from reaching your browser, you might have a surprise waiting for you. Windows XP will detect and process a WMF file based on its content ("magic bytes") and not rely on the extension alone, which means that a WMF sailing in disguise with a different extension might still be able to get you.

Now you know why I visit http://isc.sans.org on a daily basis in my official on-the-job capacity.

Postscript: I estimate the odds that Microsoft knows about this one are as close to unity as makes no difference.

A couple of things that Microsoft and the FBI seem to have in common:

1. They both have a habit of hiring line troops who are among the smartest guys in the room.

   Microsoft's best are at work on patches for this thing as I write. No doubt in my mind at all. Nada.



2. The folks in overall charge are NOT the smartest guys in the room, to put matters charitably.

   Don't expect patches to arrive right away. The PHBs running Microsoft are going to wait until the second Tuesday of January to release official patches for this. You can take that to the bank.

Longing for Spring

This recipe appeared in the LATimes last spring, just in time for the opening of the early Farmers' Markets (mine's on Saturday morning from May through October and I plan my menus around what I can find fresh there each week.) I'm not a vegetarian but my cooking leans heavily on fresh fruits and vegetables because that's what I most like to eat.

You can use frozen sugar snap peas for this during the winter, but it won't have the surprising fresh "green" taste that you will get with the just picked variety.

Sugar snap pea soup with Parmesan cream

Total time: 1 hour

Servings: 6

Note: In the spring, when farmers markets were loaded with sugar snap peas, Russ Parsons created this fresh-as-the-moment soup, as fabulous as much more labor-intensive English pea soup. It can also be served cold, with a few leaves of fresh chervil rather than the Parmesan cream.

2 pounds sugar snap peas

2 tablespoons butter, divided

1/4 cup minced shallots

3/4 cup chicken stock

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

Freshly grated nutmeg

1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice, plus more to taste

Up to 1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 cup cream

1/4 cup grated Parmesan

1. Add the peas to a large pot of rapidly boiling, generously salted water. Cover the pot and bring back to a boil. Uncover and cook until the peas are tender but still a vibrant green, 6 to 8 minutes. Do not cook so long that they turn drab. As soon as the peas are done, drain them and place them in an ice water bath to stop the cooking and preserve their bright color. Drain them again.

2. While the peas are cooking, melt 1 tablespoon butter in a small skillet over medium-low heat. Add the shallots and cook until they are tender and translucent, about 5 minutes. Set aside.

3. Place half of the peas in a blender and purée until very smooth. Add a tablespoon or two of chicken stock, if necessary, to keep the mixture flowing. Add the remaining peas and the cooked shallots and finish puréeing.

4. Pass the pea purée through a strainer into a bowl, pressing with a flat rubber spatula to work it all through. Rinse the spatula blade to remove any fiber and scrape the thick pea purée that sticks to the outside of the strainer into the bowl. Discard the fiber that is left behind in the strainer.

5. Stir just enough chicken stock into the purée to make it a flowing liquid. It should have the consistency of fairly thin split pea soup. Stir in the salt, a few gratings of nutmeg and lemon juice. Taste, and if the peas aren't bright and sweet, stir in enough sugar to correct. If necessary, add more salt and lemon juice as well. The recipe can be prepared to this point up to 8 hours in advance (any longer and the color will start to fade). Refrigerate in a tightly covered container.

6. Pass the purée through the finest strainer you have into a saucepan. Warm over medium-low heat until the mixture is bubbling. While the purée is warming, cook the cream and Parmesan in a small saucepan over medium heat just until the Parmesan melts and the cream is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

7. When the purée is hot, stir in the remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Taste once more and adjust the seasoning if needed. Divide the soup evenly among 6 warmed soup plates. Gently shake each plate to distribute the purée in an even layer. Spoon some of the Parmesan cream into the center of the purée in a rough "C" pattern. Serve immediately.

I find the parmesan cream a little heavy for the delicacy of the soup and think a swirl of low-fat sour cream is a better pairing for this dish, but that's just me. This also works well on the cold version of the soup.

A Night in Hue

I make this for company when I want something that is a little different but that won't scare off the timid diner. It's so quick and easy to make that it is less trouble than take out.

Vietnamese-Style Beef With Lemon Grass
4 servings

3 tablespoons minced lemon grass, outer leaves and tough green tops removed, root ends trimmed

3 tablespoons lime juice

1/3 cup fish sauce (nam pla)

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 small red chili pepper, minced, or

1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

1 1/4 to 1 1/2 pounds beef top sirloin or flank steak, cut into thin strips

1 1/2 tablespoons light brown sugar

2 tablespoons peanut oil

1/4 cup (about 2 large) chopped shallots

1 teaspoon sesame seeds

1/2 cup chopped mint, for garnish

In a small bowl, combine the lemon grass, lime juice, fish sauce, garlic and the minced chili pepper or red pepper flakes. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, sprinkle the beef with the brown sugar. Set aside.

Place a wok or large skillet over medium-high to high heat. Add the oil and swirl to coat. Add the shallots and stir-fry for a few seconds to release fragrance. Add the beef and stir-fry about 3 minutes, or until just cooked through. Stir in the sauce and cook for 1 minute, or until heated through.

Transfer the beef to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the sesame seeds. Garnish with the mint. Serve immediately with rice noodles tossed with chopped green onions. A salad of cucumbers, red onions and herbs tossed with rice vinegar is a refreshing side.

If you can find fresh red Thai chilis (and you like A LOT of heat) they work well with this dish. Wear rubber gloves to clean them and don't get the gloves anywhere near your face.

Into the Future

I don't know how 2005 was for you, but it is a year I'm glad to say farewell to. How about you? What kind of year did you have? Have you got some hopes and dreams for 2006? Maybe even a New Year's resolution or two? Discuss.

What's Left

My new boss called me from NOLA last week. CNN may have moved on, but he tells me that the level of destruction is absolutely breathtaking.

Baghdad on the Mississippi
A frayster reports from New Orleans.
Compiled by Kevin Arnovitz
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005, at 2:09 PM ET

It's beautiful here, if you're only looking at the sky. It's warm, and a few trees are left alive. Wait, some entire blocks look normal. New Orleans after Katrina is just as the author said, post-war Europe, rubble where history once stood, landmarks rising ghostly against a now peaceful sky, dusty people trying to reassemble their lives stone by stone. The closest equivalent now would be present day Baghdad. Some areas downright lawless, some almost normal. You can drive down St. Charles Street and still find lovely mansions, some with piles of sheet rock and ruined furniture in front. Who knows what's behind those shining doors?

Some parts of town you can drive for blocks and see nothing but debris and row after row of abandoned, blackened homes. But it's not fire, it's filthy water like a bathtub ring at eight, six, four, two feet. Cars piled against trees, boats tipped drunken in the medians of the boulevard. The corpses of trees stacked haphazardly between lanes.

On my cousin's block we're all starting to make our piles of lathe, plaster, sheetrock, insulation, banana leaves, branches, trunks. Beds for ogres. The cat down his block has taken over most of the piles. Monday I saw her stalking a chicken wing, absconding with a KFC skin dangling from her mouth. Lucky cat. You have to drive to another part of town to find an open KFC, much less a bottle of water. That's what the Red Cross is for. You'll hear them driving by, megaphones blasting so you can hear them from the back of your busted up house, proffering MREs and bottled water.

My aunt over in Metairie has shown me her supply of MREs. You'd be surprised what people will save, even when the stores have reopened. You never know.

My son and I donned our coveralls and respirators, which we fondly nicknamed our hazmat suits, and helped gut a house that has stood since long before the first New Orleans flood of the century, back in 1927. It'll survive this too. Losing electricity means nothing to a house that was built before indoor plumbing became the fashion.

As we pull out layers of wall and ceiling, we find the bones of this house, and realize it was built by someone far more skilled than whoever renovated it, however many times. I test a couple of floors toward the back, and warn my cousin that these will have to come out. Have to? He knows, that cat in the front lawn has found its way in through the holes in this floor, slept in his bedroom and left hair on everything still functional on the upper floor. But the rest of the house is solid. Everything original is still tight and smooth, even floors that had been underwater for almost a month. If you know floors, you know what I'm saying. Someone knew what he was doing.

Read the whole thing, as we say. The writer uses this old house as a metaphor for the people of the Gulf Coast.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Between the Holidays, a City Basks in Sunlit Silence

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 28, 2005; A01

In its quietness, a big, strong-shouldered and often hurly-burly metropolis suddenly exposes other emotions. Other joys will come to the fore.

So it was the day after the Christmas holiday yesterday. A city found itself less peopled, nearly bare. And still, it found its own way, its own music.

"I'm actually enjoying the city," 11-year-old Trent Cook said, standing underground at the Van Ness Metro station with Jodie Cook, his aunt. Trent was on a visit from Binghamton, N.Y. He had a little drummer boy's sweetness about him. Or maybe it was just that there was room to swirl and twirl on the platform. "This is a better time to catch the trains," he said, bouncing joyfully.

A train whizzed into view. There were empty seats everywhere, and an everyday commuter stared in disbelief.

Above ground, sunlight fell everywhere. Hemingway, who was into clean, well-lit places, would have loved the day, its warmth. Through the tree branches, through the leaves, the sunlight took on a golden glow.

Whole swaths of city blocks were quiet. So you heard birds chirping. Saw diners slumped back in chairs, as if this were Paris and it were April.

Joggers ran about fearlessly, like gazelles. "It's certainly easier here on Connecticut Avenue," said Maura Lee, a lawyer, slowing up. "I don't have to zigzag today, don't have to deal with a lot of stop-and-go coming across the bridge, either."

The big banners outside the National Zoo advertised Mei Xiang and her cub, Tai Shan. This may be the year of King Kong, but the pandas are still quite the sensation. The lines have been painfully long. But yesterday, at times, there was unalloyed joy. "There was no line when I entered," said Tsutomu Oyabu, a 65-year-old visitor from Japan in town for a convention. He confessed he had heard about the long lines, then smiled at his own luck. As for the pandas, they thrilled him. "I was at a distance, but I could still see enough."

There were simply plain blessings. "I could find a place to park. Isn't that great?" piped Amy Beth Harmon, 31, a freelance violinist. "Although there was nobody in my building to let the furnace guy in this morning, and I had to get up and let him in."

Robert Daughtry, who lives in Southeast Washington, who is 61 and semi-retired, was standing outside Union Station yesterday. He had his sketchbook with him. He lives for a quiet city, a city on holiday. "This is a good time of year," he said, allowing as to how he bolts in these days after major holidays to find perches to sketch buildings. "When tourist season picks up you have to choose your time and places," he explained. "But now I can go around and get inside buildings and sketch and then get out."

It's true, this is the best time of the year in the DC area: you can get a table at the popular restaurants, the malls are quiet if you want to do some shopping. You can get around town without the usual traffic hassles. This is actually the best time of the year to visit DC if you don't mind the risk of snow (we rarely have a white Christmas.) I'm going to try to get to the Zoo to see the new panda before the end of the week.

Winter 'Cue

It is so warm in the Mid-Atlantic coming into the New Year that I'm thinking about firing up the grill. I'm missing East Carolina-style barbecue, which I can't get around here, so I have to make it. Here's a sauce recipe, I make it spicier (I keep a suite of pepper sauces in the fridge) but this is a middle of the road East Carolina sauce. It's perfect on hickory-smoked pork shoulder and baby back ribs, but I like it on beef (brisket or london broil) as well. Use 1/4 of this recipe for marinating, reserve the rest for basting.

INGREDIENTS:

* 2 quarts cider vinegar
* 1/4 cup salt
* 2 tablespoons cayenne pepper
* 3 tablespoons red pepper flakes
* 1 cup light brown sugar
* 1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce

In a large bowl, mix together cider vinegar, salt, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, light brown sugar, and hot pepper sauce. Stir until salt and brown sugar have dissolved. Cover, and let stand at least 3 hours before using as a basting sauce or serving on meat.

I like to let the ingredients "marry" for a day before introducing it to whatever meat I'm cooking. Then, I like to marinate the meat overnight before cooking. Pat it dry before you put it on the grill on a very slow heat, 225-300 degrees F. Baste with reserved sauce only during the last half of cooking.

Recommended Reading

One of the conversations I've had over and over with sociologists, anthropologists, historians and ecclesiasticians is that we are living through unprecendented times. I won't bore you with laying out the historical precendents for how we got here, but we are on untrammeled ground. Nearly all of my history and theology professors agreed, and their reasons had nothing to do with denominational concerns. I laid out my own speculations in my oral comprehensive exam, which is not the place to do speculation, but I found that they agreed. Sometimes, I get lucky.

I spend more time with sociologists and anthropologists than I do with theologians or historians these days, and the social scientists get even more excited when we get around to talking about "The Hinges of History", a concept named by writer Thomas Cahill, but not unique to him. We are living through an opportunity for a change of imagination about what it means to be human, what our relationship with the larger universe is, and what we should do about it. A couple of decades ago, this was called "The Age of Aquarius." More recently, it has been called "global mind change."

I'm at work on both an article and a book on this subject, but while I'm finishing those up, I offer for your perusal Eamon Kelly's Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World". The flu conference DemfromCT and I attended last month was mostly facilitated by Eamon, and I couldn't have asked for a better interlocutor. I've finally had time to start reading his book and it is quite the spade for digging up more ground for questions. Since the wiki partners and I are now getting into the books we got for the holidays, I recommend this one.

Katrina and Bird Flu

Sifting Through Official Speak on Bird Flu

by Jon Hamilton
Audio for this story will be available at approx. 10:00 a.m. ET

Morning Edition, December 28, 2005 · Federal officials are saying some scary things about bird flu these days.

Earlier this month, for example, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said the virus that causes bird flu "could become one of the most terrible threats to life that this world has ever faced."

That's true. But it's hardly news. The current version of bird flu began infecting people back in 1997. Since then it's caused the deaths of about 150 million chickens and more than 70 people.

The most recent wave of bird flu began sweeping across Asia in 2003 -- long before the Bush administration began issuing a stream of dire warnings.

Risk communications expert Peter Sandman says that's not because the virus became more of a threat recently. Sandman says the change appears to be a response to criticism that the government wasn't prepared for another known threat: Hurricane Katrina.

"Prior to Katrina, the federal government in my judgment was profoundly over-reassuring about the risk of a pandemic," Sandman says. "Katrina had, I think, a lot to do with the federal government reversing its rhetoric and sounding much more alarming about pandemics."

Sandman and his wife, psychiatrist Jody Lanard, have done work on pandemic preparedness for the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Sandman also works as a consultant on risk communications for a range of corporate clients.

Together they've written dozens of articles on how to communicate the risks associated with bird flu and other infectious diseases.

Lanard says her own interest in bird flu began well before the Bush administration started talking about it so publicly.

"I became concerned and then alarmed about pandemic influenza in about January 2004," she says, "while Thailand was still covering up the very obvious signs they had bird flu outbreaks in their poultry. I thought about what we should do. I thought about stockpiling food. I felt the fear of this thing spreading in Thailand."

Lanard spent months learning everything she could about the virus and its risks.

Lanard and Sandman say risk communicators must walk a tightrope. On one side is the risk of promoting irrational fear. On the other side is irrational complacency. The goal is to instill appropriate fear that gets people to take appropriate precautions.

Lanard says accomplishing this means presenting information that is accurate, complete, and often frightening.

"Good information should increase the level of fear in people that haven't been thinking about it at all," she says. "It should decrease the level of fear in people who are over-imagining how bad it could be."

Sandman and Lanard praise the Bush administration for finally sounding the alarm about pandemic flu. But they say the administration's message has been undercut at times by statements that are misleading, self-serving or simply wrong.

One example is an image federal officials frequently use to describe the pandemic.

In a speech at the National Institutes of Health, President Bush described it this way: "A pandemic is a lot like a fire, a forest fire. If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder undetected it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it."

Lanard says the forest fire image does capture the speed at which a pandemic can spread. But she says it's profoundly misleading to suggest that a flu pandemic can be snuffed out like a smoldering cigarette.

"The quote as it stands gives an overly optimistic impression of the likelihood of stomping it out," she says. "This has never been done. Surveillance is terrible in most of the developing world."

Links to Jody and Peter's work can be found at The Flu Wiki and Jody contributes to the discussion forum.

Good risk communication (and I hope I'm doing it here) means communicating the full range of possibilities, from the most hopefull to the most frightening. Each of us have to deal with our own adjustment reaction and to move on from there to getting done what needs to be done to be ready for whatever risk we think most confronts us.

I know that ice storms and hurricanes are in my future. I can build on what I know needs to be done to prepare for them for a more prolonged pandemic event. This is not rocket science, it is merely good risk assessment and planning.

Learn about The Gambler's Fallacy and don't succumb to it.

Risk Assessment

A Shared Uncertainty
Hurricane Unites Evacuees on Both Sides Of New Orleans's Divide of Race and Class

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 28, 2005; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS Joseph and Kesa Williams have come home once since Hurricane Katrina chased them off to Atlanta. Once was all they could bear.

Inside their ruined house on Delery Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, they found ceilings collapsed, possessions rotted and mold triumphant. They had expected as much from watching TV news. Much more disturbing was the abandoned-graveyard feel of the entire neighborhood, where working-class black families have owned houses for generations.

"From what I could see, nothing was happening," said Joseph Williams, 32, who has a new job as a probation officer in suburban Atlanta. "The only thing I found in my house that was worth taking was my high school class ring. I threw it back on the floor and we left."

Across town, Gary and Bea Quaintance, together with their son, Steven, 16, have moved back into their house on Memphis Street in Lakeview, a white middle-class neighborhood that was also wrecked by Katrina. Theirs, though, is an isolated, post-apocalyptic style of housekeeping. Lakeview is a neighborhood in name only, especially at night. The Quaintances are the only family on their block.

Armed with a portable propane heater and a gasoline generator, they sleep on the unflooded second floor. The house beneath them has been stripped of its stinking contents and gutted to the studs. There's no kitchen, no washing machine, no nearby stores and no neighbors to see the Christmas lights Gary Quaintance has strung around the house. Still, it is home.

"If you can't get back home, then you are living your life in limbo," said Bea Quaintance, 47, who raised her two college-age daughters on Memphis Street and is determined to finish raising her son there.

This is a wrenching holiday season for exiles from Memphis and Delery streets. Local politicians plead with them to come home, even as a panel of urban experts warns that both streets lie in neighborhoods too ruined and too flood-prone for immediate reconstruction.

The future of New Orleans teeters on choices made by families such as the Williamses and Quaintances. The sum of their private deliberations will determine the size of the reconstituted city, reset its racial balance and dictate its politics.

While white families from Memphis Street are more likely to return than are black families of Delery Street -- primarily because houses in Lakeview sustained less damage -- the storm has united evacuees on both sides of the city's formidable divide of race and class. What they share is uncertainty, which, like the mold in vacant houses, has mushroomed in the nearly four months since the hurricane. Decisions about coming home are vexed by fear of another storm, worry about money and doubt about government help. The passage of time and the power of distance also make it more difficult to leave new addresses where, despite loneliness and unfamiliarity, there is no risk of drowning in your attic.

So far, only the Quaintance family has returned to Memphis Street. Most others from their block are waiting. At least four are trying to sell. On Delery Street, where bulldozers will soon raze the many houses now marked with red "UNSAFE" stickers, no one is back and former residents say returning is all but impossible.

"I ain't coming back," said Judith Jordan, 53, a grocery store cashier who lived for 20 years on Delery with her brother and mother before the storm sent them away to Shreveport, La. "None of us is coming back."

Jordan has returned home once, with her brother John in early December. They found their wooden one-story house tilted off its foundation. It had that red sticker of doom on it: "Partial Collapse Possible. Do Not Enter." They took some pictures and drove back to Shreveport.

We have to imagine a new New Orleans, one that may not have the world-class draw and culture of the original, one which may have to make itself up from scratch from its roots. And the roots are there, but the geography is not. A city which can be scoured out of a river basin by a combination hurricane and flood in an historic hurricane zone is not a going proposition as we head into a decadal cycle of historic hurricanes. My impulse would be to get out of the way.

Swiss Re, the global re-insurer, says,

"While the industry dealt in a robust way with the largest insured loss ever, there are significant lessons to be learnt, if the industry is to continue to meet the considerable and growing demand for catastrophe cover." Losses to insurers as a result of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma between August and October have been estimated by the industry at between 40 and 50 billion dollars (33 and 41.5 billion euros).

Michel Lies, Swiss Re's head of client markets, said insurers needed to "produce new models for risk pricing and assessing capital requirements, which more accurately reflect the true magnitude of risk being underwritten".

He added that insurers should move to use exposure, rather than premiums, as a reference for risk. This could prevent a wave of downgrades by rating agencies as seen in the wake of Katrina."

Translation: don't expect to get insurance forever if you live in a hurricane or earthquake zone. Don't expect that you can afford it if it is available at all.

It is time to re-think.

No Controlling Civil Authority

Defense Lawyers in Terror Cases Plan Challenges Over Spy Efforts

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: December 28, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.

The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say.

The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions.

"It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security."

While some civil rights advocates, legal experts and members of Congress have said President Bush did not have authority to order eavesdropping by the security agency without warrants, the White House and the Justice Department continued on Tuesday to defend the legality and propriety of the program.

Have we surrendered our common sense? The courts will tell us if we have lost our minds.

Fabled Fungi

I've been dreaming of truffles lately, it's a foodie thing. Probably the most delicious meals of my life, and I've had a few, included the white truffles of Spain and Italy and the black truffles of France. Virginia is becoming a truffle hunting place, but I haven't had the local variety yet, they are so rare that they go for hundreds of dollars each. French and Italian truffles, both black and white, are the easiest to find imported into this country. Fresh pasta needs little more than some cream and butter if you can serve it with shaved truffles. This recipe needs an egg cutter, but is quite do-able for the home cook and has the additional virtue of being something which could be served at any meal of the day. As a brunch with a hearty barley soup and salad, or first course for dinner, serve with champagne, nothing else will do. For dinner, I would serve this before pheasant or very French stewed chicken. The earthy taste of the truffle goes very well with game.

The presentation in this recipe assumes nice ceramic egg cups. My long dead grandmother had those, I don't. As an alternative presentation to serving in egg cups, with a pastry bag pipe make an egg sized 2" built up border of mashed potatoes two inches high using a star tip and the back and forth motion which will give you a Greek edge. Butter the tops of the potatoes and broil for one minute to brown lightly and let cool before inserting the egg.

Crowd four decent sized eggs into a simple pyrex dish standing up next to each other and you'll have a working method for steaming the eggs.

If your guests have never had truffle before, this simple and elegant preparation lets the truffle shine. Ingredients for 4 people.

6 farm eggs, cleaned
150 ml vegetable consommé
50 ml (3 tbsp.) truffle juice
Soy sauce
Balsamic vinegar (30 year-old, if possible)
1 truffle
1 bunch rosemary
Peanut oil

Method

1. Using an egg cutter, remove the tops from the eggs.
2. Mix the eggs with the truffle juice, vegetable consommé and a little soy sauce, pour back into the eggshells and steam.
3. Fry the rosemary in peanut oil and drain on a paper towel.

Presentation

1. With a coffee spoon, drizzle a little balsamic vinegar onto each egg.
2. Shave truffle over and garnish with crispy rosemary.

If you are trying to make someone fall in love with you, serve truffles. If that doesn't work, they weren't worth your time and the high cost of the truffle was worth it to sort the wheat from the, cough, chaff before you paid a much higher price down the road. Trust me on this. If a truffle doesn't make your love interest swoon, move on.

Yes, a one ounce truffle will set you back about a hundred dollars. Yes, I usually feature cheap cuisine on this site. But once in a while you have to let your ya-yas out, and if you are a foodie, it really doesn't get any better than this.

And it is a great test case for a love interest, if you are a foodie. ;>)

Familiar Goes Upscale

It's hard to believe, but deviled eggs are the "comfort food" of the moment in DC restaurants (these trends hardly last longer than a month these days.) Here is the recipe provided to The Washingtonian this month by chi-chi Vidalia's Jeff Buben.

12 eggs
1⁄2 cup mayonnaise
1 T butter, softened
2 t Dijon mustard
1⁄2 t Worcestershire sauce
1 T cornichon, finely minced
2 T Vidalia onion, finely minced
1 t Colman’s dry mustard
1⁄8 t cayenne pepper
1⁄8 t sugar
1 T La Chinata smoked paprika
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Optional: two slices country ham, cooked then minced

Cover the eggs with cold water in a large saucepan and add 1 T salt. Bring to a boil over high heat, then remove the pan from the heat, cover, and let stand for ten minutes. Shock the eggs in cold water, then peel them. Split the eggs in half and remove the yolks to a bowl. Using the back of a fork, mash them with the mayonnaise and butter until smooth. Add all remaining ingredients but paprika and ham, and mix well. Season with salt and pepper. Fill a pastry bag with the yolk mixture and pipe into the hollowed whites. Top with the minced ham and a sprinkle of paprika.

I prefer capers to the cornichon, but that's just me. Imagine this: you can serve deviled eggs for your New Years bash this year and be trendy.

If you want to make this look particularly attractive, slice the ham into extremely thin juilliene strips and tie them into a sideways figure 8 to place on top of the yolks. That's the Greek symbol for "eternity."

Troubling Signs

U.S. Stocks Retreat on `Flat Yield Curve;' Valero Shares Fall

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks dropped the most in a week after a phenomenon in the Treasury market called a `flat yield curve' touched off concern economic growth may slow.

Two-year Treasury yields drew even with 10-year yields for the first time in almost five years. An inverted curve, where short-term yields exceed long-term yields, last occurred in December 2000 and has preceded each of the country's past four recessions.

``What's foremost in investors' minds is what's potentially going on in the bond market,'' said Stephen Massocca, co-chief executive officer of Pacific Growth Equities in San Francisco. ``With light trading days, it doesn't take much to move the market one way or the other. The fear is that it would lead to a short-term recession.''

The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up as much as 0.3 percent before the selloff. Energy producers including Valero Energy Corp., the best performers in the index this year, dropped with the price of oil, fueling the market's decline.

The S&P; 500 lost 6.82, or 0.5 percent, to 1261.48 as of 12:06 p.m. in New York, for its biggest decrease since a 0.6 percent fall on Dec. 19. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 47.30, or 0.4 percent, to 10,835.97 and the Nasdaq Composite Index declined 15.93, or 0.7 percent, to 2233.49.

More than two shares declined for every one that advanced on the New York Stock Exchange. Some 575.3 million shares changed hands, 22 percent less than the same time a week ago. The U.S. market was closed yesterday for the Christmas holiday.

Trading may be lighter in U.S. stock markets this week, as investors take time off between the Christmas and New Year's holidays. In the past five years, the average number of shares that changed hands on the day after Christmas at the Big Board was 43 percent lower than the annual average.

`Yield Curve'

Two- and 10-year notes both yielded 4.37 percent at 11:13 a.m. in New York, according to Cantor Fitzgerald LP. Investors have pushed up short-term yields following 13 straight interest- rate increases by the Federal Reserve since June 2004. Longer- term debt typically yields more than shorter-term debt to compensate investors for such risks as faster inflation, which erodes the purchasing power of fixed-income payments.

The flat yield curve is ``causing some hesitancy even though the trend has been ongoing,'' said Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at New York-based Miller Tabak & Co., in an e-mail message. Since it's the last week of the year, ``no one wants to see gains disappear so people are quick on the trigger to sell if no rally ensues.''

What have I been telling you for more than a year? Start moving out of equities now.

Tech Fear

Presents Causing Panic? The Gadget Doctor Is In
'Techplumber' Assembles High-Tech Gifts

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; B01

In the '60s, people asked, "Who is your dealer?" In the '70s, it was, "Who's your Realtor?" In the '80s, your stockbroker, and in the '90s, your personal trainer. And now, Patty Joffee says, it's, "Who is your personal tech consultant?"

Especially on the day after Christmas, when you can't get the new #(*$(*&$# TiVo to work.

"What could be a more extravagant thing?" Joffee said. "But it's so necessary."

So at 8:30 a.m. yesterday, Joffee called the appropriately named Jason Hacker, who runs his own "techplumber" personal tech support business and, without trying to sound too desperate, asked if he could come over. "Santa came, and we have a TiiiiiVoooo," she sang into his answering machine. The kids are home, "and we'd love some help getting it to work."

When he arrived at her North Arlington home about 10 a.m., she flung open the door, announced that she'd gotten out of her pajamas just for his house call, then pulled out a checklist of all the other stuff she wanted Hacker's help with: Her cell phone is obsolete, her daughter's laptop keeps freezing . . . "and we do have some iPod issues."

She turned to visitors and said, "I was a liberal arts French major."

Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, has long been the unheralded day that makes all that Christmas joy work. Parents return rejected gifts for demanded ones or put together the new wagons and dollhouses that had been eagerly awaited presents.

Except these days they're figuring out cell phones, computers, USB flash drives, Xbox 360s, PSPs, BlackBerries, DVD players, Treo 650s, digital videos and cameras, fancy photo printers and TiVos. Now Dec. 26 means parents spend hours deciphering manuals or on the phone on hold to get tech support while kids forlornly wait for their shiny new toys to become more than expensive paperweights.

That's why Hacker ran this ad: "Call Us Because You Know You Need Us."

Hacker had prepared for this day -- finding four extra people in case he needed backup, like the guy he met at the drive-through coffee shop in Falls Church ("He seems techie"). And he'd borrowed friends' Xboxes and latest gadgets to make sure he was up to speed.

"The biggest noise is from the kids these days," Hacker said. "When the parents get computers or digital cameras and can't figure out how to work them, they take it in stride. When the kids' machines don't work, you hear about it immediately. They scream the loudest: 'Dad, I don't have 10,000 songs in my pocket! What am I going to do?' "

Hacker often fields desperate calls as early as 5:30 a.m. He described his job as "sometimes kinda like talking to someone on a ledge."

I'll admit I should do something about the tangle of wires behind the computer, but I think I can figure that out myself with some cable ties.

I think this guy is brilliant, making money off of other people's fear and laziness. None of this stuff is all that difficult.

Time to Go

Power That Bush Can't Just Take

By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, December 27, 2005; Page A25

Since the holiday season is a time of generosity and goodwill toward all -- even those who torture the Constitution and hoodwink the nation into ill-advised wars -- let's do a little thought experiment.

Let's assume that George W. Bush's claim of virtually unfettered presidential power is not just an exercise in reclaiming executive perks that Dick Cheney believes were wrongly surrendered after Watergate. Let's assume that Bush genuinely believes he needs the right to blanket the nation with electronic surveillance, detain indefinitely anyone he considers a terrorist suspect, make those detainees disappear into secret, CIA-run prisons, and subject them to "waterboarding" and other degradations. Let's assume for the moment that the president's only desperate motivation is to prevent another day like Sept. 11, 2001.

Let's go even further and assume he decided to invade Iraq for the same reason. Even in a thought experiment, we can't forgive the way he snowed the country into believing there was some connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks; nor can we forget the way he hyped the flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction -- we're being generous here, not stupid. But let's assume that however calculated and cynical the machinations, and however wrongheaded the decision to go to war, the underlying motive was purely to avoid another catastrophic terrorist attack.

All right: Given these overly kind assumptions, can this administration's usurpation of power somehow be justified?

Every time I work it through, the answer I come up with is no. The president has no right to ignore the rule of law as if it were a mere nuisance.

The problem is that if the president really were determined to do anything it takes to prevent another terrorist strike, why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War? That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted. Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold?

Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.

If potential terrorists may be walking among us, why not have police officers stand on street corners all day and subject anyone who looks "suspicious" to questioning and a search? That's what Fidel Castro does in Cuba, and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country.

In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them?

The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.

If you go along with my experiment and assume that the president has the best of motives, then the problem is that he wants to protect the American people but doesn't trust us.

If W can void the 4th Amendment without a lot of outcry on the part of the sheeple, ignoring the 22nd won't be much of a problem.

Meme of Fours

The reveres tagged me with "the meme of fours," without telling me about it.

Four jobs you've had in your life: hardware store clerk; statistical typist; database trainer; paralegal.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Young Frankenstein; The Wizard of Oz; The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Four places you've lived: International Falls, MN; Brookline, MA; Davidson, NC; Arlington, VA

Four TV shows you love to watch: Emeril Live!; Inside Washington; The Great Railroads; Mystery!

Four places you've been on vacation: Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada; Rekjavik, Iceland; Mykonis, Greece; Aarhus, Denmark.

Four websites you visit daily: Effect Measure (thanks, reveres); The Next Hurrah; Suburban Guerrilla; The Newsblog.

Four of your favorite foods: fettucine Alfredo; filet of beef (rare) with bernaise sauce; anything with Italian truffles; lobster rolls.

Four places you'd rather be: San Jose, Costa Rica; Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Spoleto, Italy; London.

I'm tagging: pogge, Suburban Guerrilla, Tyler Cowen, and Steve Gilliard.

Our Values

AFTER 9/11: Fear destroys what bin Laden could not
ROBERT STEINBACK
[email protected]

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.

That's no America I know, I would have argued. We're too strong, and we've been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.

What is there to say now?

All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ''Happy Holidays'' could be a disguised attack on Christianity.

I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America's character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke -- speaking metaphorically now -- mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we'd follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege.

Never would I have expected this nation -- which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty -- would cower behind anyone just for promising to ``protect us.''

President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president -- or is that king? -- has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.

Is that America's highest goal -- preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, ``What's wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?''

Bush would have us excuse his administration's excesses in deference to the ''war on terror'' -- a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn't know where tomorrow's first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection -- even when it's beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again.

Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It's time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it?

Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights.

Ultimately, our best defense against attack -- any attack, of any sort -- is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn't understand or respect that. Do we?

More Splits

Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: December 27, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26 - An analysis of preliminary voting results released Monday from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.

The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.

American military commanders say that it is crucial to build an Iraqi Army representative of Iraq's ethnicity, and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of Shiite and Kurdish forces' trying on their own to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.

It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are underrepresented in the new military and police. Election officials believe that a special tally from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.

In the special tally - which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces, but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners - about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Across the whole population, though, officials have estimated, Sunni Arab candidates won about 20 percent of the seats in the new Parliament.

Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in the security forces.

The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall Sunni population.

A spokesman for the American military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces also said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggest.

Yet the results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency. And the estimation seems to be a sign of how complete the reversal of fortune has been for Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.

This is yet another stress in a society under great stress, perhaps enough to bust apart or burst into civil war, as some say is already happening. At any rate, I doubt it is a good thing.

Rebuilding or What?

With Coastline in Ruins, Cajuns Face Prospect of Uprooted Towns

By JERE LONGMAN
Published: December 27, 2005

GRAND CHENIER, La. - Cameron Parish, where generations of Cajuns have hunted ducks and pulled up redfish, lost about 400 people to Hurricane Audrey in 1957. Last fall, when Hurricane Rita destroyed thousands of structures and flattened the coastline, some state officials began to question whether life there was still worth the risk.

Now Louisiana planners are proposing an idea that would have been unimaginable here a few months ago: moving an entire string of seaside towns and villages - and the 4,000 longtime residents who live in them - 15 or 20 miles inland to higher and presumably safer ground.

"If we could get 100 percent participation, which admittedly is extraordinarily difficult, if possible at all, we could conceivably take the entire population of Cameron Parish largely out of harm's way for future events," said Drew Sachs, a consultant to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He has been asked to develop bold suggestions for rebuilding the state's coastal region in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The idea, of course, is already encountering resistance, particularly among younger residents. The tightly knit group of Cajuns who have lived here in unincorporated villages like Cameron, Johnson Bayou, Holly Beach, Creole and Grand Chenier are fiercely independent and self-sufficient. They have resided for generations on inherited family property in the state's southwest corner, 160 miles to the west of New Orleans, living off the land and giving resonance to Louisiana's nickname as the Sportsman's Paradise.

"My grandfather would roll over in his grave if I sold our land," said Clifton Hebert, 44, operations chief of the parish emergency operations center. "He'd haunt me the rest of my life."

But others admit there may be some wisdom in a move, as painful as it would be. Wanita Harrison, a retired biology and chemistry teacher from Grand Chenier, loves the way the marsh fills with pelicans when a cold front pushes through. Her husband, Lee, relishes the splendid rural isolation and the ability to run off to Houston for a week without bothering to lock the house.

With their ruined belongings now piled along Highway 82, however - the piano is somewhere back in the woods - the Harrisons are actually considering the idea. Mrs. Harrison, in fact, says that if she goes north, it will be beyond Cameron Parish.

"It's a good idea to consider moving inland," said Mrs. Harrison, 70. "I love my area, but we have to face reality."

No one died in Hurricane Rita, which struck early on Sept. 24, thanks to a vigorous evacuation plan, but the storm destroyed or rendered structurally unsound about half of the 5,400 parish homes and commercial buildings examined by the Army Corps of Engineers, parish officials said. They caution that many more structures may also have to be condemned. In the lower part of the parish, as few as 20 of 1,000 residences may be inhabitable, according to the most dire estimates. Residents remain scattered.

There is a great fear here, residents say, that the hurricane destroyed not only property but a way of life. Many of the parish's 10,000 residents say they feel both neglected by the federal response and suspicious that outsiders will dictate their future with prohibitive building codes and flood insurance requirements. They worry that even if they want to return to lower portions of the parish, they may not be able to afford it.

Do we preserve a way of life which is a national treasure or do we surrender to geography? This is a question which needs to be asked.

Facing Janus

For the New Year:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

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.

For us all, prophets of a future not our own, may the new year be rich in beauty.

At Break of Day

At end of year, I want to ask my nearest and dearest, "How was it for you, hon?" This year, I don't have to ask. One of my best friends is no longer with us and I spent the weekend of his funeral so bent over a toilet that I couldn't help.

How was it for you, Hon?

This is going to be a crockpot week at Bump, a time for long thoughts. If you are brave enough to send them to the front page, we'll post them. Learn to live with controversy. I won't be posting much, I have things to do to redirect my life which aren't on the computer, I need to make my house work better. And that means trips to Home Depot to buy tools I barely understand.

For 2006, Mary, my friend is caught in grief and and I'm missing Charles nearly as much as she. I was too sick to attend his funeral.

May it be better for you.

This is a work in progress.

Melane

The Clothes That Make the Pope

In the 72 hours I've been home with mom for Christmas, about 43.6 of them have been spent debating the Benedict clothing controversy.

Yeah, you might have heard about this: Pope Benedict XVI is gaining a lot of media attention (an AP story appeared in the Arizona Republic, which my mom subscribes to down here in Phoenix; I don't know if the Seattle Times ran that same AP story) for wearing red shoes, designer sunglasses, and some fancy coats with elegant trim.

My mom's verdict: Benedict, as shepherd of the global Catholic Church, should be setting a better example. Society being what it is, Benedict can, should and must know he has a responsibility to shun the trappings of power. This is very emblematic of all that's wrong with Benedict's papacy.

I have a different verdict. I have a ton of problems with Benedict and his papacy, and cringe at the direction the Church is taking under his (silent, bureaucratic, overly technical, insufficiently warm, PR-poor) brand of not-so-vibrant leadership. But this story is something of a red herring, in my mind.

Benedict's choices of clothing are, like the (non-)actions of so many American Catholic Bishops, extraordinary PR failings that project a poor image of the Church to the masses at the very time when the Church needs a better, newer, fresher image. The lack of PR skills among Catholic leaders--in America and the Vatican--is astounding, given that these men are supposed to be communicators of the Gospel par excellence. When one's job is to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the masses within the contexts of a given time and place, the total inability to do this creates a mixture of numb shock and way-over-the-top outrage for anyone who cares about the Catholic faith and, more importantly, the fate of the world.

But with that having been said, Benedict's clothing choices are just that--PR failures. Unlike mom, I don't view the red shoes or the Gucci sunglasses as representing failures beyond that level or realm.

It's weird: on the surface, anyone who knows me would be inclined to think that I'd be outraged at Benedict for draping himself with high-priced products. After all, I try and spend as close to zero on myself as humanly possible; for me, the finer things in life are giving, giving, giving, giving, and (fifth in order) sportswriting.

But why am I not outraged at Benedict ON THIS ISSUE?

Because I'm a journalist.

Yes, Benedict is showing zero PR acumen by parading around in these accessories, but at the end of the day, he still wears the clerical garb, making a fixation on these other items rather trivial. Journalism is supposed to be all about the covering of substantive news, and what f---ing clothes the pope wears above his alb and cassock do not represent substantive news.

The fact that the pope's clothes are being reported on, instead of much more pressing stories inside and beyond the Catholic Church, is the real outrage.

The fact that my mom is so obsessed with and fixated on the pope's clothing is a sad commentary in itself. For this issue to gain emotional momentum and real-world visibility can only distract my mom--and other passionate yet conflicted Catholics--from the real issues at hand. Precisely when this asinine debate about the "War on Christmas," and the supposedly satanic nature of the phrase "Happy Holidays!" is distracting Christians from what really matters (helping the poor), Catholicism now has its own distraction: the pope's clothes.

Let's be very clear on this: the problem with Benedict's papacy is that he's not getting the Catholic Gospel message out to the world with the skill and craftiness John Paul II displayed... and on issues across the board, beyond (for an American audience, anyway) gays in seminary and abortion.

Benedict's problem is not what he puts on his feet--if people are consumed by that question, they're showing evidence they're imprisoned by our mindless, celebrity-focused, bread-and-circus culture of emptiness and surface imagery. No, Benedict's problem--like the problem of the American Catholic episcopacy--is that he's silent (silent at least in terms of getting the global media to eagerly transmit his message; apparently, he does talk about the scandal of poverty, but somehow, such talks don't reach the pages of daily American papers) precisely when the social teachings of the Church need to be broadcast and communicated more robustly and urgently than ever before.

Clothing? It's a distraction. It is much more the fault of the media for reporting this story than it is a failing on Benedict's part for wearing a few comfy things while trying to lead the global church. Benedict is failing at the church leadership part; what shoes he wears are not reflective of his pastoral skills, for better or worse.

Benedict just needs to get a clue about PR savvy, as do his bishops, particularly here in the states. (Where the heck is your collective voice, USCCB? Do you have any influence left? Show me, please!) If he led the Church well, I somehow think my mom wouldn't view clothing to be much of an issue at all.

Bad journalism, bad leadership, and a cultural obsession with the trivial when far more significant problems go unattended: developments with these three commonalities are far too prevalent these days.

It's enough to make a grown Catholic journalist cry... or smash a pair of designer sunglasses.

Please, world: let's focus on what matters. Can we actually do that in 2006?

The Inn Within

A very brief reflection on this Christmas Day... time on the Internet isn't (and frankly, shouldn't be) superabundant on this day.

One of the enduringly poignant elements of the Christmas story is that Jesus and his parents weren't allowed a room at an inn. If we're to honor the spirit and meaning of Christmas, we must see the Baby Jesus in the guise of all the others who lack room at the inns and homes of America. Then, having made this connection, we must make room in our hearts and our lives for these same folks. Our hearts must become the inns and shelters where Jesus--the incarnate God who endures within every one of us--can be revealed, acknowledged and celebrated.

For the poor to have an inn in which to sleep and rest, they must first find an inn within the hearts of people like you and me. Remember "the inn within yourself" this Christmas, and encourage others to make room for Jesus in the most sacred dwelling place of all: your own very large heart.

Merry Christmas.

"UMass student visited by Homeland Security over Little Red Book" Story a Hoax

Long story short: the UMass Dartmouth student who was the original complainant was lying his ass off. And later 'fessed up, when confronted by the spectacle of the elephant in his living room.

Although he is an authentic scumbag, this does put the kid a couple of cuts above W and his buddies, who have yet to 'fess up to the lies which have buried more than 2000 Americans, uncounted thousands of Iraqis, and the nation-state of Iraq, soon to be either de-facto partitioned or else slide into outright civil war.

This has already been reported on dKos. It has also been dissected on Bruce Schneier's blog. Atrios hasn't picked it up yet. Ah, well, I can forgive the momentary lapse on account of his Christmas Eve kitten blogging. They remind me of my younger two except that they are cuter and not nearly as big.

The whistleblower of record was the newspaper that originally broke the story, "The Standard-Times". The original story is here. The retraction and extensive followup is here.

BTW, Melanie. The Standard-Times seems to be one of the few really decent newspapers out there. By way of evidence, the original story was on page A9. But the retraction was on page A1. This is a quite unexpected and pleasant reversal of the usual weary paradigm. My personal thanks and appreciation go to its writers and editors for their guts and honesty. Too curst bad we can't clone the whole bloody paper, staff, editors, and all, and seed its replicates densely throughout the whole interior of the Beltway.

Merry Christmas

I never met Tom Duffy, but he is legendary in the Washington, DC diocese.

The Keen Spirit of Father Duffy

By E. J. Dionne

Sunday, December 25, 2005; Page B07

Imagine a pastor who begins his Christmas sermon with a Garrison Keillor story about a priest serving a church called Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.

The line goes over well in a congregation acutely familiar with Catholic guilt. And it follows an excellent rule for homilies: Get 'em to laugh and you'll get 'em to listen. Since Proverbs teaches us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine," it's even biblical.

Monsignor Tom Duffy, who told that Keillor story in a Christmas sermon many years ago, is a man with a very merry heart. He needed it to keep the peace at our politically diverse parish, Blessed Sacrament, on the northern edge of our nation's capital. This will be my first Christmas in a long time without Father Duffy as my pastor -- he retired this year at 79.

We are living through a moment when the definition of "Christian" seems to come down to which party you belong to, how you stand on a few hot-button issues and how often you say "Merry Christmas." Duffy represents a Christianity that is more capacious and more demanding.

As a personal matter, he combines good humor, intellectual curiosity and an uncontrived humility. Mary McGrory, my tough-minded late colleague who was a member of our roomy parish, once described Duffy as "kindness itself" and rightly said that he is "not one of those autocratic, bellowing prelates who rules with fear and the expectation of total deference." He is dedicated to the simple but difficult things prescribed in the Gospel: visiting the sick, comforting the aggrieved, strengthening the faith of doubters, helping families, lifting up the poor.

Do not for an instant think he's some stereotypical liberal priest. Such a man wouldn't survive in a parish that includes so many principled conservatives along with its many devout liberals. Duffy was so successful at maintaining warm relations among his parishioners on all sides of politics that a friend once said that he "must either be very good or very vague." When I mentioned this to Duffy one Sunday, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, "Sometimes, I like to believe I'm both."

In truth, he's not at all vague on the things that matter. Consider that Christmas sermon. In Duffy's telling of the Keillor story, an imaginary priest named Father Emil thunders at those in his prosperous congregation "who have left what you were brought up with that was good, that was true, and that was so beautiful beyond compare."

"They were clever," Emil snarls about the apostates, "and they learned how to rationalize their indolence and their sadness as a rebellion against orthodoxy and made it seem adventurous when in fact it was just their spirits that had become dull."

And then the priest finally, grudgingly, gets around to tidings of comfort and joy -- sort of. "The Lord had come to earth to save us from dullness of spirit," he says, "and this is what the shepherds found in one dazzling moment."

Having offered this challenge to his parishioners, Duffy promptly identified with the people in the pews, not with his imaginary preacher. "Christmas isn't the moment for pointing the finger of shame," Duffy said. "Unfortunately, we all suffer from the dullness of spirit that Father Emil spoke about, that slowness to perceive the wonder of God in our lives." But notice what Duffy has done here:

He challenged the members of his congregation to think hard about their own dullness of spirit and to consider whether they take seriously the dazzling point of the faith that they celebrate every Christmas.

I dearly hope that my children and their children will encounter priests with Duffy's spirit. He was shaped by the moment of the two Johns -- Pope John XXIII and John F. Kennedy. Duffy, who occasionally celebrated Mass for JFK, recalled that era as an exciting time when Catholics all over the world sensed new possibilities and when American Catholics finally found themselves fully accepted in their democracy. Across the Christian denominations there was less defensive peevishness and an opening to a theology of hope.

I'm grateful Tom Duffy was willing to warn a Washington congregation full of us aspiring and worldly folks against a "dullness of spirit." He offered us the Christ described in Luke's Gospel anointed "to preach good news to the poor . . . to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed." Every Christmas I hope I'll remember what Duffy preached.

May your spirit shine in the New Year.

At Close of Day

Like most other bloggers, I'll be away from early tomorrow until Monday night, taking the train up to see the bro and SIL and stay overnight. The day will begin early so I can finish wrapping presents and get ready to take an early train. The no-longer guest-posters, now co-bloggers will be around as they can around their family time, and I'll try to poke my head in if my bro doesn't slap my hands away from the keyboard (hey, it happens, he's got nearly a foot and almost 60 pounds on me.) I'll be cooking with him for most of the next two days, when not tearing paper off of packages or playing with the puppies. Bump will be a quiet place, as befits the dignity of this holiday for those of us who are Christians. It's a time for reflection on what our faith means to us and to think about what we are called to do with it in the coming year. It's a time for looking back and looking ahead. I hope Bump's Jewish readers will take advantage of the recipe threads to add their own reflections for their 8-day holiday, one which I also observe with a menorah. Jews are our older uncles and I honor that tradition, as well.

In the past year, Bump has added the voices of Mike, Chuck, Charles, RT, Wayne,
Rich, and Matt. I couldn't have gotten through the year without them, the server crashes and all the other nonsense. Thank you, guys, and I'm handing you the blog to run as I take up my new responsibilities in the new year. It will be in good hands. Pogge might even put in the occasional appearance. I'll be around, and

Back to Normal

Believe it or not, at some point in the next week you are going to get tired of leftovers and rich foods and long for something simpler. This will fill the bill:

The Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich

* 2 slices sourdough bread
* 2 oz Grafton Reserve Cheddar, grated, or a sharp white Vermont cheddar
* 1 tsp whole grain mustard
* 1/2 Granny Smith apple, *very* thinly sliced, no need to peal
* 1 TB butter, softened

Makes one sandwich

Spread one slice of bread with mustard and arrange apple slices on top. Add cheese and top with bread. Spread butter outside both slices. Place sandwich on a skillet over medium high heat and brown each side until golden and cheese in center has melted.

Gawd, this is good. The apple is what makes it.

If you want to add chopped bacon on top of the cheese before you close the sandwich, go ahead. I won't tell. The combination of bacon and apple is awesome, but don't think this is a low-cal recipe!

Serve this with your turkey carcass, beef and vegetable or pea and ham soup later in the week to a group of satisfied campers.

As an aside, a satisfying and nutritious breakfast I often eat is just a thinly sliced Granny Smith apple with thin shavings of sharp cheddar. That's enough fuel for a day. Or add finely cubed Granny to your morning scrambled eggs just before serving. The contrast of textures is quite fun.

New Year's Eve With The Grownups

I've never been a big fan of smoked or cured salmon, but this is a different and delicious take on the traditional recipe. These are meant to be served as appetizers or cocktail hors d'oevres, but it could also be a superb main course with latkes instead of blinis for Chanukah. Passed as hors d'oevres this would be an elegant focus for a cocktail party.

Citrus-Cured Gravlax with Lemon-Caper Cream Cheese Spread and Chive Blinis

1 medium orange, washed, wiped dry, and cut into eighths
1 lemon, washed, wiped dry, and cut into eighths
1 lime, washed, wiped dry, and cut into eighths
2 cups kosher salt
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cracked black peppercorns
1 (3 to 3 1/2-pound) side of salmon fillet, skin and pin bones removed, rinsed under cool water, and patted dry
1 cup roughly chopped fresh basil leaves
1 cup roughly chopped fresh dill
1 cup roughly chopped fresh mint leaves
1 cup roughly chopped fresh parsley leaves
1 recipe Lemon-Caper Cream Cheese Spread, recipe follows
Chive Blinis, for serving, recipe follows
Chopped chives, for garnish, optional
Fresh dill sprigs, for garnish, optional

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the fruit, salt, sugar, and pepper and process to a paste.

Center a 2 by 3-foot piece of cheesecloth in a non-reactive baking dish or plastic container large enough to hold the fish flat, about 9 by 13 inches. Pack half of the citrus-salt mixture onto the skin-side of the fish, spreading out to the edges, and top with half of the herbs. Place the fish skin-side down in the middle of the cheesecloth and spread the remaining salt mixture and herbs over the flesh. Fold the cheesecloth in over the fish and carefully roll and turn the fish over into the cheesecloth to completely enclose.

Top with a second large non-reactive baking dish. Place weights or large heavy cans on the second dish to weight and press the fish. Let cure in the refrigerator for 48 hours, turning once.

Remove the weights and top baking dish and place the fish on the work surface. Discard the wrap and scrape the remaining salt and herb mixtures from the fish. Rinse the fish under cold running water for 1 minute to remove any remaining mixture and gently wipe dry with paper towels. Wrap in plastic wrap, place on a platter, and freeze until firm enough to slice easily, 30 to 45 minutes. (Alternatively, refrigerate until ready to slice.)

Remove the fish from the freezer and slice the salmon as thinly as possible at a slight angle. Arrange the slices decoratively on the platter and serve with the Lemon-Caper Cream Cheese Spread and the Chive Blinis. (Alternatively, blinis may be spread with the Lemon-Caper Cream Cheese Spread and then topped with a small piece of gravlax and passed or plated as hors d'oeuvres. Garnish with fresh dill or chives before serving.)

Lemon-Caper Cream Cheese Spread:
10 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
2 ounces sour cream, at room temperature
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped, drained capers
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh chives
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
Pinch freshly ground black pepper

Place all the ingredients in a medium bowl and cream together using a rubber spatula or heavy wooden spoon. Spoon into a decorative bowl and serve immediately.

Yield: 1 1/2 cups

Chive Blinis:
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
2 cups warm milk, 105 to 115 degrees F
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
2 teaspoons sugar
5 egg whites
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives, or more to taste
1/4 teaspoon salt

Dissolve the yeast in 1 cup of the warm milk and add 1 teaspoon of the all-purpose flour. Place the mixture in a warm place until it rises and doubles in size, about 10 minutes. Add the rest of the warmed milk. Sift in the remaining all-purpose flour and the buckwheat flour. Add the sugar, 3 of the egg whites, the butter and the chives. Beat until smooth. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set aside to rise until doubled in size, about 1 hour. Stir the mixture lightly and let it rise again for 30 minutes.

Whisk the remaining egg whites until frothy and add to the mixture. Heat a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat and spray with nonstick cooking spray (or lightly brush with butter). Drop tablespoonfuls of batter into the skillet and cook until bubbles form and blinis are golden brown on the bottom, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Turn blinis and cook until golden brown on the second side, 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Yield: about 5 1/2 dozen (2-inch) blinis

Tip: Blinis may be made in advance and frozen, wrapped well in plastic wrap and placed inside a resealable food storage bag.

On the Side

If the centerpiece of your holiday meal is going to be beef, this makes a spectacular side.

Bleu Cheese Potatoes Delmonico

Serves Six

* 8 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
* 1/2 cup butter
* 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup cream
* 1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
* 1/3 cup bread crumbs

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Place the potatoes in a large saucepan with water to cover. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, and cook until tender, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain, and transfer to a casserole dish.
2. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Whisk in the flour, and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Gradually whisk in the milk and cream so there are no lumps. Reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and whisk in the blue cheese until smooth. Pour over the potatoes in the dish. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top.
3. Bake for 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until top is nicely browned.

Es ist ein' Ros'

1. Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming
from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse's lineage coming,
as those of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright,
amid the cold of winter,
when half spent was the night.

2. Isaiah 'twas foretold it,
the Rose I have in mind;
with Mary we behold it,
the Virgin Mother kind.
To show God's love aright,
she bore to us a Savior,
when half spent was the night.

15th Century German traditional, translated by Theodore Baker

A Poet Ahead of his Time

September 1, 1939

W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade;
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
Find what huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

For Dinner Tonight

This is an Italian tradition for Christmas Eve feasting:

Cioppino

This will serve 12-14.

INGREDIENTS:

* 3/4 cup butter
* 2 onions, chopped
* 2 cloves garlic, minced
* 1 bunch fresh parsley, chopped
* 2 (14.5 ounce) cans stewed tomatoes
* 2 (14.5 ounce) cans chicken broth
* 2 bay leaves
* 1 tablespoon dried basil
* 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
* 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
* 1 cup water
* 1 1/2 cups white wine
* 1 1/2 pounds large shrimp - peeled and deveined
* 1 1/2 pounds bay scallops
* 18 small clams
* 18 mussels, cleaned and debearded
* 1 1/2 cups crabmeat
* 1 1/2 pounds cod fillets, cubed

DIRECTIONS:

1. Over medium-low heat melt butter in a large stockpot, add onions, garlic and parsley. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally until onions are soft.
2. Add tomatoes to the pot (break them into chunks as you add them). Add chicken broth, bay leaves, basil, thyme, oregano, water and wine. Mix well. Cover and simmer 30 minutes.
3. Stir in the shrimp, scallops, clams, mussels and crabmeat. Stir in fish, if desired. Bring to boil. Lower heat, cover and simmer 5 to 7 minutes until clams open. Ladle soup into bowls and serve with warm, crusty bread!

Start the meal with an antipasto of olives, fresh mozzerella and roasted red peppers:

INGREDIENTS

* 4 large, thick-fleshed red bell peppers
* Roasted garlic (see note below)
* Balsamic or red wine vinegar
* Fresh basil
* Salt and pepper to taste
* Olive oil

Charring the Peppers: Wash the peppers but leave them whole. Place them on a very hot grill, in a grill pan or under the broiler and grill until charred on all sides. Place the hot peppers in a closed plastic bag or under a towel. Let them "sweat" until tender and cool enough to handle. Remove the skin; it will come off very easily with your fingers. Cut open the peppers, remove the stem, core and seeds. Slice in 1-1/2 to 2-inch thick strips.

Place the peppers in a bowl. Sprinkle with the remaining ingredients. Go easy with the vinegar and oil and taste to adjust. It doesn't take much to lightly flavor and you don't want to overpower. Serve at room temperature.

Note: You can use minced fresh garlic, but I prefer the mellow taste of roasted with these peppers. To roast the garlic, remove the loose layers of peel, but do not peel completely. Cut the top end off of a whole head so that the garlic is exposed all over. Place the head, cut side up, in a small ovenproof dish or baking sheet. Drizzle with some olive oil. Roast at 375° F until very tender, about 40 minutes. When it's just cool enough to handle, squeeze the garlic out of each clove. What you don't use may be refrigerated for several days. You can use the same method using separate cloves if you don't want to use the whole head.

While Trimming the Tree

Hot Mulled Cider

1. Pour one gallon of fresh cider into a large pot on the stove or into a crockpot or slow cooker.

2. Add a half cup of brown sugar.

3. Place 1 teaspoon of whole cloves, 1 teaspoon of whole allspice, and 3 cinnamon sticks on a square of cheesecloth and tie up. Add to the pot.

4. Heat the cider to a boil, stirring regularly. Leave the pot uncovered so that you and your family or guests can enjoy the warm, delicious aroma.

5. Once the cider boils, lower the setting to simmer for at least another 15 minutes to allow for thorough infusion of the spices. Stir occasionally.

6. Remove the spices from the pot and ladle hot mulled cider into mugs or other glasses designed for hot beverages.

Tips:

1. If you don't have cheesecloth on hand, use a tea ball or a coffee filter to hold the spices.
2. Add a splash of rum or brandy to really warm up a chilly day.
3. For a decorative touch, you can stud an apple with cloves and allow that to float in your cider pot instead of adding cloves to your spice bag.

On the Radar

Tracking Santa with Real, WMP or Quicktime.

Oh Holy Night

Let me repeat the words of my friend Fr. Chip from a couple of years ago:

It is important, occasionally, to ask yourself, feeling the chill of the evening when you are walking the dog on a snowy night, "What if I had to spend the night out here? What would that be like?" That’s all you need to do. Look around and see if you can find a spot that might be suitable for you to sleep. It keeps the plight of the homeless in your consciousness and plants a seed or two which might grow into some kind of solution to the problem which you may have some gift to resolve and didn’t think about. At the very least, we develop and maintain an empathy with those much less fortunate than ourselves, who can’t do anything but endure. It reminds us of the birth of a son to a young couple, very long ago, who found shelter on a cold winter’s night in a freezing, drafty, stable. As we prepare, in the warmth of our homes, for the celebration of his birth, let us remember the circumstances of that birth, feel the chill for a moment, and remember that he was born so that we might come to know the troubles our brothers and sisters face, and find the compassion and the wisdom to do something about it.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

(words by Christina Rossetti, setting by Gustav Holst)

Divinum Mysterium

Of the Father's love begotten
Ere the worlds began to be
He is Alpha and Omega
He the source, the ending he.

Of the things that are, that have been,
and that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore.

Time to Come Home

Remember all those names they called Rep. John Murtha a couple of weeks ago when he called for bringing the troops home?

Rumsfeld Announces Troop Cuts in Iraq
'Adjustment' of Two Brigades Comes After Day of Violence, Post-Election Anger

By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 24, 2005; Page A14

BAGHDAD, Dec. 23 -- As anger over Iraq's disputed recent election boiled over in Baghdad's streets and mosques Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that the number of American combat troops in the country would be reduced by about 7,000 early next year.

Rumsfeld said the "adjustment" was made possible by political progress demonstrated in the elections last week and the development of Iraq's U.S.-trained police and army. U.S. officials have maintained that any reduction of American forces was contingent upon the capability of Iraqi security forces, who now number about 216,000.

"To successfully have three elections, fashion a constitution and ratify a constitution, and elect a government under that new constitution is a truly impressive accomplishment," said Rumsfeld, flanked by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari and the country's interior and defense ministers. "We feel very pleased with the progress being made by the Iraqi security forces and the increased role they are playing in providing security in Iraq."

Meanwhile, the U.S. military announced Friday that three American soldiers died in improvised bomb attacks in Baghdad. One was killed while on patrol Thursday, and two died Friday when a blast struck their vehicle. Elsewhere, a suicide bombing and other insurgent attacks killed at least 17 people north of the capital.

While Rumsfeld spoke inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, more than 10,000 demonstrators gathered in the western part of the city to protest an election they called a sham. The imam of an influential Sunni mosque told followers to expect more unrest ahead.

I don't listen to anything Rummy says, he's living in the same bubble as W. I do listen to Juan Cole. You should, too.

Warrantless Searches

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: December 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

Note to British and Canadian readers: your governments are part of this scheme. Uh-huh.

Welcome to my nightmare. The only thing which makes this remotely tolerable is that the Bushies are demonstrably incompetent.

The Troops

From Heckles to Halos
# In dramatic contrast to the Vietnam War era, U.S. service personnel now are being treated to strangers' spontaneous bursts of gratitude.

By Faye Fiore, Times Staff Writer

There's a diner called Peggy Sue's about eight miles outside of Barstow, and as hard as Lt. Col. Kenneth Parks tries, he can never seem to pay his bill.

He orders a burger and a chocolate shake. But before he's finished, the waitress informs him the tab has been taken care of by yet another stranger who prefers to remain anonymous but who wants to do something for a soldier in uniform.

Many Americans have conflicted feelings about the Iraq war, but not about the warriors. The gestures of gratitude and generosity that occur with regularity at Peggy Sue's — across Interstate 15 from Ft. Irwin, a military desert training site — have become commonplace across the United States.

A spontaneous standing ovation for a group of soldiers at Los Angeles International Airport. Three $20 bills passed to a serviceman and his family in a grocery store in Georgia. A first-class seat given up to a servicewoman on a plane out of Chicago.

These bursts of goodwill have little to do with the holiday season or with political sentiments about the war. In contrast to the hostile stares that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago, today's soldiers are being treated as heroes throughout the year, in red states and blue, by peace activists and gung-ho supporters of the Iraq mission. The gestures are often spontaneous, affiliated with no association or cause, and credit is seldom claimed.

"It makes you feel great. It may just be a burger and a shake, but it's the thought behind it," said Parks, 41, who has served two tours in Iraq. Stationed at Ft. Jackson, S.C., he goes to Barstow regularly for training.

"My father went over to Vietnam three times, and he felt like he was not respected," Parks said. "Sometimes he felt like he was not even an American. But I see a big difference. I feel we're appreciated. An airport is about the best place for a soldier to be."

That was Sgt. Baldwin Yen's experience when he landed at LAX on Thanksgiving Day 2004. The pilot asked whether the other passengers would mind letting the soldiers on board exit first so they could get home to their families all the sooner. Not a passenger complained. Still in their combat fatigues, the soldiers were assembled in a corner of the airport when a bystander began to applaud. Soon, people were standing up and clapping in spontaneous tribute as far as Yen could see.

"I was kind of embarrassed," said Yen, 27, of West Hollywood. As an Army reservist who wore his uniform only infrequently until he was called to Iraq, he was unaccustomed to such attention. "I'm a slight, Asian man — 5-feet-9 and 140 pounds. People usually didn't think I looked like the military type. But then all these people were standing up. I was touched and surprised."

This is not a nation at war so much as it is an army at war. Service members and their families mostly bear the weight of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions alone — family separations, career dislocation and danger. Many soldiers are serving third tours, and there is no clear end in sight.

For civilians, the chance to directly touch a military member or family can be irresistible, so much so that people break the comfortable anonymity of public places — airports, hotels, supermarkets — to walk up and pat a soldier on the back.

"For probably the first time in American history, civilians are asked to make no sacrifices in a time of war. We don't have a draft. There is no gas rationing the way there was in World War II. There is no increase in taxes; we get tax cuts instead," said Charles Moskos, a leading military sociologist at Northwestern University. "These acts are small ways of showing some recognition, because we're not doing it any other way."

http://www.anysoldier.com

They need phone cards, toiletries and all the little things a touch from home can provide. Whether or not you agree with the Iraq War, and I certainly don't, our shortsided troops can use your help for things like shampoo.

anysoldier.com can take your gift in cash or trade goods.

He or she are stationed in Kuwait or Korea. What matters is that they are far from home.

We're needed.

The New Boss

Alito's Zeal for Presidential Power

Published: December 24, 2005

With the Bush administration claiming sweeping and often legally baseless authority to detain and spy on people, judges play a crucial role in underscoring the limits of presidential power. When the Senate begins hearings next month on Judge Samuel Alito, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, it should explore whether he understands where the Constitution sets those limits. New documents released yesterday provide more evidence that Judge Alito has a skewed view of the allocation of power among the three branches - skewed in favor of presidential power.

One troubling memo concerns domestic wiretaps - a timely topic. In the memo, which he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Judge Alito argued that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits when he illegally wiretaps Americans. Judge Alito argued for taking a step-by-step approach to establishing this principle, much as he argued for an incremental approach to reversing Roe v. Wade in another memo.

The Supreme Court flatly rejected Judge Alito's view of the law. In a 1985 ruling, the court rightly concluded that if the attorney general had the sort of immunity Judge Alito favored, it would be an invitation to deny people their constitutional rights.

In a second memo released yesterday, Judge Alito made another bald proposal for grabbing power for the president. He said that when the president signed bills into law, he should make a "signing statement" about what the law means. By doing so, Judge Alito hoped the president could shift courts' focus away from "legislative intent" - a well-established part of interpreting the meaning of a statute - toward what he called "the President's intent."

In the memo, Judge Alito noted that one problem was the effect these signing statements would have on Congressional relations. They would "not be warmly welcomed by Congress," he predicted, because of the "novelty of the procedure" and "the potential increase of presidential power."

These memos are part of a broader pattern of elevating the presidency above the other branches of government. In his judicial opinions, Judge Alito has shown a lack of respect for Congressional power - notably when he voted to strike down Congress's ban on machine guns as exceeding its constitutional authority. He has taken a cramped view of the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional provisions that limit executive power.

The Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have had to repeatedly pull the Bush administration back when it exceeded its constitutional powers. They have made clear that Americans cannot be held indefinitely without trial just because they are labeled "enemy combatants." They have vindicated the right of Guantánamo Bay detainees to challenge their confinement. And they will no doubt have to correct the Bush administration's latest assertions of power to spy domestically. The Senate should determine that Judge Alito is on the side of the Constitution in these battles, not on the side of the presidency - which the latest documents strongly question - before voting to confirm him.

Get your Reichstag fire right here! Yesirree, step up and get your marshmallow on a stick right here!

Home for the Holidays

Lingonberries and lefse, what is not to like? Sigh.

The White House Judge

Alito Urged Wiretap Immunity
Memo Offers Look at Nominee on Privacy

By Jo Becker and Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 24, 2005; Page A01

Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. once argued that the nation's top law enforcement official deserves blanket protection from lawsuits when acting in the name of national security, even when those actions involve the illegal wiretapping of American citizens, documents released yesterday show.

As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito said the attorney general must be free to take steps to protect the country from threats such as terrorism and espionage without fear of personal liability. But in a 1984 memo involving a case that dated to the Nixon administration, Alito also cautioned his superiors that the time may not be right to make that argument and urged a more incremental approach.

"I do not question that the Attorney General should have this immunity," Alito wrote. "But for tactical reasons, I would not raise the issue here."

To date, much of the debate involving Alito's nomination has centered on his views on abortion. The latest of Alito's memos to be disclosed opened a window on his thinking in the area of national security vs. privacy rights, an issue that is currently under considerable scrutiny.

The release of the memo comes as President Bush is under attack for launching a secret National Security Agency program to bypass the courts and eavesdrop on the overseas telephone calls and e-mail of U.S. citizens with suspected ties to terrorists. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has said he will press Alito for his views on that subject when the panel opens confirmation hearings Jan. 9.

Democrats were quick to link the issues yesterday, saying Alito's memo raises questions about his commitment to protecting civil liberties by checking executive power. The type of absolute immunity that Alito discussed would have shielded attorneys general even when their actions violated constitutional rights.

"At a time when the nation is faced with revelations that the Administration has been wiretapping American citizens, we find that we have a nominee who believes that officials who order warrantless wiretaps of Americans should be immune from legal accountability," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

But Alito supporters noted that the memo does not defend the practice of warrantless eavesdropping, instead dealing only with the question of whether government officials who often must act quickly can be sued for damages when they err. Nor did the memo deal with the question of whether a warrant was necessary to investigate foreign threats.

"Despite Democrats' attempts to link this memo to reports of NSA activities, the two have nothing to do with each other," said White House spokesman Steve Schmidt.

The memo was among more than 700 pages released by the National Archives yesterday in response to a public records request from The Washington Post.

They portray a strategic legal thinker attuned to the sensitivities and ideological balance of the Supreme Court. Coupled with previously released memos, they paint a picture of a man who often preferred more indirect approaches over headlong charges in advancing the Reagan administration's legal agenda.

The guy never met an executive order he didn't like. Reining in the president isn't on his dance card.

A Perfect Short Bread

INGREDIENTS:

•3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

•2 tsp. baking soda

•1 1/2 tsp. salt

•2 tsp. cinnamon

•2 tsp. nutmeg

•3 cups sugar

•4 eggs, beaten

•2 cups of fresh pumpkin --> 16 ounces if using canned pumpkin

•2/3 cup water --> if pumpkin is canned

•1/2 cup water --> if pumpkin is fresh or frozen

•1 cup vegetable oil •1 cup chopped pecans
DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine flour, soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar in large mixing bowl. Add eggs, water, oil and pumpkin. Stir until blended. Add nuts. Mix well. Pour into two 9x5" loaf pans. Bake 1 hour at 350 degrees. Cool slightly and take out of pans to let cool on a rack. This tastes best if you wrap, refrigerate and wait a day to eat it. It keeps well in the refrigerator and can be frozen.

'Pop' Goes the Bubble

New Home Sales Fall More Than Expected

By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 23, 2005; 1:51 PM

Americans bought far fewer new homes than expected in November and the number of unsold homes that builders are carrying jumped to a record high, government figures released today showed, further evidence that the sizzling housing market has officially cooled off.

The Commerce Department reported today that 1.245 million new single-family homes were sold in November at an annual rate, a precipitous drop of 11.3 percent from October's all-time high, the biggest monthly drop in almost 12 years.

Construction continues in a file photo from Nov. 9, 2005, at RiverWalk, a new housing development in Bedford, N.H. New home sales slumped 11.3 percent in November, the largest drop in nearly 12 years. (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File)
Construction continues in a file photo from Nov. 9, 2005, at RiverWalk, a new housing development in Bedford, N.H. New home sales slumped 11.3 percent in November, the largest drop in nearly 12 years. (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File) (Jim Cole - AP)

Wall Street analysts had been expecting a drop of about 8 percent.

"Housing has peaked," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at online economic consulting firm Economy.com. "And all indications are that sales will weaken further in the months ahead."

Zandi said the "most worrisome" aspect of the government data released today was that the number of unsold homes that builders were carrying rose to a record 503,000 in November from 487,000 a month earlier.

"Builders are building too many homes and have begun discounting the homes they've got to try and move inventory," Zandi said. "Prices of new homes have also not risen, reflecting that discounting."

The median price of a new home sold in November was $225,200, up just 0.3 percent from November a year ago, the weakest year-over-year price change in two years.

Although sales of new and existing homes are still on track to set records for a fifth straight year in 2005, analysts are forecasting home sales will drop in 2006 as the five-year housing boom comes to an end.

"We're predicting a 3 to 5 percent decline in new home sales next year," said Phillip Neuhart, economic analyst with Wachovia Corp., one of the country's largest lenders, "which is not a crash-and-burn scenario. We're predicting a soft landing, but a landing nevertheless."

Rising lending rates are one of the principal reasons for the slowdown, economists say. The Federal Reserve raised its target lending rate for the 13th straight time on Dec. 13 to 4.25 percent.

Average rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to 6.33 percent last month from 6.06 in October. That compares with averages of 5.85 percent for the year.

Sales are dropping, and they've got unusually high inventories of unsold houses. Not a good combination.

The reason why this is a problem, of course, is that a lot of people have maintained their spending habits in the face of falling incomes by borrowing on their houses, through home equity loans and the like. When their houses drop in value, they owe more on the house than they can sell the house for. Then if they have to sell the house, they wind up owing a bunch of money. So if they lose their jobs and have to move to find work, they start over in a new city with nothing but debt. Or bankruptcy.

In other economic news, the Commerce Department also reported that orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods surged to a record $223 billion in November, a 4.4 percent increase from October.

Although the gain in demand for durable goods was well above the 1.1 percent increase Wall Street had been expecting, the growth was concentrated in an increased demand for commercial aircraft. Outside that area, manufacturing demand was weak with businesses trimming their orders for most types of equipment.

If that 4.4% increase was because people were buying more refrigerators and washing machines, that would be good news. But it sounds like that's far from the case. Joe and Jane Sixpack aren't doing so well. The median household income was $46,058 in 2000, and it was down to $44,389 in 2004. (In constant dollars.) Meanwhile, productivity has increased by 13.5% over the past four years. The economic pie has grown, but Joe and Jane's slice of the pie has shrunk.

To put it bluntly, all those campaign contributions by Bush's Pioneers and Rangers have paid off magnificently for them, but the rest of the country's getting screwed.

There ought to be a Democratic message in there somewhere, ya think? If there's one core reason for there to be a Democratic Party, it's to fight to keep the little guys from being screwed by the big guys. But so many of the Beltway Dem elite are so far removed from the reality of everyday Americans that this doesn't even seem to register on their radar.

New Year's Resolution

Slogging and Blogging Through Iraq

By David Ignatius

Friday, December 23, 2005; Page A21

The military blogs coming out of Iraq are some of the most interesting reading I've found this holiday season. Soldiers have sent letters home in every war, but this is the first time civilians back home have been able to read over their shoulders. The best collection I've found is at a Web site called Milblogging.com. It has compiled more than 1,000 military blogs in 22 countries, including 258 coming out of Iraq.

As in every war, these soldiers have their own language. They travel with Arabic interpreters they call "terps"; when they go outside, they put on the "business suit" (body armor). And they have every shade of political opinion you would find in the United States. Some are jingoistic superpatriots ("Pull the troops out?" thunders Captain B. "Did these people eat a bowl of frosted dumbass for breakfast?") Others are skeptical that the war is making much progress. ("Most of us seem to be here to justify our own presence," says the author of a blog called "Sisyphus Today.")

I don't know how many Rupert Brookes this war will produce, but the blogs carry some vivid imagery. An example is "365 and a Wakeup," written by a company commander in southern Baghdad. Walking the perimeter of his base, he sees an Iraqi moon that "glittered in the winter sky like a silver lantern." At dawn, sunrise breaks over the eastern sky "like dye spreading in a still water." He knows it's mealtime when he hears the rumble of tanks arriving with containers of hot food. "The troops held out their plates like Buddhist monks seeking alms, until the plastic dishes looked like the steep-sided slopes of a steaming volcano."

There are some haunting images of the Iraqi people. A blogger named Michael, who spends his days dodging roadside bombs in Ramadi, sees an Iraqi man driving a tractor and wearing a New York Yankees cap. "I wondered if he hated the Red Sox," he writes. The author of "Sisyphus Today" describes moving with a speeding convoy when he sees a little Iraqi boy "crying at the top of his lungs" beside the road and realizes that the boy is alone and afraid. "I wanted to stop, in my mind the risk was minimal, but I couldn't stop the convoy. Where would I have taken the boy anyway? I can only say 'stop' and 'hello' in Arabic. So we drove on past."

The bloggers dream about being home for Christmas. IraqiDirtChick has been trying desperately to make it back to Missouri, but she keeps missing flights out of Baghdad. To distract herself, she thinks of shopping: "Shampoo, body washes (SO DAMN YUMMY . . . stuff that makes you smell so damn good) gold necklaces, a ring, a bracelet."

And when the soldiers finally make it home, there is joy -- and also introspection, like that voiced by a blogger who calls himself Where's Your Baghdaddy? and who left Iraq a few weeks ago: "I once read somewhere that, 'going into a combat zone is a one-way door since the person that leaves is not the same person that returns.' This new person returning is committed to being a better husband, father and friend. I have felt the pain of leaving all that I hold dear, and I will not take it for granted again."

Amen. I wish this for all of us in the new year.

$172 Million Judgment Against Wal-Mart

Calif. Jury Backs Wal-Mart Workers
Thousands Claimed They Were Denied Lunchtime Breaks

By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 23, 2005; Page D01

A California jury yesterday awarded $172 million to thousands of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. workers who claimed that they were illegally denied lunch breaks.

The company was ordered to pay $57 million in general damages and $115 million in punitive damages to about 116,000 current and former California workers.

The jury found that Wal-Mart violated a 2001 state law requiring employers to give an unpaid half hour lunch break to employees who work at least six hours. Workers who are denied the break are supposed to receive an extra hour's worth of pay.

The lunch break lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court covers former and current workers who worked in the state from 2001 to 2005. The employees claimed they were owed more than $66 million plus interest, and sought damages to punish the company for alleged wrongdoing.

Wal-Mart said in a written statement that it would appeal the verdict.

"Wal-Mart has acknowledged it had compliance issues when the statute became effective in 2001. The problems were also experienced by other employers in the State of California. Wal-Mart has since taken steps to ensure all associates receive their meal periods, including adopting new technology that sends alerts to cashiers when it is time for their meal breaks," the statement said. The company settled a similar lunch break case in Colorado for $50 million last year.

The California suit is one of about 40 cases nationwide alleging workplace violations against Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer. In 2002, a federal jury in Oregon found Wal-Mart employees were forced to work off the clock and awarded back pay to 83 workers.

One of the pending cases, which accuses the company of paying men more than women, is the largest private employer civil rights class action in history. Wal-Mart has asked an appeals court to overturn the class action status of the case.

The ruling yesterday was "a very important decision, in part because this was an important case, but also there are 40 or so other class actions pending against Wal-Mart," said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at University of California at Berkeley. "This is sort of a testing of the waters as to how a jury is going to respond when a group of workers sues Wal-Mart."

"I think [the verdict] is going to let employers know they must apply with the law and can't take unfair advantage of their employees," said Mike Christian, an attorney representing the workers. "And Wal-Mart has to pay particular attention to that because it has similar pending cases" around the country, he said.

The company has been struggling to repair its image in recent months after critics cast negative light on the company, claiming it pays poverty wages and offers few benefits. An internal document leaked earlier this year suggested the company might cut health care costs by hiring younger, healthier workers. Wal-Mart, in response, has launched a massive public relations campaign to improve its reputation.

Wal-Mart has a reputation as a tough legal opponent. Where other companies may settle a case to minimize court costs, Wal-Mart typically fights the cases. "This really is a wake up call to Wal-Mart that these class action suits in front of a jury can be costly," Shaiken said.

The company is also embroiled in a wage and hour case pending in New York state that claims the company failed to give promised breaks to employees.

$172 million gets into the neighborhood of real money, even for an operation of Wal-Mart's size. And on top of that, the article suggests there's quite a potential multiplier effect here, as cases like this are pending against Wal-Mart all across the country.

Eventually Wal-Mart may actually have to start complying with labor laws, if this trend keeps up.

But they'll have to clean up their act quite a bit before I start shopping there again.

They're Doing *SUCH* A Good Job of Protecting Us

Federal Investigators Probe High-Tech Explosives Theft
About 400 Pounds of Explosive Material Missing

ABC News, Dec. 19, 2005 — Officials are investigating the theft of 400 pounds of high-powered plastic explosives in New Mexico. The material was stolen from a bunker owned by a bomb expert who works at a national research lab outside Albuquerque, N.M.

ABC News has been told it's one of the most significant thefts of high-power explosives ever in the United States.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed today they are investigating the large theft from Cherry Engineering, a company owned by Chris Cherry, a scientist at Sandia National Labs.

The theft was discovered Sunday night by local authorities. The thieves used blowtorches to cut through thick steel walls at the bunker, authorities told ABC News.

The missing 400 pounds of explosives includes 150 pounds of what is known as C-4 plastic, or "sheet explosive," which can be shaped and molded and is often used by terrorists and military operatives.

"It is a very dangerous material, we want to keep this off the streets," Cherry told ABC News.

Also, 2,500 detonators were missing from a storage explosive container, or magazine, in a bunker owned by Cherry Engineering.

Authorities have no leads in the theft and said there is no indication terrorism is involved.

The theft is one of the largest reported cases from a facility in the United States in the last decade ending 2004. During that time, a total of about 1,000 pounds was reported stolen from government facilities in 14 reported incidents. It is unknown whether there is any connection to terrorism.

A special agent at ATF said the incident was unusual because such high-powered material was targeted.

The missing material could potentially make numerous bombs.

You've got to wonder just what they've been doing for four years, besides fighting turf wars inside DHS. Are there any Federal standards for owning, controlling and securing this stuff? Have they been strengthened since 9/11? And will anyone in the media ask questions like these?

All I Want for Christmas

A FOIA request on Judge Alito's documents in the National Archive was answered this morning with a document dump just in time for Christmas right here. Enjoy!

Silent Night, Please

I don't know how it is where you are, but everyone is on their cell in public spaces all the time around here. I think I'm the only one in the grocery store who doesn't have to check in with someone else to find out what I need to pick up. And I'm getting tired of being nearly mowed down by drivers more interested in their conversations than steering their cars. I have a cell, for emergencies, but I am not so important that whatever I have going on can't wait until I can get to a landline. I resonate with this Al Kamen piece from the WaPo's "In the Loop."

Carol of the Cells

The Federal Communications Commission's Staff Carolers, about a dozen in all, gave their annual performance last week in a reception area outside the commissioners' offices. One carol, to the tune of "Silent Night," was about the moronic proposal to allow airline passengers to yell into their cell phones throughout flights. "(Not So) Silent Flight" goes like this:

Silent flight, quiet flight

Passengers squeezed in tight.

Wait a minute, what's that drone?

Someone's yakking on his cell phone

Can't he wait till we've landed?

I'd like to sleep in peace

Nowhere to flee, no privacy

Jabbering relentlessly

Must I listen to more discourse

'Bout his boss or his divorce?

Pray his battery gives out

Then I can sleep in peace

In Ruins

Brown's Turf Wars Sapped FEMA's Strength
Director Who Came to Symbolize Incompetence in Katrina Predicted Agency Would Fail

By Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 23, 2005; Page A01

On Sept. 15, 2003, one of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's deputies lobbed a bureaucratic hand grenade across his desk. In a seven-page memo, the new department's undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response told Ridge that his organizational plan would cripple America's ability to respond to disasters.

The memo, like so many that flew around Washington during the largest government reshuffling in decades, involved turf: Ridge had decided to move some of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's preparedness functions to an office less than one-fifteenth its size. The writer warned that the shift would make a mockery of FEMA's new motto, "A Nation Prepared," and would "fundamentally sever FEMA from its core functions," "shatter agency morale," and "break longstanding, effective and tested relationships with states and first responder stakeholders."

The inevitable result, he wrote, would be "an ineffective and uncoordinated response" to a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

The author was Michael D. Brown, who was FEMA's director as well as a Department of Homeland Security undersecretary. Two years later, Brown would lose both titles after Hurricane Katrina, when his prophecies of doom came true.

Katrina exposed FEMA as a dysfunctional organization, paralyzed in a crisis four years after the supposedly galvanizing attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And it turned Brown -- a former executive of the International Arabian Horse Association who had no emergency management experience before joining the Bush administration -- into a symbol of government ineptitude. But Brown's well-chronicled gaffes in Louisiana had less impact on FEMA than his little-known power struggles in Washington. Brown lost almost all of them -- partly because he was widely despised at DHS for his relentless infighting -- and FEMA paid a price in money, manpower, missions and prestige.

In his first extensive interview about FEMA's chaotic integration into DHS, Brown acknowledged that the agency deteriorated on his watch. But he blamed its decline on the mammoth reorganization that forced FEMA into the new department, and on his constant setbacks once inside.

"The slogan was 'Do No Harm,' but we were doing harm," Brown said. "People became distracted from the mission, because we spent so much time and energy fighting for resources and working on reorganization. It just disintegrated our capacity."

Initially, Brown's bosses at DHS and the department's architects in the White House shared the same goal of a beefed-up FEMA; their catchphrase was "FEMA on steroids." But that is no longer the vision or the reality. And FEMA's deterioration is not only the most visible failure of DHS: It is also emblematic of the turf battles that have plagued the rest of the department.

Notice that it is all somebody else's fault.

On June 5, 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. called then-FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh with stunning news. President Bush was about to announce a secret plan to merge 22 agencies into a Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA was on the list.

Allbaugh immediately decided to quit. His handpicked deputy, his old friend Mike Brown, would replace him once the department took shape.

"Joe signed on to be agency head, not to play second fiddle," said Bruce P. Baughman, a former senior FEMA official. "He didn't want to be reporting to anybody but the president."

After managing Bush's 2000 campaign, Allbaugh had been exiled to FEMA when he lost a power struggle with the other members of Bush's "Iron Triangle," Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. But FEMA had enjoyed a renaissance under President Bill Clinton, who had entrusted it to his Arkansas emergency management director, James Lee Witt, and elevated the post to Cabinet level. And after Sept. 11, Allbaugh recognized that his obscure agency could take a lead role in the fight against terrorism.

With Vice President Cheney's support, Allbaugh cleared out FEMA's second floor to make room for an Office for National Preparedness. He also began plotting to seize the Justice Department's three-year-old Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP), which already distributed anti-terrorism grants. Allbaugh wanted FEMA to oversee the inevitable cascade of post-Sept. 11 emergency dollars.

The White House officials who designed DHS also envisioned a more robust FEMA, leading America's efforts to prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks as well as natural disasters. Ridge, Bush's homeland security adviser before he became DHS secretary, was a FEMA fan; as a congressman, he had written the Stafford Act, which governs the agency. The self-styled "Gang of Five" -- the mid-level aides who sculpted DHS in the White House basement -- also hoped to strengthen FEMA into a "prime-time agency," said Richard A. Falkenrath, a member of the gang. It would no longer be an independent Cabinet agency -- it would not even be called FEMA -- but it would swallow the ODP and control all federal emergency grants.

The goal was for FEMA to "go away and become something bigger, more important and more central to the role of the department," said Lawlor, another member of the gang.

FEMA's staff worried that their expertise with natural disasters would get lost in a terrorism-focused department. But while Ridge said the administration was aware of the "huge angst" at FEMA, it never considered preserving its independence. "If you didn't have a FEMA-like agency at Homeland Security, you'd have to create one," he said. Overall, Ridge figured, FEMA would benefit from the overhaul, because it would gain control of the ODP.

Wait, it gets worse.

After Chertoff was sworn in last winter, he promptly began a "Second Stage Review," preparing to reconfigure the new department. And Brown promptly began bombarding his office with memos, relitigating fights that FEMA had lost under Ridge.

On the National Response Plan: "The time is right for FEMA to be given full responsibility for all aspects."

On the shift of the ODP: "This reorganization has failed to produce tangible results."

On DHS raids on FEMA's budget: "A total of $77.9 million has been permanently lost from the base."

Brown even took his appeal public, declaring in a speech to emergency managers that all of the department's preparedness grants should go back to FEMA. Chertoff's aides, worried that Brown was boxing in the new secretary, frantically prepared a release clarifying that DHS policy had not changed.

Chertoff, a blunt-spoken former prosecutor and judge, was not swayed by Brown's appeals. "I don't box in very easily," he said. He agreed with Brown that preparedness was a serious deficiency, but not that FEMA was the place to fix it.

Instead, Chertoff endorsed a plan that had originated at the ODP -- to replace Brown's EP&R; directorate with a new preparedness directorate that would absorb whatever remained of FEMA's preparedness mission. He agreed with Brown's bureaucratic rivals that FEMA was too busy responding to daily disasters to focus on the long-term planning needed to prepare for a major catastrophe.

DHS officials dangled the possibility of heading the new directorate in front of Brown, but he was not interested. "It's a Hobson's choice," Brown e-mailed a friend in the White House. "Take something that I don't believe in and that I don't think will work, or stay at FEMA and try to keep it from failing. Geez, what a life!"

Brown sent one last-ditch memo to Chertoff's deputy, warning that under the new plan, "FEMA is doomed to failure and loss of mission." But his appeal was rejected, and after his White House contacts said they could not find him a job elsewhere in the administration, Brown decided to submit his resignation after Labor Day.

FEMA's career professionals made similar choices. Eric Tolbert, chief of the agency's response division, said he quit this year because DHS was siphoning away "huge chunks" of his budget. Chertoff points out that FEMA's budget has increased since Sept. 11, but Tolbert said the periodic incursions "dramatically impacted my ability to maintain a readiness level."

For example, a FEMA exercise simulating a Category 4 hurricane in New Orleans was suspended when funding ran out. "Those of us involved became pretty disenchanted near the end," Tolbert said.
'Can I Quit Now? Can I Go Home?'

On Sunday, Aug. 28, Brown was supposed to be finalizing his resignation letter. Instead, he was on his way to Louisiana for Katrina and chuckling into his BlackBerry. Hagin had e-mailed from Bush's ranch, teasing that his imminent departure no longer seemed so imminent: You didn't get out in time!

Brown would be gone soon enough.

His agency, as he had predicted, was not ready. Its relations with state and local agencies, as he had warned, were in shambles. Three of its five operations chiefs for natural disasters and nine of its 10 regional directors were temporary fill-ins. And as Katrina approached, Brown and his aides were still balking at a DHS directive to join an interagency crisis management group -- and ignoring DHS requests for information.

"Let them play their reindeer games as long as they are not turning around and tasking us with their stupid questions," Brown's deputy chief of staff e-mailed him.

Once Katrina came ashore, the newly completed National Response Plan spectacularly failed its first test. Chertoff neglected to activate it until the day after landfall, and Brown resisted the secretary's efforts to name him the principal federal official. And the 426-page plan proved to be mostly irrelevant once local responders were unable to participate; FEMA had not finalized the "Catastrophic Annex" that was supposed to guide that situation.

"Can I quit now?" Brown e-mailed a press aide during the storm. "Can I go home?

Katrina also triggered the biggest deployment in the National Disaster Medical System's history. Thompson called the result "a national embarrassment." In an after-action report, NDMS team leader Timothy Crowley, a doctor on the Harvard Medical School faculty, called the deployment a "TOTAL FAILURE."

Crowley's team was summoned late, then sent to Texas instead of Louisiana, then parked in Baton Rouge for a week while New Orleans suffered. When the team was finally sent to the disaster zone, it was immediately overwhelmed, but NDMS leaders told Lowell there was no help available, even though he later found out that a host of other teams "had been sitting on their butts for days waiting and asking for missions."

"The current management team and disaster response is completely dysfunctional," Crowley wrote. "I never learned what sort of political agenda or just plain incompetence or stupidity were behind these decisions." His report was harsh, but not atypical.

"I was holding back!" he said.

Katrina has inspired a round of soul-searching throughout DHS. A terrorist attack, after all, would not provide several days' warning; Chertoff has vowed to "retool FEMA, maybe even radically, to increase our ability to deal with catastrophic events."

But Brown believes that if DHS leaders had not spent so much time retooling FEMA in the first place, his name would not be a synonym for poor performance. He's proud of the losing battles he fought inside DHS, and he could not resist a final dig at his old bosses.

"To this day," he said, "I'm not sure they've got a vision for the department."

Pandemic influenza, anyone?

Power Grab

Power We Didn't Grant

By Tom Daschle
Friday, December 23, 2005

In the face of mounting questions about news stories saying that President Bush approved a program to wiretap American citizens without getting warrants, the White House argues that Congress granted it authority for such surveillance in the 2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said the president "was granted authority by the Congress to use all means necessary to take on the terrorists, and that's what we've done."

As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel's office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

The shock and rage we all felt in the hours after the attack were still fresh. America was reeling from the first attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor. We suspected thousands had been killed, and many who worked in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not yet accounted for. Even so, a strong bipartisan majority could not agree to the administration's request for an unprecedented grant of authority.

The Bush administration now argues those powers were inherently contained in the resolution adopted by Congress -- but at the time, the administration clearly felt they weren't or it wouldn't have tried to insert the additional language.

Daschle, clearly in an effort to be polite, left out two key terms: fascism and impeachment. With the statements made by the leaders of this administration over the past week, there can be no other rational conclusion for what is taking place and what must be done.

FEMA Follies

Would someone explain to me why anyone connected with this agency is still working for the Federal Government in any role more complicated than a janitor?

FEMA Slows Search for Kids From Katrina

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 23, 2005

Efforts to locate 500 children still classified as missing after Hurricane Katrina are stalled because the Federal Emergency Management Agency, citing privacy laws, has refused to share its evacuee database with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to investigators tracking the cases.

Not until the White House and Justice Department intervened earlier this month did Department of Homeland Security officials agree to a compromise that grants FBI agents limited access to information that may provide clues to many of the unresolved cases.

In recent days, FEMA has released data that helped close 15 cases. Yesterday, after inquiries from The Washington Post, the agency sent the FBI a computer disk with the names of 570,000 evacuees.

But as the four-month anniversary of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history approaches, congressional leaders, law enforcement authorities and family advocates say FEMA's slow response has meant that many families that could have been reunited this holiday season instead remain apart.

"We are deeply disappointed by the low priority FEMA assigned to the cases of missing children," Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) wrote yesterday to FEMA's acting director, R. David Paulison. "And while FEMA may not have sole responsibility to investigate cases of missing children, it should do what is in its power to assist other agencies in completing the investigations."

Officials believe it is likely that many of the 500 children are safe, perhaps even in the care of a family member. But a case is not closed until the relative who reported the child missing learns the youngster's whereabouts and is assured the child is unharmed.

Under U.S. privacy laws, FEMA is prohibited from releasing information such as names and Social Security numbers to anyone.

"The information that people provide us when they are in the midst of, or recovering from, a life-altering event includes Social Security number, income levels, very personal information," said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews. "We take our charge to protect that information very seriously."

Nicol, don't talk down to us. Of course you should protect that information, that's why we have laws on the books about it. By the same token, anyone with half a brain would understand that if you are having a problem getting families back together, the rules might need to be adjusted some.

Look who else was involved with searching for the families. It's not some rn of the mill Internet charity that stumbled across your e-mail doing a search on Yahoo.

When Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, the Justice Department and Louisiana officials asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to handle missing-person reports.

.....

The center, created by Congress 21 years ago to serve as a quasi-governmental clearinghouse for missing children, dispatched teams of former law enforcement officers to the four affected states and negotiated agreements with the Red Cross and U.S. Postal Service to share evacuee information.

In early October, as leads began to dwindle, the center requested access to FEMA's list of the 2.8 million families that had applied for federal disaster assistance. FEMA balked, saying it was illegal to share the private information. Lawyers at the center argued that because it was working on behalf of the Justice Department "it would fall within one of the exceptions of the Privacy Act for this limited purpose," Allen said. For years, investigators for the center have had access to FBI databases.

On Oct. 25, the center provided the list of 1,600 children missing at the time to FEMA and made its request for the database in writing. On Nov. 23, nearly three months after Katrina hit, FEMA rejected it.

See, it's stupidity like this that makes people reluctant to trust the government (at any level) to get things done. Short of FEMA having a bug in its butt about being part of "Homeland Security", I have no idea why they balked at sharing this information (for that matter, why did it take a month to reach a conclusion?). Haven't they caused enough pain to the Katrina victims already?

Russian Winter

Outside of this article and a piece on NPR a week or so ago, this is a topic that isn't getting too much play in America.

Revised Russian Bill Governing NGOs Fails to Mollify Critics

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 22, 2005

MOSCOW, Dec. 21 -- The Russian parliament on Wednesday passed a revised version of a controversial bill governing grass-roots activity in the country. Nongovernmental organizations welcomed a few of the amendments but reiterated their concern that the measure will authorize strict government supervision and allow the shutting down of some groups.

An earlier version set off a barrage of international and domestic criticism that it could shutter the Moscow offices of foreign NGOs and foundations, such as Human Rights Watch, by forcing them to register as Russian organizations. That provision has been dropped.

he new version restricts foreign funding of political activity but doesn't define what constitutes political activity, and whether it could, for instance, include human rights work or the training of election monitors. The measure will also force foreign and domestic NGOs to re-register with a state body that will examine their work before using what critics say are vague grounds to decide if they can continue operations.

More than 400,000 NGOs operate in the country, in charitable, medical and educational work as well as the kind of political and human rights activity that the bill appears designed to rein in.

.......

Critics charge that the legislation, even after the amendments, will bring one of the last areas of independent activism in Russian life under the control of the Kremlin, which already dominates parliament and much of the country's broadcast media. They said that narrower, more specific legislation could have targeted terrorist activity and illegal political activity.

The measure "is aimed at establishing sweeping control over all organization of civil society, interfering in the activities of independent organizations," Yuri Dzhibladze, president of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, said at a news conference in Moscow this week. "It will harm not only these organizations. It will harm Russia."

While the author tries to give us some glimpse of hope that things really aren't as bad as we think they are, the article really doesn't sell it too well. The fact is that Russia has slipped back into the old ways with, essentially, single party control over an authoritarian leader. Putin is doing all he can to return back to that closed society which few outsiders can peer into.

And the sad thing is that most Russians probably support him. The transition into a capitalistic, "democracy" was abrupt, unplanned, and showed the worst tendenceies of both. No wonder so many Russians long for the "good old days" of Communism.

Let's have a moment of silence for that brief spark of democracy that many of us thought we saw through perestroika and glasnost. I remember watching Yeltsin standing up to the tanks on CNN as we watched from St. Charles Ave. There was hope then that the US and Russia would become allies in peace.

Instead, we have become reluctant allies in the War on Terror (tm), agreeing not to criticize the other so long as they don't stray into our sphere(s) of influence or try to make us look foolish on the international stage. At least that is the way it is for now... who knows what it will be like if the Russian economy ever gets back on its feet.

Diebold Loses Another

First it was California, now my home state of North Carolina has gotten into the act.

Diebold withdraws as N.C. voting equipment vendor; only one left

By GARY D. ROBERTSON
Associated Press Writer

The effort to upgrade voting equipment in North Carolina by next spring took a hit when an approved vendor pulled out of the running, saying it couldn't follow a new law that required it to share its software coding with the state.

Diebold Election Systems told the State Board of Elections it would be impossible to meet a Thursday deadline to account for all software used by the company for machines certified to be sold in all 100 counties.

Ok, there reporter makes a mistake here while trying to be "fair". It's not impossible for Diebold to present it's information, they are not chosing to do it, period. Why is that I wonder?

Diebold is worried it could be charged with a felony if officials determine the company failed to send a copy of all the software its machines use to a special holding company assigned by the state. They say they don't have permission to provide code that is owned by third parties such as Microsoft Corp.

Although a trial judge agreed Wednesday that the elections board had followed the law in choosing vendors, Owen said Diebold believed the law is too broad and the company can't provide regulators all the information it needs.

In a separate case last month, a Wake County judge declined to issue an injunction that would have protected Diebold from prosecution if someone accused it of failing to provide all of its software to the state.

In one county, the leaders practically begged the state to allow the Diebold machines only to have the State Elections Board meet long enough to reject the request.

North Carolina was burned very badly by an electronic machine that failed in 2004 and just lost *poof* a few thousand votes out on the coast. While that didn't effect any Federal races, it did leave a pair of state races up for grab for a very long time (and the State Legislature engaged in some... creative lawmaking to solve one of them). Consequently, Diebold's word along just isn't good enough.

Of course, you'd never know that from the article's tone. The touch screen devices are pretty, but I want something that works and that I can trust, in so far as these things are trustworthy. Maybe for a change, the Old North Staet can be at the forefront of a reform movement, instead of the grumbly old guy in the back of the van whining all the way there.

The Holiday Table

In case you are still dithering about what to do for your holiday feast, I offer this:

ROAST TENDERLOIN OF BEEF WITH MUSTARD
SAUCE

2 tsp. soy sauce
2 1/2 lbs. beef tenderloin
1 tsp. freshly ground pepper
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 med. garlic clove, minced
3 med. shallots, minced
1/3 c. dry red wine
1 1/2 tbsp. Dijon mustard
1 c. canned low-sodium beef broth
1/4 c. plus 1 tbsp. heavy cream
2 tbsp. unsalted butter

1. Rub the soy sauce all over the beef and let sit for 30 minutes. Season with the pepper.

2. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 450 degrees. In a large, heavy, oven-proof skillet, heat the oil over high heat. Add the beef and cook until well browned on all sides, about 6 minutes.

3. Transfer the pan to the oven and roast the tenderloin for about 20 minutes, turning once, until the internal temperature reads 120 degrees on a meat thermometer for rare. Transfer the meat to a cutting board, cover loosely with foil and let sit for 10 minutes.

4. Pour off any fat from the skillet. Add the garlic and shallots and cook over low heat, stirring, until lightly browned, about 2 minutes. Pour in the wine, increase the heat to high and simmer for 1 minute. Stir in the mustard, broth and cream and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to moderate and simmer until the sauce has reduced to 1 cup and is thick enough to lightly coat the back of a spoon, about 6 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and stir in the butter until incorporated.

5. Using a sharp knife, cut the meat into 12 slices. Arrange the meat on plates or a platter, spoon the mustard sauce on top and serve hot. 6 servings.

If you have carving cujones, slice this on a cutting surface which offers some drainage, it is an impressive piece of work which will heighten the appetite of your dinners.

Serve with mashed potatoes (get a ricer, I'm not kidding) and green beans, and horseradish sauce. I like it so hot that it makes your eyes water, but that's me.

Our Booming Economy

Max Sawicky debunks whichever Bush sockpuppet was just on CNN talking about the wonderful Bush economy:

1. Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down.

* Inflation-adjusted hourly and weekly wages are still below where they were at the start of the recovery in November 2001. Yet, productivity—the growth of the economic pie—is up by 13.5%.

* Wage growth has been shortchanged because 35% of the growth of total income in the corporate sector has been distributed as corporate profits, far more than the 22% in previous periods.

* Consequently, median household income (inflation-adjusted) has fallen five years in a row and was 4% lower in 2004 than in 1999, falling from $46,129 to $44,389.

2. More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt.

* The indebtedness of U.S. households, after adjusting for inflation, has risen 35.7% over the last four years.

* The level of debt as a percent of after-tax income is the highest ever measured in our history. Mortgage and consumer debt is now 115% of after-tax income, twice the level of 30 years ago.

* The debt-service ratio (the percent of after-tax income that goes to pay off debts) is at an all-time high of 13.6%.

* The personal savings rate is negative for the first time since WWII.

3. Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.

* The United States has only 1.3% more jobs today (excluding the effects of Hurricane Katrina) than in March 2001 (the start of the recession). Private sector jobs are up only 0.8%. At this stage of previous business cycles, jobs had grown by an average of 8.8% and never less than 6.0%.

* The unemployment rate is relatively low at 5%, but still higher than the 4% in 2000. Plus, the percent of the population that has a job has never recovered since the recession and is still 1.3% lower than in March 2001. If the employment rate had returned to pre-recession levels, 3 million more people would be employed.

* More than 3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since January 2000.

4. Poverty is on the rise.

* The poverty rate rose from 11.7% in 2001 to 12.7% in 2004.

* The number of people living in poverty has increased by 5.4 million since 2000.

* More children are living in poverty: the child poverty rate increased from 16.3% in 2001 to 17.8% in 2004.

5. Rising health care costs are eroding families' already declining income.

* Households are spending more on health care. Family health costs rose 43-45% for married couples with children, single mothers, and young singles from 2000 to 2003.

* Employers are cutting back on health insurance. Last year, the percent of people with employer-provided health insurance fell for the fourth year in a row. Nearly 3.7 million fewer people had employer-provided insurance in 2004 than in 2000. Taking population growth into account, 11 million more people would have had employer-provided health insurance in 2004 if the coverage rate had remained at the 2000 level.

Tinhorn Dictator

Warrantless Wiretapping: Why It Seriously Imperils the Separation of Powers, And Continues the Executive's Sapping of Power From Congress and the Courts

By EDWARD LAZARUS

I might even accept, for the purposes of argument, that, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, it was understandable for the President to act unilaterally to protect against a potential second-wave attack, regardless of constitutional limits.

But over four years have passed, and there has been copious time for deliberation and, if necessary, Congressional action. In this context, it simply cannot be that the President, acting alone, has the permanent authority he now claims to override a carefully-wrought congressional scheme for fighting terrorism, and enact his own set of secret rules.

Naturally, such a scheme implicates civil liberties, as enshrined in our Constitution. It is not the President's job, alone, to make the nation's trade-offs between security and privacy. Congress ought to legislate, and if it goes too far, the Supreme Court ought to make sure its legislation stays within constitutional bounds.

But even worse, such a scheme threatens basic democratic principles. This Administration wants virtually unlimited power with essentially no accountability. I might almost be able to stomach Bush's "just trust me" claims of Executive power, if the President could be made truly accountable for his decisions down the road. But Bush wants the power with no public debate and a minimum of public disclosure.

I wouldn't trust any Administration with such a blank check. And this isn't just any Administration. It's an Administration with a deeply troubling history of mistakes and obfuscation, an Administration that seems to expand its definition of terrorism however it finds convenient, an Administration that brooks none of the internal dissent that might check authoritarian impulses.

Against that backdrop, the new revelations of warrantless wiretapping, and the Administration's latest set of explanations, sound less like a plan to fight terror than like tyranny's engines, raring to go.

Those Pesky Amendments

Police Infiltrate Protests, Videotapes Show

By JIM DWYER
December 22, 2005

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.

Provided with images from the tape, the Police Department's chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, did not dispute that they showed officers at work but said that disguised officers had always attended such gatherings - not to investigate political activities but to keep order and protect free speech. Activists, however, say that police officers masquerading as protesters and bicycle riders distort their messages and provoke trouble.

The pictures of the undercover officers were culled from an unofficial archive of civilian and police videotapes by Eileen Clancy, a forensic video analyst who is critical of the tactics. She gave the tapes to The New York Times. Based on what the individuals said, the equipment they carried and their almost immediate release after they had been arrested amid protesters or bicycle riders, The Times concluded that at least 10 officers were incognito at the events.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, officials at all levels of government considered major changes in various police powers. President Bush acknowledged last Saturday that he has secretly permitted the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant on international telephone calls and e-mail messages in terror investigations.

In New York, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg persuaded a federal judge in 2003 to enlarge the Police Department's authority to conduct investigations of political, social and religious groups. "We live in a more dangerous, constantly changing world," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

Before then, very few political organizations or activities were secretly investigated by the Police Department, the result of a 1971 class-action lawsuit that charged the city with abuses in surveillance during the 1960's. Now the standard for opening inquiries into political activity has been relaxed, full authority to begin surveillance has been restored to the police and federal courts no longer require a special panel to oversee the tactics.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said the department did not increase its surveillance of political groups when the restrictions were eased. The powers obtained after Sept. 11 have been used exclusively "to investigate and thwart terrorists," Mr. Browne said. He would not answer specific questions about the disguised officers or describe any limits the department placed on surveillance at public events.
.....

Among the events that have drawn surveillance is a monthly bicycle ride called Critical Mass. The Critical Mass rides, which have no acknowledged leadership, take place in many cities around the world on the last Friday of the month, with bicycle riders rolling through the streets to promote bicycle transportation. Relations between the riders and the police soured last year after thousands of cyclists flooded the streets on the Friday before the Republican National Convention. Officials say the rides cause havoc because the participants refuse to obtain a permit. The riders say they can use public streets without permission from the government.

In a tape made at the April 29 Critical Mass ride, a man in a football jersey is seen riding along West 19th Street with a group of bicycle riders to a police blockade at 10th Avenue. As the police begin to handcuff the bicyclists, the man in the jersey drops to one knee. He tells a uniformed officer, "I'm on the job." The officer in uniform calls to a colleague, "Louie - he's under." A second officer arrives and leads the man in the jersey - hands clasped behind his back - one block away, where the man gets back on his bicycle and rides off.

Shorter version: 9/11 is a great excuse to strip away any restraints there ever were on the police and their abuses of powers. The police in New York, like in many cities, see this as a carte blanche grab on the 1st and 4th Amendments to the Constitution. After all, those biker riders might have been supporting terrorists within the dreaded bicycling industry who want to destroy our way of life.

Since we might have some uninvited visitors, let's remind them, and everyone, what those wise amendments say:

Amendment 1: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause , supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Manufacturing Controversy

Advocates of 'Intelligent Design' Vow to Continue Despite Ruling

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 22, 2005; Page A03

A federal judge's ruling in Pennsylvania that "intelligent design" is religious fundamentalism dressed in the raiment of science has wounded a politically influential movement.

"It was a real disappointment," biochemist Michael J. Behe, who testified in the trial, said from his office at Lehigh University. "It's hard to say this chills the atmosphere, because if you're publicly known as an ID supporter you can already kiss your tenure chances goodbye. It doesn't help."

But Behe and other proponents of intelligent design emphasized that the court decision would not cast them into the political and cultural wilderness. They have pushed their theory, which holds that life is too complicated to have arisen without the hand of a supernatural creator, to the center of legislative debates in more than a dozen states, and they intend to keep it there.

Some politically influential backers of intelligent design warned that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, who was appointed by President Bush, so overreached that his ruling will outrage and inflame millions of conservative and religiously observant Americans.

"This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that's coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito," said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. "This was an extremely injudicious judge who went way, way beyond his boundaries -- if he had any eyes on advancing up the judicial ladder, he just sawed off the bottom rung."

Look, I have a graduate degree in theology. Catholicism, the protestant mainline and Judaism have no problem with evolution. Judge Scalito may be a practicing Catholic, but if he's going to ram ID down the throats of US students, he's defying the tenets of his own church. ID isn't science and there is no controversy about this within the scientific community, regardless of the crap CNN is pushing.

Finding the Ghosts in the Machines

State wants more tests of voting machines
Diebold's electronic systems shown vulnerable to hackers

John Wildermuth, Chronicle Political Writer
Wednesday, December 21, 2005

A controversial electronic voting system must undergo federal security testing before it can be approved for use in California, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said Tuesday.

Diebold Election System's optical scan and touch-screen voting systems, which were scheduled to be used in 17 California counties in June's election, will have their state certification delayed for the second time, McPherson said.

"We have determined that there is sufficient cause for additional federal evaluation,'' he said in a statement. "I have consistently stated that I will not certify any system for use in California unless it meets the most stringent voting system requirements.''

Studies in other states have suggested that the company's new memory cards may be vulnerable to hackers. A test in Leon County, Fla., showed that hackers using the same access as election department employees could reprogram the cards to change election results and leave no trace.

McPherson had talked about running a similar test in California, bringing in a Finnish hacker who had been involved in the Florida study to test Diebold's security in California. Tuesday's decision, however, punts the entire security question back to the federal government.

"Unresolved significant security concerns exist with respect to the memory card" because the federal government never reviewed the software that programs the card, said Caren Daniels-Meade, head of the secretary of state's election division, in a letter to Diebold. "We strongly believe it is the duty and responsibility of the secretary of state and you to make sure that the ultimate users of your products -- the voters of California -- have a voting system that has been thoroughly and rigorously evaluated.''

Diebold officials declined to comment directly on McPherson's concerns.

Now is the time for the Democrats to demand, in a rational way, for fair and transparent voting procedures and not shams like the Help America Voting Act which made it easier for these REPUBLICAN controlled companies to get a larger share of the precincts in America. The tests have shown that it takes nothing more than a talented 14 year old hacker to get into these systems and change the outcome. A couple of hundred votes here and there, well within the "margain of error", and those exit polls appear to be inaccurate.

This demand must be done first on a state level and also at a national level or there will be more Georgias, Floridas, and Ohios.

Making S**t Up

File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under 'Urban Myths'

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 22, 2005; Page A02

President Bush asserted this week that the news media published a U.S. government leak in 1998 about Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, alerting the al Qaeda leader to government monitoring and prompting him to abandon the device.

The story of the vicious leak that destroyed a valuable intelligence operation was first reported by a best-selling book, validated by the Sept. 11 commission and then repeated by the president.

But it appears to be an urban myth.

The al Qaeda leader's communication to aides via satellite phone had already been reported in 1996 -- and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.

The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.

Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps, missing him by hours.

Bush made his assertion at a news conference Monday, in which he defended his authorization of warrantless monitoring of communications between some U.S. citizens and suspected terrorists overseas. He fumed that "the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak." He berated the media for "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for" and thus helping "the enemy" change its operations.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that the president was referring to an article that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998, the day after the cruise missile attack, which was launched in retaliation for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa two weeks earlier. The Sept. 11 commission also cited the article as "a leak" that prompted bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone, though it noted that he had added more bodyguards and began moving his sleeping place "frequently and unpredictably" after the missile attack.

Two former Clinton administration officials first fingered the Times article in a 2002 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror." Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that after the "unabashed right-wing newspaper" published the story, bin Laden "stopped using the satellite phone instantly" and "the United States lost its best chance to find him."

The article, a profile of bin Laden, buried the information about his satellite phone in the 21st paragraph. It never said that the United States was listening in on bin Laden, as the president alleged. The writer, Martin Sieff, said yesterday that the information about the phone was "already in the public domain" when he wrote the story.

This is right up there with Reagan's "welfare queens."

Not Just Here

I've always jokes about fleeing to the UK if things got too bad here, but now I'm not sure.

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 22 December 2005

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

Gee, I feel so safe knowing that my every movement is being monitored and that there is very little oversight as to how this data is being used. Ah well, maybe Norway is nice this time of year.

Serf Society

A blogger sent me this and if it doesn't make your blood boil, you haven't been paying attention:

Ohio Congressman Boehner's "Tricks" Are Not For Kids
By Daniel Auld

When Ohio Congressman John Boehner recently told a gathering of student loan bankers that he had some "tricks up my sleeve to protect you," he wasn't talking about new tricks.

He was talking about the oldest trick in the book: "Protecting" business people from competition and innovation. Stopping consumers from getting lower rates and better terms for their student loans.

These tricks are not for kids.

The student loan business is now one of the most profitable in America, says Fortune Magazine. And it did not get that way because student loan bankers are smarter, better or less expensive than bankers in other industries.

It is more profitable because they have more protection from competition. And now Boehner, head of the House Committee that oversees student loan legislation, is promising them even more protection from the one force that drives down prices, improves service, and stimulates innovation: Competition, of course. Which in the student loan business in almost non-existent.

Thank you, Congressman Boehner.

That is the way it was until earlier this year, when in January, the Department of Education ruled that borrowers looking to reconsolidate their student loans could sidestep the longstanding anti-competitive rule against doing so.

It was cumbersome, but effective. Borrowers had to use a two-step process of reconsolidating into the federal governement's Direct Loan Program, then reconsolidating again with a private lender offering better rates. Before then, borrowers were locked in to their current lender no matter what other lenders offered them a better deal.

In May, the Department of Education set aside another longstanding anti-consumer policy by ruling that borrowers who are still in school could convert their variable rate student loans into fixed-rate consolidaton loans before rates increased in July. That way they could take advantage of historically low interest rates, much as millions of other borrowers do with their home loans.

While borrowers celebrated, consumer bankers plotted.

Enter Boehner. Buried deep in legislation to raise prices on student loans are provisions that will largely outlaw the reforms that introduced so much competition into student loans earlier this year.

If passed, student loans would once again be the only thing sold in America that cannot be freely refinanced.

Columnist Dick Morris calls the anti-refinancing scheme an "obnoxious .. ripoff." Terry Savage, the financial columnist of TheStreet.com, says there is "no way" borrowers should support this plan." The New York Times calls it "Robbing Joe College to Pay Sallie Mae," the country's largest student loan provider. The Times Union of New York, calls plans to outlaw refinancing a "student loan shame.'

Boehner's tricks are not for kids.

30 years ago I worked in student loan collections for a bank. We knew that they were going to be mostly write-offs, but the phone calls had to be made. My student loans took ten years to pay off and had to be refinanced twice because I was making next to nothing. But, because of refinancing, I was able to pay them off and rescue my credit rating. W/R/T the credit rating, let's say the last four years have a been a, cough, challenge.

I Googled aroung and I couldn't find much on this. Anybody have Lexis to check it out?

Of course, if you think I should have Lexis, there is always the PayPal link at the top right....

And, no I haven't finished my shopping or made that trip to UPS yet. Tomorrow is going to be very long and very expensive. This is the first year I've been able to think about buying half-way decent Christmas presents in years. I'm kinda enjoying it.

But next year, I plan to learn to knit. I still think homemade is best.

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill

Tolls Start to Mount: Financial, Medical, Emotional

Every apartment block, office, store or sidewalk had its tales of people who were unable to get to work, of businesses that had trouble functioning or were able to operate only at a daunting cost, of workers and employers who reached their jobs and found there had been little point in trying because the customers were missing.

The economic burden was felt citywide, but there were other costs, too - hundreds of thousands of children missing school, commuters spending extra hours shuttling to work and back, and pervasive fear of how long this will go on.

"This should be our biggest week, but I had to shut down my business," said Olga Diaz, owner of Olga's Salon in the financial district in Lower Manhattan. "If it wasn't for the strike, I would be back to back, maybe 30 clients a day through here, but yesterday I had only one, and today only two. I could lose $3,000 worth of business this week."

The hairdressers in that shop, like Maria Lozano, earn only on commission. So no work, no pay. Ms. Lozano, who lives in Queens, was unable to get to work on Tuesday. So on Tuesday night, she left her children with her mother and went to her boyfriend's home on Staten Island. She commuted to work by ferry yesterday, but there was little to do.

"I still have to buy a lot of presents, and I'm stuck," she said. "I don't have any money."

Visiting Nurse Service said it feared that if the strike continued, its workers would not be able to keep up with the need for in-home care. It warned hospitals that in the coming days, they might have to hold patients longer than usual, rather than releasing people who need home care.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg continued to describe the strike's economic impact in dire terms, saying that business at restaurants fell by 40 percent, that street traffic on Fifth Avenue's glittering shopping district was down by 50 percent, that sales dropped by 60 percent at the stores on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The office of City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. estimated that if the strike continues through Christmas, the cost to the city's economy would reach $1.5 billion.

Experts agreed that the pain would be widespread and deep, but cautioned that so far, the only measure is anecdotal evidence. The first reliable data may be from sales tax reports, which the state's Department of Taxation and Finance said would not begin to trickle in until the first of the year.

Stores and restaurants appeared to be especially hard hit, losing customers and workers at what would ordinarily be their busiest season. The financial company A. G. Edwards estimated yesterday that Federated Department Stores, the nation's largest department store chain and owner of Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor, would lose 1 to 2 percent of its December sales for the entire nation because of the New York strike.

The greatest hardship may be felt by smaller businesses and their employees, who have fewer resources to fall back on.

I led a half dozen strikes back in the early nineties. I told my fellows, regardless of the righteousness of your issues, you are going to be hated. No matter what we do or how we do it, someone will find a way to make us look bad and publish it in the New York Times. If we strike, it is because we have no other option and know that the New York Times will hate everything we do. Know that up front.

The Times is the second most anti-union paper in the country behind the WashPo.

If you really want to know how legal authorities treat union members in this country, you need to read two books: "Which Side Are You On?" by Tom Geoghagan and "Holding the Line: The Women of the Phelps Dodge Mining Strike," by Barbara Ehrenriech.

I was fired out of my union career principally because of my activities as an organizer and a strike leader

The Powers hate workers. Just read the New York Times to find out how much. Fuck the New York Times.

Just try organizing your workplace and see if it doesn't happen to you.

Lazy OR Incompetent, You Decide

The Poor Need Not Apply

Published: December 21, 2005

On Sept. 15, speaking from New Orleans's Jackson Square, President Bush was eloquent: "As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well," he said. "We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality."

Did the president really mean anything by those fine words? As Leslie Eaton and Ron Nixon reported in The Times last week, federal loans to rebuild homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina have been flowing to wealthy neighborhoods in New Orleans but not to poor ones.

The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government's main disaster recovery program for both businesses and homeowners, has processed only a third of the 276,000 home loan applications it has received. And it has rejected a whopping 82 percent of those, a higher percentage than in previous disasters, on the grounds that applicants didn't have high enough incomes or good enough credit ratings.

That is exactly the kind of barrier to upward mobility that Mr. Bush talked about battering down. Poor people live from paycheck to paycheck, unable to accumulate assets. They let their water bill go unpaid one month so that they can pay their light bill. Their credit ratings tend to reflect that.

Those are basic truths that the Bush administration obviously understands. Yet it encouraged poor people to apply for low-interest loans to rebuild their homes while keeping rules that would make it clearly impossible for most of them to qualify. Despite the widespread poverty in the most damaged regions, according to the Times article, the Small Business Administration has not adjusted its creditworthiness standards, which are roughly comparable to a bank's. As a result, well-off neighborhoods have received 47 percent of the loan approvals, while poverty-stricken ones have gotten 7 percent.

George W. Bush is Ebeneezer Scrooge. Merry Christmas, you faux Christian. Liar AND hypocrite.

The Truth Hurts

Chertoff: FEMA Changes Could Be Radical

Wednesday December 21, 2005 8:16 AM

By LARRY MARGASAK and LARA JAKES JORDAN

Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) - Internal meeting notes released by a union official say Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told employees that many changes planned for federal disaster response were a public relations ploy.

The purported statements were in typed notes issued Tuesday by a union representative for federal emergency workers. A Homeland Security Department spokesman said Chertoff considers the post-Hurricane Katrina changes one of his highest priorities and never would have made such comments.

Under the heading ``Retooling/Chertoff's remarks,'' the typed notes said, ``The re-tooling is partially a perception ploy to make outsiders feel like we've actually made changes for the better.''

The notes were released by Leo Bosner, president of the American Federation of Government Employees local that represents headquarters workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, once independent, is now part of the massive Homeland Security Department.

Bosner said he obtained the notes from another FEMA official, whom he would not identify.

Chertoff is an abolute frikkin' idiot to say this in public.

Impeachment Read-Around

Return of the 'I-Word'

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; 1:21 PM

The "I-word" is back.

The revelation that President Bush secretly authorized a domestic spying program has incited a handful of Congressional Democrats to discuss his possible impeachment. And while continued Republican control of Congress makes such a move extremely unlikely, the word is reemerging into mainstream political discourse.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) sent a letter on Monday to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking them whether they think Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense.

Boxer wrote that her interest was sparked after former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said the surveillance order was an impeachable offence.

"I take very seriously Mr. Dean's comments, as I view him to be an expert on presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future," she wrote.

Todd Gillman writes in the Dallas Morning News: "Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., suggested that Mr. Bush's actions could justify impeachment. The longtime civil rights leader said the spying program evokes 'the dark past when our government spied on civil rights leaders and Vietnam War protesters,' adding that he believed Mr. Bush violated the law. 'There is no question that the U.S. Congress has impeached presidents for lesser offenses,' he said."

Ron Hutcheson writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers that "some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.

"(TM)'The president's dead wrong. It's not a close question. Federal law is clear,' said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law. 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors.'

"There's little enthusiasm for impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress, but few lawmakers have rallied to Bush's defense."

Here's commentator Jack Cafferty on CNN yesterday: "If you listen carefully, you can hear the word impeachment. Two congressional Democrats are using it. And they're not the only ones."

Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter writes about the spying program : "This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974."

(Alter also reports "that on December 6, Bush summoned [New York] Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running" the Dec. 16 Times story that first reported Bush's secret authorization of the eavesdropping.)

Liberal columnist Joe Conason writes in the New York Observer: "Until Mr. Bush openly proclaimed as commander in chief that he can brush aside the law, cries for impeachment were heard only on the political fringe, although most Americans have long since realized that he misled America into war. Much as he is disliked and disdained by liberals, even they have shown little enthusiasm for impeachment. In addition to the obvious obstacle of a Republican-controlled Congress, there appeared to be no firm proof of an offense that justified such action. To mention the word was to be dismissed -- even by people who believe that this President may well have committed 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' . . .

"As political strategy and as public policy, the impeachment of Mr. Bush is an unappealing prospect. (Besides, if he could be thrown out somehow, who would want Dick Cheney to succeed him?) And yet, the actions and attitudes of this President raise the question of how else we can preserve the bedrock principles of a democratic republic."

Even conservative Jonah Goldberg , writing in the National Review Online, is talking about impeachment -- except he's kidding.

"In the wake of the revelation that President Bush ordered secret surveillance of some Americans -- without a warrant or statutory authority -- some commentators are suggesting that his presidency is in dire trouble. Well, I have one idea for a pick-me-up that will put his approval ratings into at least the mid-60s: Impeach him. . . .

"The main reason Bush's poll numbers would skyrocket if he were impeached is that at the end of the day the American people will support what he did. The legal defense of Bush's ongoing use of warrantless wiretaps is debatable. But the political case for what he did is rock-solid."

Froomkin is a national treasure. When he goes on paternity leave (soon) I'm going to go into withdrawal.

Getting the Word Out

Democrats Seek All of Alito's Writings

Associated Press
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; Page A04

The Bush administration should release all of Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s internal Justice Department documents before confirmation hearings begin next month, Senate Democrats said yesterday.

The documents "will be important in evaluating Judge Alito's nomination," the eight Judiciary Committee Democrats said in a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Alito worked for the solicitor general's office from 1981 to 1985, and as deputy assistant U.S. attorney general from 1985 to 1987 before becoming a federal prosecutor and judge. President Bush named him to the Supreme Court in October.

"There are currently thousands of public documents on Judge Alito's extensive 15-year judicial record that provide more than sufficient evidence into his judicial philosophy," Justice Department spokesman Brian J. Roehrkasse said. "Furthermore, as a number of former solicitors general from both Republican and Democratic administrations have noted, releasing internal . . . documents would significantly compromise the ability of the solicitor general's office to obtain advice necessary in defending the American people in legal proceedings."

The National Archives has released some of Alito's solicitor general documents, including a memo in which he urged fellow Reagan administration lawyers to seek the gradual erosion of abortion rights rather than mount an all-out repeal of Roe v. Wade , the 1973 ruling establishing a constitutional right to abortion.

Those documents "make it clear that we and the American people could learn much about Judge Alito's judicial philosophy and legal thinking" from the undisclosed documents, the Democrats wrote.

The Dems are not doing a good job of getting out the message of how scary this guy is:

Majority of Americans Support Alito Nomination

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; 10:21 AM

A majority of Americans now support the confirmation of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court to fill the seat of retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey found that 54 percent of the public say the Senate should confirm Alito while 28 percent say he should not be approved. That marks a modest increase in public support for Alito since November, when 49 percent said he should be confirmed and 29 percent said he should not. In both surveys, about one in five Americans said they did not know enough about the nominee to have an opinion.

Christmas Budget

With Cheney's Vote, Senate Passes Budget Bill

By William Branigin, Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 21, 2005

The Senate narrowly passed a $40 billion budget-cutting bill today, with Vice President Cheney casting the deciding vote after the chamber split 50-50 on the measure.

Taking his seat as president of the Senate after cutting short a trip to the Middle East, Cheney announced he was voting for the legislation, making the final tally 51-50 in favor of passage.

The budget legislation would trim federal spending growth by nearly $40 billion over the next five years.

Fearing a close vote, Cheney cut short his Middle East trip yesterday and flew back to Washington overnight after five Republican senators signaled they would vote against the measure, possibly leading to a 50-50 tie.

That turned out to be the case, as the five Republicans joined all 44 Democrats and one Democratic-leaning independent to oppose the hard-fought budget bill, which tackles the growth of entitlement programs such Medicaid and Medicare for the first time in nearly a decade.

"The bottom line is, we stood firm and we made tough choices," said Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who joined other Republicans in hailing what they called a great, if narrow, victory.

You know, a statement like that just begs for some investigating. Ok Ricky... let's play. What tough choices did you make?

Medicare. Saves a net $6.4 billion from the health care program for the elderly. Saves $6.5 billion by increasing Medicare payments to insurers that cover sicker patients and lowering payments to those covering healthier patients. Accelerates premium increases for better-off Medicare patients for doctor visits. Increases Medicare beneficiaries' premiums for coverage of doctor visits by about $2.30 a month in 2007. Saves $2.8 billion by reducing payments for imaging services, and saves $2 billion by freezing payments to home health care providers. Provides $7 billion for doctor's fees to avoid a 4.4 percent cut otherwise taking effect Jan. 1.

Digital television. Requires television broadcasters to shift from analog to digital signals by February 2009, which would require about 21 million owners of non-digital TVs without cable or satellite service to purchase converter boxes. Sets aside $1.5 billion to give two $40 coupons per household for converter boxes, estimated to cost between $50 and $60 each.

Student loans. $12.7 billion in net savings, achieved chiefly by reducing lender subsidies and retaining a scheduled shift from variable interest rates to a 6.8 percent fixed rate on most loans.

What a brave group of representatives you are... beating up on the elderly, women, and students. My goodness, I don't know what we'd do without you. So how much of an impact will it have on the budget?

According to budget experts, the bill would barely dent the federal deficit, cutting less than one-half of 1 percent from an estimated $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years. Opponents said the poor would bear the brunt of the cuts -- especially to Medicaid, child support enforcement and foster care -- whereas original targets for belt-tightening, such as pharmaceutical companies and private insurers, largely escaped sanction.

And a Ho, Ho, Ho to you too. At least we have all of you on record for being against these programs... I just with the two nuts that represent my state were up for reelection in 06 (and we picked someone besides Bowles to run).

Where We Look, How We Talk: A Focus for 2006

Yes, New Year's resolutions might still be a week and a half away, but while pre-Christmas Day juice is still flowing, it's important to get in an early word on the next year, and how life in America needs to change.

One need not be lengthy about this--after all, these next five days are the most crowded, stressful, anxiety-laden days on the entire calendar for most Americans--so I'll be mercifully brief. (After Christmas Day, I'll probably feel inclined to expand on this in greater depth and detail.)

Here is our 2006 challenge: less ideology, more people.

I realize it's important to not abandon the culture wars, but as life goes on in America, the way I see the calculus changing is that the more we fight ideological fights, the easier it is for the rhetoric to escalate. The more our polarized emotions intensify between Red and Blue America, between FOX/CNN/Mainstream Media America and Alternative/Blog Media America, the more the quality of political and moral debate will suffer.

What Jim Wallis and his friends at Sojourners have been doing in recent weeks is closer to the kind of movement we need: a movement of the heart, full of prophetic courage but bereft of particularly personal ad hominem attacks or overly manipulative Beltway games that corrode our political landscape. Protests of budget cuts for the poor must be connected to an awareness of and familiarity with the individual lives of those around us who struggle. When we hold up these lives and show how they need to be defended and advocated for, the other side can't hide the truth. When we keep issues focused on people, not on the ideological fights that only stir up emotions, we--who want our country back--will advance.

I know ideological stories and issues get the blood flowing and the adrenaline rushing--I've felt that pull many times, and it's darn near irresistible. But a certain discipline needs to emerge in 2006 and beyond--we need to focus not just on groups of people, but individual people. When we write to our elected officials, seeing the specific dynamics (and spiritual urgency) at work in one person's life story can give us the force and clarity with which to move forward in our work and struggle.

That's all for now. Remember these individuals in your thoughts during Christmas; advocate like heck for them in 2006 (if you haven't done so already).

Christmas Panic Open Thread

I've got meetings this morning and then I've got to finish shopping and get the goods to UPS. The co-bloggers will be around, but me, not so much. How's your last week before the holidays going?

A Matter of Principle

Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest
Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Panel

By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; Page A01

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.

Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late yesterday.

Word of Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security Agency's warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorist groups. They questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.

Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) echoed concerns raised by Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has promised hearings in the new year.

Hagel and Snowe joined Democrats Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.) in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels into the classified program.

The hearings would occur at the start of a midterm election year during which the prosecution of the Iraq war could figure prominently in House and Senate races.

I can't make any predictions about how this is going to play out. More than one of my associates have noted that principled resignations by noted figures have had no impact at all on the course of the Bush/Cheney administration. Unless there is widespread public outrage, which I'm not seeing, I don't think anything changes.

Interesting Leak

Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

The officials say the National Security Agency's interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact "international."

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

Vice President Dick Cheney entered the debate over the legality of the program on Tuesday, casting the program as part of the administration's efforts to assert broader presidential powers.

Eavesdropping on communications between two people who are both inside the United States is prohibited under Mr. Bush's order allowing some domestic surveillance.

But in at least one instance, someone using an international cellphone was thought to be outside the United States when in fact both people in the conversation were in the country. Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, would not discuss the number of accidental intercepts, but the total is thought to represent a very small fraction of the total number of wiretaps that Mr. Bush has authorized without getting warrants. In all, officials say the program has been used to eavesdrop on as many as 500 people at any one time, with the total number of people reaching perhaps into the thousands in the last three years.

Mr. Bush and his senior aides have emphasized since the disclosure of the program's existence last week that the president's executive order applied only to cases where one party on a call or e-mail message was outside the United States.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former N.S.A. director who is now the second-ranking intelligence official in the country, was asked at a White House briefing this week whether there had been any "purely domestic" intercepts under the program.

"The authorization given to N.S.A. by the president requires that one end of these communications has to be outside the United States," General Hayden answered. "I can assure you, by the physics of the intercept, by how we actually conduct our activities, that one end of these communications are always outside the United States."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also emphasized that the order only applied to international communications. "People are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors," he said. "Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States."

A spokeswoman for the office of national intelligence declined comment on whether the N.S.A. had intercepted any purely domestic communications. "We'll stand by what General Hayden said in his statement," said the spokeswoman, Judy Emmel.

The Bush administration has not released the guidelines that the N.S.A. uses in determining who is suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and may be a target under the program. General Hayden said the determination was made by operational people at the agency and "must be signed off by a shift supervisor," with the process closely scrutinized by officials at the agency, the Justice Department and elsewhere.

But questions about the legal and operational oversight of the program last year prompted the administration to suspend aspects of it temporarily and put in place tighter restrictions on the procedures used to focus on suspects, said people with knowledge of the program. The judge who oversees the secret court that authorizes intelligence warrants - and which has been largely bypassed by the program - also raised concerns about aspects of the program.

Remote System Compromise Vulnerability: Multiple Symantec Antivirus Products

This one could get ugly.

If you run any A/V product made by Symantec, this means you.

That includes Norton Antivirus, because Symantec bought them a couple of years ago.

This vulnerability hasn't hit the MSM as of this writing, so far as I know. Amazingly, it hasn't shown up at the SANS Internet Storm Center site, either.

BTW, that last is well worth bookmarking. They may have let this one slip past, but they often catch things that other reporting sources don't. This site is gold. Take it from a professional infosec geek.

There is, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, no published exploit code for this vulnerability as yet.

Once exploit code is out there and weaponized, this one will be all over the map. Every dirtbag criminal from Dnepopetrovsk to Denver will be using it.

All the victim needs to do is scan a maliciously crafted RAR archive and *BINGO*! His machine is compromised. Compromised in the sense that it isn't his anymore. It now belongs to some nameless gutter filth who will proceed to either mine it for personal info, or use it to propagate spam and/or fraud. Or any combination of the above.

Even people cautious enough to refrain from opening attachments before scanning them can get nailed by this one. They will step on the IED when they scan the attached RAR archive they just saved to disk.

If you can't filter RAR archives at an external hardware firewall, then, well ..... Most people have a webmail interface that will let them see attachment lists while the email is still on the server, and the A/V software is still safe from it. If it were me, I'd use webmail to check out email for attachments before downloading it. Then I'd either zap suspect emails or just let them sit on the server, safe, until Symantec fixes this.

That fix cannot be too long delayed, unless they've gone completely bughouse crazy over at Symantec. They have already acknowledged this, and it affects every single solitary A/V product that they sell.

Their main cash cow is in the slaughtering pen. I think it's a safe bet they will consider this issue a five-alarm fire until it's well and truly put out.

Remotely exploitable application vulnerability, multiple Symantec antivirus products.

Affected Products

• Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 8.x - 10.x


• Symantec AntiVirus for Caching 4.x


• Symantec AntiVirus for Network Attached Storage 4.x


• Symantec AntiVirus for SMTP Gateways 3.x


• Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine 4.x


• Symantec AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino 3.x


• Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam 4.x - 6.x


• Symantec Client Security 1.x - 2.x


• Symantec Mail Security for Domino 4.x


• Symantec Mail Security for Exchange 4.x


• Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 4.x


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2001 - 2005


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus 5


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus 5.0 for OS/2


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition 7.x


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh 9.x - 10.x


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus for Microsoft Exchange 2.x - 3.x


• Symantec Norton AntiVirus Solution 7.5


• Symantec Norton Internet Security 2001 - 2005


• Symantec Norton Internet Security 2003- 2004 Professional


• Symantec Norton Internet Security for Macintosh 3.x


• Symantec Web Security 2.x - 3.x

Risk: System compromise.

Risk Mechanism: A heap-based buffer overflow allows arbitrary code execution when a malicious RAR archive is scanned.

Vendor Response: Symantec is aware of and has acknowledged this vulnerability. No patch or upgrade mitigation is currently known to be available.

Workaround: Filter RAR archives at email or proxy gateways.

References:

• http://secunia.com/advisories/18131/


• http://www.rem0te.com/public/images/symc2.pdf


• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/419853


• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/15971
  

While Nestled in their Beds

A question to all of the supporters of the White House and their policies... if you have such a huge mandate for your ideas and legislation, why are you constantly pulling stunts like this?

House Voting More Often in the Wee Hours

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 20, 2005

It was well past midnight yesterday, and the food outside the sumptuous Capitol suites of the House Republican leadership was piling up, a smorgasbord of Chinese dishes, piles of pizza, and cartons of Mrs. Fields cookies. House lawmakers casually dined as they waited for their final votes, knowing full well they still had a long night ahead of them.

Those votes -- on a sweeping budget-cutting measure and a defense bill that also would open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling -- did not come until practically the break of dawn. But that was nothing new for a House that has taken its most controversial votes in recent years under the cloak of darkness -- well past the deadlines for the evening news or the morning paper.

The House voted at 6:07 a.m. yesterday to shave $39.7 billion from entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. At 5:04 a.m., lawmakers voted to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil exploration.

The House's original version of the budget-cutting bill, which was significantly tougher, passed Nov. 18 at 1:41 a.m. On July 28, the Central American Free Trade Agreement -- ardently opposed by labor unions, which had put excruciating pressure on industrial state lawmakers -- squeaked through the House just past midnight. On March 21, a measure that thrust the federal government into the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case passed the House at 12:45 a.m.

And on Nov. 22, 2003, in an extraordinary, three-hour roll call, the House took much of the pre-dawn morning to pass the bill adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare.

In no way do House leaders mean to hide their actions from the public, said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Each case is different, but never were the late-night votes planned.

Ron... I know that your boss thinks we are all idiots, but let's use a little bit of logic here.

Each one of the programs/bills cited in this article are extremely unpopular by themselves. According to Polling Report:

48% of Seniors disapprove of the new Medicare Plan
55% of Americans disapprove of drilling in ANWAR
(not even discussing the shenanigans you've used to get it this far)
74% of Americans disapprove of your actions in the Schiavo case

Gee, I wonder why you are waiting until the wee hours of the morning to get this done?

Oh, and if your ideas are winners, can we get a straight up and down vote on ANWAR? Otherwise, you look like a coward who is afraid of a fight.

Dental Care and the Poor

Poor Families Aching for Dental Care

By Ann E. Marimow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 20, 2005; Page B01

When Shenna Foster called the 800 number to find a dentist for her teenage son, Maryland's health care program for the poor offered three options: Greenbelt, New Carrollton and Fort Washington. Foster lives in Waldorf, 15 miles from the nearest location.

She does not drive, and public transportation is spotty for the journey. Six months later, her son's teeth remain a problem, with on-again, off-again pain.

There is only one general dental practice within Charles County that routinely accepts patients covered by the state, and that office won't accept new patients until summer.

"I called and asked for the dentist closest to me, and I'm still trying to find one," said Foster, a mother of four. "I've been calling for over a year."

Foster's struggle to find a local dentist is a dramatic example of the statewide and national shortage of dentists who treat patients covered by government-run Medicaid. The 8,000 children who qualify in Charles have the lowest rate of access to dental care in Maryland, according to the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The shortage is particularly trying in this emerging Washington suburb, because of the relatively small pool of private dentists -- 63 for 137,000 people -- and the limited public transportation to reach offices beyond the county's borders.

The two community clinics in Charles each have one dentist available one day a week for both adults and children.

.......

The state's Medicaid program covers 409,000 children in families earning up to 300 percent of the poverty level, or $58,050 for a household of four.

Dental health care may not be as urgent as some other forms of health care, but it is something that needs to be looked at. Under the Maryland rules, if my twins were born when I started teaching 6 years ago, my family would have qualified for Medicaid with two adults working full time (both with advanced degrees).

Even those of us who have decent health care, it doesn't come attached with dental. The State of North Carolina, for example, offers its workers dental insurance but at an extra $348 a year for one person. If you just do two cleanings, there is no point in the insurance since you are paying @$240 for those two appointments.

Obviously, this gets quite a bit more expensive if you have small children and since the states are scaling back their health care activities, who is going to help people. Good teeth can help reduce a myriad of other health problems and if the government isn't willing to invest in preventive health care, then why should it complain when we have to pay for the problems that crop up as a result of our inattention?

After all, it's not like the employers are willing to invest in the health of their employees.

Fog of Lousy Rhetoric

The Fog of False Choices
Article

Published: December 20, 2005

After five years, we're used to President Bush throwing up false choices to defend his policies. Americans were told, after all, that there was a choice between invading Iraq and risking a terrorist nuclear attack. So it was not a surprise that Mr. Bush's Oval Office speech Sunday night and his news conference yesterday were thick with Orwellian constructions: the policy debate on Iraq is between those who support Mr. Bush and those who want to pull out right now, today; fighting terrorists in Iraq means we're not fighting them here.

But none of these phony choices were as absurd as the one Mr. Bush posed to justify his secret program of spying on Americans: save lives or follow the law.

Mr. Bush said he thwarted terrorist plots by allowing the National Security Agency to monitor Americans' international communications without a warrant. We don't know if that is true because the administration reverts to top-secret mode when pressed for details. But we can reach a conclusion about Mr. Bush's assertion that obeying a 27-year-old law prevents swift and decisive action in a high-tech era. It's a myth.

The 1978 law that regulates spying on Americans (remember Richard Nixon's enemies lists?) does require a warrant to conduct that sort of surveillance. It also created a special court that is capable of responding within hours to warrant requests. If that is not fast enough, the attorney general may authorize wiretaps and then seek a warrant within 72 hours.

Mr. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales offered a whole bag of logical pretzels yesterday to justify flouting this law. Most bizarre was the assertion that Congress authorized the surveillance of American citizens when it approved the use of "all necessary and appropriate force" by the United States military to punish those responsible for the 9/11 attacks or who aided or harbored the terrorists. This came as a surprise to lawmakers, who thought they were voting for the invasion of Afghanistan and the capture of Osama bin Laden.
....
Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the power to spy on Americans. Fine, then Congress can just take it back.

Bush can't actually craft an argument. Strawmen and false dichotomies are all the Bushies have to offer.

Civics 101

The "Think Progress" blog of the Center for American Progress has this today:

Move Over Supreme Court: Rice Anoints Gonzales As “The Highest Legal Authority In The Country”

Last night in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the president’s decision to authorize a warrantless domestic spying program:

The President spoke to this earlier and the Attorney General, who is, after all, the highest legal authority in the country, has spoken to this.

As any veteran of an 8th grade civics class can tell you, the highest legal authority in the country is the Supreme Court. Rice’s position illustrates the problem with this administration – the belief that the power of the executive is unchecked.

Scopes-- 2 Fundies -- 0

How many more times are we going to need to dance this dance? The tune is the same and, to no one's surprise, the law is the same.

Judge Bars 'Intelligent Design' From Pa. Classes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 20, 2005

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.

I can hear them now over on FOX... those evilly rasically liberals out to destroy our Christian heritage... that must have been one of those activist judges... except the Times noted earlier this week that:

He is a lifelong Republican appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President Bush.

He (Judge John E. Jones III) ran for Congress 10 years earlier (he lost by one percentage point) and later considered running for governor. His supporters include Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and his mentor is Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and homeland security secretary.

Doh!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that "Intelligent design" is nothing more than a smokescreen for Creationism. Thankfully, we have a case of a judge acting in a non partisan way and upholding the law instead of a doctrine.

No dobut there are people in the House lobbying for his impeachment as we speak. Maybe this issue will lay and rest some for another 80 years until a whole new generation forgets about the lessons learned here.

Our Booming Economy

Survey Shows Increases in Hunger and Homelessness

Tuesday, December 20, 2005; Page A20

Hunger and homelessness are growing in major U.S. cities, according to a national survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors released yesterday in San Francisco.

Overall, in the 24 major cities surveyed, the demand for food grew by 12 percent and the need for shelter by 6 percent over last year, according to the Conference of Mayors' 22nd annual Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness. Cities surveyed include some of the largest in the country, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia.

The survey also found that evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita have not had a significant strain on resources in the cities surveyed, although officials in those cities worry that "a lack of federal commitment to the evacuees" may eventually have an impact on their resources devoted to the hungry and the homeless.

Da vinci Decoded

Software decodes Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile

17 December 2005

IT'S official: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands tested emotion-recognition software on the famous enigmatic smile. His algorithm, developed with researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, examines key facial features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes, then scores each face with respect to six basic emotions.

Thank goodness! I know I can sleep easier at night now.

BTW: How are you 2% angry? Just wondering....

Uh-Oh

Customs Agents Seize Counterfeit Bird Flu Drug

Associated Press
Monday, December 19, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18 -- Customs agents have intercepted more than 50 shipments of counterfeit Tamiflu, the antiviral drug being stockpiled in anticipation of a bird flu pandemic, marking the first such seizures in the United States, authorities said Sunday.

The first package was intercepted Nov. 26 at an airmail facility near San Francisco International Airport, said Roxanne Hercules, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Agents have since seized 51 packages, each containing as many as 50 counterfeit capsules labeled generic Tamiflu.

I haven't seen this anywhere else, which is probably a good thing. Do we really need a panic at this point (not that there is any proof that Tamiflu will do any good if/when the bird flu arrives)?

What They Don't Tell You

Geov Parrish: WorkingForChange.com
12.19.05
2005 media follies!
The year's most over- and under-reported stories

Welcome to the tenth year of my annual list of the year's most overhyped and underreported stories. As one would expect in a year when one of the underreported stories was our government's covert propaganda campaigns, there's plenty to unravel: stories that should never have been stories, stories whose reporting largely missed the point, and stories barely told at all in mainstream US media.

The good news is that, more than ever, mainstream media is no longer the last word in journalism. Foreign media, now universally available in English on the Internet, often tells a completely different (and usually more accurate) story than what we see, read, and hear here. So-called alternative media -- which has been way ahead of the mainstream media on any number of issues -- has repeatedly shown its relevance, to the point where the Internet is rapidly becoming the preferred news source for many Americans.

But it's the mainstream that still has the largest audiences, and so it is the stories that do and don't appear there that require our attention. Here's our list, which is surely incomplete. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, e-mail them to [email protected] and we'll run the best ones in a coming issue.
....
The Underreported Stories
The right-wing radicalism of Samuel Alito is no secret; it's just been deeply ignored by a too cautious press. Likewise, John Roberts' portrayal as a moderate was simply mind-boggling.

Early Morning Outgoing Mail

Mr. Jeffrey Dvorkin
Ombudsman, National Public Radio

Mr. Dvorkin,
The producer's decision to put Barbara Bradley Haggerty on this morning's "Morning Edition" story on "Intelligent Design" was an extremely poor one. Ms. Haggerty is not a science reporter, but one of your religion reporters and is well known as a Christian evangelical. A science reporter would have had the background to critique "Intelligent Design." Ms. Haggerty does not and has no interest in doing so.

Words

Editor in chief

ONE OF THE PERKS OF being commander in chief is that you get to edit the Constitution, even the Bill of Rights, from time to time. That is in essence the legal justification offered by the Bush administration for its authorization of a secret program to wiretap, without any court order, international communications of individuals within the United States suspected of ties to terrorist groups. Bush acknowledged in his Saturday radio address that he had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct such wiretaps in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the administration has been trying ever since to explain why it believed it could get away with such a brazen deviation from accepted practice.

In his radio address, Bush said he was empowered by a congressional resolution that authorized the "use of all necessary and appropriate force" to respond to the 9/11 attacks, on top of his normal constitutional powers as commander in chief.

"The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy," Bush testily said at his Monday news conference. He then made much of the fact that the monitoring program, which bypasses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's requirement that investigators seek secret court warrants in national security cases, only applies to international communications, where one caller or e-mail correspondent is out of the country.

"So in other words," Bush explained, "this is not a — if you're calling from Houston to L.A., that call is not monitored. And if there was ever any need to monitor, there would be a process to do that."

This distinction between international and domestic calls is perplexing. Americans in their own country do not waive their 4th Amendment right to privacy when they dial 011.

Moreover, the distinction doesn't even make sense on the administration's own terms. The FISA courts are notoriously accommodating to government requests, which can be made even after the eavesdropping has taken place. Nonetheless, Bush claims they're not nimble enough to be effective in the war on terror. Yet if that's the case, why is the government still relying on them in the domestic context? What if you had two suspected Al Qaeda cells communicating with each other within the United States?

If the current setup is so cumbersome, the president should have pushed for a change in the law. The fact that he instead made a secret decision to cut out judicial oversight of wiretaps may have had more to do with the White House's desire to expand executive power than with any real shortcomings in the process.

He likes the perks, but where is all that "hard work" he talks about in between his extensive vacations at the Crawford ranch? Ask the Katrina survivors about what he's done to shake down the executive branch agencies to "get the job done" for them. Look at the cuts to veterans programs. He spent the weekend crowing on TV about "victory" in Iraq. Well, where's the plan? He still doesn't have one other than rhetoric and it isn't at all clear to me that he can tell the difference between hot air and hot lead. The pissy and petulant presser he gave yesterday may pass for "hard work" in his tiny brain, but a press conference loaded with evasions ain't the same thing as, you know, actually "governing," of which we've seen none from this crony laden administration of incompetents. In a constitutional democracy, there is a difference between governing and "ruling," but the oligarchs don't understand the difference and it is not clear to me that the sheeple care.

I am a Crook

Let's make it clear here... with all of the recent revelations on domestic spying, including this article, it's 1973 all over again except for the great music.

F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 20, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.

F.B.I. officials said Monday that their investigators had no interest in monitoring political or social activities and that any investigations that touched on advocacy groups were driven by evidence of criminal or violent activity at public protests and in other settings.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general, loosened restrictions on the F.B.I.'s investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads. The bureau has used that authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign terrorists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities.

But the documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I want to know from the 50.5% that voted for these yahoos exactly how these groups rank up in importance with Al-Qaeda. Come on now... no pressure...

If they can't explain why, then they should contact their representatives and demand for impeachment hearings. The Catholic Workers are no more of a security threat than the Cub Scout group that meets in my church every tuesday and the FBI knows that (or should). If 9/11 changed everything, then why are we still focused on "semi-communistic" groups?

Pommes Frites, I have no Idea how to say that in Basque

According to the editor of "The Basque Table" this is way fries are cooked in Basque country. Well, this is simply good sense in my part of the country. These are a delicious side to any steak or burger dinner. These are so good that you will need to double this recipe for a group of four over the burger grill. Yes, you will. They are that good. All I can tell you about this is that these are so good that people will be asking for the recipe.

4 small potatoes (about 3/4 pound)
1/2 cup olive oil
Salt

1. Put the potatoes into a saucepan, and add enough water to cover them by several inches. Bring the water to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce the heat to low, and cook the potatoes for about 20 minutes, until they are fork-tender. Drain the potatoes, and set them aside to cool.

2. Peel the potatoes, and cut them into strips or crosswise slices.

3. In a deep skillet, heat the oil over high heat until it is very hot. Add the potatoes, and cook them for about 1 minute, or just until they are golden. Drain them on two layers of paper towels, salt them to taste, and serve them hot.

On the side: in Holland and Belgium, "frites" like this are served with mayonaisse, which I find, well, dreadful. If you want some acid to cut the grease, use the UK's favorite, malt vinegar. I haven't really found a decent use for ketchup yet (other than in my non-traditional beef stroganoff) so I'm going with bernaise sauce with the fries, if anything. Good fries shouldn't need much more than a shake of Kosher salt, and these don't. These are crunchy on the outside, mealy on the inside, pretty much the perfect fry..

This will serve four as a side to steak frites, but you'll need to double it to serve with burgers and fries for four. Use kosher salt liberally on the fries and people will wonder why you've been holding out on them with this recipe. Gawd, these are good. They will coax you into buying a deep frier. I kid thee not

The Good Stuff

GRANDPA ARROYO'S CUBAN BLACK BEANS &
RICE

2 lbs. black beans
2 lg. bell peppers
1 c. olive oil
1/2 c. sugar
2 lg. onions
8 oz. diced pimentos
1 c. vegetable oil
1 1/2 c. sherry
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 c. vinegar (to taste)
2 c. rice
Salt & pepper to taste

Soak black beans overnight. Cover in pressure cooker with water 2 inches over top of black beans. Cook in pressure cooker for 45 minutes. Do not drain any remaining fluid. Dice onions. Cut bell peppers into 1/2 inch by 3/4 inch slices. Add all ingredients to black beans. Simmer for 2 to 4 hours. Beans should make their own broth.

Add liquid when necessary to prevent drying out or burning, but keep broth thick. Serve over rice. Use as side dish to chicken or steak, or main dish on its own. Also, try in flour tortillas to make unique Cuban burittos.

This is so good that it will make you hug yourself. I promise, Scouts' honor.

If you don't yet own a pressure cooker, this recipe will make you ask for one for Christmas. Yes, you will.

Posted by Melanie at 03:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

New Blogger

In praise of ... Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Leader
Monday December 19, 2005
The Guardian

It may seem mundane to others, but to the sleepless fanatics of the world wide web it has been their Princess Diana moment, a catalyst for a worldwide release of affection and emotion. The event? One more person has joined the 23 million others around the world who write blogs or online diaries. The difference is that this one is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web itself.

Sir Tim believes that blogging is a milestone for the creativity he intended for his invention. Characteristically modest, he started his blog, untrumpeted, a week ago. It was only on Friday that it was noticed by another blogger. Since then the news has spread around the internet in the usual word-of-blog way, creating a spontaneous gush of gratitude from hundreds around the world.

Typical was this comment from gus3: "Dear Sir Timothy/ For helping me with my job/ For helping me with my education/ For helping my mother find her family/ For helping my brother know about the medicines he needs/ And for so much more. With tears in my eyes, I say, 'thank you'." Another observed: "Without you, who are we?" A third said he was a god among men - maybe or just God. Another complained that Sir Tim should have had a dukedom, not just a knighthood.

It is not given to many to change someone else's life for the better. But Sir Tim has done that many millions of times over without seeking payment. His bequest to the human race is the world wide web itself - not a bad achievement for anyone's CV.

My new boss sent me the link earlier today:
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/38

Go and join the chorus of praise.

Froomkin Deconstruction

Here is Postie Dan Froomkin's analysis of Bush's speech last night and it's a lot better than anything I heard from the cable pundits:

The president is getting a lot of credit from journalists this morning for sounding chastened, conciliatory, even humble. Some are writing that he is finally admitting his mistakes and engaging his critics. But a close reading of his speech makes it quite clear that he did neither last night.

During the past two weeks, Bush has been more realistic than before about the obstacles in Iraq.

But when it came to admitting mistakes, Bush acknowledged tactical errors and intelligence failures by others. He didn't take responsibility for the bad intelligence -- just for "the decision to go into Iraq." He was still unwilling to admit he's made any mistakes himself. And in fact he said he has "never been more certain" about the mission in Iraq.

Some of Bush's speech was directed at his critics -- a first. He even voiced one of their major concerns -- that "we are creating more problems than we're solving" -- and called that an "important question." All quite unprecedented.

But Bush then moved right into one of his classic straw-man arguments, attacking those who believe that "the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them." The arguments made by critics are quite different. They argue, for instance, that the occupation is turning ordinary Iraqis into terrorists, is turning Iraq into a training ground for terrorists, and is distracting from the greater war on terror. Bush didn't mention those arguments.

And there is a big difference between speaking to critics from the Oval Office -- and actually hearing and responding to their criticisms in person.

The odious Kyra Phillips is spouting Bush's talking point "everything is different after 9/11" because she wouldn't know a straw man if it fell on her. CNN=Crappy News Network.

Unsupportable

Via Suburban Guerrilla:

Fox poll shows Alito support Alito just 35%

RAW STORY

A poll conducted by Fox News December 13 - 14 shows dwindling support for Bush SCOTUS nominee Samuel Alito. Overall support for Alito has dropped from 46% November 8 - 9 to just 35% among registered voters. This is significantly lower than the 51% support enjoyed by confirmed Bush nominee John Roberts.

The drop in support is across with board, with just 57% of Republicans (down from 75%), 28% of Independents (down from 39%), and a mere 17% of Democrats (down from 26%) reporting that they would vote to confirm Alito, if given the opportunity.

The group Alliance for Justice has made the Fox poll data available to RAW STORY. The data can be viewed in PDF format here.

Every Breath He Takes

War Data Cited by Bush Are Debatable
By Doyle McManus, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — President Bush offered only a few pieces of specific evidence Sunday to support his assertion that "we are winning the war in Iraq." And like so much in Iraq, even those are hotly debated.

The president said more than 126 Iraqi combat battalions were now engaged in "fighting the enemy" and "more than 50 are taking the lead."

Those numbers are based on current Pentagon estimates of Iraqi troop strength, officials said. An Iraqi battalion includes about 600 men. So Bush's estimate of 126 Iraqi battalions in combat would add up to about 76,000 men, about half the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

And during a Nov. 30 address at the U.S. Naval Academy, Bush estimated that 40 Iraqi battalions were "in the lead."

But "taking the lead" does not mean an Iraqi unit is fully capable of fighting on its own. In U.S. military parlance, an Iraqi unit can "take the lead" when it is capable of launching combat operations with the help of U.S. support and logistics.

"When we say 'in the lead,' we mean putting them in charge, still with our transition teams and still with our enabling support," Army Gen. George W. Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told reporters last week. "So it's different than being operating totally independently."

Only one Iraqi battalion is currently listed at Level 1, capable of fully independent operations, officials said. The 50 battalions Bush cited are listed at Level 2.

On one point, the president appeared to have offered a conservative estimate: He said the United States had "transferred more than a dozen military bases to Iraqi control." Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Dec. 8 that "about 17 [military bases] have actually been turned over."

Bush also quoted selectively from recent opinion polls to suggest that Iraqis were satisfied with the course of events in their country. "Seven in 10 Iraqis say their lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve even more in the year ahead," he said.

He was quoting almost verbatim from the findings of a recent poll in Iraq that was sponsored jointly by ABC News, Time magazine and other news organizations.

But the same poll had findings that Bush left out: Fewer than half of Iraqis — 46% — said their country was better off than it was before the war; half said it was wrong for the United States to invade in 2003. Two-thirds said they opposed the continued presence of U.S. troops, and almost half said they would like to see U.S. forces leave soon.

"A lot of the numbers throughout his speech spin reality almost out of control," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has been generally supportive of Bush's strategy in Iraq.

"He's cherry-picked numbers and I think rounded them up … [he's] ignored all the negatives," Cordesman said on National Public Radio, referring to the polling results.

Every word out of his mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Defending the Boy King

Gonzales Defends Eavesdropping Program
Congress 'Authorized' Domestic Surveillance in Iraq War Resolution, Claims Attorney General

By Fred Barbash and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 19, 2005; 10:03 AM

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this morning defended the administration's domestic eavesdropping operation, saying it derived its legality from the congressional resolution permitting the use of force to fight terrorism as well as from the "inherent powers" of the president as commander-in-chief.

He acknowledged that such eavesdropping would be illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that act, he said, makes an exception for eavesdropping when "otherwise authorized" by statute. That authorizing statute, he argued, was the 2001 resolution, known as the "Authorization to use Military Force."

That resolution makes no reference to eavesdropping or of detention policies. The administration has cited it in justification of both, however.

Responding to Gonzales' claim, Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold said on NBC's Today Show. "Nobody, nobody, thought when we passed a resolution to invade Afghanistan and to fight the war on terror, including myself who voted for it, thought that this was an authorization to allow a wiretapping against the law of the United States."

In a briefing for reporters after his television appearances, Gonzales said his position was bolstered by the Supreme Court's 2004 ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In that decision, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court said the resolution constituted "explicit congressional authorization for the detention of individuals" in the narrow category of terrorism related to the September 11 attacks. At the same time, the court said that the legality of any individual detention could not be determined by the government alone, but required a judgment by some neutral objective third party.

Gonzales' comments, made in briefings and on CNN and other network appearances this morning, constituted the administration's most elaborate attempt yet to explain the derivation of its authority to eavesdrop.

President Bush acknowledged Saturday that since October 2001 he has authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States without seeking warrants from courts.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of the program last week. Bush and other administration officials initially refused to discuss the surveillance or their legal authority, citing security concerns.

I'm listening to Bush's press conference this morning. He has never sounded more petulant. He talks down to the press and to us from the height of an imperial presidency. He is a dangerous sociopath.

Pillage, Then Burn

Leaders in Congress OK Cuts to Budget
# Lawmakers agree to slash $41.6 billion and to attach an Arctic drilling measure to a defense bill.

By Richard Simon, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — On the second day of a rare weekend session, House and Senate leaders Sunday approved the first significant spending cuts to domestic social programs in nearly a decade and agreed to attach a proposal allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to a bill funding the U.S. military.

Rushing to complete its business before leaving town for the holidays, the House met past midnight and was expected early today to take up the military spending bill, which includes the drilling measure, and the budget cuts.

The Senate has in the past blocked efforts to open the Alaskan refuge to energy exploration. But because the proposal is now part of a bill funding troops in wartime, President Bush's long-sought goal of allowing drilling in the refuge will be politically tougher for senators to oppose.

"Obviously, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think I had the votes," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Sunday as partisan tensions ran high over the maneuver to put one of the nation's most contentious environmental issues in a defense bill. The Senate is expected to vote on the drilling measure this week.
....
House and Senate negotiators also rejected an effort to include in the budget-cutting bill a measure to split the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals into two benches.

Environmental ruin, but the 9th Circuit stays together. Ugh. Rapacious barbarians.

Wretched Excess

The Market Is Getting Tight for High-End Jeans
# Demand sizzles for brands such as True Religion, but there's talk of a denim bubble.

By Leslie Earnest, Times Staff Writer

Prices show few signs of easing, buyers say they won't back off, and analysts are left to wonder whether the bubble is going to burst.

The commodity in question? Not Southern California housing but premium jeans — frayed, faded or ripped, and sometimes all three, selling for upward of $400.

Helping to fuel the frenzy is True Religion Apparel Inc., a Los Angeles company that would be happy to burst all that bubble talk. Three years after its start-up, the manufacturer has become the No. 2 premium denim brand in the United States. Now True Religion is continuing its expansion with the opening of its first store, in Manhattan Beach, this month.

Growth has been swift. The company projects that sales will pass $100 million this year and reach $136 million in 2006. Its stock price has doubled this year, closing Friday at $16.44, up 8 cents.

True Religion, through its early success and potential vulnerability, provides a window into the premium denim industry, which is dominated by Los Angeles County companies. The niche is populated with brands such as 7 for All Mankind, the top seller, as well as Citizens of Humanity and Chip and Pepper.

Wholesale revenues in the premium denim segment, still only a small fraction of the overall jeans market, have doubled this year to about $1 billion, said analyst Vera Van Ert of Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc. in Los Angeles.

The action at the retail level continues to sizzle, but "the question is: Is that a trend that can keep on going?" said analyst Eric Beder of Brean Murray, Carret & Co.

Those who sell the jeans say the premium prices are justified because the denim is top quality and the pants are painstakingly hand-finished by workers who sand them to the perfect shade, fray pockets and hems with grinders and sometimes stitch on patches in unique patterns.

"It's very expensive to do that," said Jeffrey Lubell, True Religion's chief executive and co-founder.

If you wonder whether or not we've reached the end of empire yet, this is proof. $400 for a pair of jeans. It is time to get out. What happens next is collapse.

Posted by Melanie at 04:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Details

Via The Agonist community:

Indian Ocean Islanders Take On a Superpower

By Padma Rao,
Der Spiegel
Published: December 8, 2005

The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is located perfectly from a strategic point of view. But when the US military adopted it as a military base in the 1960s and 70s, it was inconveniently populated. The natives were driven out -- but now, they want their home back. Skip to next paragraph

Former truck driver Norbert L'Emclume, 65, sits in a shabby hut in Cassis, a slum in Port Louis, the capital of the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. His wife hangs up laundry, while their grandchildren play on old mattresses laid across a narrow, open sewage ditch. In addition to serving as in impromptu playground, the mattresses are also where the 12 members of L'Emclume's family sleep.

Questions about L'Emclume's origins awaken sad memories and he often responds with an elegiac poem often recited in the slums. "I left my country, my little island; I lost my family and my heart."

This week, the fate of L'Emclume and other former Chagossians is the subject of a case being argued halfway around the world, before a court in London. Once again, lawyers and judges in faraway Great Britain are revisiting the story of a destroyed paradise in the Indian Ocean -- and a dirty chapter in the more recent history of the former colonial power.

At issue is a story from the days of slavery, except that this tale begins only four decades ago. It's the story of how Her Majesty's government depopulated and sold off the 60-square-kilometer (about 23 square miles) Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, along with their 2,000 inhabitants, including L'Emclume. Their imperial goals, after all, were more important.

The story begins in the 1960s, when the English -- then as now led by Queen Elizabeth II -- depopulated the islands. The Chagossians were starved out, pets were gassed before the eyes of the islands' children, and finally, the islanders were loaded onto freighters and shipped off to the Seychelles and Mauritius.

What to do with the inhabitants?

The emptied islands didn't remain empty for long, though. For $14 million -- paid indirectly in the form of a discount on Polaris rockets purchased by Great Britain from the United States -- America leased the largest island in the archipelago in 1966. Diego Garcia soon became one of the US's most important military bases the world over.

The choice of location was hardly accidental. From the beginning of the coldest phase of the Cold War -- beginning in the early 60s with the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis -- the US had been ramping up its search for strategically located military bases. A base in the Indian Ocean, they reasoned, would help keep the Soviet Union and China at bay. Films at Britain's national archive, the Public Records Office in London, offer extensive documentation of the exploratory trips taken by US military personnel. For the Americans, the Chagos Islands were the perfect location. The only problem? They were inhabited.

Well, you could just torture them and hold them in jails forever as enemy combatents. Oh, wait, we hadn't thought that one up yet.

If you aren't reading Sean-Paul and the Agonistas everyday, you are missing a great deal of information.

Fools and Knaves

Bush, Saying U.S. Is Winning, Asks Patience on Iraq

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: December 19, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 - President Bush declared to the nation on Sunday night that the United States was winning the war in Iraq and pleaded with his viewers not to "give in to despair" over a conflict that has cost more than 2,100 American lives and an estimated 30,000 Iraqi deaths. Skip to next paragraph Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The president spoke to the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday night.

In a 17-minute live televised address from the Oval Office, his first in the formal setting since he announced that he had ordered the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Mr. Bush offered a vigorous reaffirmation of an unpopular war and asked his viewers for patience.

"Some look at the challenges in Iraq, and conclude that the war is lost, and not worth another dime or another day," Mr. Bush said. "I don't believe that. Our military commanders do not believe that. Our troops in the field, who bear the burden and make sacrifice, do not believe that America has lost."

He added, "And not even the terrorists believe it. We know from their communications that they feel a tightening noose and fear the rise of a democratic Iraq."

The president, speaking in a steady voice punctuated by the constant gesturing of his hands, nonetheless acknowledged his critics more than he has in the past, and adopted a more humble tone. "I also want to speak to those of you who did not support my decision to send troops to Iraq," Mr. Bush said. "I have heard your disagreement, and I know how deeply it is felt."

But he also made clear that he himself had not wavered in his commitment to the war.

"I do not expect you to support everything I do, but tonight I have a request," the president said. "Do not give in to despair, and do not give up on this fight for freedom."

The president held out the possibility of American troop withdrawals in 2006, but he made no promises, and did not mention anticipated Pentagon reductions of troops to 138,000 in the next few months, which would be a return to the military's "baseline" level before the election last Thursday. Currently there about 160,000 American troops in Iraq, a number that was increased to keep order during the vote.

"We will see the Iraqi military gaining strength and confidence, and the democratic process moving forward," Mr. Bush said. "As these achievements come, it should require fewer American troops to accomplish our mission. I will make decisions on troop levels based on the progress we see on the ground and advice of our military leaders, not based on artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington."

Democrats countered that while they welcomed the more realistic tone of Mr. Bush's speech, he had failed to explain the realities of the war. "He acknowledged that we have made mistakes and he acknowledged that he understood why people are upset with him," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, in an interview after Mr. Bush's speech.

But "he made it sound like if we just get rid of Al Qaeda all will be fine in Iraq. As I said to the president on Friday, every single member of Al Qaeda in Iraq could be shot dead, but Mr. President, you would still have a civil war in Iraq."

Bush's "Fantasy War" threatens to destroy him. This is as it should be. The ever naive Liz Bumiller fails to ask the most obvious questions on behalf of the ever credulous media shill New York Times.

No wonder the reporters for the paper call it "the death star."

Joe Biden, call your office, you media whore.

The Slutworks

Same old shit. Your boy king hasn't learned a goddamn thing. This is news? It was like watching the same old newsreel. And the networks gave up time for this? Slutworks, the same as before.

Hacks.

A Great Recipe and a NOTE on Tools

Tamales are labor intensive, but, dayyum, they are good. I learned to make these in the kitchen, as I've mentioned before, of the couple who own Manuel's in Santa Cruz. I've given you a couple of other versions of the classic tamale, but this is my favorite. My then-boyfriend was a musician in the festival orchestra which was based at Aptos Community College each summer and we were housed with board members. John Cage was the guest composer in residence one summer and our hosts held the celebratory party for him at the Church of San Juan Bautista after one of the concerts. He's vegan, so we made the vegan variety for him. I prefer these chili cheese jobs, and they will give you rave reviews for a crowd. This makes about 12. If you are serving a meal or a pretty solid roster of passed or buffet foods, figure on one of these per person. They are pretty substantial and one makes lunch for me, or breakfast. Oh, definitely breakfast. This is a great rough carb and protein way to start the day with a calcium punch. Serve the cold ones (steamed over boiling water for ten minutes, the microwave dries them out) next to your eggs instead of hashbrowns in the morning, if you have left overs. But I'm pretty sure you won't. This is cucina de magre, food of the poor, and cheap to make.

1 8-ounce package dried corn husks
1 pound Mexican cheese, such as Ranchero, queso fresco, panela, or manchego, cut into 1/2-inch cubes, (about 3 cups) [ed. note, I prefer manchego, but try the others if you can find them]
4 poblano chiles, roasted, peeled, seeded, cut into 1/2-inch strips
1 1/2 cups Green Salsa (see recipe)

1 cup canned reduced-sodium chicken broth, room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 pound cold prepared ground masa for tamales
1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening or cold lard

Twelve 6-inch square foil sheets

Sour cream

RECIPE METHOD

TO PREPARE TAMALES: Soak dried corn husks in hot water 2 hours or overnight. Drain on paper towels. Combine cheese, chiles and 1/2 cup salsa in medium bowl. Set cheese mixture aside.

Combine 1/2 cup salsa, chicken broth, salt and baking soda in 2-cup glass measuring cup. Set broth mixture aside. Using electric mixer, beat cold masa in large bowl until light and fluffy, about 6 minutes. Gradually beat in broth mixture. With mixer on high speed, beat shortening or lard 1 tablespoon at a time into masa, beating well after each addition. Continue beating and scraping down sides of bowl until mixture is light and fluffy, about 15 minutes total. Test for lightness by dropping 1 tablespoon masa into cold water: If it floats, masa is light enough to use. If not, continue beating at high speed a few minutes longer.

TO WRAP TAMALES: Spread 1 or 2 whole husks lengthwise on counter with narrow end pointing away from you. Spread about 21/2 tablespoons masa mixture over 3x2-inch area of husk. Top with 1 heaping tablespoon cheese mixture. Fold sides over, then fold in ends to enclose filling completely. Place folded tamale on foil square and fold foil to enclose tamale. Repeat with remaining husks, filling and foil squares.

TO COOK TAMALES: Add enough water to large pot to come 1 inch up sides. Cover bottom of steamer basket with remaining corn husks. Arrange tamales upright and in layers in steamer basket. Cover pot and bring water to boil. When water begins to boil, place steamer basket with tamales into pot. Reduce heat to low. Cover and steam tamales until husks just pull away from masa without sticking, checking water level occasionally, about 1 hour. Remove basket from pot and let rest 10 minutes. (Cold tamales can be reheated in a steamer over simmering water for 30 minutes. They’re delicious for breakfast the next day, topped with a fried egg.)

Transfer tamales to platter and serve hot with remaining salsa verde and sour cream.

NOTE: If you cannot find masa for tamales at a Latin American market, mix 1 3/4 cup dry masa harina with 1 cup warm water and then chill.

Green Salsa Recipe

This is an uncooked recipe, you have to husk the tomatillos without blanching, but the sauce has such a fresh "green" flavor that you won't mind the extra work.

3/4 lb tomatillos, husked and quartered
2 serrano chili peppers, coarsely chopped
1/4 small yellow onion, sliced
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon salt, or as needed
1/3 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro

RECIPE METHOD

In a blender or food processor fitted with the metal blade, combine the tomatillos, chilies, onion and water; process briefly until chunky. Add the 1 teaspoon salt and the cilantro and purée until no large chunks remain, about 2 minutes longer.

Taste and add more salt, if needed. Pour into a bowl and serve, or cover and refrigerate for up to 3 days.

Serve this as part of a Mexi buffet, and let the other dishes be prepared from a local carryout. Save the real effort for the tameles. They WILL eat your entire afternoon, but, dayyum, will they be worth it.

Like most foodies, I have favorite food memories and some of the recipes have been reproduced here. This is one of those. That day I spent in the kitchen cooking with Anna, Manny's wife changed the way I thought about food. I requested a food processor for the next Christmas and my hard-working Cuisinart is more than twenty years old now. None of these things are cheap, but can be purchased in pieces over time to turn you into an efficent cook who can read these recipes without turning pale at the amount of time involved. Most professional chefs are not entirely convinced by food processors, but for the home cook, I wouldn't willingly do without. The basic Cuisanart will cost you about a hundred bucks and will pay you back fast if you cook a lot. Much more expensive, but just as important, are a good set of knives, and I'm not talking about the Chicago Cutlery set on display at Walmart. I use a professional set of Henckels and Sabatiers, stored in a professional chef block with a real sharpening steel. This is going to set you back some money, but your fingers will love you for it because you won't chew them up with dull knives when you have to go chasing every ingrediant that went skittering across the counter when you cut yourself with a dull knife while chasing it. Every chef has a mass of cuts, but the sharp ones heal faster and leave fewer scars. You'll work faster and more efficiently with sharp knives that hold an edge.

Learn to chop and debone quickly by taking a knife class at your local community college or cooking school. You will literally be amazed at how much time you save by learning how to rock a french knife properly and save yourself some sore muscles. Sometimes the right tool for the job is your check book and an investment of a little time. These things don't take much time to learn but will save you hours in the kitchen. What is that worth to you? Unless you are a professional cook, I assume you have other things to do with your time.

A Visit to Ybor City

In the cities of south Florida, every deli and Cuban restaurant sells these. Cuban bread is hard to find outside of Florida, but French baguette can be substituted. If you have hispanic markets where you live, check around to see if anyone imports Cuban bread from Florida bakeries. If you have a Cuban restaurant, call them and ask where they get theirs. You might be surprised by how much luck you have. Cuban bread is a little spongier than French and holds up to the pressing and heating part of the preparation with less flaking of the crust.

CUBAN SANDWICH

Traditional Ingredients:

3 slices (almost shaved) of boiled ham
3 slices roast pork hot or cold
3 slices of salami
3 slices of Swiss cheese
3 or 4 slices of pickles
1/3 cut Cuban bread hard crust

Optional Ingredients:

3 slices of tomato
4 slices of green bell pepper
3 slices onion
1/3 cut French or Cuban bread
1 leaf romaine lettuce
mayonnaise, mustard to taste

It is important that the sandwich be prepared on Cuban bread, French or Italian bread - any artisan style bread with a hard crust.

All cold cuts should be sliced very thinly; almost shaved. Slice the bread in an open faced fashion and spread lightly with mustard first, then with mayonnaise. Remember this is not entirely traditional, but still good.

Add the ham, roast pork, turkey and salami. Next add a layer of tomato, pepper, onion and lettuce. Top the sandwich and press.

Press the sandwich on a hot skillet with a weight on top. A suitable weight would be a heavy (clean) cast iron skillet that has been heated until sizzling.

Or better yet, use a sandwich press or panini grill if one is available.

Cuban sandwiches are good cold and for picnics or take-alongs, too.

I make them with thinly sliced banana peppers on top, but that's me and not traditional.

Miserable Failures

Bigger brother

To the rest of us, the revelation in the New York Times that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on people within the United States without judicial warrants was stunning. In one of the more egregious cases of governmental overreach in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the monitoring, without any judicial oversight, of international phone calls and e-mail messages from the United States. .... The scandalous abuse of Americans' civil liberties in that period led in the 1970s to a new set of laws aimed at curtailing domestic espionage by intelligence agencies. To balance national security needs with our constitutional liberties, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act created secret "FISA" courts in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies can covertly obtain warrants to eavesdrop on suspected spies (now terrorists too) in the United States. These courts are generally efficient and deferential to the government. Yet the Bush administration still opted to cut them out of the process in some cases; warrants are still sought to intercept all communications that took place entirely within the United States.

Some critics say the FISA courts are too slow to issue decisions in an environment in which every minute counts, and that Cold War laws are ill-suited for a war on amorphous terrorist cells. If that's the case, the administration and Congress should have worked together to alter the courts' procedures or to amend the law. Instead, the White House unilaterally opted to exempt much of its antiterrorism efforts from any kind of judicial oversight — just as it tried doing with its policies regarding detainees.

The Supreme Court has already reined in the executive branch on that score, and the NSA's eavesdropping, arguably a violation of both the law and the Constitution, may lead to even greater legal woes for the president. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called reports of the NSA practices clearly unacceptable and said he would hold hearings early next year. There will be plenty to ask about.

One early defense of the program is a claim by the administration that it had to be implemented quietly — the president authorized it in a classified order — because otherwise terrorists would be alerted to its existence and work to evade it. But those same suspected terrorists would have already known that they might be wiretapped with the aid of a secret warrant. What is the difference?

Last week may come to be seen as a tipping point in the public's attitude, one that will cause the administration to reverse its encroachment on rights in the name of security. The report of the NSA's unsupervised eavesdropping program helped defeat an extension of certain controversial provisions of the Patriot Act in the Senate on Friday.
....
As for the Defense Department's counterterrorism database, the Pentagon was forced on Thursday to acknowledge that it hadn't followed its own guidelines requiring the deletion of information on American citizens who clearly don't pose a security risk. Imagine that: a domestic military intelligence program that failed to abide by its own safeguards.

Given this administration's history, none of these developments is especially surprising. But the latest revelations may serve as a timely reminder of why the American constitutional system requires the judiciary — the third branch of government — to review the actions of the executive branch when necessary to protect the people's liberty.

The level of outrage I'm feeling is only matched by the LAT edboard in the national dailies today. I am furious. The frikkin' incompetently pursued war on terra doesn't require any of this.

We are facing a constitutional crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since Watergate, arguably an important piece of news, and CNN goes wall-to-wall with Ariel Sharon's possible mild stroke. Blitzer, you are an embarrassment.

UPDATE: An early Bump post has been kicking around in the back of my head all day. It was about Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire and a book and author talk I saw him give on Book TV. He just said, "No empire ever gave up voluntarily," and this seems to be a good time to be reminded of it. When asked what we should do now, he said, "Look into acquiring a condo in Vancouver."

Actually, I'm going to be looking in Toronto. I'm not kidding. With his executive order, Bush abolished constitutional democracy. It's time to leave.

Pravda Returns

Planted PR Stories Not News to Military

By Mark Mazzetti and Kevin Sack
December 18, 2005

WASHINGTON — U.S. military officials in Iraq were fully aware that a Pentagon contractor regularly paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive stories about the war, and made it clear that none of the stories should be traced to the United States, according to several current and former employees of Lincoln Group, the Washington-based contractor.

In contrast to assertions by military officials in Baghdad and Washington, interviews and Lincoln Group documents show that the information campaign waged over the last year was designed to cloak any connection to the U.S. military.

"In clandestine parlance, Lincoln Group was a 'cutout' — a third party — that would provide the military with plausible deniability," said a former Lincoln Group employee who worked on the operation. "To attribute products to [the military] would defeat the entire purpose. Hence, no product by Lincoln Group ever said 'Made in the U.S.A.' "

A number of workers who carried out Lincoln Group's offensive, including a $20-million two-month contract to influence public opinion in Iraq's restive Al Anbar province, describe a campaign that was unnecessarily costly, poorly run and largely ineffective at improving America's image in Iraq. The current and former employees spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality restrictions.

"In my own estimation, this stuff has absolutely no effect, and it's a total waste of money," said another former employee, echoing the sentiments of several colleagues. "Every Iraqi can read right through it."

Disclosures that the military used a private firm to plant stories written by U.S. troops in Iraqi newspapers have drawn widespread criticism.

The Pentagon has ordered an investigation, led by Navy Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk. Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Friday that he expected a report from Van Buskirk "in a week or so." Casey said that a preliminary assessment made shortly after the military's information operations campaign was revealed in a Times article last month concluded that the Army was "operating within our authorities and the appropriate legal procedures."

Military officials initially distanced themselves from Lincoln Group's activities, suggesting the company may have violated its contract when it masked the origin of stories placed in the Iraqi press.

On Dec. 2, Pentagon officials told Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) that all of the published materials were supposed to be identified as originating with the U.S. military but that identification was occasionally omitted by accident.

But Lincoln Group documents obtained by The Times, along with interviews with military officials and the current and former Lincoln Group employees, show that those who worked on the campaign believed the media products would be far more credible if their origins were disguised.

Pentagon officials say Warner was given the most accurate information the Pentagon had at the time.

"Certainly, nobody was trying to deceive Sen. Warner," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, who declined to comment further on the military's role in the information campaign.

Senator Warner, call some hearings and put these people under oath and then use the full wieight of the law when they lie to you. Mark my words, they will. Read the rest of this article. If the LA Times can figure this out, I'm certain a Senate committee or two can discover even more. Heck, the Pentagon hired a pair of guys who didn't even have a track record of much of anything and gave them millions of OUR taxpayers dollars to do... what?

You've been in Washington way too long to believe Whitman, if not you don't have the IQ to be a Senator. These people would lie about the day of the week if it would protect their illegal activities. Stand up and defend the Constitution or the voters (non-Diebold of course) will put in people that will defend it.

Why This Matters

Transit Union Tries New Tack on Pensions
By SEWELL CHAN and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

In a move that could alter the shape of its deadlocked contract negotiations, the transit workers' union intends to file a complaint with a state labor board today, asserting that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority cannot legally insist that the union accept less generous pensions for future subway and bus workers.

The union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, said yesterday that it would ask the state's Public Employment Relations Board to seek a court order barring the authority from making pension demands part of its final offer for a new contract. The authority, in response, dismissed the legal action as a public-relations ploy and asserted that both sides had traditionally discussed pensions in their contract talks.

Neither side moved from its position yesterday, although top negotiators met for about four hours before taking an afternoon recess. Talks resumed and then recessed once again about 11 p.m.

If the state board were to rule in the union's favor on the pension issue - an outcome the authority insisted is doubtful - it could compel the authority to drop its demand for a worse pension plan for future transit workers. That demand, both sides say, is the main obstacle to a settlement.

The dispute added a new wrinkle to the brinkmanship that has characterized the last several days. The authority has said that it has made its final offer. The union has set a new strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. Tuesday for the whole transit system and another for 12:01 a.m. tomorrow at two private bus companies in Queens that are being transferred to the authority's control. Union officials said yesterday that they had asked the authority to put its best and final offer on the table by 9 p.m. Monday so the union's executive board would have time to consider it before the Tuesday deadline.

There really isn't anything particularly noteworthy in this story, but I'm using it as a newspeg for some thoughts on labor negotiations and some reasons why this particular negotiation have significance for everyone, even those who are not in unionized work.

First of all, every negotiation which runs up to the end of the contract is going to engage in brinkmanship. That's the nature of any negotiation in which the stakes are high or are perceived of as high. Remember, this isn't about money, of which the MTA has plenty. It is about power.

Second, every benefit attached to work that we used to be able to take for granted (paid health insurance, pensions, vacation and sick pay, for example) have eroded for all workers in direct proportion to the decline of the labor movement and the erosion of those benefits for unionized workers. When a large union like the TWA takes a hit in benefits, so does everybody else. When you cross a picket line, you are hurting yourself.

Third, every news story about a negotiation is a snapshot, when a negotiation is a movie. All such stories should be taken with a lot of salt.

Last, the basic principal behind labor negotiations is that of any market transaction: the fair price of the negotiation is that discovered between a willing buyer and a willing seller. Outside parties don't get to determine what that fair price is. I wish some of my brothers in the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees could have remembered that.

Unprecedented

My distrust of the press these days nearly matches my distrust of government, but Bart Gellman has been on the intelligence beat for a long time and in a honorable fashion.

Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers

By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 18, 2005; Page A01

In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.

The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.

Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for "detecting, identifying and engaging" internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI's use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States -- without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.

Defiant in the face of criticism, the Bush administration has portrayed each surveillance initiative as a defense of American freedom. Bush said yesterday that his NSA eavesdropping directives were "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." After years of portraying an offensive waged largely overseas, Bush justified the internal surveillance with new emphasis on "the home front" and the need to hunt down "terrorists here at home."

Bush's constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as "plenary" -- a term defined as "full," "complete," and "absolute."

A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA's new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

In describing the briefings, administration officials made clear that Cheney was announcing a decision, not asking permission from Congress. How much the legislators learned is in dispute.

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers "no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. He believed eavesdropping would continue to be limited to "calls that initiated outside the United States, had a destination outside the United States but that transferred through a U.S.-based communications system."

Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go "beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens' communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney."
....
No president before Bush mounted a frontal challenge to Congress's authority to limit espionage against Americans. In a Sept. 25, 2002, brief signed by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Justice Department asserted "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

The brief made no distinction between suspected agents who are U.S. citizens and those who are not. Other Bush administration legal arguments have said the "war on terror" is global and indefinite in scope, effectively removing traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.

"There is a lot of discussion out there that we shouldn't be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists," said Gordon Oehler, a former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center who served on last year's special commission assessing U.S. intelligence.

By law, according to University of Chicago scholar Geoffrey Stone, the differences are fundamental: Americans have constitutional protections that are enforceable in court whether their conversations are domestic or international.

Bush's assertion that eavesdropping takes place only on U.S. calls to overseas phones, Stone said, "is no different, as far as the law is concerned, from saying we only do it on Tuesdays."

Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI's national security law unit when Bush signed the NSA directive, described the ongoing program as "very dangerous." In the immediate aftermath of a devastating attack, he said, the decision was a justifiable emergency response. In 2006, "we ought to be past the time of emergency responses. We ought to have more considered views now. . . . We have time to debate a legal regime and what's appropriate."

When the president has a track record of lies and dissembling, pulling this kind of shit is going to be met with a lot of opposition. That opposition should include impeachment for this blatantly illegal and unconstitutional act. That is not a word I toss around casually.

Know Your Rights

Here is a link to The Constitution of the United States, thanks to Emory University's Law School. Like Senator Robert Byrd, I carry a copy around with me, but most people probably don't. You should print this out if you don't have a copy in the house, however.

Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment:

Amendment IV.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Getting a warrant from a FISA court for a wire tap is easy and can be done at almost any hour of the day or night. The president, George W. Bush, is in violation of the Constitution.

Uncharitable

Dispute Over Historic Hospital for the Poor Pits Doctors Against the State

By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: December 17, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 16 - Charity Hospital, an institution that for nearly three centuries has been dedicated to treating the poorest and sickest here - the shot, stabbed, overdosed and uninsured - has been abandoned downtown since Hurricane Katrina. It is now at the center of a battle over whether it will continue that tradition, or become a more conventional hospital.

The state officials who manage Charity say Hurricane Katrina dealt this Huey Long-era landmark a deathblow and want it torn down. In its place, they say, they want to build a hospital with a "new mission," one that treats both public and private patients and relies less on government money.

But doctors who work there sharply disagree with that plan. They say Louisiana officials are using the storm as an excuse to achieve the state's long-sought goal of demolishing Charity, getting millions in federal dollars to build a new hospital, and then moving away from a promise that has long been made to the city's poor.

"People want to use these disasters to get insurance money," said Dr. James Moises, an emergency room physician at Charity who helped clean up the hospital after the storm. Louisiana officials, he said, "saw it as a great opportunity to get the federal government to pay for a new facility."

For months now, officials have barred doctors from the building and forced them to practice in a tent field hospital, even though the doctors say the hospital is ready for use. The doctors say the makeshift arrangement is inadequate for the severe trauma cases the hospital specializes in treating.

As one of the two oldest hospitals in North America - it was founded in 1736, the same year as Bellevue Hospital in New York - Charity has from the beginning been a symbol of a social commitment to the poor, and its wards are empty at a moment when thousands of poor New Orleans residents are struggling to return home and fear that government has abandoned them. In many ways, the debate over its future parallels that of New Orleans itself, as it chooses whether to become a more middle-class city or to return to earlier traditions.

Louisiana is the only state with a network of hospitals dedicated to serving the indigent. Before the storm, the hospital network - of which Charity was the linchpin - was the main source of care for some 900,000 uninsured patients, about a fifth of the state's population.

......

On a recent warm day here, the emergency room at Charity was empty and silent, worn-looking from decades of hard use, but hardly derelict. The only sound was from a security guard's television set. She had seen it all: gunshot victims, stabbing victims, rape victims, enraged arrestees, inmates, as well as legions of the uninsured.

"We had all that going on here," said the guard, Donna Jennings. "Now, we have nothing. This is just about where the average person came. Now, I don't know. Where are all the gunshot victims going to go?"

Ok. I understand the US does not have a Constitutional right to health care and that's ok. But, the government, in this case state and federal, should not be practicing a de facto social darwinism on its citizens. Doesn't that clash with the whole unalienable right to life?

Say what you want about the Louisiana government, and there is plenty of negatives to say about them, but Charity hospital and its associates were an example of something that worked. Sure, the building needs a serious upgrade... it did back in 1993 when I visited a friend there, but for hundreds of thousands of citizens that is the best they can do. Even putting aside the historical importance of the hospital, it would be a disaster to make Charity a for profit hospital that couldn't or wouldn't take care of the gunshot victims.

We have a situation that strikes me as similar to what the FBI did after 9/11. They presented a long list of powers which they had lusted over for a long time in a giant bill that no legislator could vote against called the Patriot Act. And so, they got all of those wonderful powers that had been denied to them since Watergate. Here we have the Louisiana government using Katrina as an excuse to get this "burden" off of their shoulders while the rebuilding process is taking place.

It's much easier to pass the buck to someone else and forget about it, than to fix things the right way. And if there are unintended consequences in the future... welll... Katrina changed everything, we can't act in a pre-Katrina way, there is no way we could have know this would take place, .

One Way of Looking At It

GWB, June 23, 2005:

What you have left in the Social Security system today is a file cabinet with IOUs. In West Virginia, I actually went and saw the file cabinet, and I'm proud to report the paper is there. (Laughter.)

Maybe he could give another speech, where he would say something like this:

What you have left in the Constitutional system today is a display filled with old parchments. In Washington, D.C., I actually went to the Archives and saw the display, and I'm proud to report the parchment is there. (Laughter.)

I don't know about you, but that's certainly the message I'm getting.

History And the Constitution

Here is the oath the US military swears when they receive their commissions:

"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice."

What you can't see right now is that the career military, the ones who do the work, not the flag rank perfumed princes in the Pentagon, are in open revolt against the war and W. This will be done quietly for right now. None of these folks need to have their name on anything. Read the oath again. When the career people decide that "and domestic".... includes the President of the United States it is time to get out The Federalist Papers and start to note some of the worries the founders had.

The career military people, the ones who came up through the academies and the ones who teach at the War College in Pennsylvania, have been telling us that this war was a mistake and that we are sunk for 2.5 years. Anyone who has studied the histories of insurgencies knows this.

When military people study their oath and decide that following the Constitution and following the president have diverged, we are in for an interesting historical moment. It isn't one that I'd choose to live through, but you work with what you have.

What I'm hearing is that the tension in the Pentagon is exquisite right now. State has been purged of all dissidents, so any help for the republic comes from across the river in Arlington.

I do not like this at all, but I'll settle for it. I trust those patriots down the Blue Line to figure this out a lot faster than I think Karl Rove can undo it, and don't be fooled. That is exactly what the Imperial Bush has tasked him to do.

UPDATE: See yankeedoodle's remarks in comments.

Dinner

I got really good news tonight from the Christmas chef. He's making his very special ham with honey mustard glaze for the holiday table. The good news is that I get to take the leftovers home.

My brother the chef invented this; I've certainly never seen a recipe anything like it anywhere and I read cookbooks like some people read romance novels or murder mysteries. This is really quite simple.

Get a bone in butt ham. To prepare: remove the extraneous shell fat and score the outside in the traditional diamond pattern. Turn the ham over, bone side down and with a boning knife, separate the bone from the meat as far down the bone as you can work the knife, the farther the better. Into the pocket you've created between the bone and the ham, work in as many branches of fresh rosemary as you can. For a large ham, really stuff it, a smaller ham will need less. The bro usually makes a giant ham so that there are plenty of leftovers and he can make pea soup and a sandwich board for the staff of their store in the post Christmas return and exchange panic. There are some advantages to working for a chef, and he does try to take care of their staff during the holiday crazy periods.

Once the ham has been properly rosemary'ed, make a glaze of honey and mustard (about a half cup for a big ham and french dijon mustard, with a dash of worcestershire and a shake of allspice. Use about half to glaze the outside before you put it in the oven. Roast 20 minutes per pound and reglaze it a couple of times during roasting. Let it rest for 15 minutes before you carve it, while you make the gravy (this treatment will give you spectacular gravy.)

Then slice against the grain. You'll get nicer pieces. I take mashed potatoes and gravy as a given.

You do know how to make Ham gravy, don't you?

Serve with mashed potatoes and baby sweet potatoe pies. If someone wants to send me a ricer for the holiday it won't be turned down. This bump has never met a potato that she didn't like, South Beach diet be damned, I'm going to be ricing and cooking potatoes into the next millenium.

Freedom of Thought?

Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior

By AARON NICODEMUS
December 17, 2005

NEW BEDFORD -- A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Boy, I'm glad to know that we can trust the government not to abuse their powers to randomly investigate anyone without the slightest shred of evidence.

Because, you know that 9/11 changed everything and we have proof that the Maoists were linked to Al-Qaeda and we've found copies of the little red book with them. Really. Or maybe it was a Quran... close enough.

After all we have such a great track record going for us in this adminisrtation, why wouldn't you trust us?

Last Refuge

Bush Raps Senators Over Patriot Act

By JENNIFER LOVEN
The Associated Press
Saturday, December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Saturday that senators who are blocking renewal of the terrorism-fighting Patriot Act are acting irresponsibly and standing in the way of protecting the country from attack.

"In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment," the president said in a live broadcast from the White House of his weekly radio address.

Senate Democrats, with the aid of a handful of Republicans, succeeded Friday in stalling the bill already approved by the House. The vote to advance the measure, 52-47, fell eight votes shy of the 60 votes required to end debate.

"That decision is irresponsible and it endangers the lives of our citizens. The senators who are filibustering must stop their delaying tactics and the Senate must reauthorize the Patriot Act," Bush said.

Opponents of renewing the law, most of whom are Democrats, argue that it threatens constitutional liberties at home.

I just can't imagine why the majority of Americans don't trust this administration. Do you?

Seriously though, we need to keep an eye out for more and more fearmongering... it's the only card they've got to play and the more they play it, the more transparent it is.

Of course, if this was 2002, we'd have a color change in the terror level anytime now... so I guess the Administration needs to make a choice... save their own hides and cause fear and panic or save the economy and let people feel safe enough to do their Christmas shopping.

"A Sad Day"

Bush acknowleges allowing eavesdropping

Order 'consistent' with 'constitutional responsibilities'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush acknowleged on Saturday that he authorized the National Security Agency "to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations" and said leaks to the media about the program were illegal.

Sources have told CNN that Bush signed a secret order in 2002 allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans and others in the United States who are communicating with people overseas. The story was first reported Friday in The New York Times.

During an unusual live, on-camera version of his weekly radio address, Bush said such authorization is "fully consistent" with his "constitutional responsibilities and authorities."

"This is highly classified program crucial to our national security" and "its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks," Bush said.

"The existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly given to news organizations," Bush said. "Unauthorized disclosure damages our national security and puts our nation at risk.

"Revealing this information is illegal."

The NSA eavesdrops on billions of communications worldwide. Although the NSA is barred from domestic spying, it can get warrants issued with the permission of a special court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

The court is set up specifically to issue warrants allowing wiretapping on domestic soil.

'Sad day'

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin said Saturday: "There's not a single senator or member of Congress who thought we were authorizing wiretaps."

"If he needs a wiretap, the authority is already there -- the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act," Feingold said. "They can ask for a warrant to do that and even if there's an emergency situation they can go for 72 hours as long as they give notice at the end of 72 hours."

Feingold said "it's a sad day" in light of what he heard Bush say.

"He authorized these wiretaps even though there was no specific law allowing it," Feingold said. "He's trying to claim somehow that the authorization for the Afghanistan attack after 9/11 permitted this and that's just absurd."

Bush said two of the September 11 hijackers -- Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- who flew the plane into the Pentagon "communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here until it was too late."

He said the authorizations have made it "more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time and the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad."

"I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times" since the September 11, 2001, attacks and "I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related groups," he said.

Sources with knowledge of the program told CNN on Friday that Bush signed the secret order in 2002. The sources refused to be identified because the program is classified.

During an interview Friday for PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Bush said he understood that people want him to confirm or deny the Times report, but he couldn't discuss specifics because "it would compromise our ability to protect the people," according to a transcript of the program.

Violating our civil rights to "protect us". Breaking the law to "save us". The Great Protector speaks.

Hurricane Relief

I love trains, my preferred way to travel, and I love a feel-good story like this for the holidays. Bravo, Arlo.

Storied Train Used As Vehicle For Giving
Guthrie Tour Aids Musicians With Losses in Katrina

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 17, 2005; Page A03

"This train is bound for glory," sang Arlo Guthrie, joined by his daughter Sarah Lee, son Abe and various friends, as the City of New Orleans train rumbled past factories and fields between Chicago and Kankakee, Ill.

The Dec. 6 trip was actually the first time Guthrie rode the train celebrated in the Steve Goodman song of the same name that Guthrie made so famous. In a hastily-pulled-together benefit, Guthrie and a crew of musicians are riding the City of New Orleans from Chicago to the Big Easy, stopping along the way to play fundraising shows. The goal is to raise money for New Orleans musicians who lost instruments, homes and work as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

But in many ways the trip, which ends tonight with a sold-out show at Tipitina's club in New Orleans, is just as much a celebration of the train itself. The route Goodman wrote about in 1970 was run by the Illinois Central. Now Amtrak operates the 19-hour trip, which runs daily between Chicago and New Orleans, passing through Memphis. The train stopped running because of Katrina's flooding, and the New Orleans train depot was used as a temporary criminal detention facility. But service resumed Oct. 9.

"It really helps people going home to see what they have left," said Darnell Bennett, 38, a kitchen-car staff member who as a child often rode the train from New Orleans to Chicago to visit his mother. "This has always been a lifeline to the South for all the people who migrated to Chicago and Detroit."

When Guthrie heard the train was back on track, he sent an e-mail to his children and a few friends floating the idea of the fundraising trip. Within hours he was swamped with responses from musicians wanting to donate their time and energy.

"We had been glued to the TV" watching the damage in New Orleans, Guthrie said. "Then a little scroll came across the bottom saying the train had resumed service. I thought, why not ride the train I'd sung about 30 years ago, and do fundraisers along the way?"

Trains run in the Guthrie family's blood; famous troubadour Woody Guthrie crisscrossed the country on freight trains visiting starving farmers and labor strikers, and many of his son Arlo's songs also pay homage to trains. In 1987, Arlo Guthrie traveled and sang on the Montrealer train in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Amtrak not to discontinue that line.

Do you understand how much of their networth musicians have invested in their instruments? Brass and most woodwind instruments are relatively cheap, less than $10,000 each, but they wear out and need to be replaced at regular intervals. Good pianos are real expensive. String instruments can cost as much as a house.

The Patsy

At the Times, a Scoop Deferred

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 17, 2005; A07

The New York Times' revelation yesterday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping raised eyebrows in political and media circles, for both its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication.

In an unusual note, the Times said in its story that it held off publishing the 3,600-word article for a year after the newspaper's representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."

The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.

In a statement yesterday, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller did not mention the book. He wrote that when the Times became aware that the NSA was conducting domestic wiretaps without warrants, "the Administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security."

"Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions," Keller continued. "As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that time."

In the ensuing months, Keller wrote, two things changed the paper's thinking. The paper developed a fuller picture of misgivings about the program by some in the government. And the paper satisfied itself through more reporting that it could write the story without exposing "any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record."

Just another citation in the decline of the Gray Lady, who is now the President's bitch. The Times uncovers evidence of the most serious breach of the Constitution in modern times and sits on it for a year like a good puppy when it is told to? "Officials assured" the Times, they say. The same officials who justified torture. Who in their right mind is going to believe anything coming out of the Bush administration? Bill Keller is an idiot.

I also note than none of the Big Three papers have an editorial this morning decrying this travesty. Perhaps they will do better in their Sunday editions.

Deiu et Mon Droit

Behind Power, One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration's war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.

From the government's detention of Americans as "enemy combatants" to the just-disclosed eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants, the administration has relied on an unusually expansive interpretation of the president's authority. That stance has given the administration leeway for decisive action, but it has come under severe criticism from some scholars and the courts.

With the strong support of Vice President Dick Cheney, legal theorists in the White House and Justice Department have argued that previous presidents unjustifiably gave up some of the legitimate power of their office. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made it especially critical that the full power of the executive be restored and exercised, they said.

The administration's legal experts, including David S. Addington, the vice president's former counsel and now his chief of staff, and John C. Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, have pointed to several sources of presidential authority.

The bedrock source is Article 2 of the Constitution, which describes the "executive power" of the president, including his authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Several landmark court decisions have elaborated the extent of the powers.

Another key recent document cited by the administration is the joint resolution passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for Sept. 11 in order to prevent further attacks.

Mr. Yoo, who is believed to have helped write a legal justification for the National Security Agency's secret domestic eavesdropping, first laid out the basis for the war on terror in a Sept. 25, 2001, memorandum that said no statute passed by Congress "can place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response."

That became the underlying justification for numerous actions apart from the eavesdropping program, disclosed by The New York Times on Thursday night. Those include the order to try accused terrorists before military tribunals; the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret overseas jails operated by the Central Intelligence Agency; the holding of two Americans, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, as enemy combatants; and the use of severe interrogation techniques, including some banned by international agreements, on Al Qaeda figures.

Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, declined to comment for this article. But Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associate counsel to President Bush from 2001 to 2003, explained the logic behind the assertion of executive power.

"After 9/11 the president felt it was incumbent on him to use every ounce of authority available to him to protect the American people," Mr. Berenson said.

This Postie has never studied history. It's called "the divine right of kings." If you had ever learned any thing about the French Revolution, Scott, you might be a tad more sceptical when reporting this story. G. W. Bush is shooting for tyrannical powers but none of the pressies have ever seen it happen before because they've never cracked a history book.

God, these are reporters with college degrees who are willfully stupid. What's that "one principal" Bush holds? I'm fucking king and the rest of you are serfs.

Lunch in Eastern Canada

Sometimes I'm so slow that it is embarrassing. I was doing some research on Turkish food when I realized that what is called a doner kabob in the US is what the Canadians serve as a Donair in eastern Canada.

Here's the recipe for doner kabob in the Turkish fashion. The Canadian Donair is here. When Kelseigh sighs over Halifax Donair sauce, this is what we're talking about.

Having dined on the Donairs of most of Atlantic Canada, all I can tell is that I prefer lobster rolls.

Happy Holidays

Postie Dana Milbank took part in a Post Chat earlier today. Here's one interchange I liked.

Boston, Mass.: This country is a wreck.

If we look at our leaders... torture, spying on Americans, bribes, fraud, outing of CIA agents, lying about stock deals, lying about wars...

If we look at ourselves.... our kids are fat, on prescriptions, and 1 in 20 can't read. We've got global warming, high prices, low wages, no health insurance, a housing bubble, and the gap between rich and poor is extreme.

Dana, make it all better, please. I can't take much more of this.

Dana Milbank: On the positive side, Speaker Hastert has saved Christmas by renaming the "Holiday Tree."

Damage Assessment

McCain Defeats Cheney

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, December 16, 2005; 3:36 PM

President Bush's cave-in yesterday on Sen. John McCain's torture ban was embarrassing for him -- but it was a total debacle for Vice President Cheney.

Cheney had publicly taken the lead in trying to scuttle McCain's proposal. When that proved both unseemly and ineffective, Cheney was equally publicly pulled off the case.

When Stephen Hadley -- the like-minded but not nearly as tightly wound national security adviser -- also failed to either rally the GOP ranks or roll McCain, Bush chose to surrender and call it victory.

Cheney was conspicuously absent when Bush invited McCain to the Oval Office yesterday and announced his decision to embrace legislation that was in almost every way identical to what he had promised to veto five months ago.

In fact, the image of Bush and McCain sitting side by side in that room raised the following hypothetical question: Who would be a better vice president for Bush right now, Cheney or McCain?

On the torture issue, the answer is obvious: McCain. Cheney's up-front advocating of the "dark side" was increasingly making even members of his own party distinctly uncomfortable.

What are some of the other themes plaguing the White House these days?

There's the whole lack of candor thing. Bush has recently gotten good press for admitting mistakes -- but its worth noting that they're other people's mistakes. Even now, he's still not admitting he did anything wrong himself. Cheney is certainly not partial to airing dirty laundry. By contrast, McCain is the poster-boy for candor.

There's the corruption issue afflicting the Republican Party in general. Cheney is Mr. Halliburton. McCain is Mr. Clean. He's the champion of campaign finance reform.

And there's the fact that, in part because Cheney is not planning to run for president, the White House is careening headlong into full lame duck status. As attention turns to the 2008 presidential election, a lot of people may be asking if Bush is even relevant.

By contrast, with the Republican heir apparent at his side, Bush's own position could be enhanced -- as could his ability to make Karl Rove's dream of long-term Republican political dominance come true.

I'm not predicting anything's actually going to happen. I'm just saying you might want to prepare for another round of the dump-Cheney tom-toms.

Death of a City

Where's Bush? Not in New Orleans.

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A35

The old New Orleans is effectively gone. If the new New Orleans is to be more than a few port facilities and a sad little "sin and decadence" theme park for liquored-up conventioneers, you need the people to come back. The Congressional Black Caucus has introduced a comprehensive bill designed to attend to the needs of evacuees from the entire Gulf Coast and give them the resources they need to go home, but the Bush administration and the congressional leadership have preferred a scattershot, largely ineffective approach.

"I really get the feeling sometimes that our government would like for these people to remain scattered around the nation and not come back and rebuild," said Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.), chairman of the caucus. "Trying to do it in a piecemeal way is just going to prolong the agony for the people."

It may or may not be wise to rebuild New Orleans on a grand scale -- we may be talking about a much smaller city. But if it's going to be rebuilt on any scale, there has to be some assurance that the next big hurricane won't flood the city again. That means you need upgraded levees, flood walls, pumps -- a whole system of hydraulic protection. The additional $1.5 billion that the White House pledged to spend on the levees yesterday is a start, but just a start. To go any further, you have to know what areas to protect.

Does it make sense to rebuild the devastated Lower Ninth Ward? Even if it is rebuilt, are the people who lived there before the flood really going to come back?

All the issues involved in reconstruction are so interlocked that nothing much is moving, and the longer the city sits empty and ruined, the less likely its renaissance becomes. Who but the president can break the logjam?

It's the responsibility of local officials to design the new New Orleans, but only the federal government is big enough to guarantee the money and provide the determination to make any plan a reality. What institution but the federal government can restore the wetlands south and east of the city into a buffer that will absorb much of the impact of the next hurricane? What institution but the federal government can break through all the jurisdictional barriers and push this halting process forward?

Bush ended his Sept. 15 speech in Jackson Square by pledging that "the streetcars will once again rumble down St. Charles and the passionate soul of a great city will return." Half of that prediction may soon come true -- they're talking about resuming token service on one of the streetcar lines. But the soul of New Orleans is its people, and that soul is being lost forever. Where is the president now?

Preznit Short Attention Span doesn't care.

Ditz

That's News to Her

White House communications director Nicolle Wallace , interviewed by Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on Wednesday: "Thank God 65 to 70 percent of the American people don't get their news from any of those places," referring to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Boston Globe. "They get their news from the local paper that they look at."

Maybe she forgot most of those local papers pick up our wire services?

The Oligarchs

This was in Slate ten days ago, but I missed it. Dahlia Lithwick is one of the mag's legal commentaters and a voice I respect.

Why Alito needs to talk to us about the war on terror.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 5:17 PM ET

Pretend, for a minute, that I am not completely paranoid and that there is truth behind my sense that we are all missing the real story of the new Supreme Court nominations. My fear is that we are all snoozing through an elaborate plan to pack the court for the Bush administration's war on terror. What if all the obsessive talk about whether candidates are for or against overturning Roe v. Wade is a strategic head feint? What if I am right, and Samuel Alito is confirmed to the Supreme Court without ever substantively answering a question about torture, enemy detentions, the rights of foreigners, or civil liberties during wartime?

I think we will, all of us, be very sorry. Not just the edgy civil libertarians or the ACLU types, and not just Jose Padilla, or his attorneys, but everyone who believes there is a place for the rule of law even in the midst of a war, especially when that war threatens to go on forever.

This president—for reasons that hardly warrant repeating here—doesn't really want to be remembered as the guy responsible for the court that overturned Roe. (Although he certainly wants us to think he wants to be remembered as that guy.) No, Roe is not what keeps George W. Bush awake nights. What he wants to be remembered for is winning the war on terror. He wants to be seen as the president who carried the great torch of democracy into the world's darkest corners. And he believes—of this I am certain—that the courts are standing in his way.

I have written before that the arc of his Supreme Court nominations can best be explained by his desire to pack the courts for all of the Hamdan, Hamdi, and Padilla cases to be heard by the courts for years to come. Think about it: Roberts, Miers, and Alito each have a long track record of endorsing executive power. Each seems highly likely to strongly support the president's claims to virtually limitless executive authority in wartime. The Bush administration saw that claim repudiated by a margin of 8-1 in Hamdi. And the president won't let that happen again.

It won't. How do I know? In his 15 years on the federal bench, Judge Samuel Alito has yet to rule on a case substantively involving the war on terror. But Alito's votes in pending and future war on terror cases can be fairly accurately predicted. They lurk in dark alleys, near his decisions about criminal rights, immigration cases, and government power. Alito's record in none of those areas bodes well for people who worry about the Bush administration's push for unchecked war powers.

Robert Gordon has written in Slate, for instance, that in his survey of the criminal and Fourth Amendment cases Alito heard as an appeals court judge, he adopted the position most supportive of the government every time. Justice Antonin Scalia is a conservative who has crafted a healthy jurisprudence of doubt about limitless government powers. Alito, on the other hand, is a former prosecutor who has seemingly never met a search, seizure, warrant, or arrest he couldn't love.

Similarly, Emily Bazelon just wrote about a memo Alito penned on whether there should be any constitutional protection for an unarmed teenage boy shot and killed by a police officer as the youth fled a crime scene. Alito's personal position—that there was no constitutional protection from such conduct—was more extreme than some other Reagan administration lawyers, the Supreme Court's eventual ruling in the case, the dissenters on that Supreme Court, and more than 85 percent of police departments at the time. It's hard to conceive of someone who loves police powers more than the police. But that someone may be our next Supreme Court justice.

This cavalier disregard for defendants of every stripe was also explored recently by Goodwin Liu, in a survey of Alito's death penalty decisions in the Los Angeles Times. Liu found that of the 10 capital cases in which Alito has participated, five were decided unanimously by three-judge panels and the other five engendered split decisions. In every one of the five contested cases, Alito voted against the defendant. Moreover, concludes Liu, "these opinions show a troubling tendency to tolerate serious errors in capital proceedings," including some shockingly erroneous jury instructions.

Which brings us to Alito's record on the rights of immigrants and foreigners. His views on this score were illuminated last week by documents released from his 16-month tenure as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. In one memo, Alito signed off on an FBI plan to collect fingerprint cards of Iranian and Afghan refugees living in Canada. He suggested that the program was constitutional because these refugees were nonresident immigrants of another country, thus freeing the FBI from abiding by court decisions that barred the agency from spreading "stigmatizing'' information about U.S. citizens. Alito simply feels that nonresident immigrants of other countries have no due process rights under the Constitution. The Washington Post last week quoted Martin Redish, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern University Law School, arguing that Alito's logic would likely support the Bush administration's current policy of CIA interrogations in secret European prisons as well.

Despite the Bush administration's urgings to deny review, the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the next big war on terror case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, author of perhaps the most famous words in the post 9/11 struggle between the courts and the executive—"[a] state of war is not a blank check for the president"—will not be on the court to decide it. Samuel Alito, who has made a judicial career out of writing, signing, and endorsing blank checks—will.

Buh-bye, checks and balances, hello executive dictatorship!

God and Caesar

buzzflash, one of my favorite websites, has a terrific interview this morning with former Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart about his new book, God and Caesar in America. Here is an excerpt:

BuzzFlash: You are an attorney who went from Yale Divinity to Yale Law. Our legal system is based on equal protection for people of divergent backgrounds, divergent beliefs, from divergent income statuses – it protects them, and it’s supposed to level the playing field – all people are equal in a courtroom and before the court of law under our Constitution. If the Supreme Court starts to view cases through a theological lens, what happens then?

Gary Hart: Well, all the bad things one can imagine.

BuzzFlash: For instance, suppose the Supreme Court looks at the abortion issue. Judges Alito and Scalia have at least intimated that it is against their religious viewpoint. If judges begin to assess Constitutional issues through a religious filter, what happens to our legal underpinnings?

Gary Hart: It’s very murky, and very, very tough. We’re living in a time where holding office requires you to have, as I say in the essay, "faith" and "values," often undefined. Then you come up with judicial nominees who do have "faith" and "values," but they say, faced with confirmation for the highest court, I will set those aside when I make decisions. It almost stands the whole process on its head. The religious right believes that, by getting George elected, and a majority of Congress, and having a veto power over judges, it is achieving exactly their objective of putting judges on the courts, including the highest court, who will impose their faith and values on the system.

It makes an objective observer very suspicious when the leaders of the world say, I will set my "faith" and "values" aside. They’re being nominated because of their "faith" and "values." Republicans get upset when Democrats are suspicious, but there’s good reason for suspicion, since the whole point is to get people on the court who will insert their faith and values into the judicial process.

BuzzFlash: Your concluding section, entitled "God and Caesar," alludes to the well-known advice, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is God's.” This sums up the dilemma in a nutshell. What is God’s, and what belongs to the realm of politics?

Gary Hart: There’s no simple conclusion. There is not a night-and-day distinction. Almost all of us have faith in something, and we certainly have values. I talk about that old phrase that used to be used – "the moral majority" – well, I think, with rare exception, almost everybody in America and the world is moral, or has a moral compass. Obviously some don’t always follow that compass, but that’s what the judicial process is all about.

My essay is not an argument about taking "values" – I prefer to call them "principles" – out of public life, or even causing people of faith or religion to not participate in public life. I think they should. This is not the argument. It’s a question of when one wing of one religion dominates one party, and then seeks to impose its values on the rest of America, that we’ve gone too far. And I would simply say that we’ve got to get back to the kind of moderate consensus which prevailed up until, let’s say, the age of Reagan, and the period in which the religious right began to assert itself through the Republican Party, where people were tolerant. I keep coming back to those values of Jesus – tolerance, forgiveness, mercy, a sense of social justice and equality. Otherwise, a mass democracy of 300 million people simply will not work.

The divisiveness was introduced by the religious right, and a new set of Republicans in the eighties and nineties, and it has polarized this country. I will make that assertion. I don’t think it was liberals that polarized this country. Liberal Democrats got along well with moderate Republicans. I was there in the seventies in the Senate. You could compromise. You could reach agreement. It is when a different kind of Republican began to be elected that the divisiveness set in.

As I point out in the essay, the reason you can’t mix religion and politics is, religion is about absolutes, right and wrong, good and evil. Politics is about compromise. If you cannot compromise on issues that are not central to a person’s faith – and that’s about 99% of the issues our country faces – then the country doesn’t work. The government doesn’t work. That’s why we’ve had government grinding to a halt in recent years. People are frustrated by it.

We live in a political world which has become black and white, "you are for us or against us," which despises the shades of gray which is where most of us live most of the time. Denying complexity doesn't make it go away.

Read the whole interview. I'm going to go pick up the book this afternoon.

Friday mystery

Somebody left a diamond ring in a stranger's car, along with a typewritten note.

Merry Christmas. Thank you for leaving your car door unlocked. Instead of stealing your car I gave you a present. Hopefully this will land in the hands of someone you love, for my love is gone now. Merry Christmas to you

CNN.com - Heart-broken stranger gives away $15,000 ring - Dec 15, 2005

My theory:
The giver is a mystery (or possibly romance, but I think mystery is more likely) writer who has been writing long enough that he or she used to use a typewriter. The writer's spouse has recently died, and their courtship coincided with the writer's starving artist period. During that time, they were involved in a car theft (either victims or perps) which became a story that they shared for many years.

What's yours?

Star Chamber

Bush Authorized Domestic Spying
Post-9/11 Order Bypassed Special Court

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A01

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.

The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

The aim of the program was to rapidly monitor the phone calls and other communications of people in the United States believed to have contact with suspected associates of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups overseas, according to two former senior administration officials. Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court, sources said.

But the program's ramifications also prompted concerns from some quarters, including Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, and the presiding judge of the surveillance court, which oversees lawful domestic spying, according to the Times.

The Times said it held off on publishing its story about the NSA program for a year after administration officials said its disclosure would harm national security.

The White House made no comment last night. A senior official reached by telephone said the issue was too sensitive to talk about. None of several press officers responded to telephone or e-mail messages.

Congressional sources familiar with limited aspects of the program would not discuss any classified details but made it clear there were serious questions about the legality of the NSA actions. The sources, who demanded anonymity, said there were conditions under which it would be possible to gather and retain information on Americans if the surveillance were part of an investigation into foreign intelligence.

But those cases are supposed to be minimized. The sources said the actual work of the NSA is so closely held that it is difficult to determine whether it is acting within the law.

Since we know nothing about it and there is no oversight, we have know way of knowing if the Constitution is being respected. Given the proclivities of Bushco, what do you think?

Missing the Point

N.Y. Transit Union Rejects Offer and Will Begin Limited Strike

By SEWELL CHAN and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: December 16, 2005

After five hours of intense negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the transit workers' union decided this morning to delay for four days a decision on whether to strike the New York City subway and bus system, but to start an immediate strike against two private bus companies in Queens that are being transferred to the authority's control. The authority, which had offered two 3 percent raises over 27 months, raised its offer today to 3 percent in each of the next 3 years. It also agreed to lower its demand, to 1 percent from 2 percent, the proportion of earnings that it wants new employees to pay toward health-care premiums. But it refused to budge on its insistence that new workers reach age 62 before being able to collect full pensions, compared with age 55 for most current workers.

At 6:30 a.m. today, the union's executive board rejected that offer and agreed to set a new strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. The decision prolonged, for millions of riders, uncertainty about whether the nation's largest transit system will be shut down by a labor strike for the first time since 1980.

The union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, immediately began a strike at Jamaica Buses, which operates 6 local routes and 1 express route, and at the Triboro Coach Corporation, which operates 13 local routes and 6 express routes. The union represents 217 workers at Jamaica Buses, based in Jamaica, Queens, and 490 workers at Triboro, based in Flushing, Queens.

Roger Toussaint, the union's president, and Peter S. Kalikow, the authority's chairman, met at 11 p.m. last night for the first time in the labor talks, just one hour before the union's three-year contract expired at 12:01 this morning.

The key sticking point, according to several union officials, is the authority's proposal that new employees reach age 62 before being able to collect a full pension. Since 1994, the vast majority of transit employees have been able to collect a regular pension at age 55 if they have 25 years of experience.

Mr. Toussaint presented the authority's new proposal at 6 a.m. to the 46-member executive board, which is the union's governing body. The board approved, by a vote of 25 to 14, a resolution authorizing the strike at Jamaica and Triboro and postponing a broader strike until Tuesday. Two members abstained.

Then at a news conference, Mr. Toussaint said that the union had been repeatedly "provoked" and that "we have been left with no choice" but to strike.

Mr. Toussaint criticized Mr. Kalikow for coming to the negotiating table so late in the talks, which formally began on Oct. 14. "One hour for 34,000 workers that was the M.T.A.'s idea of good-faith bargaining," Mr. Toussaint said.

As talks have faltered over the past few days, the union has repeatedly portrayed the authority as forcing its back to the wall.

"We tried to bargain with the M.T.A.," Mr. Toussaint said this morning. "We negotiated well past our contractual deadline, because we wanted to get a deal done, and we still do. However, the M.T.A. is insisting on a contract that would leave the next generation of transit workers way behind - a contract that would put a lock and key on transit workers' access to the middle class."

The decision to begin a strike at the two Queens bus companies may well be part of a legal strategy.

Jamaica and Triboro are among seven private bus companies that have received city subsidies since 1974. In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his intention to end the subsidies and transfer the companies to the authority's direct control.

So far, four of the seven companies have been transferred. Jamaica Buses is to be transferred on Jan. 30, and Triboro on Feb. 20. A third company, Green Bus Lines, is to be transferred on Jan. 9, but its members are represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union.

Because the transfers of Jamaica and Triboro have yet to take effect, union lawyers believe the state's Taylor Law, a 1967 statute prohibiting strikes by public employees, does not apply. The state has received an injunction barring the union from striking the city's subways and buses, but whether that injunction applies to private bus lines that are soon to be public is not clear.

Local 100 represents 1,800 workers at five of the seven private bus companies, and the workers' last contract expired on March 31, 2003.

The union has insisted that those workers have a new contract at the same time as the 33,700 subway and bus workers have theirs.

Excuse me? You have 1,800 workers who have been without a contract for nearly three years, and the NYT can't figure out what this potential strike is about? Jeebus, don't these frickin' reporters don't ever study any history?

As per usual, the MSM doesn't have a clue when it comes to labor issues.

A Busy Week for Paranoids

Just to sum up, this week we've learned that:

1) since 2002, the NSA has been conducting domestic spying with Bush's authorization;

2) the military's also collecting information about 'suspicious activity' by Americans here at home; and

3) there are secret laws and regulations that we apparently can be charged with disobeying, even though we don't know they exist.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?

Abramoff Ex-Partner Adam Kidan Pleads Guilty

By CURT ANDERSON
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 15, 2005; 9:37 PM

MIAMI -- A former business partner of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty Thursday to fraud and conspiracy in the ill-fated 2000 purchase of a fleet of gambling boats.

Adam Kidan's plea bargain is likely to require that he cooperate in the case against Abramoff involving the SunCruz Casinos deal and perhaps even testify against his old partner.

Kidan pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud; four other felony counts were dropped. He could get up to 10 years in federal prison at sentencing March 1.

Kidan declined to speak with reporters after the hearing, though his attorney, Joseph Conway, described him as "happy" with the outcome.

Abramoff and Kidan were indicted in August on charges of conspiracy and fraud for allegedly concocting a fake $23 million wire transfer to make it appear they were putting a significant portion of their own money into the $147.5 million SunCruz deal. Two lenders agreed to provide $60 million in financing for the SunCruz purchase based on that false wire transfer, according to prosecutors.

Abramoff has claimed in court papers that Kidan was to blame for any irregularities in the deal and that he found out about it only later. Abramoff is scheduled to go on trial Jan. 9.

"We'll have to see what impact it has, if any," said Abramoff's attorney, Neal Sonnett, regarding Kidan's plea. He declined to comment further.

Abramoff, a top Republican fundraiser and lobbyist, is also being investigated in Washington on suspicion of defrauding his Indian tribe clients of millions of dollars and using improper influence on members of Congress.

Kidan and Abramoff bought SunCruz from founder Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, who was slain in 2001 in a gangland-style hit while driving his luxury car in Fort Lauderdale. Investigators say Boulis and Kidan were embroiled in a battle for control of SunCruz; Kidan has denied any involvement in Boulis' death.

Three men were arrested in September on murder charges in Boulis' killing and are awaiting trial.

Kidan's guilty plea comes after another of Abramoff's former associates, Michael Scanlon, agreed to cooperate in the SunCruz case as part of a plea agreement in a separate federal case in Washington.

Scanlon said he helped Abramoff and Kidan buy SunCruz by persuading Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, to insert comments into the Congressional Record that were "calculated to pressure the then-owner to sell on terms favorable" to Abramoff and Kidan.

According to court papers, Ney received trips, tickets and campaign donations, allegedly in exchange for official acts. Ney has not been charged and has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

SunCruz, which operates gambling "cruises to nowhere" off Florida, fell into bankruptcy after Boulis was killed and has since emerged under new management.

This was expected, but it's still sweet. One by one, these guys are going down. And Abramoff's the guy in the middle of one humongous spiderweb of GOP corruption.

Poached Garlic Soup

This soup is certainly for garlic lovers, but others who are not so sure about the root fruit will find a side of it they haven't experienced before. Poaching makes it mild. This is a subtle and delicious soup. This isn't something you'd serve at a catered meal (unless it was to the Garlic Convention in Gilroy, CA) but partnered with the right entree, this will be an experience new to most. I've served this to people who thought they hated garlic and made converts with it. Tell 'em it is a cream of potato soup and they'll ask you, "what is that wonderful flavor in the background?" Garlic and onion haters won't even need their beloved "Beano" for this one. Don't tell them and they won't have a problem.

For vegetarians, substitute vegetable broth or, better still, potato broth from cooking potatoes on another day and frozen in the freezer.

30 cloves garlic, peeled (yes, 30)
7 cups chicken broth, divided
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
8 small new potatoes, peeled, diced and reserved in cold water
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup milk
Salt and coarsely ground pepper to taste
Freshly grated parmesan cheese
Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread

In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, combine garlic cloves and 3 cups of chicken broth; bring to a boil and poach 15 minutes or until soft. Remove garlic cloves to a small bowl and mash with a fork; set aside for use in make Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread. Cook and reduce chicken broth to a glaze; remove from heat and set aside.

In a large soup pot over low heat, melt butter. Add onion and sauté until soft. Drain potatoes; stir into butter and onion. Season with salt and pepper. Add 4 cups chicken broth. Increase heat to medium-high; simmer, uncovered, 25 minutes or until the potatoes are softened. Remove from heat and let cool 10 to 15 minutes.

In a food processor or blender, puree soup; return to soup pot. Add garlic-chicken glaze; stir until well blended.

NOTE: The soup can be made 1 to 2 days in advance up until this stage. Refrigerate until ready to finish.

Stir in heavy cream, milk, salt, and pepper; cook, over low heat, another 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Serve in soup bowls and garnish with parmesan cheese. Serve with Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread.

Makes 6 servings.

Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread

6 slices sourdough bread, thinly sliced and lightly toasted
6 tablespoons butter, room temperature
Poached garlic cloves

Preheat broiler. In a small bowl, combine butter and mashed garlic cloves; mash until well blended. Spread garlic mixture evenly over the top of the bread slices. When ready to serve, broil bread for a few seconds or until top is lightly browned and bubbly.

This makes a spectacular first coarse before a hearty entree like a roast. Serve it before a beef tenderloin or rib roast and just soak up the accolades. Dress the top of the soup plates and the sides of the bowls with finely chopped parsely and a quick grind of fresh white pepper. Drizzle some garlic oil along the side of the soup plate. Just for effect.

You'll have enough garlic-butter spread to pass with fresh bread at the table with the entree.

This is hug-yourself-good-food and it will astonish your guests. Astonish. I'm not kidding. And the cost of the ingredients are so cheap that you can afford a beef roast as a main coarse. If you can't put that kind of money into a roast, this will still be achingly good with London Broil, the poor man's steak. Broil the toasts while the steak is resting after you've cooked it and before you slice it. It needs ten minutes, anyway. I keep a raft of those cheap foil broiler pans around from the dollar store so that I can tuck another course into the oven while the big broiler pan is in the sink for washing.

Slice your offering to your friends on a nicely presented plate and enjoy the compliments. Garnish the meat plate with lemon slices and parsley. Have a ball, you are going to enjoy this dinner party.

Serve this with a petite Syrah, my favorite all-purpose wine. Boiled new potatoe with fresh cream butter and steamed french beans with

For vegetarians, substitute vegetable broth or, better still, potato broth from cooking potatoes on another day and frozen in the freezer.

30 cloves garlic, peeled
7 cups chicken broth, divided
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
8 small new potatoes, peeled, diced and reserved in cold water
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup milk
Salt and coarsely ground pepper to taste
Freshly grated parmesan cheese
Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread

In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, combine garlic cloves and 3 cups of chicken broth; bring to a boil and poach 15 minutes or until soft. Remove garlic cloves to a small bowl and mash with a fork; set aside for use in make Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread. Cook and reduce chicken broth to a glaze; remove from heat and set aside.

In a large soup pot over low heat, melt butter. Add onion and sauté until soft. Drain potatoes; stir into butter and onion. Season with salt and pepper. Add 4 cups chicken broth. Increase heat to medium-high; simmer, uncovered, 25 minutes or until the potatoes are softened. Remove from heat and let cool 10 to 15 minutes.

In a food processor or blender, puree soup; return to soup pot. Add garlic-chicken glaze; stir until well blended.

NOTE: The soup can be made 1 to 2 days in advance up until this stage. Refrigerate until ready to finish.

Stir in heavy cream, milk, salt, and pepper; cook, over low heat, another 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Serve in soup bowls and garnish with parmesan cheese. Serve with Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread.

Makes 6 servings.

Toasted Garlic-Butter Bread

6 slices sourdough bread, thinly sliced and lightly toasted
6 tablespoons butter, room temperature
Poached garlic cloves

Preheat broiler. In a small bowl, combine butter and mashed garlic cloves; mash until well blended. Spread garlic mixture evenly over the top of the bread slices. When ready to serve, broil bread for a few seconds or until top is lightly browned and bubbly.

This makes a spectacular first coarse before a hearty entree like a roast. Serve it before a beef tenderloin or rib roast and just soak up the accolades. Dress the top of the soup plates and the sides of the bowls with finely chopped parsely and a quick grind of fresh white pepper. Drizzle some garlic oil along the side of the soup plate. Just for effect.

You'll have enough garlic-butter spread to pass with fresh bread at the table with the entree.

This is hug-yourself-good-food and it will astonish your guests. Astonish. I'm not kidding. And the cost of the ingredients are so cheap that you can afford a beef roast as a main coarse. If you can't put that kind of money into a roast, this will still be achingly good with London Broil, the poor man's steak. Broil the toasts while the steak is resting after you've cooked it, it needs about 20 minutes to rest. This apple cider vinaigrette is all you need on the side over the steamed green beens.

Yum.

From Land and Sea

Read about paella and then go make some.
I've been studying the Spanish regional recipes and this one seems the closest to what I ate in Valencia.

PAELLA MARINERA

(Seafood paella)

Recipe from Paco Nomdedeu

by Montse Nomdedeu

INGREDIENTS: (8 people. Leftovers are delicious)

*
2 pounds short round rice
*
1 cup olive oil (or enough to cover the bottom of the pan)
*
2.5 liters of water
*
1 chicken (cut in small pieces)
*
1/2 pound or so of short pork ribs (cut in small pieces or cubes)
*
Mussels
*
Squid (clean, in pieces or rings)
*
Shrimp (1 or 2 per person)
*
Green beans
*
Snow peas and/or sweet peas
*
Lima beans (flat yellow beans)
*
Pepper (sweet red/green)
*
Tomato (crushed; 1 small can)
*
Garlic (1 head; peel cloves or not, cut them in pieces ; try it different ways)
*
Salt
*
Saffron , Puro Ground (Diana’s suggestion)

You can choose not to use some of the vegetables/beans if you don’t like them. Some people like to use a little of crushed onion. If you make traditional meat-only paella (the real traditional “Paella de la huerta Valenciana”), add artichoke (hearts of soft small ones, cut in 4 pieces or so) and rosemary springs when you add the saffron to the water.

Warm paellón with coating of olive oil. Add pieces of chicken (previously salted) & fry lightly, then add pork ribs (previously salted also). Add the squid, and then when meat is almost done frying, add veggies in order of tenderness: artichokes, peppers, garlic (be careful not to burn it) - wait & stir. Then add green beans & peas. Stir. When veggies are almost fried add crushed tomato. Heat tomato (don’t burn it!) & add water. Boil for 20 minutes. While boiling, check taste & add salt. When satisfied with taste (salt), add saffron (& springs of rosemary if it’s meat-only paella). Stir and wait a little. Then add rice (evenly throughout - water must cover rice by at least 1/2 “. If not, add water and re-taste for salt). Lower heat slowly at this point so water doesn’t evaporate too quickly. Once the rice is evenly distributed don’t stir it. When there is only a little water left add shrimp and mussels. When all water has evaporated, remove & let cool for a few minutes (“reposar”).

¡QUE APROVECHE! (Enjoy it!)

(If the rice hasn’t cooked evenly, before serving, mix the rice from the bottom with the one at the top, which will be harder)

Some people like meat-only paella with snails. The rosemary kind of substitutes the snails and leaves a wonderful flavor (in the Spanish mountains, snails eat rosemary and different herbs, so when cooked, even if you don’t eat them you can still taste the herbs flavor)

Carolina Style

I've been corresponding with Tyler Cowen about finding a decent barbaque joint in the area. He didn't have a lot to add (but read his site for a list of the best ethnic places) and I pulled up this recipe from the Net.

http://southernfood.about.com/od/pulledporkrecipes/r/cpweekly33.htmDelicious pork shoulder, cooked with barbecue sauce and onion, then shredded.

INGREDIENTS:

* pork shoulder roast, about 4 pounds
* 2 medium onions, thinly sliced
* 1 1/2 cups water
* 1 bottle (16 ounces) barbecue sauce, or 2 cups homemade sauce
* 1 cup chopped onion

PREPARATION:
Place half of the thinly sliced onions in bottom of slow cooker; add pork and water, along with remaining onion slices. Cover and cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours or 4 to 5 hours on HIGH heat setting. Drain liquid from slow cooker; place meat back in cooker.
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Add barbecue sauce and chopped onion. Cover and cook on LOW for 4 to 6 hours longer. Stir occasionally. Serve with warm split buns and coleslaw.
Serves 8 to 10.

For true East Carolina barbeque, that sauce should be vinegar and mustard based, without a hint of ketchup, like this.
Serve the shredded pork on a large sandwich bun with Carolina Cole Slaw. In North Carolina, you put the slaw on the bun with the barbeque. And add extra hot sauce. Here at Harmony Hall, we prefer the the real item.

Holiday Cooking

I once had a girlfriend who was a gifted French chef. When she lived in New York, she taught at the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America. She taught me to be a curious cook and taught me a great deal of the technique which got me started as a cook and new and very young wife. This is a dish I've never made, but it is part of her Christmas every year. This recipe is from Texas Monthly magazine, and true to their CIA roots, the chef who wrote it sticks to the classic French preparation.

Ruggles Grill's Bouche de Noelle

This traditional French rendition of the Yule log is all done up for the holidays with two lavish buttercream frostings.

Cake

1 1/3 cups flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 pound butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line bottom of 16- by 11-inch jelly roll pan with parchment paper. Butter paper and sides of pan. Dust lightly with flour.

Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Set aside. Beat butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating until smooth. Add flour mixture in three parts, alternating with milk. Beat until smooth. Spread evenly in pan, and bake 9 to 12 minutes, or until cake is light brown and springs back to the touch. Let cool 5 minutes, then flip cake from pan onto linen dishcloth spread on flat surface. Remove paper. Roll cake tightly lengthwise; rolling cloth in with cake may be easier. Set aside, seam down, and cool.

Coffee-Pecan Buttercream

2 tablespoons instant coffee
2 tablespoons hot milk
2/3 cup soft butter
3 1/2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
1 teaspoon brandy
1 cup chopped toasted pecans

Dissolve coffee in milk. Combine butter and sugar separately. Add coffee mixture and brandy. Set aside 1/3 cup of frosting. Add pecans to remainder.

Chocolate Buttercream

3/4 cup soft butter
2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
3 egg yolks
6 ounces semisweet chocolate,
melted and cooled

Beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Stir in yolks one at a time. Stir in chocolate.

To assemble: Unroll cake, remove cloth, and frost with coffee-pecan buttercream. Reroll cake tightly. Slice off 1 1/2 inch from one end at slight angle. Set cake on platter. Place cutoff end on top of cake to resemble a limb. Frost ends of log and limb with reserved coffee buttercream and rest of cake with chocolate buttercream. Draw barklike lines on log with fork tines. Garnish with meringue mushrooms, shaved chocolate, chocolate leaves, and marzipan holly berries.

Bad Manners

This story has gotten no traction in the US press but it has pissed the Canadians off no end.

Editorial: Canada, stifle yourself!
Dec. 14, 2005. 01:00 AM

Like Archie Bunker's long-suffering wife Edith, Canada's politicians should learn to stifle themselves.

That's the thought of the day from U.S. ambassador David Wilkins, who wants Paul Martin to stop criticizing Washington over Kyoto and lumber.

"It may be smart election-year politics to thump your chest and criticize your friend and your Number 1 trading partner constantly," Wilkins said yesterday in Ottawa. "But the last time I looked the United States was not on the ballot." Last summer Wilkins deplored our "emotional tirades." Now our "heated rhetoric."

In reality, though, it is Washington that puts itself on our ballot when it imposes unfair duties that cost our softwood lumber exporters $5 billion. And while Canada is no Kyoto champion, the U.S. is the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

The New York Times featured a lead editorial yesterday — America's shame in Montreal — on the United Nations climate change conference last week. The U.S. "deserves only censure" for threatening to "blow the whole conference to smithereens," the editorial said.

Yet when Canadians voice similar views, we are branded as American-bashing hotheads. That's not true.

As Martin puts it, "it's the job of the prime minister of Canada to defend the interests of Canada."

Yes, it is. Our tundra is melting, and our exporters are hurting. Like it or not, those are facts, not tirades. All Canadian politicians should be talking them up.

Here's another place where the Bush administration has broken new ground: diplomatic corps staffs and ambassadors never comment on the domestic politics of the host government in an election season. Canadians go to the polls to elect a new government on the 23rd of January. Wilkins is an embarrassment.

Mouthing Off

Bush Declares DeLay Innocent

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, December 15, 2005; 1:51 PM

In a Fox News interview aired last night, President Bush declared that he believes indicted former House majority leader Tom DeLay is innocent of the money-laundering charges brought against him in Texas.

It's unusual for a president in any circumstance to make such a definitive pronouncement about an ongoing criminal case.

But it seemed particularly at odds given Bush's repeated insistence that his obligation not to prejudice a criminal investigation or trial resoundingly trumps the public's right to hear what he thinks or knows about the role of senior White House officials in the outing of a CIA operative's identity.

Bush last year vowed to fire anyone involved in that leak, but went mum once a criminal investigation was launched. Even after his top aide was implicated and Vice President Cheney's top aide was indicted -- raising widespread concern about the ethics and honesty of his closest advisers -- Bush refused to answer even basic questions, saying it would be inappropriate to comment.

Senior adviser Karl Rove is of course still working at the White House; Scooter Libby resigned after being indicted and received a warm sendoff from both Cheney and Bush.

Here's the transcript and video of Bush's interview with Fox's Brit Hume. When Hume asked if he believes DeLay is innocent, Bush replied: "Do I? Yes, I do."

Un-fscking-believable.

Rebuilding NOLA

Feds to Rebuild New Orleans Levees

By DEB RIECHMANN
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 15, 2005; 1:39 PM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush is requesting $1.5 billion more to help make the levee system in New Orleans stronger than it was before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

At a news briefing at the White House, officials dodged the question of whether the levees would be built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, using broader language instead to promise that the city's citizens would be safe and the levees would be "stronger and better."

"The federal government is committed to building the best levee system known in the world," Donald Powell, the top U.S. official for reconstruction, told reporters. "It's a complicated issue."

The money the president is requesting is in addition to the $1.6 billion he has already committed to repair the breeches in the levees, correct the design and construction flaws and bring the levee to a height that was authorized before the hurricane, a Category 4 storm, hit on Aug. 29, killing more than 1,300 people.

"That work is being done as we speak," Powell said.

The additional $1.5 billion that the president is requesting would pay to armor the levee system with concrete and stone, close three interior canals and provide state-of-the art pumping systems so that the water would flow out of the canals into Lake Pontchartrain, Powell said.

Officials said the levee system would be rebuilt to its previous level of protection before the hurricane season next year, and that the process of strengthening them further would take two years.

Color me sceptical. Show me even once where the Bushies have done anything competently. Just once.

Site News

Weather Alert: It's snowing right now at a pretty good clip. This is unremarkable, but we are expecting as much as a half inch of ice this afternoon. That, of course, means possible power outages. I'll ask the guest posters to keep their eyes peeled if I don't seem to be around much.

Late Answer

Repetitious, Yes, but They Didn't Cut and Run

By Dana Milbank
Thursday, December 15, 2005; A19

Lawmakers, diplomats and assorted military types settled into their seats in the Ronald Reagan Building yesterday to watch President Bush's fourth speech on Iraq in a fortnight. A snap poll was conducted in the press section: Would the feature presentation be a new film, a remake with updated effects, or just a rerun?

In the end, everybody agreed: They had seen this movie before.

For the 22nd time in a speech as president, Bush said we would not "cut and run" in Iraq. For the 28th time, he said Iraq was "the central front" in the war on terrorism. And, for the 100th time, Bush promised that "we will prevail" against the terrorists.

The lack of new material in Bush's speech complicated the second act in yesterday's double feature. Jack Murtha (Pa.), the Democratic congressman who has been rebutting each of the four Iraq speeches, had little to work with. "He keeps saying the same thing over and over," Murtha protested during his regular televised rebuttal.

Instead, Murtha opted to rebut the location of Bush's speech. "Let me take a few minutes to remark about the irony of President Bush speaking today in the Ronald Reagan Building," he said. Given "the sorry state of our Army, the erosion of the U.S. credibility in the world, and the deficits far as the eye can see, you've got to believe President Reagan is turning over in his grave."

On the eve of today's elections in Iraq, there was, evidently, nothing left to be said about the matter, as supporters and opponents of the war went into rerun season. Democrats wanted the troops out sooner rather than later. Bush wanted the troops out later rather than sooner. But both sides seemed to be going through the motions as they traded bumper-sticker slogans.

Bush: "We will never accept anything less than complete victory."

Murtha: "American troops have become the targets in Iraq."

Bush: "An artificial deadline would be a recipe for disaster."

Murtha: "You've given them a mission which they cannot carry out."

Bush: "Plant the seeds of freedom."

Murtha: "The Army is broken."

After four engagements, the Bush-Murtha act was getting stale. When Murtha, a hawkish retired Marine, first called for a pullout from Iraq last month, it was standing-room only. Yesterday, only six reporters showed up to see Murtha, who arrived early and stood, silently, at the lectern. Behind him in the House television gallery, titles on a bookshelf were visible: "A History of the American People," "Constitutional Law," and, appropriately for the dyspeptic Murtha, "Diseases of the Stomach."

By contrast, Bush's setting left nothing to chance: 24 flags behind him, four poinsettias in front, and top Cabinet members and supportive lawmakers planted in the audience. Yet for all the passionate words in his text, the president's delivery was muted. At one point he seemed not to be paying attention to what he was reading and ended a thought about the Iraqi elections in the middle of a sentence.

Dana, all the snark is sort of, um, a little late in arriving. Where the fuck were you in the run up to the war, eh? (Sorry, I spent the morning on the phone with pogge and another Canadian.)

The Fingernail Bill

House Backs McCain on Detainees, Defying Bush
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: December 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain's measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.

Although the vote was nonbinding, it put the Republican-controlled House on record in support of Mr. McCain's provision for the first time, at the very moment when the senator, a Republican, is at a crucial stage of tense negotiations with the White House, which strongly opposes his measure.

The vote also likely represents the lone opportunity that House members will have to express their sentiments on Mr. McCain's legislation. The Senate approved the measure in October, 90 to 9, as part of a military spending bill. But until Wednesday, the House Republican leadership had sought to avoid a direct vote on the measure to avoid embarrassing the White House.

The vote was on a motion to instruct House negotiators, who had just been appointed to work out differences between the House and Senate spending bills, to accept the Senate position on the McCain amendment.

The House bill, providing $453 billion for military programs, has no provision like Mr. McCain's, but if the negotiators follow these instructions to the letter, the final bill passed by Congress will

The House vote was 308 to 122, with 107 Republicans lining up along with almost every Democrat behind Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who sponsored Mr. McCain's language and who has become anathema to the administration on any legislative measure related to Iraq since his call last month to withdraw American troops from Iraq in six months.

"Torture does not help us win the hearts and minds of the people it's used against," Mr. Murtha said on the House floor. "Congress is obligated to speak out."

Unlike the tumultuous three-hour debate that Mr. Murtha's Iraq-related measure provoked last month, this measure met with just 10 minutes of statements to a nearly empty House chamber.

Mr. Murtha, a former Marine colonel who is the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said Mr. McCain's legislation was essential to standardizing American interrogation methods and sending a clear signal to the world that the United States condemned the abusive treatment of detainees.

"If we allow torture in any form," Mr. Murtha said, "we abandon our honor."
Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, head of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, was one of 121 Republicans who voted against Mr. McCain's language. One Democrat, Jim Marshall of Georgia, voted against it; 200 Democrats and one independent supported it.

The vote was non-binding. The Congress of the US cannot go on the record endorsing a law which forbids torture. That speaks well of this country.

The Rationale

Polls Open in Iraq As Danger Remains

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 15, 2005; A20

BAGHDAD, Dec. 15 -- Explosions in Baghdad and Ramadi marked the opening of polls Thursday but failed to discourage early voters, including many Sunni Arabs in western insurgent strongholds taking part in national elections for the first time.

At least one mortar round hit a neighborhood near Baghdad's Green Zone as some leaders of Iraq's transitional government cast ballots behind the fortresslike walls. More explosions hit near a polling center in the far western city of Ramadi, a heavily Sunni insurgent stronghold, prompting U.S. and Iraqi forces to cordon off the area. There was no immediate word of casualties in either blast.

Dozens lined up outside Ramadi polling places before they opened, freed to vote by promises from some insurgent groups to refrain from election day attacks and by Sunni clerics' lifting of a boycott call that had suppressed Sunni turnout in January's national elections.

"Even though there were many explosions last night, and even if there are more now or on my way to the polling center, I will come and vote," declared Mizhar Abud Salman, heading to a schoolhouse polling center in Saddam Hussein's home region of Tikrit.

On Wednesday, Iraqis had staged spontaneous celebrations, taking advantage of a three-day moratorium on vehicular traffic intended to guard against car bomb attacks during the election period.
But explosions could be heard in the capital throughout the night. Residents to the south said they could hear U.S. military helicopters and Iraqi troops battling insurgents.

Let us make tomorrow a national celebration, a day of national unity and victory over terrorism and those who oppose our democratic march," President Jalal Talabani said Wednesday in a speech on nationwide television. Talabani, a member of the Kurdish minority based in the north, has served in the Shiite-dominated transitional government for 10 months.

About 15 million Iraqi voters were eligible to select 275 members of the new National Assembly. Complete returns were not expected until late December or early January.

The results may determine whether Iraq becomes a more heavily religious nation, and whether factions will split among sectarian and ethnic regions. The new government will face insurgent and political violence that have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The current alliance of Shiite religious parties was widely predicted to win most seats, as it did in voting in January. But members of the Sunni Muslim minority hoped to win more representation, as Sunni religious leaders encouraged Sunnis to participate in the vote. Many members of the minority boycotted the January elections and an October ballot to approve a new constitution.

The Bush administration considers the elections a third political milestone in the pursuit of its goals following the U.S. invasion and ouster of President Saddam Hussein.

"In spite of the violence, Iraqis have met every milestone," President Bush said in Washington. "We are in Iraq today because our cause has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator," Bush said, confronting growing domestic criticism of the war and of the presence of about 160,000 U.S. troops.

Um, President Bush, where are those WMDs that you scared the crap out of people with? I don't recall you talking about "democracy in Iraq" when you went to war. But you've always been a liar and a failed business man and I really shouldn't expect anything else...

Storm Food

I was intrigued by Chuck's Guatamala post and went looking for the foods of the native tribes. I came up with a recipe for cocoa. It is still one of the most significant exports from this part of the world. And, cor' blimey, I can't think of a better thing on a cold day. That's a serious cup of hot chocolate.
It is so cold here right now that I might start whining, but I'm from International Falls, where Sears goes to test their batteries. Its nasty and icy here. We have an ice storm in the works (note to readers, this is one of the things which takes the power out here. Yes, I have wood laid next to the fireplace.) here in Northern Virginia. We might be down, but Out? Never. If the Washington Branch of Bump is down, we have other branches. Check in with the Flu Wiki Partners at here.
This looks a perfectly dreadful storm here in the midAtlantic, filled with the ice that take our power lines down. Ugh. I laid in enough supplies to get us to Friday.

Archaeology in the News

Preserved Mural Unearthed in Guatemala

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 14, 2005; Page A03

Archaeologists have uncovered an elegantly painted 30-foot-long mural in a ceremonial chamber beneath a Guatemalan jungle pyramid, providing new evidence that Mayan civilization was in full flower more than 2,000 years ago.

Archaeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire and Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology said yesterday that the San Bartolo site, in Guatemala's Peten wilderness, is "the find of a lifetime," depicting the Mayan creation myth and the crowning of a king in vivid color on a plaster wall as though "parts of it . . . were painted yesterday."

The painting is the oldest intact mural ever found in Meso-America, dating to about 150 B.C. in the Mayan "pre-classic" period. But the subject matter has the same breadth of mythology and cultural complexity as that displayed at "classical" Mayan sites nearly 500 years later.

"This verifies what we had long suspected -- that Mayan civilization had crystallized by the time" the San Bartolo site arose, said University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Robert J. Sharer, author of "The Ancient Maya." "The institution of divine kingship is in place -- the imagery is consistent with later times. It's a terrific find."

Saturno discovered San Bartolo in 2001 when he took refuge from the tropical heat by ducking into a looters' trench cut into the back of a jungle-covered pyramid in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. He found himself inside a chamber choked with landfill. But the north wall revealed a four-foot-long swath of beautifully preserved mural depicting the resurrection of the Corn God, a scene from Mayan creation myth.

The rest of this article is simply amazing. Just when you think that all of these places are known, a story like this pops up and shows there is even more to learn about these rich and ancient cultures.

The Mayans are especially ripe for new insights. It's only been recent that anthropologists think they have translated the glyphs in the Mayan ruins and their discoveries from those texts will rewrite everything our textbooks have about how the Mayan people lived.

If you want to see an image of part of the mural the National Geographic website has a large portion of the wall and USA Today looks to have a different segment from it.

Screw the Poor

Some may face choice: Whether to heat or eat
5 states seeking food aid denied

By Richard Wolf
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has denied requests from five states to increase food stamps for low-income families facing higher heating bills this winter
.
Maine, New York, Kansas, Virginia and South Carolina sought to raise monthly food stamp allotments by projecting what families will pay to heat their homes. The increases would have ranged from $8 to about $30 a month for families who pay their own utility bills.

State officials and advocates for the poor said the decision will make it hard for needy families to afford both heat and food. The Energy Department has forecast 25% average increases in heating bills this winter. Research shows that when utility bills rise, some poor families reduce food purchases.

Robert Greenstein, director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said federal food stamp law says benefits should reflect current costs. “It's effectively cheating low-income families,” he said. If the five states' requests had been approved, many others would have followed, he said.

The Agriculture Department, which runs the food stamp program, said the best solution to rising utility bills is an increase not in food stamps, but in the low-income heating assistance program. The administration supports a $1 billion increase, pending in Congress. Advocates for the poor say as much as $4 billion is needed.

Jean Daniel, director of public affairs for the Agriculture Department's Food and Nutrition Service, said states can seek an increase in food stamps if they document higher utility bills. That way, she said, the government can “make sure that each individual is getting the right benefit amount … not too little, not too much.”

The federal food stamp program helps 25.7 million Americans pay for food by giving them an average of $92.70 in purchasing power each month. To be eligible, family income generally must be below 130% of the federal poverty level, or about $25,100 for a family of four.

At least two states — Maine and New York — said they would appeal the decisions.
.....
James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, said the decision “will force people to choose between heat, medicine and food. … We know that people will eat less. … It will have particularly damaging effects on kids, especially poor kids.”

Compassionate conservatism my a**.

Reocrd Distortions

Internet Ads Back Nominee on Search Case

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: December 14, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - As part of what they are calling "law enforcement week," conservative backers of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. began circulating an Internet advertisement on Tuesday defending the judge's argument that the police were justified in strip-searching the young daughter of a man suspected of dealing drugs.

The advertisement is part of a broad effort by a coalition of conservative organizations to spotlight Judge Alito's record on law-and-order issues. The groups are trumpeting the recent decision by the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, to endorse Judge Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court and are seeking signatures from former attorneys general who support his confirmation.

As of Tuesday afternoon, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general under President Bush, and Griffin B. Bell, attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, had agreed to sign the letter, which will praise Judge Alito for his public service, said Keith Appel, a spokesman for the coalition.

.......

The case was the subject of a recent television advertisement by liberal advocacy groups. The liberal advertisement asserted that Judge Alito "voted to approve the strip-search of a 10-year-old girl." The conservative advertisement attacks the "left-wing extremists" who oppose Judge Alito, saying they "may have found new allies, drug dealers who hide their drugs on children."

Gary Marx, the executive director of the Judicial Confirmation Network, said his group hoped the advertisement would reach as many as 10 million Internet users. "If the left groups are going to continue to distort Judge Alito's record, we want to go ahead and engage them in that argument," he said.

Isn't that special? It's now left wing extremists who oppose the random strip searching of 10 year olds by the police. We do it, naturally, to protect drug dealers and not the 10 year old who by their twisted logic shouldn't be anywhere near drugs in the first place or they have that coming to them.

And this is from the group that promised to bring honor and high morals back to the United States. If they aren't willing to stand up and take *gasp* personal responsibility for the positions of their nominee, perhaps they ought to find one that isn't so repulsive to the majority of the population that believe in the Constitution.

A Little Light Reading

Flu Wiki's Will Stewart just sent me this:

You Know You're A Redneck Survivalist If...

*If your MREs consist primarily of Slim Jims, Cheetoes, and Bud Light
*If you listen to the weather so you will know how much electricity you will have that day, ....
*If someone says Christmas ham, and you think you are getting a radio as a present, ...
*If you have to go outside to get something out of the fridge, ...
*If the hood of your truck is higher than the roof of your house, ...
*If your tires are worth more than your truck, ...
*If your honeymoon involved time at a deer camp, ...
*If you always thought "Guns and Roses" was something you get for your anniversary, ...
*If your favorite restaurant has a gas pump in front of it, ...
*If your favorite cologne is Deep Woods Off, ...
*If your 23-channel CB radio is used to communicate with your family,
*If you've ever had a conversation about truck tires that lasted more than an hour, ...
*If you keep catfish in your aquarium, ...
*If you know how to milk a goat, ...
*If your flashlight holds more than four batteries, ...
*If your 5-year-old can rebuild a carburetor, ...
*If your wife's best shoes have steel toes, ...
*If your idea of home security is keeping all the guns loaded, safeties off...
*If your idea of gun control means using two hands ...

Myopia

CNN's odious Kyra Phillips just did a feature on why Christmas is celebrated on December 25. Why is it that the cable channels are incapable of interviewing anyone other than evangelicals when they do a story on religion?

Still Debating Torture

New Army Rules May Snarl Talks With McCain on Detainee Issue

By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: December 14, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday

The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.

The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

Some military officials said the new guidelines could give the impression that the Army was pushing the limits on legal interrogation at the very moment when Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, is involved in intense three-way negotiations with the House and the Bush administration to prohibit the cruel treatment of prisoners.

In a high-level meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, some Army and other Pentagon officials raised concerns that Mr. McCain would be furious at what could appear to be a back-door effort to circumvent his intentions.

"This is a stick in McCain's eye," one official said. "It goes right up to the edge. He's not going to be comfortable with this."

Army officials said the manual required interrogators to comply with the Geneva Conventions, which give broad protections to prisoners of war against coercion, threats or harsh treatment of any kind.

What does it say about our society when I am yearning for the day when we did not have the Congress debating about if we should torture people or not. Even better, do you remember the last President who stood up for human rights? Now that was someone we could be proud of.

Babble

I'm listening to this third or fourth W speech on Iraq in the last week. "Free nations are peaceful?" What horseshit. This free nation has killed 30,000 Iraqis, according to W's own estimate. What's peaceful about that?

There are so many logical fallacies in this speech that my brain just froze up.

Reverse Motion

The Web edition of The Nation brings us this column:

Pro-Alito Buzz Cloaks a Draconian Agenda

Seth Rosenthal

How often, in the past month alone, have you heard President Bush and his supporters claim they want judges who "won't legislate from the bench," believe in "judicial restraint" and "understand the limited role of the courts"? Influential conservatives say they opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers because she didn't have a proven record demonstrating these traits. They are ecstatic, they say, because Samuel A. Alito does.

The right's exuberance over the Miers-Alito switcheroo has made it crystal clear (if it weren't already) that the innocuous-sounding buzzwords carry a substantial subtext. For movement conservatives they are code for a legal regime, endorsed by role models like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, that University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein calls "a political program in legal dress" because of its eerie resemblance to the agenda of the right wing of the Republican Party. If a judge embraces the regime, he or she is called "restrained"; if not, "activist."

Funny thing, though: The rhetoric defies reality. While they talk about judicial modesty, movement conservatives pursue their goals by advocating legal tactics that are downright immodest. A truly restrained judiciary respects the decisions of prior courts and defers to the decisions of the elected branches of government. Yet movement conservatives want to scuttle precedent, strike down hard-won legislation and render other laws toothless.

Following precedent "is fo' suckas." Or so says prolific right-wing blogger Steve Dillard at Southern Appeal. As detailed nearly twenty years ago in reports produced by Edwin Meese's Justice Department, the right would like to raze what it sees as the law's accumulated liberal superstructure and rebuild it from the ground up based on their interpretation of the 215-year-old views of those who ratified the Constitution. Overturning Roe v. Wade is just the tip of the iceberg. Sunstein explains--and the Meese reports confirm--that the new arrangement would feature a Constitution that severely restricts the work of federal regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board; hamstrings federal legislation prohibiting pollution, hazardous working conditions and discrimination; and permits state governments to discriminate against women, ban contraception and regulate private, noncommercial sex between consenting adults.

Note who stands to benefit from this agenda: white male businesspeople. The same people who ratified that Constitution 215 years ago when slavery was enshrined, women were chattel and we still had poor houses. What a great vision for the country!

What's It Worth To You?

City Seeks Stiff Fines for Workers And Transit Union if They Strike

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: December 14, 2005

With three days to go before a threatened transit shutdown, the Bloomberg administration stepped into the middle of the fray yesterday, asking a judge to fine the transit workers' union $1 million and each striker $25,000 on the first day of a strike and to double the fines successively each day after that.

The city's request would mean that on the third day, the union would face a $4 million fine and each striker a $100,000 fine. Transit workers' average pay is $55,000 a year, including overtime.

The union has been negotiating with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency, whose initial wage offers have been forcefully rejected. The contract is set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Friday. By filing the suit, the city put itself squarely in the fight.

"A strike would pose enormous risks to the city and impose serious economic losses on all businesses and residents," said Michael A. Cardozo, the city's corporation counsel. "The city intends to hold the union and its members responsible for their conduct to the full extent provided by law."

The city's suit is identical to one it filed three years ago during similar transit negotiations - the judge never ruled on it - and the new lawsuit came on a day of fast-moving developments.

Earlier yesterday, a judge granted the state an injunction barring the 33,700 subway and bus workers from going on strike, which is prohibited by state law. Then, at 4 p.m., more than a thousand workers gathered outside Grand Central Terminal for a rally, one of several around the five boroughs.

The city's lawsuit was the target of withering criticism at the rally, suggesting a sharp intensification of tensions with City Hall.

"They're not going to force a lousy contract down our throats," Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, told the crowd. "We have told them from the beginning that this contract will be negotiated by bargaining in good faith and not by threats and not by intimidation."

To end his speech, Mr. Toussaint said, "If Mayor Bloomberg wants to know what we think about this lawsuit, I'll show you." With that, he tore the lawsuit into little pieces, to thunderous applause from the crowd.

I don't know what is going to happen with this situation, I have no "inside" information, but I can tell you a few general things about municipal workers.

Public sector "unions" are now the largest segment of "organized labor" in the US. I say that in quotes because, if you don't have the ability to strike, and public sector workers don't, you barely have a union. Wage and conditions negotiations are all about power, and if you can't strike, you don't have any. That's blunt, but it is the truth. The employer can impose whatever conditions they want. If you can't shut them down in response, you have very little bargaining power. I refer you to my earlier essay, The Worker Worthy of Hire, about the unconscious assumptions we have about work, money and worthiness. Labor negotiations are also about power. In the context of NYC, these unions have some that they wouldn't have elsewhere in the country because in this city every blue collar worker is in a unionized workforce and the residents of New York understand that. Here in DC, they would be mostly neutered.

Several years ago, the International Food and Commercial Workers were on strike against one of our grocery chains. I was at a meeting with a bunch of volunteers from my church. As the meeting broke up, we wished each other Christmas greetings and I added, "And don't cross any picket lines!" One of the people said,"Why not?" These were liberals with graduate degrees.

The strike was a failure and management slashed health benefits and imposed a two-tier wage system. In no small part because people like my then-co-religionists couldn't see that labor laws are a religious issue.

UPDATE: I led five strikes or lockouts in the early '90's. One of my negotiation teams included a women whose husband owned a pretty large small business. She told me that if his workers unionized, he'd be put out of business. I told her that if he is treating his workers fairly and compensating them appropriately, a union will never get a foot in the door. She couldn't understand what I said. This is the reason there is so much confusion about labor in this country.

A Human Moment

Good Morning!

I hope you'll forgive me for sleeping in today. Last night was very teary as the weight of the loss of my friend Charles Butler settled on my shoulders. If you know anything about neural networks in physics, the name will be familiar to you. He was one of the founders of that science.

I knew him in a different context, as a seeker of of wisdom, a friend, husband, gourmet and lover of life. The weather is going to be dreadful tomorrow, but his funeral/memorial service will be tomorrow at 5 EST at his and his wife's church, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax, Virginia. Please join me in spirit at that time.

A Little Clams Casino

INGREDIENTS:

* 24 large clams
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 1 tablespoon butter
* 1/2 cup minced onion
* 1/4 cup chopped green bell pepper
* 2 cloves garlic, minced
* 1 cup dried bread crumbs
* 4 slices bacon
* 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
* 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
* 2 teaspoons dried parsley
* 1/4 teaspoon paprika
* 2 tablespoons olive oil

DIRECTIONS:

1. In a small skillet, cook bacon until crisp over medium heat. Crumble, and set aside.
2. Wash clams. Place on a baking sheet. Heat in a preheated 350 degree F (175 degree C) oven for 1 to 2 minutes, or until clams open. Discard any that do not open. Remove meat from shells. Chop, and set aside.
3. Add 2 tablespoons oil and butter to a small skillet, and place pan over medium heat. Add onion, pepper, and garlic; saute until tender. Remove from heat, and cool.
4. In a medium bowl, combine bread crumbs, bacon, oregano, cheese, sauteed vegetables, and chopped clams. Mix well. Fill clam shells with mixture, and place on baking sheet. Sprinkle with parsley and paprika. Drizzle with olive oil.
5. Bake at 450 degrees F (230 degrees C) for 7 minutes. Serve.

The Bird

This is so good it almost hurts.

CIDER-BRINED-AND-GLAZED TURKEY

Unlike most brined turkeys, this one can be stuffed because the apple-cider brine contains less salt than the typical recipe. Begin brining two days ahead.

Brine
4 quarts apple cider, divided
1 1/2 cups kosher salt
1/4 cup whole allspice
8 bay leaves
4 quarts cold water
1 20-pound turkey (neck and gizzard reserved)

Sage Broth
2 cups low-salt chicken broth
1/2 onion, quartered
1 celery stalk, cut into 4 pieces
8 fresh sage leaves

Glaze
2 cups apple cider
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

8 cups Apple, Sausage, and Parsnip Stuffing with Fresh Sage

Gravy
3 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 tablespoons fresh sage leaves
1/4 cup applejack brandy or Calvados
1/4 cup whipping cream

For brine:
Simmer 1 quart apple cider, salt, allspice, and bay leaves in 20-quart pot 5 minutes, stirring often. Cool completely. Add remaining 3 quarts cider and 4 quarts water. Place turkey in brine. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Drain turkey and rinse. Arrange on several layers of paper towels in roasting pan. Refrigerate uncovered overnight.

For broth:
Simmer all ingredients in large saucepan 30 minutes. Strain sage broth into bowl.

For glaze:
Boil cider in saucepan until reduced to 1/4 cup, about 15 minutes. Whisk in butter. Cool completely.

Set rack at lowest position in oven; preheat to 350°F. Remove paper towels from roasting pan. Pat main and neck cavities of turkey dry; stuff loosely with stuffing. Place turkey in pan, tuck wings under, and tie legs together loosely.

Roast turkey 1 hour. Brush with some of glaze. Roast until beginning to brown, about 1 hour. Cover with foil. Roast until thermometer inserted into thickest part of thigh registers 175°F, brushing with glaze every 30 minutes and adding up to 1 cup water to pan if drippings begin to burn, about 3 hours longer. Transfer turkey to platter; tent with foil. Let stand 30 minutes.

For gravy:
Pour pan juices into large measuring cup. Spoon off fat. Reserve 3 tablespoons fat and degreased juices. Pour sage broth into roasting pan. Bring to boil, scraping up browned bits. Combine flour, sage leaves, and reserved 3 tablespoons fat in heavy large saucepan; stir over medium heat 1 minute. Whisk in broth from roasting pan and reserved pan juices. Add applejack and cream and boil until gravy thickens slightly, whisking often, about 4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Strain into sauceboat. Serve turkey with gravy.

Makes 12 servings.

Serve this at your peril. You will be on turkey duty FOREVER.

A Little Something For the Body

I saw Emeril Legasse make this on his Food TV program this evening. The recipe is an old friend, but watching Emeril make it live, with incredible enthusiasm, was inspiring. This is one of the classic dishes from his incarnation of that Nawrleans institutions, Delmonico's on St. Charles St. You can tell he's not a native or even a resident, he still says "New ORlenz," but the recipe has been a local classic for decades.

Emeril is a real chef, I have one in the family and know what they look like, he's not just a TV phenom. The man knows how to cook. I don't watch him every night, but he is one of the things which justify my cable TV bill.

Chicken Delmonico
Difficulty: Medium
Prep Time: 25 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour
Yield: 4 servings

4 (6 to 7-ounce) boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
2 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon Essence or Creole Seasoning, recipe follows
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup fine dry bread crumbs
1 large egg beaten with 1 tablespoon milk to make an egg wash
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1/4 cup minced yellow onions
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
3/4 pound assorted exotic mushrooms, such as shiitakes, chanterelles, and black trumpets, stemmed, wiped clean, and sliced (about 4 cups)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
1/4 cup dry white wine
1 cup chicken stock, or canned, low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 large boiled artichoke hearts, recipe follows, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons chopped green onions
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley leaves

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and set aside.

Season each chicken breast half with 1/2 teaspoon of the Essence and set aside.

Combine 1/2 cup of the flour with 1 1/2 teaspoons of the Essence in a shallow bowl. In another shallow bowl, combine the bread crumbs with the remaining tablespoon Essence. Put the egg wash in a third bowl.

Dredge the chicken first in the flour, shaking to remove any excess, then in the egg wash, letting any excess drip off, and then in the bread crumbs.

Heat the oil and melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet or saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the chicken in 2 batches and cook until golden brown, 1 1/2 to 2 minutes per side. Transfer the chicken to the prepared baking sheet and roast until cooked through, 15 to 18 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a large clean skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of the remaining butter over medium-high heat. Add the yellow onions and cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the mushrooms and cook until soft and they give off their liquid, about 4 minutes. Add the salt and pepper and stir. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons flour, stir to incorporate, and cook until the mixture is thick, about 1 minute. Add the wine and cook, stirring, until evaporated, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Add the chicken stock, stir well to incorporate, and simmer until the mixture is thickened, about 2 minutes. Add the cream, bring to a simmer, and cook until the mixture is thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 2 minutes. Add the sliced artichoke hearts and lemon juice and stir to incorporate. Remove from the heat and stir in the remaining tablespoon butter, the green onions, and parsley. Adjust the seasoning, to taste.

To serve, place 1 chicken breast in the center of each of four large plates and top each with an equal portion of the sauce. Serve immediately.

Emeril's ESSENCE Creole Seasoning (also referred to as Bayou Blast):
2 1/2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried thyme

Combine all ingredients thoroughly.

Yield: 2/3 cup

Recipe from "New New Orleans Cooking", by Emeril Lagasse and Jessie Tirsch, published by William and Morrow, 1993.

Boiled Artichoke Hearts:
1 gallon water
4 bay leaves
3 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons whole black peppercorns
4 large globe artichokes, about 10 ounces each
1 lemon, halved

Bring the water, bay leaves, salt, and peppercorns to a boil in a large pot.

With a small, sharp knife, trim the tough outer skin from the artichoke stems and remove the bottom row of leaves. Using long handled tongs, carefully add the artichokes and lemons to the pot and return to a boil. Place 2 small heavy plates on top of the artichokes to keep them submerged, lower the heat, and cook at a low boil until the artichokes are tender, 20 to 25 minutes. Drain in a colander and let the artichokes sit until cool enough to handle.

Pull off the large outer leaves from the artichokes, and discard or reserve for another use. Remove and discard the spiky inner leaves. Scrape the hairy choke from each heart and slice as needed or serve whole.

Yield: 4 hearts, or 4 servings

Emeril plates the chicken breasts over the artichoke hearts which are sauteed with mushroom, green onion and a duxelles of raw vegetables sauteed together, topped with a slice of canned red beet and sliced tomatoes on the sides. The presentation, decorated with chopped fresh parsley is appealing and I can tell you from personal experience that this chicken is a crowd pleaser. My grocery sells Emeril's "essence" which is really a familiar old combination of spices which have been used by Cajun cooks for generations. The recipe is above. Make your own fresh each time you need it.

If you've never had fresh cooked artichokes, you are in for one hell of a treat. When my co-bloggers show their little kids the right way to eat an artichoke leaf (pulled from the bunch and dipped in melted butter, the ultimate finger food) the kids will be hooked for life. If life gets any better than fresh artichokes and a suite of dipping sauces which include melted butter and hollandaise sauce, I don't think I really need to know about it.

To present artichokes as a first course, in a French restaurant you will be presented with your thorny fruit in a bowl, which will serve for the discarded leaves, and three dipping sauces, typically drawn butter, hollandaise and lemon butter, in porcelain dishes. Dip each leaf before you draw it through your teeth to extract the meat and sauce. If you have room in your cupboards for such specialized things, there are artichoke plates which have a dent for the globed fruit and little wells on the edge for the sauces. If you come to my house, you are going to get your choke in an Ikea bowl and your sauces in some some glass ramekins by Pyrex from the grocery store. Hey, it works and your tummy won't know the difference.

The Sandwich That Might Save Your Life

This is a superb recipe for an American classic. What makes it superb is that it has you making fresh sauerkraut from scratch (it isn't hard.) Over at Flu Wiki there have been days of discussion over whether or not Kraut and Kim Chee are virus fighters. Follow the link, it's kind of entertaining.

Classic Reuben Sandwich Recipe
American Appetizer

For Six

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
1 (10-ounce) package shredded cabbage
2 tablespoons white vinegar
2 tablespoons caraway seeds
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 (16-ounce) bottle Thousand Island dressing
18 rye bread slices
12 sandwich size Swiss cheese slices
2 pounds corned beef, thinly sliced
Softened butter or margarine

Directions:
Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a nonstick 5 quart saute pan over medium-high heat; add cabbage, vinegar, caraway seeds and salt, and sautee until tender. Drain, if necessary, and let stand 30 minutes.

Spread dressing evenly over 1 side of each bread slice. Layer 12 bread slices evenly with cheese, cabbage mixture, and corned beef. Stack layered bread to make 6 (2-layer) sandwiches, and top with remaining bread slices.

Spread softened butter over the top of each sandwich.

Wipe pan clean, and cook sandwiches, buttered side down, over medium heat 4 minutes or until golden. Spread butter on ungrilled side of sandwiches; turn carefully, and cook until golden. Serve immediately.

I have one of these browning in a toaster oven, rather than sauteeing, right now. I like to save a fat calorie now and then.

I like to serve these with mushroom soup.

Gift Giving Suggestion

Wracking your brain for Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Christmas presents for your favorite Lefties? If you've got a lefty who is interested in the health and well being of the American military, let me recommend the ad over there on the right side bar. Untidy: The Blogs on Rumsfeld is a terrific little book as well as a devastating deconstruction of the SecDef. It's also a terrific introduction to the world of lefty blogs for people who don't have our pixel fascination. The editor, Tom Sumner, was a dream to work with and I look forward to working with him again. The link on the right will take you to Amazon, which has the book on sale for the holidays. Yes, I have an extended essay in the book which Tom took from an early blog post.

This is one book in a new series by William, James and Co. which they've named "Informed Citizen." It's about introducing people who are only used to dead tree reading to our cyberworld by publishing books of blogs. Tom's the blogosphere's great evangelizer.

As Duncan likes to say, reward good behavior. The book is only $8.00 for the holidays. Unlike Markos, none of the authors are making a dime off of this, we gave Tom first reprint rights in order to get the series started.

Death With Dignity and Stanley Tookie Williams

It isn't about life, it is about control.

For all their talk about trusting people instead of govornment, their actions are all about the govornment having more and more control over when people live and die.

If it were about life, I would be far more likely to accept the interference. A govornment can legitimately act to protect life. but when a govornment executes people, it makes it clear that the issue is not life but control.

How can you accept a govornment that wants to control your life and your death? Because that govornment claims not to want to control your MONEY?

When you vote for these people - hell, when you refrain from revolting against these people - you sell your sovereignty over your own life and death for a tax cut.

Time to Call Your Senator

Here's an issue I hadn't thought about, from writer and film-maker Tom D'Antoni's blog:

What Congress should really be asking Alito about

As usual, when discussing the merits of Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr., both liberals and conservatives are spending most of their time re-re-re debating the abortion issue and how he will or will not deal with it. They’re each missing several other issues, but one thing they’re both ignoring has folks of a certain age in Oregon holding their breaths, and it’s something that should concern everyone. It’s the Bush challenge to the Oregon Death With Dignity Law.

That law allows the terminally ill, after a rigorous process, to be prescribed a lethal dose of drugs (usually Nembutal) by a physician. The patient may then end his life when, where and in the company of whom he chooses.

The Oregon experience with that law has disproved all of the dire predictions that the (mostly religious-based) opponents made before the law was first enacted. I have interviewed many of the major opponents to the law and the only person to freely admit that his opposition was based on his faith was U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oregon).

The law was passed by the Oregon Legislature and then by the voters in two ballot initiatives. The results of last vote in 1997 found Oregonians voting 666,275 to 445,830 to keep the law on the books.

It’s easy to talk academically, medically, theologically or philosophically about the issue, but when I think about it I see, in my mind’s eye, a bedroom in North Portland on May 3, 2003.

For my collaborator, Greg Bond and I, it was the end of shooting on a documentary we had been producing for twenty-three months, “Robert’s Story: Dying With Dignity.” It tells the story of the struggle of Robert Schwartz, fifty-two years old and terminally ill who had the medication, prescribed legally under the law. The struggle was with the decision when to end his life.

His family and friends gathered that day, and after a back porch communion service, Robert and his partner, his pastor, a representative from Compassion In Dying of Oregon, his mom and dad, brother and cousins participated his death in the most loving way possible.

I said my goodbyes, sat at his bedside and promised I would tell his story, and do right by him. After an anointing service, he drank the liquid Nembutal and went into a coma shortly thereafter, but not before his final act, which was to comfort his crying partner.

I think of the struggle he had trying to choose the right time. Of the two previous dates he had chosen, only to change his mind, because he wasn’t ready. He had more living to do, even in his weakened state. Robert had AIDS and many complications from it.

It was not a snap decision, as the opponents would like you to think. It was the most difficult decision he ever had to make.

Robert loved life, and he allowed us to video a hundred hours of it, in his weakest and strongest times. He gave up the ultimate privacy, his own death, so that others might learn how the Oregon law works.
The documentary is now complete and is in the marketing process.

This issue is not going away. Although it affects hundreds of millions more folks than the abortion issue ever will, it is much the same. The issue is simple, “I want people to have the right to self determination.” Robert told us. “I don’t mean just from their government but in every personal aspect of their life. As long as they are not hurting anybody physically or otherwise it shouldn’t make any difference to the guy next door.”

Isn’t that basic old-school conservative thinking?

When Judge Alito comes before the Senate Judciary Committee, will anyone ask him about his views on this issue, which is before the current court, and upon which his vote could be the difference? There are many terminally ill Oregonians and also those in other states (where the issue has yet to be decided) who are hoping for the peaceful option that we saw in Robert’s eyes.

Misusing the Language

This headline writer should be fired.

Investigation Finds More Than 120 Abuse Victims
U.S. Ambassador Says Abuse Was "Far Worse Than Slapping Around"

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 13, 2005; 11:24 AM

BAGHDAD, Dec. 12 -- Iraqi and U.S. officials found more than 120 victims of abuse in inspections of two Interior Ministry detention centers, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said Tuesday. He said the number of torture victims was far greater than authorities earlier disclosed.

Khalilzad also rejected suggestions from the Interior Ministry that the abuse found at the second prison in an inspection last week was relatively mild. The abuse was "far worse than slapping around," Khalilzad said.

According to an Iraqi official who U.S. authorities say had first-hand knowledge of the second Interior Ministry detention center, at least 12 detainees there suffered torture. Prisoners had their bones broken and their fingernails pulled out, were subjected to electric shocks and had burning cigarettes crushed into their necks and backs, said the Iraqi official. A 13th detainee there was starved to "bones and skin," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The U.S. military said 13 of the inmates required immediate medical treatment and hospitalization. A first, unannounced visit to another Interior Ministry detention center in November found victims of abuse among 170 total detainees there, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said at the time.

This utterly maddens me. "Abuse" and "torture" are not equivalents. Let's call torture what it is. I thought newspapers were supposed to care about the written word.

Fighting Dems

This moved on the Reuters wire service last night:

Fight looms if Republicans change Senate rules

Mon Dec 12, 2005 6:31 PM ET11

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd warned on Monday that he would bring the U.S. Senate to a virtual standstill if Republicans carry out a threat to change its rules by outlawing filibusters on judicial nominations.

Byrd of West Virginia, a staunch defender of the Senate's often arcane rules and procedures, was responding to a comment by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who said Sunday he might move to restrict filibusters if Democrats try to block the nomination of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Minutes after the Senate returned from a three-week vacation Byrd challenged Frist, a Tennessee Republican, in an unusually pointed floor debate.

"If the senator wants a fight, let him try. I'm 88 years old but I can still fight and fight I will for freedom of speech," Byrd said.

Byrd said he did not expect a filibuster against Alito, but complained, "I'm tired of hearing this threat thrown in our faces if we decide we want to filibuster."

The filibuster is a tactic used to indefinitely prolong debate on the Senate floor. The debate can be stopped if 60 senators vote to do so. The Republicans hold 55 of the Senate's 100 seats, not necessarily enough to end a filibuster.

"My principle is an up or down vote ... that's all I'm arguing for, is an up or down vote," Frist told Byrd.

Byrd shot back, "That's never been the rule here. Senators have the right to talk, the right to filibuster."

If Frist tries to limit that right, "He's going to see a real filibuster," Byrd warned.

Bob Byrd is one of the great filibusterers of the Senate. This is going to be some interesting political theater, if it happens.

The Question

A Unit's Fitful Year at War
For Men of the 7th Cavalry's 5th Battalion, Iraq Tour Meant Long Days Broken by Startling Violence

By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 13, 2005; Page A01

BALAD, Iraq-- Long before he came to Iraq, Spec. Russell Nahvi hoped to save the world. In a spiral-bound notebook filled with math equations, he jotted his secret yearnings: "I PRAY one day I can make the world proud of me. I hope I can restore an unknown peace to wartorn nations, peoples, families, friends."

Nahvi's ambitions led him to a dark road on the outskirts of this town, where, on a patrol Oct. 19, a bomb hidden in a pothole dismembered him and incinerated his Humvee. Two other Americans were also killed. One soldier survived: a platoon sergeant who managed to wrench himself out of the vehicle, flames rolling off him.

Afterward, the Pentagon tersely attributed the soldiers' deaths to "enemy indirect fire." An officer handed Nahvi's mother, Nancy, a form asking if she wanted her 24-year-old son's body parts returned if they were recovered. President Bush sent his parents a three-paragraph condolence letter. It contained a typo: "God less you."

"It was just a grunt's death," said Nancy Nahvi, an Arlington, Tex., nurse, her voice tinged with bitterness.

Nahvi was assigned to the 5th Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga. The unit's year-long combat tour, now in its final days, is a study in the banality of war: ordinary American lives confronted by moments of extraordinary violence, set against the backdrop of an inscrutable culture and an unfamiliar land.

This account of the unit's year at war was drawn from soldiers' diaries, from correspondence and from interviews in Balad, in the heart of Iraq's Sunni Triangle, where the 5th Battalion is based. It also draws on interviews in the United States with relatives of the soldiers, as well as Vietnam veterans of the same battalion, many of whom sponsored troops in Iraq. The experience has reverberated in a profound way among soldiers and their families, much as it has divided the nation over the price of a war now nearing the end of its third year.

"What is the purpose of us really being over there?" asked Latisa Baker, whose husband, Staff Sgt. L.B. Baker, 38, of Belcher, La., was the sole survivor of the attack that killed Nahvi. As she spoke, Baker had just been released from an Army hospital in San Antonio. He sat stiffly on the couch in his redbrick house near Fort Stewart, nursing a beer, second-degree burns covering nearly 10 percent of his body.

"People dying every day, for what? That's the question: For what?" Latisa Baker said. "If you give me a reason for why we're really fighting, then maybe I can handle it a little better. But we really don't know."

"You know, when I was in Iraq I never even thought about why I was over there," Baker told his wife. "I was just doing my job."

John Kerry's question in the "Winter Soldiers" hearings after Viet Nam remains germane: "how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Bias

After 14 Weeks, Evacuees Settle Into 14th Home

By JODI WILGOREN
Published: December 13, 2005

Five shelters. Six hotel rooms. Twelve days in the home of a good Samaritan in a tiny Louisiana town where they were the only black people. Six weeks in Durham, N.C., in the two-bedroom apartment that a church found for Mr. Brown's mother after the storm, where no buses ran nearby and a cab to Wal-Mart cost $10.

And, since shortly before Thanksgiving, this dark room decorated with a Cinderella princess poster in a shotgun shack, where nearly all they have is packed in a plastic tub and several suitcases stacked on top of each other in the cramped closet.

"We don't know when we're going to have to pick up and go again," said Mr. Brown, 24, whose apartment near downtown New Orleans was destroyed by a fire after the hurricane. "It's just surviving, you know. You don't know where your next turn is going to be."

The immediate aftermath of the hurricane exposed the deep divide between New Orleans's haves and have-nots, as middle-class families rushed to hotels while the poorest of the poor suffered in the squalor of the Superdome.

The chasm remains, more than three months later. Thousands of the displaced have taken significant steps to rebuild their lives, returning to surviving sections of the region or finding new jobs, new schools and new homes out of state. But the Jackson-Browns, who are not married and lack high school diplomas, credit cards, even driver's licenses, are among the legions of desperately destitute still lost and in limbo.

Their troubled, directionless odyssey is one of opportunities missed and squandered, of government money and charitable donations spent partly on a stack of DVD's and costume jewelry, of fumbling to find family without phone numbers, of many days doing little more than waiting for help to somehow happen.

Ms. Jackson, 25, long ago applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a travel trailer, but there are 78,000 families waiting with her for the few hundred units opening in Louisiana each day. Mr. Brown longs to return to New Orleans in search of his still-missing brother, but he has no place to stay, no way to make a living, not even a ride into the city 80 miles away.

So they are camped here in a rundown section of Baton Rouge, sharing the three-bedroom house Ms. Jackson's sister, husband and two children - also New Orleans refugees - rent for $600 a month through the federal government's Section 8 voucher program for the poor. Ms. Jackson, still in pajama bottoms in the late afternoon, stirs pork and beans as Mr. Brown arrives, pants painted with dirt, from his new $7.50-an-hour job at a concrete company.

"We're still together, that's the biggest thing, and we're with family - at least we're around people we know," Mr. Brown said. "It ain't feel like home until you got your own. You might feel happy, you might feel wanted, but it ain't nothing like your own."

Notice the way that Wilgoren plays into the popular bias about the poor, that they spend what they are given on crap, have no discipline and deserve to be poor. This is horseshit. The middleclass treat shopping as recreation and buy things they don't need all the time. If a poor person goes to a dollar store and buys something frivolous, it is treated as a social sin.

Hanging Crepe

Things are going to be a little subdued around here today. As happy as I am to be back, someone I loved a lot died yesterday morning of ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. My uncle died from this 2 years ago. It is a particularly cruel way to go. Read about ALS on the link, and if you have some funds to put into an end of the year charitable gift, consider the ALS Foundation. There is a lot of research going on and they could really use your help.

Charles, I'm going to miss you a lot. But you knew that.

Supreme Showdown

All I want to know is, who blinks first... the Constitution or Tom Delay?

Top court to review Texas redistricting plan

Mon Dec 12, 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide a challenge by Democrats and minority groups to the controversial 2003 Republican-supported congressional redistricting plan in Texas.

The justices agreed to review a ruling by a federal three-judge panel that upheld the bitterly contested map, which had been strongly supported by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas.

DeLay, the former second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, faces money laundering charges in Texas as part of a campaign finance investigation. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The Texas Legislature adopted the redistricting plan after calling three special sessions. Democrats stymied efforts to approve the plan at the first two sessions by leaving the state and denying Republicans a quorum.

Those challenging the redistricting plan argued it amounted to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander by manipulating voting districts to give one party an unfair advantage and that it diluted the voting strength of minorities.

Nina Totenberg had a great break down this evening on all of the different points the SCOTUS has to look at. There are 4 areas of concern for the plantiffs and the Court will hold a two hour session for the oral arguement which is quite unusual (I hope they provide an audio recording like they have for some other recent important cases).

SCOTUS Blog also speculates that the central area of focus will deal with mid year redistricting. If so, that could reduce some of the blatant gerrymandering that has taken place in many states.

Site News

There was a lot of activity at The Flu Wiki over the weekend. We received the gift of free dedicated server hosting from TextDrive.com, our hosting service. This fantastic gift will enable the wiki to continue to grow. We thank and applaud this community minded business.

Last week, USA Today printed an interview with me and printed Flu Wiki's URL. The traffic coming from that article crashed our server and sent us a message that we were beginning to outgrow the very basic hosting package I'd purchased. Pogge and I and the tech staff at TextDrive worked overnight Wednesday to bring the server back on Thursday. On Friday, traffic started to peak again and disrupt the server. I got an email from Nate Ladd, TextDrive's tech director, asking me to immediately upgrade my hosting package to something that would start costing real money, but handle the traffic and keep from crashing their server. At Christmastime. I got out my debit card and went to their home page to enter the information.

Two hours later my phone rang. It was Nate Ladd, calling to tell me that TextDrive was donating a full dedicated server and hosting service, the kind they give their top corporate customers, for free, gratis, as a public service. Pogge and I spent most of Saturday with Nate migrating the site to the new server. As my wiki partners will tell you, "speechless" isn't a word that applies to me very often. When Nate called, I was thunderstruck and I hope I thanked him profusely. I don't think I cried the big, fat tears of relief until later that night. I might have blubbered on the phone. I don't remember.

If you are looking for a hosting service which will keep you in the loop with excellent communication, guarantee you excellent uptime and treat you fairly and, if you blog, treat you like a human being, I cannot recommend TextDrive highly enough. I have a lot of experience with hosting services, including the Big Five service which hosts this site, and most of my experience has been unpleasant. They want their money when they want it, but don't expect customer service and tech support to match the efficiency of their billing department. TextDrive is different. I have a lot of money invested in a couple of year's hosting with the company currently hosting Bump. As soon as pogge and I get the upgrade completed and we are sure the platform is stable, we are changing hosts, to TextDrive. Once we move, I'll have a few things to say about the current host.

The URL will change, too, to something which is a better match for Just a Bump in the Beltway. I don't own http://www.node707.com. It belongs to Mel Goux, the woman who gave me this blog two years ago. Pogge and I have been kicking around a better URL for a while and this is going to happen.

As I told you earlier, as we start our third year, there are going to be some changes, some of them forced by the circumstances of my new job, some of them just flowing out of the good sense experience of having learned from a couple of years of blogging. That's a decade in blog years. My new boss wants me to continue blogging (I won't get dooced again.) because this is the place I try things, experiment and keep my writing and editing skills sharp, but the new job is going to be really intense and I have a healthy respect for the fact that I'm not 30 anymore.

The new job has really come from both this blog and Flu Wiki. The organization is looking for someone who understands blogs and wikis and can work with the people who run both. They have their own hosting situation which has Google-like capabilities, but if they didn't, I'd take them to TextDrive.

I'm looking for one more thing. I need a Web designer for the new site that will be my job. It's in prototype right now, the realm of developers. All the data is there but it isn't attractive and it is hard to use. If you are or know a designer who is PHP capable and experienced with the Drupal platform, shoot me an email at [email protected]. I'll need someone who has time on their schedule in a February-April timeframe next year. I have very distinct ideas about what makes a website work for the ordinary user and I'm willing to have the right designer test them.

Ahhh. It is good to be home.

Spoiling for a fight

Update 1: Byrd Warns Frist Against 'Nuclear Option'

Associated Press
12.12.2005, 05:32 PM

Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia said Monday he doesn't expect Democrats to filibuster the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, but he still chastised Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for threatening to stop any such effort through a drastic parliamentary effort that has been dubbed the "nuclear option."

"If he ever tries to exercise that, he's going to see a real filibuster if I'm living and able to stand on my feet or sit in my seat," Byrd said in a Senate debate with Frist, R-Tenn.

"If the senator wants a fight, let him try it," said Byrd, the Senate's senior Democrat. "I'm 88 years old, but I can still fight, and fight I will for freedom of speech. I haven't been here for 47 years to see that freedom of speech whittled away and undermined. "

The animated exchange, springing from the majority leader's threat on Sunday to block judicial filibusters, featured Frist waving his hands and wiping his brow in exasperation.

Byrd insisted that Democrats have not threatened to filibuster Alito, who was chosen by President Bush as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In response, Frist read from a half-dozen news stories that quoted Democrats mentioning the option, looking back at Byrd after each item.

"I will do everything I possibly can if your side chooses, if the Democrat side chooses to filibuster," Frist said.

Senate Democrats have questioned whether Alito, a federal appeals court judge, has the proper judicial temperament and ideology to replace O'Connor. Some have said Alito's views on issues such as voting rights and abortion could provoke a filibuster unless he allays their concerns about his commitment to civil rights at his confirmation hearings, beginning Jan. 9.

The filibuster is a parliamentary tactic whereby senators use their right to virtually unlimited debate to block measures, legislation or nominations. It takes 60 votes in the 100-member Senate to stop a filibuster.

Under Frist's scenario, the GOP would seek a parliamentary ruling that declares filibusters are not permitted against judicial nominees. That ruling ultimately would go before the full Senate for a vote, with a simple majority required to prevail. Republicans hold 55 seats.

Democrats like Byrd have threatened to retaliate with a fight that could snarl Senate business for months.

Doesn't Frist remember when Harry Reid took the Senate into closed session? Does he want that to happen every day the Senate is in session?

All Things Flu

The WaPo Sunday Magazine had a big (and very good) avian influenza story yesterday:

Can We Stop the Next Killer Flu?

By Joel Achenbach

Sunday, December 11, 2005; Page W10

Scientists like Jeffery Taubenberger aren't just going to sit there waiting for a pandemic. They're gearing up for the war between bugs and humans

JEFFERY TAUBENBERGER, VIRUS HUNTER, goes to work in a bland building overlooking I-270 in Rockville. It's the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and it is scheduled to be "disestablished" as part of the broader plan to close military bases around the country. Taubenberger doesn't know for sure what he'll be doing in a year or so. For now, he's still walking past the fluttering flags every day, down a flight of steps to a windowless office, where he's trying to save the world from a mysterious germ.

Doom and Gloom Talk Will Be Limited to 30 Minutes Daily, reads a sign on his bookshelf. I ask if that's a reference to the avian flu. No, he says, that's about the base closings.

The office is small and cluttered, with multiple stacks of documents, suggesting a man who is struggling to impose order on an overly busy life. His phone keeps ringing -- everyone wants a piece of him. You can't pick up a newspaper without seeing a story about the possible plague of avian flu, also known as bird flu or, to be scientifically correct, influenza A/H5N1. Millions could die, the stories say. Or tens of millions. Or hundreds of millions. Avian flu has reached a cultural and media tipping point, a kind of celebrity as the premier biological menace to civilization.

Avian flu is certainly a frightening virus. It kills birds, can infect human beings and has been lethal in about half of the documented cases so far in Asia and Indonesia. More than 60 people have died already. But so far it hasn't become easily transmissible from one human to another, unlike the common influenza virus that circulates every winter. Avian flu is still just that -- a bird flu, not a human flu. Every article about this flu has a boilerplate paragraph, as if mandated by law, stating that scientists fear the virus will mutate, become highly contagious in humans, and create a pandemic that will rival the catastrophe of the Spanish influenza of 1918.

Taubenberger is doing his part to keep that from happening. He wants to understand the various types of flu viruses at the most essential level -- tunneling deep into their genetic mysteries. What kind of mutation could turn avian flu into a pandemic pathogen? What genetic improvisations in these little nodules of RNA and protein -- these things so small and spare they hardly deserve the grandiose label of "microbe" -- can turn an ordinary flu into a cold-blooded killer?

There was a lot of activity at The Flu Wiki over the weekend. We received the gift of free dedicated server hosting from TextDrive.com, our hosting service. This fantastic gift will enable the wiki to continue to grow. We thank and applaud this community minded business.

We're Back!

My, that was a long, strange weekend. Here's what happened: our friend pogge attempted to upgrade the Movable Type platform to the most recent version on Friday night. There was a glitch in the process and the software locked us all out. It's taken him three days, almost, to repair the damage. Needless to say, all of our anxiety levels have been through the roof while pogge unsnarled the code. He's going to do some more research and try to figure out what went wrong before we try that upgrade again. At any rate, sending out that message, "we're back," to my blogging partners was the best thing I've been able to do in nearly 72 hours. Expect the news and attitude to return shortly.

Monday Snark

New York Time's syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd concludes her opinion piece today with this observation:

Speaking of silly masquerades, who does Samuel Alito think he’s fooling by presenting himself as a reasonable jurist? Here’s a guy whose entire career seems to be based on interfering with women’s lives. He wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, condoned the strip search of a 10-year-old girl and belonged to a conservative alumni club that resisted the admission of women to Princeton.

All in all, a bad week for women — sheer torture to watch.

Clusterfailure

Slow Business Administration

Friday, December 9, 2005; Page A30

THERE ARE many competitors for the title. But after viewing the video (available at http://sbc.senate.gov/democrat/20051108.cfm ) of a hearing held Nov. 8 by the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, we'd like to nominate Hector V. Barreto, chief of the Small Business Administration, as "the next Michael Brown." The committee chairwoman, Sen. Olympia

J. Snowe (R-Maine), began the session by pointing out that the Small Business Administration had, at that time, processed only 10 percent of 28,540 applications for disaster loans from small businesses in the Gulf Coast area and had approved only 3 percent of them. Mr. Barreto responded with a long and self-pitying description of how difficult things remain in the Gulf, how emergencies are not really his responsibility and how much his agency's performance had improved lately.

Unfortunately, "improvement" isn't the first word that comes to mind when the SBA's loan records are examined a month after that hearing. As of Tuesday, the SBA had received 37,214 applications for disaster business loans. Of those, 2,127 have been approved. Meanwhile, Mr. Barreto and his agency are still resisting the committee's proposal to give the SBA funding to make short-term "bridge loans" similar to those set up to help businesses affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (loans that the affected states were making before they ran out of funding), arguing that the same needs are met through other SBA programs. This may well represent the first time a government agency has resisted a congressional attempt to give it more money. It may also help explain why economic recovery in Louisiana is going so slowly.

I'm booked for the rest of the afternoon. Anybody want to do some digging on this bozo and find out if his only qualification for the job is that he's a Bush Ranger?

Polluting the Military

Dan Froomkin of the WaPo is going on paternity leave later this month when his first child is born. That's going to be a great loss. He finds things other people miss. Case in point from today's White House Briefing:

Greg Kelly of Fox News is pursuing a story no one else seems to want to touch. On Tuesday, he filed this report: "Twice last month in speeches to military audiences, the president attacked Democrats and fired back at their accusations that pre-war intelligence was manipulated by his administration. . . .

"The attacks against critics at military settings may have put troops in the awkward position of undermining their own regulations. A Department of Defense directive doesn't allow service members in uniform to attend 'partisan political events.' . . .

"Several members of the military told FOX News that Bush is inviting the troops to take sides in a partisan debate in his speeches.

" 'This is a very bad sign,' said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who led Central Command in the early 1990s and is an administration critic. 'This is the sort of thing that you find in other countries where the military and political, certain political parties are aligned.' "

Kelly apparently isn't done with the story. Here he is asking a question at yesterday's press briefing:

"Q Scott, this is going back a little bit, but we've received some complaints from soldiers, both former and current, about the Tobyhanna speech and the Elmendorf, Alaska speech. They cite their own regulations that say U.S. soldiers cannot participate in partisan political activity. But when the President attacked Democrats, they are -- they feel like they were put in the position where they're supporting a democratic cause in uniform. Does the President feel --

"MR. McCLELLAN: Who said that? I think the President was talking as Commander-in-Chief to our troops and talking to them about the war that we're engaged in.

"Q Well, he was talking about Democrats, as well. 'Some Democrats who voted to authorize use of force are now rewriting the past.' He said, 'It is irresponsible Democrats --

"MR. McCLELLAN: That's true.

"Q -- 'claim we misled them.'

"MR. McCLELLAN: Now, I notice -- now, I notice they're not making those same claims recently.

"Q Well, nevertheless, does the President feel like it's appropriate to inject the troops into what is, I think, quite clearly a partisan debate?

"MR. McCLELLAN: No, I disagree. The President is the Commander-in-Chief. No one has been more involved in this war on terrorism than our troops and their families. And our troops understand the importance of the mission."

This doesn't surprise me, of course. Just when you think Bush can't sink any lower, he does.

Wave of the Future

Listen Up! Oxford Dictionary Picks Its 'Word of the Year,' and It's 'Podcast'

By E&P; Staff

Published: December 08, 2005 10:20 AM ET

NEW YORK All sorts of media operations have been studying its uses, and now the term "podcast" has been declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, and will be added to the online version of the dictionary during the next update early next year.

The word, of course, is derived from a combination of "broadcasting" and the Apple listening device "iPod."

Some have said they resent the Apple branding and proposed "audioblogging" or "blogcast" or some such as an alternative, to no avail.

Oxford apparently will define the word as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player."

The term was coined, according to the BBC, by journalist Ben Hammersley.

Podcast was considered for the honor last year, but didn't gain wide use until this year.

Also considered this year: bird flu, trans fat, sudoku (the puzzle), lifehack, rootkit.

I will be getting into podcasting next year. I really haven't been impressed with what I've heard so far out of the amateurs. I'm a media pro and know how hard it is to do well. Most people don't have the background knowledge or experience.

Sick Theater

Once in a while even the wingnuts get it right.

Man for a Glass Booth

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, December 9, 2005; Page A31

Of all the mistakes that the Bush administration has committed in Iraq, none is as gratuitous and self-inflicted as the bungling of the trial of Saddam Hussein.

Although Hussein deserves to be shot like a dog -- or, same thing, like the Ceausescus -- we nonetheless decided to give him a trial. First, to demonstrate the moral superiority of the new Iraq as it struggles to live by the rule of law. Second, and even more important, to bear witness.

War crimes trials are, above all and always, for educational purposes. This one was for the world to see and experience and recoil from the catalogue of Hussein's crimes, and to demonstrate the justice of a war that stripped this man and his gang of their monstrous and murderous power.

It has not worked out that way. Instead of Hussein's crimes being on trial, he has succeeded in putting the new regime on trial. The lead story of every court session has been his demeanor, his defiance, his imperiousness. The evidence brought against him by his hapless victims -- testimony mangled in translation and electronic voice alteration -- made the back pages at best.

"This has become a platform for Saddam to show himself as a caged lion when really he was a mouse in a hole," said Vice President Ghazi Yawar. "I don't know who is the genius who is producing this farce. It's a political process. It's a comedy show."

There hasn't been such judicial incompetence since Judge Ito and the O.J. trial. We can excuse the Iraqis, who are new to all this and justifiably terrified of retribution. But there is no excusing the Bush administration, which had Hussein in custody for two years and had even longer to think about putting on a trial that would not become a star turn for a defeated enemy.

Why have we given him control of the stage? We all remember the picture of him pulled out of his spider hole. That should be the Saddam Hussein we put on trial. Instead, with every appearance, he dresses more regally, emerging from cowering captive to ordinary prisoner to dictator on temporary leave. Now he carries on as legitimate and imperious head of state. He plays the benign father of his country, calling the judge "son," then threatens the judge's life. Hussein shouts, defies, brandishes a Koran. The judge keeps telling him he's out of order. He disobeys with impunity, the guards not daring to intervene.

What kind of message does that send to Iraqis who have been endlessly told that Hussein and his regime were finished? "The performance has heartened his followers," writes The Post's Doug Struck from Baghdad. "In Tikrit . . . a large crowd of demonstrators chanted their loyalty on Tuesday. Several marchers said they were emboldened by his courtroom bravado."

Charles gets a little shrilly propagandistic, but his basic point is correct. This is another example of Bushco incompetence. I haven't checked in there lately, but has anyone seen how this is playing on Al Jazeera?

Us vs. Them

T. R. Reid generally does a responsible job of covering education issues but I have a sense that there is another part of this story which is missing. I have a sense that if the two boys involved had had there interchange in German or Russian, there wouldn't have been an issue.

Just a question from me which is never answered in the article: are students who are taking language classes as part of their accredited study forbidden to practice in the hallways?

Spanish At School Translates to Suspension

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 9, 2005; Page A03

KANSAS CITY, Kan., Dec. 8 -- Most of the time, 16-year-old Zach Rubio converses in clear, unaccented American teen-speak, a form of English in which the three most common words are "like," "whatever" and "totally." But Zach is also fluent in his dad's native language, Spanish -- and that's what got him suspended from school.

"It was, like, totally not in the classroom," the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. "We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he's like, 'Me prestas un dolar?' ['Will you lend me a dollar?'] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I'm like, 'No problema.' "

But that conversation turned out to be a big problem for the staff at the Endeavor Alternative School, a small public high school in an ethnically mixed blue-collar neighborhood. A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school.

Watts, whom students describe as a disciplinarian, said she can't discuss the case. But in a written "discipline referral" explaining her decision to suspend Zach for 1 1/2 days, she noted: "This is not the first time we have [asked] Zach and others to not speak Spanish at school."

Since then, the suspension of Zach Rubio has become the talk of the town in both English and Spanish newspapers and radio shows. The school district has officially rescinded his punishment and said that speaking a foreign language is not grounds for suspension. Meanwhile, the Rubio family has retained a lawyer, who says a civil rights lawsuit may be in the offing.

The tension here surrounding that brief exchange in a high school hall reflects a broader national debate over the language Americans should speak amid a wave of Hispanic immigration.

The National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group, says that 20 percent of the U.S. school-age population is Latino. For half of those Latino students, the native language is Spanish.

Conflicts are bursting out nationwide over bilingual education, "English-only" laws, Spanish-language publications and advertising, and other linguistic collisions. Language concerns have been a key aspect of the growing political movement to reduce immigration.

"There's a lot of backlash against the increasing Hispanic population," said D.C. school board member Victor A. Reinoso. "We've seen some of it in the D.C. schools. You see it in some cities, where people complain that their tax money shouldn't be used to print public notices in Spanish. And there have been cases where schools want to ban foreign languages."

Outside of the US, Yanks are seen as self-absorbed, insular, belligerant and narcissistically jingoistic. That is what I see at work here. It is easy to make yourself feel like you belong to an important group by setting others as an antagonistic "Other." Then you can simplistically define yourself as what you are against. That's a whole lot less work than finding out what you stand for.

Torturous Decisions

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: December 9, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

....

During his time in Egyptian custody, Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation. American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation. They have said that the United States carries out the renditions only after obtaining explicit assurances from the receiving countries that the prisoners will not be tortured.

When you consider that every other Western nation avoids using torture because it is unrealiable, isn't that a sign there is something fundaentally wrong with the people in charge. This is what the famous Enlightment philosopher Cesare Beccaria had to say on the subject:

No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection until it has been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorize the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? This dilemma is frequent. Either he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary. If he be innocent his crime has not been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations to expect a man should be both the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torutre. By this method the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. [On Crimes and Punishments, trans. Paolucci, p. 67]

The Life of a City

I am thinking about this story in terms of the larger story of disaster recovery: what is needed for a region, not just a city, to attain a resilient and wholistic recovery from any kind of disaster? What are the various parts of a society which make it a vibrant, healthy and resilient community? Tulane University was the single largest employer in New Orleans.

After Katrina, A Leaner Tulane
New Orleans School Plans Historic Cuts

By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 9, 2005; Page A01

New Orleans's Tulane University, facing significant financial shortfalls since Hurricane Katrina, announced a plan yesterday to reduce its annual operating budget by laying off 230 faculty members, cutting seven NCAA Division I programs and eliminating underperforming academic programs.

Administrators say the long-term plan -- which will ultimately reduce the annual budget by $55 million -- is to create a stronger and leaner undergraduate school by focusing on strong programs in such areas as architecture, business, arts and sciences while jettisoning some engineering programs that were not as highly rated.

Full-time faculty will be required to teach undergraduates, and by keeping the school smaller, officials said they will not have to lower admission standards. Officials also intend to create a stimulating campus environment with more activities for students who can no longer be enticed by the charms of New Orleans -- but may be lured by an opportunity to rebuild a city. Starting next fall, there will be a mandatory public service requirement for graduation.

"We think these changes will be a win-win," Tulane President Scott S. Cowen said of the restructuring, which some experts called the most significant by a major university in decades. "What we are offering is a first-rate education and the opportunity to be a part of the biggest recovery in the last 100 years. . . . It's a unique opportunity that students won't get at any other school in America."

The actions taken by Tulane -- the richest of four main private institutions of higher learning in New Orleans -- underscore the challenges faced by colleges in the Gulf Coast region as they struggle to stay viable after the storm. More than 30 schools suffered a total of $1.5 billion in damage and other losses after Katrina, displacing upward of 100,000 students. Fifteen schools remain closed. This week, former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton said that $30 million from the relief fund they lead would go to 32 universities and colleges along the Gulf Coast.

"Colleges are a central ingredient of economic growth for any community," said Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the American Council on Education. "Tulane is sending a very important signal to parents, students and the city that while they might not be exactly the same after Katrina, they are still strong. They are making the hard choices to get going again."

Walter Isaacson, a Tulane board member and vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said the university "is making use of what happened to offer a great place for the study of urban transformation."

The New Orleans schools -- a staple of the city's economy -- have faced uncertainly about the future since the storm hit Aug. 29, fretting over whether students would return to the storm-ravaged area, and whether high school seniors would find any reason to attend college in New Orleans.

Tulane is the tip of the iceberg. Xavier, a historically black school and one of the stars of the black college network, was nearly completely wiped out. Will students want to return to any of these schools if what we knew as NOLA and its unique culture isn't available?

The Constitution and the Person

The South Florida Sun-Sentinal comes from Broward County, which is not a hot-bed of liberalism:

What we may get with Alito on court

Carl Lyle
Boynton Beach
Posted December 9 2005

Much has been written by opponents of Roe vs. Wade arguing that the "right to privacy" that underscores it cannot be found in the U.S. Constitution. As it becomes increasingly clear that Judge Samuel Alito harbors serious reservations about the Roe decision and its flawed rationale, those clamoring for its reversal are salivating over the potential for his confirmation to the Supreme Court. It is with that in mind that I offer these caveats.

Before the Supreme Court made its decision in Roe, a number of state legislatures were considering legislation to grant women precisely what the Supreme Court decided. Then and now, a significant number of citizens believe that freedom of choice must be protected, even if they themselves would not choose an abortion.

Should Judge Alito be confirmed and the court reverse itself with regard to Roe, there is a distinct possibility that abortion will be legalized in many states, or perhaps a constitutional amendment will be drafted to specifically recognize a "right to privacy" and a woman's freedom of choice.

It is possible that overturning Roe will galvanize the many citizens who have not expressed a public opinion on the subject. Imagine the coalescing of that group with the longstanding supporters of Roe. Opponents of abortion rights should be mindful of the old saying: "Be careful of what you wish for, because you might get it."

The writer makes an excellent point. Anti-abortion activists miss one important point: the public has moved on since 1973. No one in their right mind thinks abortion is a good thing. It's a tragic choice, but a choice that should be between a woman, her doctor and her God. The state has no role to play here other than ensuring that the doctor and the procedure are licensed and competent.

I'm torn in a number of different ways by the pro-choice/pro-life debate. The question is achingly personal for me. In the end, I don't think that I have a vote iin someone elses choice, as a voter or as a member of the population represented by the government. It's none of my business.

A Night in Mumbai

Baingan Bharta (eggplant curry)

This vegetarian south Indian curry is a great favorite found in fancy restaurant and street stands alike. It is one of my Indian favorites and it is very easy to make. If you live outside of cities with a large South Asian expat community, the ginger garlic paste may need to be ordered by mail, but everything else should be on the shelves of your grocery store. This serves four with rice and roti or naan and raita.

INGREDIENTS:

* 1 large eggplant
* 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
* 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
* 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
* 1 tablespoon ginger garlic paste
* 1 tablespoon curry powder
* 1 tomato, diced
* 1/2 cup plain yogurt
* 1 fresh jalapeno chile pepper, finely chopped
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 bunch cilantro, finely chopped

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).
2. Place eggplant on a medium baking sheet. Bake 20 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven, until tender. Remove from heat, cool, peel, and chop.
3. Heat oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Mix in cumin seeds and onion. Cook and stir until onion is tender.
4. Mix ginger garlic paste, curry powder, and tomato into the saucepan, and cook about 1 minute. Stir in yogurt. Mix in eggplant and jalapeno pepper, and season with salt. Cover, and cook 10 minutes over high heat. Remove cover, reduce heat to low, and continue cooking about 5 minutes. Garnish with cilantro to serve.

Peculiar Fame

Check your TV schedules, US readers: I'm going to be on Geraldo next week. If I can find a link to the webcast, I'll add it. Imagine that: me on Fox! The mind boggles.

He's doing a program on pandemic flu and I'll be representing the wiki, not Bump.

The Flu Wiki Story

There's been a lot of consernation around Harmony Hall for the last two days. As you may have noticed, Flu Wiki was down from noon yesterday to about 5:30 this afternoon Eastern Time. Yesterday, the site was mentioned in a flu article in USA Today and simultaneously picked up by Drudge (to whom I will not link.) The upshot is that the server got clobbered and crashed. TextDrive, our hosting company, worked valiantly with pogge, who handled the heavy lifting, to try to bring us back, but some scripts got corrupted in the crash and pogge couldn't finish bringing up the site until late this afternoon. We all owe him a big debt of gratitude for dropping all of his other work to bring the wiki back up.

It isn't up yet, but there will be an extensive interview with me about flu and The Flu Wiki in this week's National Journal, which should be up tomorrow. I don't subscribe, but my wiki partner DemFromCT does and he promises to send along a copy of the text.

I'm a peculiar kind of famous because of The Flu Wiki. Whodathunkit?

Something for Your Runny Nose

As I promised, now that all of my running around is done for the day, here's the formula for my Grandma Letty's cold remedy.

In 6 oz mug:

5 oz. boiling water
1 oz. brandy
teaspoon honey
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

Mix well. You'll still have a cold, but after a couple of these, you won't mind so much.

Non-persons

Everytime I hear the words "the rule of law" in the mouth of an administration official, I want to throw up.

Pentagon Memo on Torture-Motivated Transfer Cited
# A court filing describes a classified proposal to send a detainee away for information extraction.

By Ken Silverstein, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Although Bush administration officials have denied that they transfer terrorism suspects to countries where they are likely to be abused, a classified memorandum described in a court case indicates that the Pentagon has considered sending a captured militant abroad to be interrogated under threat of torture.

The classified memo is summarized — its actual contents are blacked out — in a petition filed by attorneys for Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmad, a detainee held by the Pentagon at its Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility.

The March 17, 2004, Defense Department memo indicated that American officials were frustrated in trying to obtain information from Ahmad, according to the description of the classified memo in the court petition. The officials suggested sending Ahmad to an unspecified foreign country that employed torture in order to increase chances of extracting information from him, according to the petition's description of the memo.

The precise contents of the Pentagon memo on Ahmad were not revealed, but the memo was described in the petition by New York attorney Marc D. Falkoff, who contested the transfer of Ahmad and 12 other Yemenis in U.S. District Court in Washington this year.

Falkoff's description was not disputed by U.S. government lawyers or by U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, who read the actual Pentagon document. The judge ruled in favor of the Yemenis on March 12, and Ahmad has not been transferred from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

The memo appears to call into question repeated assertions by the administration that it does not use foreign governments to abuse suspected militants — what critics call "torture by proxy."

Pentagon officials did not return calls Wednesday seeking comment on the memo.

The U.S. record on treatment of detainees worldwide has overshadowed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip this week to Europe. She has faced a daily barrage of related questions, especially regarding the U.S. practice of snatching and transferring suspects from foreign countries and regarding reports that the CIA maintains secret prisons across Europe for terrorism suspects.

Ahmad was captured in Pakistan after the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. The federal government charges that Ahmad was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and participated in "military operations against the United States and/or its coalition partners." Falkoff, of Covington & Burling, represents a number of Guantanamo detainees including Ahmad, and denies that his client has any links to terrorism.

Falkoff said he was allowed to review the classified Pentagon memo in preparing the defense case but was not permitted to comment on its contents beyond what was described in his legal filing.

Falkoff filed the petition for Ahmad and 12 other detainees March 11, after learning that the government had transferred a Saudi national from Guantanamo without notifying his lawyer and that the Pentagon was considering sending other detainees to foreign countries for imprisonment.

"I called the Justice Department and asked for guarantees that it would not transfer our clients while their cases were pending in court, or at least notify us if they intended to do so," Falkoff said. "The Justice Department said no — that we were not entitled to any advance notification."

Falkoff argued that transferring detainees overseas would "have the effect of denying them access to U.S. courts for review of their detainment status and also potentially expose them to interrogation techniques and treatment that would be contrary to the laws of the United States."

He asked the court to order the government to give 30 days' notice before transferring a detainee so the transfer could be contested. Collyer agreed; the government has appealed.

Bushco seems to really believe that they are above the law.

A Nobel Speech

Harold Pinter couldn't be in Stockholm today to give his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize, but he gave it on tape instead. Here is the offical place to find the video feed of his speech and the written transcript is available there and at the Guardian's web site . The speech is an amazing work of art.

Like so much of his work, Pinter gets his points across about both his art and morality with a delcious twist of irony thrown in for good measure. Many people speculated that he won the award not only for his plays, which are a must read, but also for his political views on the Iraq War.

I'm just going to quote some exerpts from the speech and leave the Guardian's article up for anyone who wants to see the whole thing. It's a tribute to thinking and caring people across the globe.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

...

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

I just wonder if CNN and the corporate media have the courage to run this in prime time. It's a fascinating, almost alternate-reality view on American foreign policy and one that the public desperately needs.

Why Our Society Is Slipping: A Snapshot

Yesterday, the Seattle Times published a story by by Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post that reveals so much of what's wrong with our country (aside of Iraq and having a policy of mistreating detainees, among other things).

Cooperman reported that the President and Mrs. Bush wished their friends a joyful "holiday season" this year in their annual Christmas card. Because of this, conservative Christians are up in arms.

"This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture," said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

That story, if it didn't make me so damn angry, would have reduced me to tears.

This is what our country has become, folks. First of all, a journalist at a major newspaper is assigned by his editor to cover what is essentially inconsequential. Why are Cooperman's editors not having him report on education, child poverty, or other news items that possess much more urgency this time of year? This is a study in journalism's immersion in the irrelevant.

But the irony of this inconsequential story--as in so many other facets of American life--is that inconsequential reportage of inconsequential stories winds up unearthing very consequential realities about our culture and society. In reporting a trivial story and, moreover, giving conservative Christians a media microphone that progressive Christians lack (seems as though Jim Wallis and the good people of Sojourners, among other groups, don't get this same kind of media exposure for, oh, doing things like protesting the recent 217-215 vote in favor of a budget that cuts tens of billions of dollars of social services for poor people in the coldest months of the year and against the backdrop of breathtakingly large tax cuts for the nation's wealthiest citizens), Cooperman unwittingly revealed the insanity, inanity and wastefulness that marks the lives of people such as William Donohue.

With Catholics like Donohue in the public square, rational people struggling with their own faith journeys can't help but be yet more puzzled, maybe even shocked, by a Church that: A) compels people to act in such bizarre and misguided ways; and B) is closer to the likes of Bill Donohue in official, outward, institutional postures and language than it is to the likes of Dorothy Day, who died 25 years ago last week.

If the name of William Donohue sounds familiar, it just might be. The Catholic League stalwart is a cultural warrior whose public statements and actions speak for themselves. I first caught wind of him (and his hot air) in 1997, when he said that Nothing Sacred, an ABC show about a fictional Baltimore priest and parish that, despite its sadly brief one-year run, stands today as one of the very best shows network television has ever produced (and on CATHOLICISM at that!), should be taken off the air for a disgraceful and basically harmful portrayal of the faith.

Yes, Mr. Donohue, if Nothing Sacred was still on the tube today, enjoying a raucously successful tenth season and continuing to inspire and demythologize about the priesthood and the Catholic faith, a lot more Americans would still be Catholic. If you tell me to clip the red wire on an explosive device, you can bet your bottom dollar I'll clip the blue one if I want to save my life.

Aside of that experience of Mr. Donohue from the past, this latest doozy of a quote in Cooperman's WaPo story led me to look up the Catholic League website.

I found that Donohue has led boycotts of Wal-Mart... but not for its piss-poor wages and socially unjust treatment of workers and communities. No, since Wal-Mart's advertising copy and materials also reference "the holiday season" and not the word "Christmas," Donohue has demanded that his fellow Catholic soldiers march in opposition to Wal-Mart.

Can you begin to see the fullness of this landscape of outrageousness and absurdity that is shaped by people such as William Donohue? For him and his ilk, "the war against Christmas in America"--and the attack on Christian values it represents--is manifested not in the commercialization of the religious feast against a backdrop of scandalous poverty and injustice (the things Jesus would be most upset about), but in the uses of the terms "happy holidays" and "season's greetings."

Yessirree, Bill. It doesn't matter that a religious celebration with deep and profound significance is turned into an exercise of cutthroat corporate competition that surrounds Americans with marketing materials and commercial images. It's not a war against Christ or Christmas when Madison Avenue relentlessly tells us that the only way to make our spouses and loved ones happy is to give them some jewelry, a car, or some other overpriced product with disposable income that is hard-earned (for some), spilling out in abundance (for others), or both. But by golly, if those advertising materials use the terms "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" instead of "Merry Christmas," then the name of Jesus Christ is besmirched in a disgustingly anti-Christian display that must be condemned from the rooftops with all the forcefulness one can possibly muster.

Bill, how did you get to this point? What is it inside you that makes you, as a Catholic Christian person, place such emphasis on that which is entirely insignificant at a time when Catholics and all other people of good will, from all faith traditions (or non-faithholding traditions), need to be combating scandalous inequalities that are made known in the broken, unmanageable, desperate lives led by tens of millions of Americans?

Mr. Donohue, YOU need to start honoring Christmas by boycotting Wal-Mart for its labor policies, not the way its advertising copy reads. YOU need to start honoring Christmas by ensuring that today's social and economic "innkeepers" aren't leaving women, children and poor families out in the cold. Get thee to a budget hearing, Bill Donohue. You and other conservative Christians, by fighting about empty ideological matters while doing nothing to oppose the conspicuous and excessive personal consumption that is reflective of our unhealthy society (because you believe that consumption helps the economy--an honest structural analysis, but not the kind of view that could even remotely be considered "Christian" in any possible sense), are helping to continue the real war against Christmas, and the Christ Child who lies at the center of it.

Mr. Donohue, you say the Bushes have "capitulated to the worst elements in our culture." One would have thought you were commenting on Iraq, Gitmo, or housing and other social service cuts for a minute there. But no, the worst of our culture is, in your eyes, not using the words "Merry Christmas" in a greeting card.

Can you stand back for a second and see how absurd your focus is in a time when tens of millions live below the poverty line and without health insurance?

Can you?

Merry Christmas, William Donohue. Why don't you spend this Christmas season (I'm not bashful about using the word "Christmas," as you can tell...) rearranging the priorities of a life that can be a much greater force for good in the name of the Catholic Christian faith you and I share?

An America I Don't Recognize

The Center for American Progress/Campus Progress have a new web video opposing Alito. It's very good, go take a look, You'll need Quicktime.

Evil or Incompetent?

The wronged man

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has a new public relations nightmare, and his name is Khaled Masri. His case has turned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's tour of Europe into a debacle, and if even half of his allegations are true, America's ever-grimier reputation in "old Europe" will have another indelible stain.

Masri, a 42-year-old German citizen, filed suit Tuesday against former CIA Director George J. Tenet and three private aviation companies. He claims he was snatched while on vacation in Macedonia in December 2003, drugged and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held for five months in one of those secret CIA prisons that the administration pretends don't exist.

In prison, he says, he was beaten, photographed naked and held in squalid conditions. According to his lawsuit, he was detained for two months even after the CIA learned it had nabbed the wrong man, apparently because the Lebanese-born Masri's name was confused with that of an Al Qaeda operative. He was released on an Albanian hillside in May 2004, having never been charged with a crime.

Masri is no enemy combatant; he was a car salesman. If the Bush administration had any secret evidence of his links to terrorism, Rice would presumably have shared it with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom she met on Tuesday.

Instead, Merkel said Rice admitted that the United States had kidnapped Masri by mistake. A Rice aide then made matters worse by denying that the secretary had admitted error in the Masri case. (The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, using diplomatic cover to imply that the new leader of Germany is either a ditz or a liar.) Now the American and European public is left to wonder who is lying: the German chancellor or the U.S. secretary of State?

If the Bush administration has any evidence to show Masri's story is false, it should present it. If, on the other hand, it knows that CIA officials masterminded the kidnapping and detention of an innocent man, it should apologize and explore his offer of a settlement.

Either way, it should spare Americans the disgrace of a trial at which the U.S. government attempts, through legal sophistry, to justify "extraordinary rendition." Can this administration truly believe the war on terrorism justifies snatching anyone it suspects, anywhere in the world, and interrogating him in secret prisons for any amount of time, all without any judicial oversight?

Yes, LAT Edboard, that's exactly what they believe.

Steve Clemmons has more:

Get this now. El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was kidnapped while vacationing by American intelligence agents. He was transported and "questioned" -- allegedly roughly -- by American authorities in Afghanistan. Along the way, these investigators finally figured out he was innocent and reported back to CIA Director George Tenet. Tenet had him held ANYWAY for another two months.

And then. . .you might ask, could it get worse? Well, yes.

We dumped him blind-folded in the deep forest, mountainous triangle area between Albania, Serbia and Macedonia. He had to walk out with no money, no identification.

He got to a border guard station -- and because of his inability to identify himself and because of how "outlandish" his story sounded to the border guards he met, he feared that the entire process would begin.

We dumped him blindfolded in a forest in one of the roughest regions nearby. Were U.S. authorities hoping he'd just be shot by someone else? What were they thinking?

Lovely Day in the Neighborhood

Just to make my day even nicer, the contractor the condo association hired to put on the new roof started today. These units have cedar shake roofs, so there is a lot of hammering and banging as they pull off the old shakes. Going back to bed isn't really an option now, and I need to get to the store to stock up before the storm hits tonight. The place will be a madhouse if I wait until later.

Once I get all that running around finished, I'll give you the recipe for my grandma's hot toddy for colds. Something tells me I'm going to want one of those tonight.

The Metrics

n Cities Bush Cited, Progress Is Relative

By Robin Wright and Saad Sarhan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 8, 2005; Page A22

In a tale of two cities, President Bush yesterday heralded progress in northern Mosul and southern Najaf as new models for rebuilding Iraq.

But last Friday, Iraq's government imposed emergency law and a curfew in Sunni-dominated Mosul and throughout Ninevah province, and a senior U.S. official in Baghdad yesterday referred to the city of about 1.7 million as "nasty Mosul."

In Najaf, militia fighters of the two rival religious parties that control the Shiite holy city recently clashed in street battles. A few days ago, former prime minister Ayad Allawi was attacked during a visit by an angry, rock-throwing mob that some Iraqis charge was backed by a militia -- and that Allawi called an assassination attempt.

The two important and politically charged cities showcase signs of progress for Iraq, as Bush described, but also security problems and other pressing difficulties for the U.S. mission and the new Iraqi government.

Since insurgents gained control of much of Mosul late last year, Bush said U.S. and Iraqi forces have "killed, captured or cleared out" many of the extremists -- reopening the way for reconstruction. In a Nov. 19 gun battle with U.S. troops, eight suspected al Qaeda operatives died in a Mosul residence, some by blowing themselves up.

Conditions had improved enough that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Mosul last month to launch the first Provisional Reconstruction Team, the new interagency approach to reconstruction -- although the city is still so volatile that she flew by Black Hawk helicopter to the U.S. military headquarters and never got into the city.

Bush also pointed out that more than half of the voters in Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital, voted in the October referendum for the constitution -- although he did not mention that 56 percent of voters rejected proposed laws for a new Iraq. Just 10 percent more in that region would have doomed the constitution and forced Iraqis to go to the polls Dec. 15 not to elect a permanent government, as scheduled, but to select another interim government.

Since the 2004 crisis over the militia takeover of Shiism's holiest shrine in Najaf, Bush cited progress on rebuilding the police force and refurbishing schools, restoring water supplies and reopening a soccer stadium.

Religious pilgrims are visiting the city again, he said, although he failed to note that vast numbers are from Iran. U.S. officials express privately concern about Iran's influence on Najaf's clerics and politics.

Some Iraqis challenged Bush's assertions. In Najaf, Rafid Farhan, 33, said security is now controlled by Moqtada Sadr, a young cleric and militia leader, and not U.S. troops or the Iraqi government.

As part of his latest efforts to counter criticism over U.S. Iraq policy, Bush said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that Iraqis have made "amazing progress" since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein. "They've gone from living under the boot of a brutal tyrant to liberation, to free elections, to a democratic constitution," he said.

But others involved in assessing Iraq argue the president's portrayal is, at best, too rosy.

"Progress is running far behind Iraqi expectations in virtually every area," said Wayne White, head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team from 2003 to 2005 and now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute. "In their view, most Iraqis are not seeing 'amazing progress.' All too many of them live in constant danger, with less electricity in many areas than under Saddam Hussein."

Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution maintains their Iraq Index, the latest edition of which was updated December 5. Go take a look and see if you can find one indicator which is better than it was a year ago. I couldn't.

Opportunity Knocks

Governor's Relative Is Big Contract Winner

By ERIC LIPTON
December 7, 2005

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss., Dec. 6 - Rosemary Barbour happens to be married to a nephew of Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour. Since the Reagan administration, when Mrs. Barbour worked as a White House volunteer as a college student, she has been active in the Republican Party.

She also happens to be one of the biggest Mississippi-based winners of federal contracts for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

To some contract watchdogs, this could be an example of how the federal government responsibly reached out to give a piece of the billions of dollars in federal hurricane-recovery work to a small Mississippi-based company owned by a Latina. Mrs. Barbour, 39, who was born in Guatemala but now lives in Jackson, Miss., is certified by the United States Small Business Administration as a disadvantaged small-business owner.

But the $6.4 million in contracts received by her company, Alcatec L.L.C., have also elicited questions about possible favoritism.

Federal records show that the company has won at least 10 separate contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the General Services Administration to install and maintain showers for relief workers and evacuees, to deliver tents, and to provide laundry equipment. The most valuable were awarded in September and October without competitive bidding, the records show.

According to a review of federal contracts awarded since Hurricane Katrina, her company ranks seventh in total contracts out of 88 Mississippi-based concerns that have received deals worth $100,000 or more.

"This case should be scrutinized to ensure those awards were based on merits and ability to return value to the American taxpayer rather than favoritism to a politically connected contractor," said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington.

Mrs. Barbour, as well as spokesmen for FEMA and for Governor Barbour, all said in interviews Tuesday that Mrs. Barbour's family and political links to the Republican Party and the governor, as well as President Bush, did not play a role in her selection for the work.

"The governor had no knowledge whatsoever of Rosemary even receiving that contract," said Pete Smith, Mr. Barbour's press secretary.

Mrs. Barbour's husband, Charles Barbour, who is a member of the Hinds County Board of Supervisors in Jackson, is the son of Governor Barbour's oldest brother. Governor Barbour, a former lobbyist in Washington and chairman of the Republican National Committee and a long-time ally of President Bush, is part of the extended family, Mrs. Barbour said. And the two families see each other on social occasions.

Mrs. Barbour said she was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 and served as the Hispanic coordinator for President Bush's re-election campaign in Mississippi.

Her company, named after her two children, Allen and Camille, was started in 2000 after she had run a laundry service for students at the University of Mississippi. Last year, she won two contracts worth $675,750 from the United States military to provide washers, driers and showers at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, where her husband also works as a spokesman and director for special services.

I'm sorry, but if you've won contracts worth over half a million dollars, that doesn't make you a " disadvantaged small-business owner". Forgive me, but someone in that category just doesn't have that type of money lying around.

Ah... take a whiff... it's the smell of hypocracy in the morning. So as delays and FEMA continue to hammer at people, the well connected are remaining so. Heck of a job there!

Lousy Reporting

Economy Lifts Bush's Support in Latest Poll

By ROBIN TONER and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Published: December 8, 2005

After months of political erosion, President Bush's approval rating improved markedly in the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, largely tracking Americans' more positive attitudes toward the economy.

But his presidency is still plagued by widespread doubts about his handling of the war in Iraq, with 52 percent of poll respondents saying the Bush administration intentionally misled the public when its officials made the case for war. A majority of Americans want the United States to set some timetable for troop withdrawal; 32 percent want the number of American troops reduced, and 28 percent want a total pullout.

The survey, conducted Dec. 2-6, showed Mr. Bush's approval rating at 40 percent, up from 35 percent a month ago, which was the low point of his presidency. His gains primarily came among men, independents, 18-to-29-year-olds and conservatives. He remains a fiercely polarizing figure, with an approval rating of 79 percent among Republicans, 12 percent among Democrats and 34 percent among independents.

Over all, 53 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Bush's job performance, down from 57 percent a month ago.

Despite his gains, Mr. Bush's 40 percent approval rating remains among his lowest, and is still substantially lower than that of Presidents Bill Clinton (who was at 58 percent) or Ronald Reagan (who was at 68 percent) at comparable points in their second terms.

The telephone poll of 1,155 adults nationwide had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

As Republican strategists have hoped, Mr. Bush seems to be getting a political lift from the economy. Mr. Bush has tried hard to highlight good economic news in recent weeks, which have seen a drop in the price of gasoline and new figures showing strong growth in the third quarter. The poll showed that 56 percent describe the national economy as good, up from 47 percent a month ago.

"Things are not that bad," Susan Huru, a 47-year-old independent from Wasilla, Alaska, said in a follow-up interview after the poll was completed. "I can still afford things except for maybe gas."

But, as Kevin Drum noted the other day, real wages have fallen by 1.7% so I advise Ms. Huru to check her paycheck before she decides to celebrate. NYT reporters' incomes haven't fallen so they don't know squat about what the rest of the economy looks like.

Most of W's "improvements" fall within the margin of error or statistical insignificance, but the reporters don't know enough about statistics to tell you that.

OY

Server troubles continue at The Flu Wiki. It is going to be another long day of messing with tech stuff I barely understand, punctuated with a lot of sneezing and a trip to the store to prepare for what is likely to be a couple of messy days in the snow department. I feel like the dog's breakfast but will try to soldier on, regardless.

NOAA says:

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN STERLING VIRGINIA HAS ISSUED A
WINTER STORM WARNING...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM THIS EVENING
TO 12 PM EST FRIDAY. THE WINTER STORM WATCH IS NO LONGER IN
EFFECT.

A WINTER STORM IS CURRENTLY TAKING SHAPE ACROSS THE OHIO VALLEY...AND
IS FORECAST TO ADVANCE INTO OUR REGION THIS EVENING. THIS STORM
HAS A POTENTIAL OF PRODUCING A MIXED BAG OF SNOW...SLEET AND
FREEZING RAIN ACROSS THE DC AND BALTIMORE METRO AREAS. TOTAL
ACCUMULATIONS OF SNOW AND SLEET OF 3 TO 6 INCHES ARE EXPECTED BY FRIDAY MORNING.

A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW...
SLEET...AND ICE ARE EXPECTED. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY
HAZARDOUS. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL...KEEP AN EXTRA
FLASHLIGHT...FOOD...AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN
EMERGENCY. STAY TUNED NOAA WEATHER RADIO OR LOCAL MEDIA FOR
UPDATES TO THE FORECAST.

Lovely. It's always nice to have something to look forward to.

With a Cold, We're Back

I spent the bulk of the day yesterday on line with the folks at TextDrive and pogge, trying to keep The Flu Wiki live in the face of an incredible demand on the server. It kept crashing in the face of yesterday's USA Today piece on avian influenza. The folks in the Flu Wiki forum hated it. I'll leave you to make up your own mind. Those of you who subscribe to National Journal will find another piece today on avian flu which quotes yours truly. I'll post the clip when someone with a subscription sends me the text: at those kind of prices, I don't subscribe. I'm hoping I don't have another internet server hell day, but this is life on the Internet and who the hell knows what is going to happen?

Jeeze, yesterday sucked.

And it is supposed to snow here tonight and everyone knows how well Beltwayland does with snow. I need another box of Kleenex and a pot of chicken soup. Aaahchoo.

Far From Home

Buy your lefse here marooned Minnesotans. They have lingonberries, too. And other good things we can't get anymore.

Royal Spuds

This is simply wonderful with Beef Wellington:

Garlic Mashed Potatoes
2 heads garlic
4 tbsp. butter
2 tbsp. flour
1 c. Pareve milk, warmed
Salt and pepper to taste
2 1/2 lbs. new potatoes, cut into quarters
4 tbsp. butter
4 tbsp. parsley

(Helpful hint: Separate garlic cloves and drop them into boiling water. Boil for 2 minutes, drain and peel.)

Saute peeled and chopped garlic in butter for 15 minutes until tender. Blend in flour, remove from heat, add pareve milk and salt and pepper. Return to heat and boil for 1 minute. Puree the entire mixture and simmer for another minute.

Boil potatoes until tender. Drain potatoes and mash until well blended. Add 4 tablespoons butter and blend until smooth. Over low heat, beat in garlic mixture. Add parsley. Serves 6.

This recipe is easy to scale up or down. It works with plain roast chicken or a more elaborate pork roast. Yum.

Cold and Flu

Sick, have the flu and massive sneezles. My ribs ache from sneezing, more later and my nose is so red from mopping up the excess. I look like Rudolph.

One for the Books

I can't believe I haven't given you this before. I've been asleep at the switch. TENDERLOIN BEEF WELLINGTON

4 individual portion size fillets tenderloin beef
1 can liver pate
1 clove garlic, cut before using
1 c. finely chopped mushrooms
Salt
Pepper
3 tbsp. butter
1 tbsp. mixed herbs
2 tbsp. brandy (optional)
1 pkg. "puffed pastry" (Pepperidge Farm)
1 beaten egg
Wellington sauce (optional) Knorr's packaged

Rub cut piece of garlic over beef, season with salt and pepper. Broil until medium rare and let cool. Do not over cook. Can be done ahead and refrigerated. Spread small amount of liver pate on each fillet, fry mushrooms and onions in butter. Add brandy and herbs, simmer 1 minute, let cool.

Roll pastry thinly on floured board to size that will completely cover each piece of meat. Lay cooled meat in center. Spoon mushroom mixture over top. Brush pastry edges with water (to help seal). Fold pastry carefully over ends to seal.

Decorate with leaves made from leftover pastry. Brush whole surface with beaten egg wash (to glaze). Bake until pastry is browned. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve each as an individual serving. (As an option, make Wellington Sauce, spoon over each.) Serves 4.

Skip the Wellington Sauce and serve with fortified pan drippings. This is so good that it will make you hurt, if you are a beef lover. I've covered the ins and outs of trimming a beef filet earlier.

The Knorr version of Wellington Sauce is loaded with MSG, and I'd just as soon skip that.

Eat with joy and eat moderately. If you have joy at other places in your life, you probably won't eat too much and get fatter.

Blast from the Past

I'm burned out on news, it's time for some recipes. Call me a throw-back to the '70's (well, I am) but I actually use my fondue set. Melted cheese and bread is the ultimate comfort food and this recipe is the classic.

Serves 8 Active Time: 30 min

1 clove garlic, peeled
1 1/2 cups cupcs white wine
1 tsp lemon juice
2 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
2 Tbsp kirschwasser (cherry brandy)
2 cups shredded Gruyere
2 cups shredded Emmentaler cheese
Sliced baguette

1. Rub heavy saucepan with garlic; leave garlic in pan. Add wine; heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer 6-7 min, until reduced by half. Remove and discard garlic; add lemon juice. Reduce heat to MEDIUM.
2. Stir together cornstarch and brandy until smooth; set aside.
3. Combine Gruyere and Emmentaler in medium bowl; gradually add to simmering wine, stirring vigorously with wooden spoon after each addition, until cheese is just melted. When all cheese is added, stir in cornstarch mixture; heat 1-2 min, stirring until thickened.
4. Transfer to fondue pot and serve with sliced baguette.

I had it for the first time in 1976 at The Lowell Inn in Stillwater, Minnesota. My first husband and I were married in The Garden Room in front of the fountain. We had a morning wedding followed by lunch for everyone in that room. The wedding present from my family included an overnight in the hotel, so my new spouse and I tried the fondue menu in the Matterhorn room for dinner. I was hooked and have remained so. I love communal meals like fondue or Mongolian hotpot where everyone prepares there meal together at the table. My kitchen is really tiny so I can't have friends in the kitchen to cook with me, so this is a better alternative.

Serve a composed salad like Salade Nicoise along with it.

My memory of that meal has lasted a whole lot longer than that marriage did.

Ted Turner is Crying

It's sad to see the continuing decline of CNN. I've just spent a couple of hours listening to the always odious Kyra Phillips go wall to wall with this airplane incident in Miami. I guess there is no other news today. Funny, all the newspapers are filled with other stories, some of them posted on this blog.

There is no news judgement at work there anymore.

Diverging Patterns

The Reimaginator

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, December 7, 2005; Page A25

Until two weeks ago, George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger were having a remarkably similar, and disastrous, year. Each began 2005 at the top of his game -- the president reelected with enhanced congressional majorities, the governator boasting an approval rating of 65 percent. Each then chose to govern well to the right of his electorate -- Bush promoting the privatization of Social Security, Arnold sponsoring ballot measures that would have cut spending on schools and diminished the power of the state's unions. Despite rising public discontent, each elected not to alter his course -- Bush refusing to scale back his war in Iraq, Arnold declining to cancel California's special election and call off his war on the labor movement.

And last month, each experienced unprecedented defeat. In the House, Republican moderates opposed the spending cuts backed by Bush and their leaders, and California voters rejected all of Schwarzenegger's propositions. Today these two once-brightest stars in the Republican firmament sputter along with approval ratings in the high thirties.

But in the final days of November, their stories finally diverged. While the president admits no errors of policy or judgment, clings to Karl Rove, and refuses to dump Donald Rumsfeld for reasons that confound all understanding, the governor has gone in for a full-body makeover. In rapid succession, he apologized to California voters for having saddled them with his special election, hatched a $50 billion-plus bond measure that exceeds anything California liberals could have conceived, and appointed as his new chief of staff a former director of the state Democratic Party and the California Abortion Rights Action League whose most recent Sacramento stint was as the top aide to Gov. Gray Davis, whom Schwarzenegger unseated in the recall election of 2003.

Even for those accustomed to the malleability of Hollywood identity, the rollout of the new Arnold is mind-boggling. After all his talk about holding down spending, the governator now says it's time to renew the legacy of Pat Brown, the great Democratic governor of the late 1950s and early '60s who built the state's freeways, aqueducts and universities. It's time, says Arnold, for a mega-bond issue that would fund more schools, shore up levees, repave roads and build affordable housing. He's still nobody's redistributionist, but the new Arnold apparently, and rightly, believes that big government can fuel big growth.

And to push his program through, he has replaced Patricia Clarey, his chief of staff, who had worked for former Republican governor Pete Wilson, with Susan Kennedy, who was Gray Davis's enforcer. In her quarter-century in politics, Kennedy, who began her career as a student organizer for Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda's Campaign for Economic Democracy, has moved steadily rightward: She backed all of Arnold's ballot measures this fall, and as a member of the state's Public Utilities Commission since 2003 she has gleefully comforted utilities and afflicted consumers. Nonetheless, she's still a registered Democrat, and Phil Angelides, the erstwhile state party chairman who hired her to run the party back in 1992, is today the state treasurer and Arnold's leading opponent in next year's gubernatorial contest. Add to that the fact that Kennedy is an open lesbian who exchanged vows with her partner in a ceremony on Maui a few years back, and you begin to get some sense of why many California Republicans are both stunned and apoplectic.
....
Clearly, the prez and the guv have learned very different lessons from life. The distinctive feature of Bush's career, as he moved from one floundering oil company to the next, was that there never were any negative consequences for failure, that any need to admit error and instigate change was always obviated by the willingness of his father's friends to bail him out. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, comes from a culture where you're only as good as your last picture, where chins are lifted, tummies tucked, scenes reshot and careers reconfigured if the box office demands it.

That said, I'm not sure what upsets me more -- Schwarzenegger's makeover or Bush's obdurate refusal to change anything. Representative democracy requires some consistency of identity in our elected officials, and Arnold has become a blur of reinvention. The most corporeal figure in American political history has crossed the line from particle to wave, while our president is as steadfast, and as open to experience, as a bump on a log.

Characterologically, at least, the Republicans might consider a Third Way.

Safer? No.

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health from Disease, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2005

TFAH's (Trust for America's Health) third annual study of preparedness for major health emergencies finds that both federal and state efforts must be accelerated in order to adequately protect the American people.

In the two-part report, the federal government received a grade of D+ for post-9/11 public health emergency preparedness, and over half of states garnered a score of 5 or less out of 10 possible points for key indicators of health emergency preparedness, such as capabilities to test for chemical and biological threats and hospital surge capacity to care for patients in a mass emergency.

The grade of the federal government's performance was based on a survey of 20 leading public health experts, who evaluated 12 different aspects of health emergency preparedness. For the assessment of states, Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia scored the highest, achieving eight of ten possible indicators. Alabama, Alaska, Iowa and New Hampshire scored the lowest, achieving only two indicators.

TFAH's "Let's Get Real" agenda for accelerated preparedness includes detailed recommendations focusing on the following topics:

* Leadership
* Accountability
* Working with the Public
* Improving Basic Response Capabilities

Here's a link to the complete report (.pdf). It's pretty scary reading.

After the Storm

Katrina's Emotional Damage Lingers
Mental Health Experts Say Impact Is Far Beyond What They've Ever Faced

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 7, 2005; A03

NEW ORLEANS -- "I've been thinking the last couple days the best thing to do is die."

The man, speaking on a dull monotone, was slumped in a chair inside the steamy convention center here, waiting to see a doctor. He didn't want to come to the makeshift hospital, but a friend insisted.

"I'd hardly had a drink in years," said the man. "Right after the hurricane hit, I just started drinking. If I stop drinking, the pain becomes so great it's unbearable."

In these months after Hurricane Katrina, it is not hard to find people like David, a quirky, debonair, fragile artiste who asked that his last name not be published. They can be seen walking on deserted streets with glazed eyes. In grocery stores and offices, they inexplicably break into tears. Police officers confess to counselors that they are fighting more with spouses and yelling at their kids. Many turn up at local hospitals searching for a neat explanation for pain the likes of which they have never felt before.

Every disaster has its second wave, the emotional scars that linger after the initial blow. But the impact from Katrina -- which displaced nearly 2 million people, eradicated entire neighborhoods, separated families and reopened racial wounds -- is far beyond what mental health experts in this country have ever confronted, they say.

In the extreme cases -- and there have been many -- they have hanged themselves, overdosed and put guns to their heads. The number of suicides in neighboring Jefferson Parish is more than double what it was in the fall of 2004. In the first days of the crisis, coroner Robert Treuting saw five suicides in three days. In the two months since, there have been 11, compared with five a year ago. Two New Orleans police officers have taken their lives, and at least one more has attempted suicide.

"It's like living in the Twilight Zone," said Candace Cutrone, who as assistant coroner for mental health in Orleans Parish has the overwhelming task of evaluating psychiatric cases for local hospitals. "The whole world changed overnight."

Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard said he does not have statistics for the city, because many deaths -- including nine by gunshot -- remain a mystery. He knows of at least one woman who killed herself recently. New Orleans emergency personnel have responded to at least six suicides and nearly two dozen suicide attempts since Katrina. The tightly knit community of Academy of the Sacred Heart, the Rosary, is coping with two suicides, headmaster Timothy M. Burns said. Shortly before Thanksgiving, a woman with young children took her life. Last week, the father of a Sacred Heart student was buried.

And with so few medical services available in the region and the slow pace of rebuilding, experts expect the psychological toll to grow far worse.

"I think the whole city's grieving," said Alvin M. Rouchell, chairman of the psychiatry department at the Oschner Clinic Foundation in neighboring Jefferson Parish. "I've seen a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder. People who had emotional disorders before the hurricane have a worsening of conditions, and some people for the first time are having panic attacks, depression, PTSD."

I watched the Katrina hearing on TV yesterday and was struck by the amount of PTSD I saw in the room. None of the disaster planning models I've looked at (including The Flu Wiki) take into account the psychic toll taken by a disaster. Mental health, in general, is treated as an afterthought in our medical system, so it isn't surprising.

The figures aren't very good because we don't have any survey instruments, but on any given day someplace north of 10% of the public have a mental illness significant enough to warrant a DSM diagnostic code. The percentage of them which will ever receive treatment is a fraction of that.

I've forwarded this article to a the Flu Wiki think tank and my Pandefense group for further thoughts and I'd like yours.

Bringing Back Music

New Village to Shelter Uprooted Musicians
# Habitat for Humanity will build 200 homes with seed money from performers who are New Orleans natives.

By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS — City officials and artists who call New Orleans home announced Tuesday that they would team with Habitat for Humanity to build a village for musicians chased from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

The alliance, which includes the Marsalis family and Harry Connick Jr., will use $1 million in seed money generated by two recent concerts in New York to launch the development. Plans call for as many as 200 homes surrounding a cultural center named for Ellis Marsalis — a patriarch of New Orleans jazz and the father of three accomplished musicians: saxophonist Branford, trumpeter Wynton and trombonist Delfeayo.

There will be single-family dwellings for younger musicians with families, and easy-to-care-for condominiums for elderly musicians — many of whom had lived in poor sections of town before the storm hit. The cultural center would include a performance hall, rehearsal space and rooms where the musicians could give lessons to children.

The development is expected to cost about $18 million, said Jim Pate, executive director of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity. Additional money would be raised through efforts such as the sale of DVDs and CDs — including an upcoming compilation called "Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast."

Organizers expect to pick a site for the village in the coming weeks.

Habitat for Humanity homes typically are not given away, and will not be in this case, Pate said. However, he said, some provisions will be made.

Poor and elderly musicians will be able to buy the homes at cost, and single-family homes will be financed with no interest. And, Pate said, musicians would be able to satisfy the organization's "sweat equity" component of Habitat for Humanity developments by performing for volunteers.

I have mixed feelings about this. Jazz and cajun and creole food are the essence of the culture of NOLA and one could make the argument that restaurant workers should be given the same treatment.

To Start the Meal

This is one of those dishes which are so good that you'll want to sort of hug yourself when you serve it. Your guests will be too busy munching or looking for seconds to hug you. A first course which shuts up the guests is no small thing.

Bruschetta With Wild Mushroom And Herb Pesto And Shaved Pecorino Wild Mushroom And Herb Pesto
Makes about 1 1/2 cups

Ingredients
1/2 pound mixed fresh wild mushrooms, such as chanterelle, morel, oyster, shitake, cremini, and/or porcini
1/2 pound white button mushrooms
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 large shallot, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary leaves
2 tablespoons chicken broth (Or dry white vermouth)
1/4 cup heavy cream
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Method

1. Clean and grit the mushrooms: Brush away any dirt or grit and trim the stems. If using shitakes, remove the stems altogether. Rinse the mushrooms briefly under cold running water to remove as much grit as possible. Shake off any excess water and transfer the mushrooms to a towel to dry. Roughly chop the mushrooms into 1/2-inch pieces.

2. In a large skillet, melt the butter in the oil over medium heat. Add the shallot and cook, stirring, until softened. Add the mushrooms and cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, until all of the liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms are browned, about 12 minutes. Add the thyme, rosemary, and chicken broth (or vermouth) and cook, stirring, until the liquid is evaporated. Add the cream, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the cream is nearly evaporated. Let cool.

3. Transfer the mixture to a food processor and pulse into a coarse puree. Add the Parmesan and pulse just until combined. Will keep, tightly covered, in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. Return to room temperature before using.

Bruschetta

Ingredients
12 baguette slices from 1/3 baguette, cut on the diagonal (that way, they are slightly larger than straight slices)
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Wild Mushroom pesto, at room temperature
1/2 cup thinly shaved Manchego (about 1 ounce)
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 bunch watercress, thick stems discarded

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 350°.

2. Brush the bread on both sides with half of the oil and arrange the slices in a single layer on a baking sheet. Toast in the center of the oven until golden, about 12 to 15 minutes.

3. Let cool, then spread each slice with about 2 tablespoons of the pesto. Top with the cheese shavings.

4. In a medium bowl, whisk the vinegar with the remaining 2 tablespoons oil. Season with salt and pepper. Add the watercress and toss.

5. Serve the salad on plates and arrange the bruschetta on top.

Make a double batch, everyone will want seconds.

Yellow Journalalmism

Democrats Fear Backlash at Polls for Antiwar Remarks

By Jim VandeHei and Shalaigh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 7, 2005; Page A01

Strong antiwar comments in recent days by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have opened anew a party rift over Iraq, with some lawmakers warning that the leaders' rhetorical blasts could harm efforts to win control of Congress next year.

The critics said that comment could reinforce popular perceptions that the party is weak on military matters and divert attention from the president's growing political problems on the war and other issues. "Dean's take on Iraq makes even less sense than the scream in Iowa: Both are uninformed and unhelpful," said Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), recalling Dean's famous election-night roar after stumbling in Iowa during his 2004 presidential bid.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) and Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), the second-ranking House Democratic leader, have told colleagues that Pelosi's recent endorsement of a speedy withdrawal, combined with her claim that more than half of House Democrats support her position, could backfire on the party, congressional sources said.

These sources said the two leaders have expressed worry that Pelosi is playing into Bush's hands by suggesting Democrats are the party of a quick pullout -- an unpopular position in many of the most competitive House races.

This is a Dem deathwish. 60% of the public thinks that the war is a "mistake" and they are running in the opposite direction? Way to read the wind, Dems, you idiots.

The WashPo and NYT are strongly pro-war, but that is a separate issue. Vandehei and Murray at the NYT and Balz and Priest at the WaPo are shills for the admin, so read everything you see with enough salt to make you up your blood pressure medication.

If this is good reporting, I'm the queen of Spain. The public wants us out. The reporters haven't figured that out yet.

Community

The Brookings Institution put this New Orleans Times Picayune piece up on their website. Post Katrina and Rita I try to read NOLA and the Beaumont (TX) Enterprise everyday. These folks have fallen off CNN's radar screen. They haven't fallen off mine. The amount of suffering going on in the Gulf region hasn't really changed but our bicycle riding president has "moved on." His "compassionate conservatism" lasts for the five minutes of his photo op. He's a self-serving bastard and some of us had that figured out in 2000. I'm glad the rest of you have figured it out now that we have to deal with him for another three years.

City Can Lure Back Its Reluctant Migrants (New Orleans)

The Times-Picayune, November 30, 2005

William H. Frey, Visiting Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

The recent Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference drew hundreds of participants determined to view New Orleans' future in a positive light. A myriad of planning ideas, ranging from the practical to the pie in the sky, were offered by a slew of invited experts (myself included) and politicians.

Infrastructure plans to make the city safe, New Economy development strategies to make it prosperous and New Urbanism ideas to improve its architectural landscape were all given public airing.

Additional Resources
In Focus: Hurricane Katrina
Yet as I looked at some of these, I couldn't help wondering if too much emphasis was placed on the economic well-being of New Orleans as a place, rather than on the hundreds of thousands of New Orleans people who want to return.

As a demographer, I study populations and the way they change. The phrase "demography is destiny" is especially relevant here, as the destiny of New Orleans will surely be transformed by whatever population moves in.

What concerns me is that some of these grand visions will, perhaps unintentionally, ignore people who made New Orleans the special place it was.

Indeed, some foresee a smaller, mostly white middle-class population attracted to new upscale housing and jobs.

Others predict an increasing Hispanic presence as the rebuilding city becomes a magnet for new, low-skilled workers.

There is also speculation about changing politics in a city where reliably Democratic black voters will comprise a smaller share of the electorate.

These scenarios leave out a key element of New Orleans' essence—the rich demographic and cultural diversity embedded in its black, Creole and multiethnic roots—which provided the zest and vibrancy for this one-of-a-kind city. I believe that this New Orleans can come back.

It may be easy to assume that Katrina evacuees, especially those from poor, low-lying neighborhoods, will be better off living in their new locales and choose to stay there. This view was given credence in a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll showing that 39 percent predicted that they would not return.

However, the survey response includes those who said they "probably" will not return. That probability is largely unknown, as evacuees are still coping with a life-transforming experience.

Katrina triggered what was arguably the biggest and quickest relocation of "reluctant migrants" in American history. They left en masse without being given much chance to consider why or where they were going.

Many who were in their 40s, 50s and 60s had not traveled widely outside of their own neighborhoods, much less to a different city or state.

To people that age, social ties that developed over decades and generations are paramount. In New Orleans, statistics bear this out: 88 percent of black New Orleanians were born in Louisiana.

Compare these figures with Houston, where only 75 percent of black citizens are native-born. In Atlanta, only 57 percent of black residents are native to Georgia.

The return of New Orleans citizens will depend on the kind of reception they will receive—in terms of housing, financial resources and community support. It will also depend on how quickly plans are implemented, especially since the "best and the brightest" will find alternatives elsewhere.

The return of these New Orleanians does not necessarily mean a return to the impoverished neighborhoods of the past, since there will be opportunities to develop safer neighborhoods with better schools and more jobs.

But it will give the city's reluctant migrants the opportunity to reestablish the rich sense of community that has always made New Orleans a special place.

The Monster in the Middle of the Room

Skepticism Seems to Erode Europeans' Faith in Rice

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: December 7, 2005

BERLIN, Dec. 6 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did what was expected, many people in Europe said Tuesday, after her meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel and other German officials. She gave reassurances that the United States would not tolerate torture and, while not admitting mistakes, promised to correct any that had been made.

She accompanied that with an impassioned argument for aggressive intelligence gathering, within the law, as an indispensable means of saving lives endangered by an unusually dangerous and unscrupulous foe.

Did anybody believe her on this continent, aroused as rarely before by a raft of reports about secret prisons, C.I.A. flights, allegations of torture and of "renditions," or transfers, of prisoners to third countries so they can be tortured there?

"Yes, I did," Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a conservative member of the German Parliament, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "The thing I believe is that the United States does obey international law, and Mrs. Merkel said that she believes it too."

Not everybody here is of that view, to say the least. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a more sudden and thorough tarnishing of the Bush administration's credibility than the one taking place here right now. There have been too many reports in the news media about renditions - including one involving an Lebanese-born German citizen, Khaled el- Masri, kidnapped in Macedonia in December 2003 and imprisoned in Afghanistan for several months on the mistaken assumption that he was an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers - for blanket disclaimers of torture to be widely believed.

"I think what she means is, 'We don't use it as an official way to do things, but we don't look at what is done in other countries,' " Monika Griefahn, a Social Democratic member of Parliament, said in regard to Ms. Rice's comment on torture. "And that's the problem for us."

What the NYT is unable to tell you, as one of the major enablers of our current regime, is that Condi lies through her teeth all the time and the Europeans know it, make nice because they have to, but aren't willing to play by the rules of a regime that ignores the Geneva Conventions. They know that Bush is a Rogue State, they've been hurt by our predecessor rogue regimes and they are ready to protect themselves.

Angela Merkel is walking a dangerous line. I'm reading the rest of the papers this morning and the Bush assertion that "We do not torture" is looking less and less sustainable.

After what he's done to New Orleans, I really doubt he can claim anything about his treatment of foreigners.

Post Katrina

I listened to the Katrina hearing all afternoon. If I can find a link to a webcast and catch the transcript, I'll post them. It was extraordinary. The testimony of the survivors was utterly damning. I don't know that I've ever heard so much pain in my life.

Good "Christians"

Hat-tip pogge:

Mirecki hospitalized after beating

By Ron Knox, Eric Weslander (Contact)

Originally published 05:37 p.m., December 5, 2005
Updated 06:31 p.m., December 5, 2005

Douglas County sheriff’s deputies are investigating the reported beating of a Kansas University professor who gained recent notoriety for his Internet tirades against Christian fundamentalists.

Kansas University religious studies professor Paul Mirecki reported he was beaten by two men about 6:40 a.m. today on a roadside in rural Douglas County. In a series of interviews late this afternoon, Mirecki said the men who beat him were making references to the controversy that has propelled him into the headlines in recent weeks.

“I didn’t know them, but I’m sure they knew me,” he said.

Mirecki said he was driving to breakfast when he noticed the men tailgating him in a pickup truck.

“I just pulled over hoping they would pass, and then they pulled up real close behind,” he said. “They got out, and I made the mistake of getting out.”

He said the men beat him about the upper body with their fists, and he said he thinks they struck him with a metal object. He was treated and released at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

“I’m mostly shaken up, and I got some bruises and sore spots,” he said.

What did Prof. Mirecki do that caused this kind of rage?

Mirecki recently wrote online that he planned to teach intelligent design as mythology in an upcoming course. He wrote it would be a “nice slap” in the “big fat face” of fundamentalists.

The remarks caused an uproar, Mirecki apologized, and KU announced last week the class would be canceled.

The theocrats in this country are also thugs. What a stunning display of "christian" behavior!

A Fragile Society

Hunger, almost eliminated in the 70’s, is now widespread
ASK THIS | November 29, 2005

The United States is the only western industrial democracy that lets millions go hungry, including many above the poverty line, and the problem is getting worse. Dr. J. Larry Brown, who runs the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis, has questions reporters need to ask.

Q. Why has hunger resurfaced again after being essentially eliminated in the late 1970’s?

Q. Why doesn’t America end hunger like other nations have?

Q. Why are federal monies allocated to fight hunger going unspent by states and local school districts?

Q. Who are the people going hungry?

Q. What is my state doing about hunger and how does it compare with the efforts of our neighboring states?

Q. What are the correlations between economic fluctuation in state and local economies and the rates of hunger? What can be done to protect people from hunger when local economies are weak?

By J. Larry Brown
[email protected]

The problem of hunger in America is so large that reporters often have difficulty comprehending its scope, root causes, and impact on society. Selling editors on stories about hunger can be even harder in an age where obesity stories get all the ink.

According to government statistics, 38 million Americans live in households that suffer from hunger or food insecurity. The number of hungry mouths has increased by 43 percent in the past five years, according to the Department of Agriculture.

The United States is the only developed country with a serious hunger problem, and more than 12 million of those affected are children.

Hunger is particularly pernicious because its effects on individuals and society are varied and long lasting. Hungry children miss more days of school and can’t process information as well. They are impeded in their physical and emotional development and more prone to illness. Hunger is also associated with both aggressive and withdrawn behavior.

It is in schools where the some of the problems of hunger are being solved. The federal government covers 100 percent of the cost of feeding breakfast and lunch to low-income students, but in too many places those funds remain unspent. Reporters need to ask if that’s the case in their area, and, if so, why.

It is hard to convince editors and readers that hunger is a pressing issue because hunger is not widely understood. Obesity is widely recognized because of the obvious physical signs. Hunger, on the other hand, shows few visible symptoms to the casual observer. Hunger in America does not look like hunger in the developing world. It is not uncommon to be both obese and hungry. Eating is reflexive and instinctual. Proper nutrition is not.

Here are some sobering statistics and findings on hunger in America:

* Households with incomes below the official poverty line have a high rate of food insecurity (36.8%), as do single female-headed households with children (33.0%), black non-Hispanic households (23.7%), single male-headed households with children (22.2%) and Hispanic households (21.7%).

* Government programs are not always available to those who are hungry. Over 47% of all food-insecure households have incomes above 130% of poverty, which in most cases would make these households ineligible for food stamps.

* Not all states face the same challenges. Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas all have food insecurity and hunger rates that are significantly higher than the national average. One bright spot is Oregon. Once considered to have the worst hunger in the country, Oregon has shown significant decreases in food insecurity and hunger since 1999-2001.

When I was homeless and living on less than $5,000 a year, I was ineligible for welfare or any food assistance because I had a part time job and no kids. Yeah, I know hunger. I lived on handouts from colleagues who would take me out for lunch a few times a week to make sure that I was getting at least one meal a day. The safety net in this country has great big holes. Advanced degrees won't keep you from falling through them.

Lost Opportunity

No Questions

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, December 6, 2005; 1:36 PM

President Bush will deliver the second in a series of four speeches on his Iraq strategy tomorrow in Washington to several hundred members of the Council on Foreign Relations -- an august group of scholars, policymakers and journalists whose Web site is an Internet hotspot for intellectual foment about foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular.

But rather than probe the group's expertise or even respond to its concerns, Bush is just using it as a backdrop.

Check here weekdays at midday for my read on the most interesting items about the president and his staff from major newspaper, magazine and broadcast Web sites and Web logs.

In a sharp break with the council's own traditions, Bush is being allowed to speak -- for 50 minutes -- then leave without taking any questions.

"Obviously, we strongly suggested -- certainly made the case -- that it would be in the interest of the president and in the interest of our membership that the president take questions," council vice president for communications Lisa Shields told me this morning.

"But true to his format, they declined."

But why accept? Why agree to leave what would certainly be important, consequential questions unasked?

"On balance, we had to make a decision," Shields said. "And we're honored to have him come and speak to our members and this is the format that they have selected."

Tomorrow's event, at 11 a.m. at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, will nevertheless still not be quite as thoroughly stage-managed as Bush's typical outings these days. For instance, the president won't be surrounded by carefully crafted slogans -- just the Council on Foreign Relations banner.

And Bush is not likely to see the same sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm from this audience that he is used to seeing from hand-picked supporters, on-duty military audiences or intimidated employees.

But he's not likely to encounter any undiplomatic behavior from this dignified crowd, either. And their inevitable standing ovations, out of respect for the office, will play well on television.

The council president Richard Haas, who was Colin Powell's chief of policy planning until 2003, has been critical of Bush's Iraq policy. He was recently quoted in George Packer's book on Iraq as saying that he would go to his grave not knowing why we went to war in Iraq.

But Haas is unlikely to stick any zingers into his introduction of the president.

Anya Schmeman, a council spokeswoman, pointed out to me this morning: "We have plenty of other opportunities with other administration officials where council members can discuss issues openly and freely."

And indeed, just last week, for instance, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spoke to council members in New York about terrorism -- and took questions. Here, from the transcript , is the very first one he got:

"QUESTIONER: Thank you. Alan Blinken, former United States ambassador to Belgium. You said the president has said clearly, 'We do not torture.' Was the vice -- two part question. One, was the vice president in the room when he said that -- (laughter) -- which I'm being serious about.

"[Council Chairman Peter G.] PETERSON: I told you this was a tough audience. (Laughter.)

"QUESTIONER: And two, would you state, as part of the administration, unequivocally tonight that the CIA and its surrogates, in whatever form they are, do not torture any place in the world?"

Gonzales's reply, in its entirety: "The president speaks for the administration. We all work for the president of the United States, including the vice president of the United States and including every member of the CIA."

I'm disappointed in the CFR. They are allowing themselves to be used. They should have refused, W has plenty of venues to spout his propaganda.

Voices of Disaster

Here is the video link to the live hearings and testimony of the Katrina survivors. Click on the C-Span2 link.

I'm watching it now on TV, it's really painful to hear.

Morality and the High Court

Dodging Debate On Alito

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, December 6, 2005; Page A29

When conservatives revolted against President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, they proudly proclaimed their desire for a big debate over constitutional principles. Now they are running from the fight.

No, they are not giving up on Samuel "I am and always have been a conservative" Alito. They just want to act as if their ardent support for Alito has nothing to do with his ideas or how he might rule. Whatever Alito said in the past that proves conservatives are right in seeing him as a comrade in arms is supposed to be irrelevant to the Senate's debate over his confirmation.

Last week a 1985 memo emerged in which Alito, then a Reagan administration lawyer, outlined a strategy to "advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects."

Alito seems, really and truly, to believe that Roe was a mistake. In his now famous letter seeking a promotion during the Reagan years, Alito said that he was proud of his work in the administration advancing arguments "that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Believing that Roe was wrongly decided is a perfectly respectable position. Many, perhaps most, conservatives hold this view. So do some liberal supporters of abortion rights.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that the court overreached in Roe . In his indispensable new book, "Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America," University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein -- obviously no conservative -- sees Roe as having "shaky constitutional foundations."
....
There are some conservatives who realize the danger for Alito and their cause if he is seen as evasive. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Terry Eastland, who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, noted that "the views Alito stated in his 1985 essay were plainly and proudly his own, and for that reason they cannot so easily be set aside." Eastland added: "The better strategy for Alito is the more credible one of straightforwardly discussing the substance of what he wrote."

Bruce Fein, a conservative legal scholar who supports Alito and worked with him in the Reagan years, has been outspoken in questioning the conservative strategy of distancing Alito from his own writing. "This idea that all the folks in the Reagan administration were all apparatchiks who didn't believe what they were saying and writing is surreal," Fein told The Post. Over the weekend, Fein warned that "you end up losing more if your credibility is strained and people think you're playing them for dupes."

Some conservatives believe that doing that is the only way to win this game. They point to the defeat of Robert Bork in 1987 to argue that Supreme Court appointees are better off with a strategy of evasion. But there is quiet grumbling among members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Alito may be telling both sides what they want to hear. That's a long way from the searching discussion of constitutional principles that his nomination once promised to occasion.

There is no shame in losing something in the service of what you deeply believe. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas defines the essence of morality as the willingness to suffer for what you believe. By that standard, questions about Judge Alito's moral system are now on the floor.

How Many More Years?

Flunking out on security

A YEAR AND A HALF ISN'T MUCH time to make the kind of sweeping homeland security improvements recommended by the 9/11 commission. But as Monday's report card from the former panel's membership shows, most of the parties involved aren't even trying.

The report card assessed the performance of Congress and the Bush administration in implementing all 41 of the panel's original recommendations, which were issued in July 2004. The grades, including five Fs, 12 Ds and only one A, show that both branches of government are flunking out when it comes to national security.

The report card is a public relations nightmare for President Bush, who was reelected largely on the perception that he could keep Americans safer than the opposition. Bush's appointees have thus far done little to reform the nation's intelligence operations, which are still mostly failing to share information either within the federal government or with state and local agencies. No action has been taken to declassify the overall intelligence budget, meaning congressional oversight of intelligence spending is impossible, and the administration's failure to develop standards for detention and prosecution of captured terrorism suspects is destroying U.S. credibility abroad.

Congress shares plenty of the blame. Among the most egregious failures identified by the panel is the way legislators allocate homeland security funds. The money is distributed to states based on a formula that sends far too much to places at little or no risk of attack, while facilities truly at risk, such as the Port of Los Angeles, are underfunded. The reauthorization bill for the Patriot Act contains a revision that would fix the problem, but it is in serious danger of being stripped out by a handful of senators who appear more interested in shipping pork to their home states than in protecting Americans' lives.

More than four years after 9/11, Americans aren't much safer from terrorist attack than they were before the tragedy. The upgraded watch list for screening airline passengers still isn't in place; local police and fire agencies still don't have a uniform system of communicating with each other; no nationwide terrorism risk assessment has been performed. Nobody expects the ship of state to turn on a dime, but this one is barely turning at all.

The fire and police departments of New York City still can't communicate by radio. We're screening someplace around 5% of the cargo coming into our seaports. What else do you need to know?

Attention Deficit Disorder

Giving up on New Orleans
# We may as well abandon the Big Easy because the White House is killing a plan to protect the city from the next Katrina.

By Mike Tidwell, MIKE TIDWELL is the author of "Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast" (Pantheon, 2003).

AS WE NEAR the 100-day mark since Hurricane Katrina hit, it's time we ended our national state of denial and abandon New Orleans for good.

We should call it quits not because New Orleans can't be made relatively safe from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do so is more trouble than it's worth. It's not. Instead, the hammers and brooms and chain saws should all be put away and the city permanently boarded up because the Bush administration has already given New Orleans a quiet kiss of death.

Although he has encouraged city residents to return home and declared "we will do whatever it takes" to save the city, President Bush last month refused the one thing New Orleans simply cannot live without: a restored network of barrier islands and coastal wetlands.

Katrina destroyed the Big Easy — and future Katrinas will do the same — because 1 million acres of coastal islands and marshland vanished in Louisiana in the last century because of human interference. These land forms served as natural "speed bumps," reducing the lethal surge tide of past hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the first place. A $14-billion plan to fix this problem — widely viewed as technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies and fishermen alike — has been on the table for years and was pushed forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But the Bush administration has turned its back on this plan.

Instead of investing the equivalent of six weeks of spending on the Iraq war or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston, we must now prepare to pay for another, inevitable $200-billion hurricane in Louisiana. Which is why, tragically, we are better off simply cutting our losses and abandoning New Orleans right now.

In the weeks after Katrina, the media portrayed the catastrophe as a matter of failed levees and flawed evacuation plans alone. But these were just horrifying symptoms of a much larger disease. No amount of levee building or stockpiles of bottled water will ever save New Orleans until the barrier shoreline is restored.

This is an admission of what is in fact happening. Between FEMA disinterest and Bush failures, New Orleans has already been forgetten by the Feds. NOLA is gone, we might as well admit it because W is only interested in photo ops. The actual effort of governing is quite beyond him.

Abusing Christmas

Do we need more proof that the religious fanatics are terrified about Alito's nomination? They must have read the tea leaves that say the majority of Americans do not want a woman's right to chose taken away. Consequently, they hope to bait and switch with stunts like this. I know when I read the byline, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Ads Portray Nominee as Protector of Christmas

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: December 6, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 - It is the time of year when bedtime stories and television specials often recall the plucky reindeer and the little girl of Whoville who managed to save Christmas. This year, some conservative groups are hoping to add a new name to that pantheon of heroes: Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee.

"Liberal groups like People for the American Way and the A.C.L.U. have opposed public Christmas and Hanukkah displays and even fought to keep Christmas carols out of school," declares a radio commercial paid for by the conservative Committee for Justice beginning Monday in Colorado, Wisconsin and West Virginia, states whose senators are considered pivotal votes on Judge Alito.

This is a bad joke right, almost like the football game last night. Really, what type of moron will by this mess? Wait a minute... isn't this going on the radio, probably right after Sunday services? It gets better though:

"Some courts and judges have supported this radical agenda, but not Judge Sam Alito," it continues. "Throughout his career, Judge Alito has consistently upheld the Constitution's protection of free religious expression."

The article does go on to say what types of cases Alito has ruled on.

Judge Alito's record on the issue as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, however, is clear. In addition to the Nativity scene decision, he ruled in favor of allowing local governments to set up Nativity scenes alongside secular symbols. He ruled against a school district that wanted to prevent an evangelical group from sending fliers home to elementary school children. And he ruled in favor of the right of Muslim police officers in Newark to wear beards for religious reasons despite the department's general rule.

Honestly, aside from the evangelical group, these are all fairly mainstream and evenhanded positions, yet what does this tell us about the support for the Judge? The best part is the overt cynicism of this position.

Manuel Miranda, a former Republican Senate aide who now helps coordinate conservative judicial confirmation campaigns, said he had been urging groups for months to play up Judge Alito's religion decisions. "It is something that the other side can't really join or debate because they come out looking like the Grinch," Mr. Miranda said.

Except, that's not true and they know it. Most Americans don't believe there is a "War on Christmas" despite what various clueless groups (a much nicer term than they deserve) think. No one is being persecuted when they say Merry Christmas. Rev. Barry Lynn, the director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, put it best:

"If they think that hitching Samuel Alito to Santa's sleigh is going to eliminate serious issues about his regard for the Constitution, I think they are mistaken," Mr. Lynn said.

Amen.

W's Apologist

Rice Defends Tactics Used Against Suspects
Europe Aware of Operations, She Implies

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 6, 2005; Page A01

BERLIN, Dec. 6 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, seeking to dampen a furor in Europe over the CIA's secret detention and transport of suspected terrorists on European soil, on Monday defended U.S. actions there as preventing terrorist attacks and strongly suggested that operations have occurred only with the cooperation of relevant governments.

At Andrews Air Force Base before boarding her plane for a week-long swing through Europe, Rice said the United States always respects the sovereignty of foreign countries when conducting intelligence operations within their borders. Aides said that was diplomatic code meaning that the United States does not act without first getting permission.

Rice's carefully crafted statement was the Bush administration's most comprehensive explanation yet of its policy on transferring terrorism suspects across international borders. U.S. officials hope her remarks will ease concerns raised in European capitals after The Washington Post reported on Nov. 2 that the CIA has operated a clandestine prison system in Eastern Europe and other countries.

Rice did not confirm or deny the existence of the prisons, saying, "We cannot discuss information that would compromise the success of intelligence, law enforcement and military operations." But she implied that governments in Europe were aware of U.S. intelligence operations there, including assistance in a practice known as "rendition," in which suspects are secretly transferred from countries without formal extradition proceedings.

At one point, Rice appeared to acknowledge that top detainees directly connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have been held outside the United States. U.S. intelligence agencies, she said, have gathered information from a "very small number of extremely dangerous detainees," including planners of the Sept. 11 hijackings and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The United States "has fully respected the sovereignty of other countries that cooperate in these matters," she said.

Intelligence cooperation between the United States and European countries has "helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives," Rice said.

The Post reported last month that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe as part of a covert prison system that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe. The Post did not identify the Eastern European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials, who said the disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

If we catch 'em, they are guilty and we can do what we want.

Gee, isn't that one of the reasons we told King George to get lost and started up the United States?

The Europeans know Bush*t when they see it.

Why Are We Here?

Bombers Kill at Least 36 at Baghdad Police Academy

By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: December 6, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 6 - Two bombers wearing explosive belts blew themselves up in a crowded courtyard in the Baghdad police academy this morning, killing at least 36 people and wounding 72, Interior Ministry officials said.

The bombings were the worst violence for months in the capital, where police officials are a favored target of Sunni Arab insurgents. Early reports indicated the bombers may have been women, but the American military said in a statement that the bombers were male.

The first bomber detonated his payload at about 12:45 p.m. in a courtyard full of cadets in the academy, a sprawling complex in eastern Baghdad. The second exploded shortly afterward, as the area was still crowded with police and emergency workers, said an ambulance driver who had spoken to police officials at the scene. The two may have been students at the academy, which might explain why they were able to get into the compound without being searches, the driver said.

"One of the suicide bombers detonated near a group of students outside a classroom," the military said. "Thinking the explosion was an indirect-fire attack, Iraqi police and students fled to a bunker for shelter where the second bomber detonated his vest."

The military said an American contractor was among the wounded.

The bombings came as Arabic satellite channels broadcast a videotape of a kidnapped American security contractor, with a warning from an insurgent group that he would be killed in 48 hours unless all Iraqi prisoners are freed. It appeared to be the latest in an extraordinary surge of abductions of Westerners over the past two weeks, after a lull that had lasted for months.

The videotape showed a blonde man, along with a United States passport and an Arabic ID card bearing the name Ronald Schultz. It bore the logo of the Islamic Army of Iraq, a group that has taken credit for many attacks here over the past year.

The 48-hour deadline coincided with a similar threat issued against four peace advocates who were kidnapped last week, also in Baghdad. Their captors have threatened to kill them by Thursday unless all Iraqi prisoners are released from American and Iraqi jails. Another captive, Susanne Osthoff, of Germany, has also been threatened with death. Altogether, seven Westerners have been kidnapped in the past two weeks.

When I hear Bush and Cheney and Rummy talk about what a wonderful job we are doing in Iraq, I wonder if they ever read the papers. I know that they don't read Juan Cole.

I apologize if I sound angry this morning. Yes, I'm angry. Both stupidity and lies make me mad.

The Elite

With Abysmal GPA, Government Fails to Make Kean's List

By Dana Milbank

Tuesday, December 6, 2005; Page A04

Thomas H. Kean, the former chairman of the 9/11 commission, sounded like the parent confronting his bright but lazy child.

"Look at this report card!" he demanded. "There are too many C's, D's and F's in this report card!"

Kean was standing on a stage in the Ronald Reagan Building in front of a giant poster grading the federal government's response to the 9/11 commission's recommendations. And the results weren't pretty: Five F's, 12 D's, two incompletes and only one A, which translates to a grade-point average of 1.8.

"Our leadership has been distracted in this country," Kean protested, citing the "scandalous" failures to improve emergency communications or get security money to highest-risk areas. "We're frustrated at the lack of urgency in addressing these various problems."

The problem pupils were absent from this dressing-down. Members of Congress were on their extended Thanksgiving vacation. And, at the exact moment Kean and his fellow former commissioners were warning about a distracted government, President Bush was at a White House holiday reception for children.

That Kean was in front of the cameras yesterday was something of a historical accident. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and his vice chairman, former Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton (Ind.) got their jobs after Henry A. Kissinger and George J. Mitchell bowed out. "These are the two best second choices in American history," former senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), a commissioner, observed at the news conference.

The commission, evenly split between the parties and opposed from the start by Bush, was "set up to fail," as Kean liked to put it. Instead, Kean and Hamilton became to independent commissions what Batman and Robin were to crime fighting: They got unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans for a hard-hitting report and a slate of specific recommendations. When the commission expired last year, Kean and Hamilton kept the group together as self-appointed monitors, popping up every few months to keep public attention on the issues.

As their formal relationship came to an end yesterday with the dissolution of the "9/11 Public Discourse Project," the two men relived some of their exploits. "We have had over 500 speaking events in 36 states," Hamilton boasted. "We've met with college students and high school students, 700 model U.N. students and 1,500 Boy Scout leaders."

Along the way, Hamilton and Kean, who hadn't met before they were appointed, became an old married couple. Kean has been heard to call Hamilton "my other half." Gorton dubbed the two men "the twins" in their private deliberations. "They would finish each other's sentences," he marveled yesterday.

In preparation for their final news conference, the two men arranged a joint appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," co-wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times and appeared together yesterday at a breakfast arranged by the Christian Science Monitor.

They were not a natural pair: The patrician Kean had monogrammed cuffs and accepted a plate of eggs, sausage, bacon and potatoes; Hamilton, a Hoosier who favors a '50s-style hairdo and glasses, declined the breakfast and instead chewed noisily on ice.

But their affection was evident, and profuse. "The reason we got a unanimous report in the commission was because Tom was the leader," Hamilton said. Kean rolled his eyes at Hamilton's modesty.

When Kean offered his view that the debate about torturing detainees has given the country a "black eye," Hamilton's rejoinder was: "I think Tom said it very well."

The breakfast done, the Tom and Lee show moved a few blocks away, to the news conference in the Reagan Building. In front of the lights, the chairman and vice chairman produced their choicest adjectives. Hamilton railed against a "dysfunctional" Congress and warned urgently of "the potential for catastrophic destruction." The normally mild Kean lobbed words such as "shocking" and called it "scandalous that we still allocate scarce Homeland Security dollars on the basis of pork-barrel spending."

The other commissioners served as a Greek chorus for Kean and Hamilton's Cassandra.

"If my children were to receive this report card, they would have to repeat a grade," former representative Tim Roemer (D-Ind.) offered.

Dana, the Wapo gives you miles of their front page real estate and all you can do is work like this? Jeebus, this is kindergarten reporting when the real story is that not a whit nor jottle has been done to stem the real threats to you and me. Dana reports from his comfortable home in Chevy Chase and us real people don't live there. I guess he thinks he is exempt.

Who Decides?

This is from a campus paper, but the writer cuts to the chase and I wish I'd written it:

Alito says a woman's right to manage her own body is unconstitutional, but he seems to think her husband is qualified to do the job.

I think that sums it up in a nutshell.

Sexist a**hole.

A note to scribes: a woman can be witty, have advanced degrees and do cutting edge research and be a wife and mother. We can walk and chew gum.

A Little Something

I don't usually go for these "amuse bouche" recipes. When it is time to eat, I want to eat, but this one is so easy and chinese spoons are so cheap and ubiquitous, I thought it was worthy of mention. It is kind of fun.

AMUSE-BOUCHE, ASPARAGUS MOUSSE

"a little bite" of a flavorful mousse to begin a dinner party
so creamy, and this can be made ahead of time
Garnish with a tomato diamond and an Arugula leaf

Serves 12

Yield: 3/4 cup

1/4 lb. asparagus, washed, trimmed and peeled if neccesary
1 green onion, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon Best Foods or Hellman's Mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
pinch cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons cream
1/4 of an egg white
1/8 teaspoon Kosher salt

1 small tomato, for garnish
12 small arugula leaves, for garnish

Cook the asparagus until tender. [ed. this takes two minutes in the microwave with a sprinkling of water.] Remove from heat, drain well, put into a processor with the green onion and puree until smooth. Transfer mixture to a bowl and place in a larger bowl of ice and water to chill for approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from iced water and blend in the mayonnaise, lemon juice and cayenne pepper. Cover and refrigerate.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whip the cream and set aside. In a separate bowl beat the egg white with salt until stiff peaks form. Remove the chilled asparagus from the refrigerator and fold in the egg white then the whipped cream. Taste for seasoning. At this point, the mousse can be covered and set aside until serving time.

Tomato Diamonds:
Cut small diamonds from the tomato using the skin only. This can be made 2 days before serving, covered and refrigerated.

Add a small quenelle of the asparagus mousse to each Chinese spoon, garnish with a tomato diamond and an arugula leaf and serve.

It's a little precious, but it tastes good and if you are using a skinless tomato elsewhere in the menu, not wastefull.

The author's vision of what this should look like is available on the link.

Eat the Old

Verizon to Halt Pension Outlay for Managers

By KEN BELSON and MATT RICHTEL
Published: December 6, 2005

Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telephone company, said yesterday that it would freeze the guaranteed pension plan covering 50,000 of its managers and expand their 401(k) plans instead.

Verizon is profitable, but Ivan G. Seidenberg sees problems ahead.

In freezing the plan, the company will pay workers the benefits they have already earned but will not let them build additional benefits.

Verizon said that it would also contribute less to the health care benefits of the managers when they retire. Over all, the company hopes to save about $3 billion over the next decade by taking the steps.

The moves are part of a broader effort by Verizon, a regional Bell company, to overhaul its pension and health care plans to keep up with rival cable and technology companies that typically pay lower salaries and provide fewer benefits.

"This restructuring reflects the realities of our changing world," said Verizon's chief executive, Ivan G. Seidenberg. "Companies today, including many we compete with, are not implementing defined benefit pension plans or subsidized retiree medical benefits."

Verizon's 200,000 retirees and its 105,000 current union employees will not be affected by the change. But in cutting retirement benefits for about a quarter of its work force of 215,000, Verizon may be setting the stage for concessions it may hope to gain from its unionized workers in the next round of negotiations.

The company's decision to scale back benefits for some employees echoes similar steps taken in recent months by other big technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M. and Motorola. Businesses across America have been trying to find ways to reduce their pension burdens and contain health care costs that are spiraling upward.

Pension experts, however, say that Verizon, which operates in 28 states and controls about 50 million phone lines, may find it harder to recruit workers as it cuts back on benefits.

Nah. Everybody's doing it. Finding a company that will actually honor its benefit promises is going to become the job of the future.

BTW, the same people who want to do away with pensions are the same people who want to kill Social Security. Just so you know. They think you should be old, poor and starve to death.

Never Skip Breakfast

This is an institutional recipe and I'm copying it here because it is easy for the home cook to replicate and it is damn good. This is a large recipe and you'll need to cut it down for home use.

Eggs Forestière

Eggs

Substitute 4 containers of Simply Eggs or other product from the dairy case
Heavy Whipping Cream 36%* 2 oz

Wild Mushrooms, assorted, chopped coarse 18 oz
Garlic, finely chopped 1 clove
Red Onion, small dice 6 oz
Spinach, sweated 6 oz
Roasted Red Pepper, fine julienne 3 oz
Boursin or Rondale Herb Cheese, crumbled 12 oz
Melted Butter or Alternative 6 oz
Salt and Pepper to taste
Rosemary Sprigs 12 each

*Heavy Whipping Cream 36% can be replaced with Half & Half for a lower fat alternative.

Directions

1. Sauté the mushrooms with the garlic and 2 ounces of butter until golden brown. Season with salt and pepper. Remove from heat and cool.
2. Combine eggs and cream.
3. Pour the remaining butter on a preheated grill. Add the egg mixture and fold over until slightly set.
4. Add the sautéed mushrooms and remaining ingredients. Season to taste and continue cooking until set.
5. Portion and garnish with the rosemary sprigs.

Boursin and Rondele, especially the lowfat versions, are just a gift to us and should be used in as many ways possible. I use the garlic variety to stuff twice baked potatoes.

This version for one gives you an idea of what you are shooting for.

Movable Bites

Melba Toast Recipe

Homemade Melba toast has the edge on the bought packaged variety. It is nicest served while still a little warm, in a basket or on a napkin-lined plate. If it is made a short time ahead, store it in an airtight container, then refresh it for a short time in the oven.
Melba Toast
8 slices white bread

4-8 servings

1. Preheat the broiler to high and toast the bread lightly on both sides.
2. Cut off the crusts and then, holding the toast flat, slide a sharp knife between the toasted edges to split the bread so that you now have 8 slices that are toasted only on one side.
3. Cut each piece into 4 triangles, and then toast under the broiler, untoasted sides uppermost, until golden and the edges curl.
4. Serve warm with soup.
5. Alternatively, make Melba toast earlier in the day, and warm for a short time in the oven at 170ºC/ 325ºF/ Gas Mark 3 before serving.

This is a bit of work, but oh so worth it. Cover each piece with tapenade and soak up the kudos.

Chowdah

In spite of the fact that I'm an adoptive New Englander, I really prefer Manhattan style clam chowder (and I like it a lot, it's my preferred soup on cold and snowy days like today.)

Chowder clams are different from the steamers that you find at the grocery and you'll probably have to ask the seafood manager to order them. Steamers get really tough when they are subjected to the amount of cooking (which is minimal) that chowder needs.

The recipe says that it takes an hour to prepare. That's about right, but I'll warn you that it is a pretty intense hour.

Serving Size: 12
Preparation Time: 1 hour
Categories: Shellfish Soups

* 1 dozen chowder clams
* 2 qts water or stock white
* 1 tsp thyme leaf
* 1 each bay leaf
* 1 cup celery tops and leaves
* 6 slices bacon diced
* 1-1/2 cups celery diced
* 1 cup onion diced
* 1 cup carrots diced
* 1 each green pepper medium in dice
* 2 each cloves garlic -- chopped
* 2 cups crushed tomatoes in puree
* 1-1/2 qts clam broth, reserved
* 1 lb potatoes peeled and diced. -- 2/3 qt E.P.
* 1 2-inch square smoked bacon rind -- optional
* salt and pepper to taste -- won't need much
* 1 tbl parsley chopped

1. Wash the clams well in cold running water and scrub the shells to remove the sand. An average chowder clam will weigh about eight ounces, a big one may weigh as much as a pound. When you get an average sized clam weighing as much as a big one, it may be dead and full of mud, and will ruin whatever it is used in. Tap it with a knife, it will sound duller than a good clam.

2. Cover the well washed clams with cold water to just cover Two quarts will cover the average dozen, and yield the needed 1-1/2 qt's strained. If you have it, white stock or white stock and water half and half, will make a richer chowder. Add the thyme, bay leaf and celery tops. Cover and bring to the boil. Stir the clams well. As soon as most of them are open, turn off the flame and remove them to a bowl. Leave the unopened ones in the hot stock, they will be open by the time you have finished with the open ones. Test any that do not open for mud over the sink, not the stock. Drain off the clam broth, through a strainer, leaving the last bit in the pot, along with any sand. This will remove the thyme leaves which will have flavored the broth, but look like black specks, a source of complaints. Reserve the clam broth. After it stands a while, you may find sand on the bottom. Check by repouring it into another bowl.

3. Remove the clams from the shells. Also remove the two round adductor muscles attached to the shells. Put them in the "tough" pile along with the lip (the thick crescent shaped part of the body) of the clams which you should remove from the clam body by jullienning it. Cut the clam bodies in 4 to 6 pieces, and hold them in a bowl of clam broth to keep them from drying out. Chop or grind the tough parts as fine as is reasonable. No amount of cooking will make them tender, but they add flavor and "clam" to the chowder. Add this to the reserved clam bodies. The cooked clam weighs 8 oz.

4. I prefer to use slab bacon with the rind on, but thick sliced bacon will do. (Should you have a piece of smoked bacon or ham rind, add it for flavor. Dice or julienne it, and cook it slowly, in a heavy pot, and allow it to take color well. If you don't color it well, it will come back to haunt you looking dead white. Add the diced celery, onions, carrots and green pepper, and cook them well in the fat. After they are softened, add the garlic and the crushed tomatoes. If you are using fresh plum tomatoes, cut an X in the bottom, give them a 10 second bath in boiling water, and then into ice water, and peel them, before chopping, Cook the tomatoes and garlic for 3 or four minutes.

5. Add the reserved sand free clam broth, and then the diced potatoes. Bring to the boil, simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add reserved chopped clams in broth, Do not boil, as it toughens the clams. Finish with some chopped parsley. This soup freezes well, so I like to double this recipe, and freeze some. Double the recipe is not double the work.

Yields 3 quarts
Serving Ideas: Saltine Crackers are needed.

Notes: Don't use Idaho type potatoes. They break up too much. Also you need not be too precise in dicing the veg and potatoes for a chowder.

Manhattan Clam Chowder is the red kind. You will also find it in Rhode Island. This chowder will not have black specks in it, as we strain the broth to remove the thyme that causes them.

This is a great first course for a dover sole or Boston scrod. For a snowy day emergency lunch with a tuna salad sandwich, it's great disaster recovery after shoveling the car out.

We didn't have that much snow and most will be gone in a day, but you sure wouldn't know that from listening to the local newscasts this evening who treated it like the Cuban missile crisis. The weathercasters are talking darkly about a Big Nor'Easter for later in the week. Our big winter storms here are ocean storms that originate in the Gulf of Mexico, cross the lower Southeast and redevelop off the coast of the Carolinas. We've got the right combination of Canadian cold air (thanks, pogge) and Gulf moisture for a possible bruiser at the end of the week.

Somebody remind me to hire a local kid before the end of the week to dig the car out. The last time I did that it took months for the torn muscle in my shoulder to heal.

Hmm. Maybe I need to order some chowder clams and get that stockpot simmering before the end of the week. Dammit, I've had worse ideas. You could bake your own oyster crackers for your chowder. These freeze well, as does the chowder.

Elevating the Humble Spud

This is simple, elegant, easy and quick, which makes it an almost perfect dish. Potatoes, cheese, what's not to like?

POTATO AND BLUE CHEESE GRATIN
Tender, rich, and browned on top, this easy potato gratin gets loads of flavor from a very minimal amount of blue cheese that is added at the last minute.

1 1/2 lb medium yellow-fleshed potatoes
1 cup heavy cream
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese (1.5 oz)

Special equipment: an adjustable-blade slicer; a 10-inch heavy skillet with a flameproof handle

Put oven rack in upper third of oven and preheat oven to 425°F.

Peel potatoes and slice 1/8 inch thick, then toss with cream, garlic, salt, and pepper in skillet. Cover with foil and roast until potatoes are very tender, about 25 minutes. Remove from oven and preheat broiler. Remove foil and sprinkle potatoes with cheese. Broil until top is browned, 2 to 3 minutes.

Makes 4 side-dish servings.

This makes a nice side for ham, or it will make a yummy main course for two with the addition of soup and salad. If blue cheese isn't your thing (I'd eat it on everything, I can't get enough) any other favorite cheese can easily be substituted. But with the blue cheese, you can also toss in a handful of coarsely chopped pecans to pump up the protein and add a contrasting texture.

The thin slicer on your food processor will work just fine to make the slices. If you have a hand mandoline, this is also a quick job. The 10 inch heavy skillet? I use cast iron, I have my grandmother's. If you don't have a food processor, get a hand mandoline. They are cheap and save a lot of slicing time.

BTW, this recipe is great with a brunch menu, too, and it is easy to expand if you need to feed a crowd.

Winter Vegetable

This is an incredible side dish. The deep flavor is particularly good with beef, lamb or pork.

BALSAMIC ROASTED ONIONS

4 pounds medium-size red onions
1/4 cup olive oil

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) butter
3 tablespoons sugar
6 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Position 1 rack in center and 1 rack in bottom third of oven; preheat to 500°F. Line 2 large baking sheets with foil. Cut onions through root end into 3/4-inch-thick wedges. Place in medium bowl; toss with oil. Arrange onions, cut side down, on baking sheets. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast until onions are brown and tender, rotating pans in oven and turning onions once, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt butter in heavy small saucepan over medium-high heat. Add sugar and stir until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat. Add vinegar. Return to heat. Simmer until mixture thickens slightly, about 2 minutes. (Onions and balsamic glaze can be made 1 day ahead. Cool. Cover separately and chill. Rewarm onions in 375°F oven about 15 minutes. Stir glaze over low heat to rewarm.)

Arrange onions on platter. Drizzle glaze over. Sprinkle with parsley.

Makes 10 servings.

Left Undone

9/11 Panel Calls U.S. Response 'Disappointing'

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: December 5, 2005

The 9/11 Commission released its final report today, outlining an array of shortcomings in the government's response to the 2001 terrorist attacks and calling overall progress "disappointing."

"We are safer, but we are not yet safe," said Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission charged with finding ways to prevent another terrorist attack and to investigate past intelligence failures. "That's simply not acceptable."

The commission, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, criticized the continued lack of intelligence sharing between government agencies; the lack of progress in curtailing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the failure to establish a uniform standard for treating detainees; and the distribution of Department of Homeland Security money based on politics rather than on potential risk.

In a statement, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the progress report issued by the commissioners today, showed that the Bush administration and Congress were "dangerously neglecting the defensive war on terror we should be fighting here at home."

"The report is a top-to-bottom indictment of the federal government's lack of resources, focus and expertise in fighting the domestic war on terror," Mr. Schumer said. "New York State is particularly hurt by the terribly unfair and inefficient homeland security funding formula and the lack of a federal program for communications interoperability among first responders. We can and must do better."

In July 2004, the 10-member commission issued a report with 41 recommendations, most of which have not been enacted.

President Bush did carry out one of the recommendations by appointing a director of national intelligence after receiving pressure from members of Congress.

Since the release of its report, the commission has embarked on what it has called a "public education campaign" seeking to get its recommendations approved by Congress.

At a Washington news conference today, members of the commission repeatedly blasted the government - though none criticized the Bush administration directly - for its lack of progress on pushing through the recommendations.

"None of it is rocket science," said John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member who was a Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. "None of it is in the too-hard category. We all believe it is possible to get all of these things achieved."

As a resident of one of the metropolitan area with a bull's eye painted on it, yeah, this bothers me a lot.

Whiteness

It's snowing, which means the afternoon commute home is going to be a nightmare. DC traffic is a mess when the roads are dry. Add a little precip and the drivers go nuts. This makes me glad that my commute is down the stairs in the morning. And it's one of the things I love about my new job: I'll continue working from home.

I need to get the desktop box fixed for the new gig, however. Typing on this undersized laptop keyboard is killing my hands and the new job is going to be an even higher production writing environment than filling a couple of blogs everyday.

Debunking Bush*t

I'm listening to W in Kernersville, NC, this afternoon (so you don't have to.) Here is what the Center for American Progress has to say about his economic fables:

Out of Touch

Today, President Bush will travel to North Carolina to tout an economy the White House says is "cooking along" with "strong and sustained economic growth." Ordinary Americans do not share the president's enthusiasm: 63 percent of Americans characterize the economy as "bad," "very bad," or "terrible," and "by 58 to 36 percent people say economic conditions are getting worse, not better." The divide is understandable. For the beneficiaries of President Bush's economic policies -- major corporations and wealthy Americans -- times are booming. Inflation-adjusted corporate profits have risen more than 50 percent since the last quarter of 2001. But the basic test of an administration is not whether it can merely improve the lot of the comfortable and well-off; it's whether growth and opportunity can be spread throughout an economy. As public opinion numbers show, President Bush has not passed this test. Middle and working-class Americans are frustrated with the economy for the simple fact that it's not working for them. Despite positive job and GDP indicators, most families are losing economic ground -- losing purchasing power, stretching stagnant wages, and piling up debt.

MAKING LESS MONEY: Real wages have declined heavily this year, and have remained stagnant both since the end of the recession and since Bush took office. In other words, the average American worker hasn't had a raise above inflation since President Bush took office. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages were about as high last October as in March 2001. Inflation-adjusted weekly earnings in October were 0.7 percent lower than in March 2001. Labor Department figures released Friday show wages continued to be flat or even lower than at the start of the business cycle in November. Hourly wages for production, non-supervisory workers -- the vast majority of workers -- rose by just 0.2 percent, while weekly earnings actually fell by 0.1 percent, before the effects of inflation are even taken into account.

FALLING INTO THE DEBT TRAP: With spending growth outstripping disposable income, personal savings rates have plummeted. In August, the personal savings rate dropped to negative 2.2 percent, a level not seen since the Great Depression, and remained negative for the fourth straight month in October. As a result, households are now spending a record 13.6 percent of their disposable income to service their outstanding debt. In the third quarter of 2005, all banks reported that the ratio of consumer loans that were in default, including credit card debt, rose to over 3 percent for the first time in more than two years. And as we continue to borrow to finance the debts of the government and American consumers, the current account deficit has ballooned -- on pace for a record $800 billion this year -- requiring us to borrow $3 billion per business day to finance our spending excess. President Bush's job record is still too weak to allow middle-class families to escape the debt trap. Without stronger, prolonged, broad-based employment growth and a clear turnaround in wages, millions of Americans will continue to struggle under a mountain of debt amassed over the past few years.

'MISERY INDEX' HITS TWELVE-YEAR HIGH: "If you ask the classic Ronald Reagan question, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' a large number of Americans are in fact not better off," says Michael Mussa, a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1986 to 1988. Bloomberg News notes that Mussa's assessment "is reflected in the 'misery index,' a combination of the rates of unemployment and inflation, which reached a 12-year high of 9.8 in September as energy prices escalated." That is higher than the 7.8 level when President Bush took office and "higher than the average of 8.7 during the past two decades."

TALKING TAX RELIEF: President Bush will also be speaking about taxes today, partly because even many conservatives are now balking at more tax cuts for the rich. (The Economist magazine says this development heralds the end of the "era of irresponsibility.") President Bush's idea of tax relief is demonstrated by his backing of the immoral House budget plan to cut $50 billion from Medicaid, food stamps and student loans while spending tens of billions of dollars on tax cuts for people earning over $1 million per year. There's a way to reform the tax code that's consistent with progressive values. The Center for American Progress released a plan earlier this year to restore fairness, simplicity, and opportunity to the tax system. To restore fairness, the Center proposes taxing wage and investment income at the same rate, reducing the share employees pay into the regressive payroll tax, and increasing the take-home pay for working families. To simplify the tax code, the Center's plan would reduce the number of tax brackets to three, close corporate and individual tax loopholes, and eliminate the AMT. By restoring fiscal discipline and offering increased incentives to save, the plan would implement a progressive growth strategy while making the tax system less complex.

Yeah, that covers it. There are no jobs out there. I've been unemployed for nearly a year.

Free the Internet from the new Robber Barons!

Always glad to know that the corporate world will strangle any attempt at making the internet more accessible....

No Heavy Lifting

Rice's Support Staff

By Al Kamen
Monday, December 5, 2005; A19

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice , a record-setting globetrotter, has made it clear she travels for strategic reasons, not to attend boring annual talkfests.

So first she blew off the ministerial meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in July in Laos, an event that every secretary of state since George P. Schultz has attended. Then she took a pass on the Australian-U.S. ministerial meeting last month in Adelaide.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went to that one, but not Rice, though she was in the area, in China, with President Bush .

And now she's headed off to Europe but skipping the ministerial conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a human rights organization that has played a key role in the New Europe and the Balkans. This even though she's going to be within an hour or so by air of the meeting in Slovenia when she flies from Berlin to Romania.

Worse yet, those guys don't even rate Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick , who covered for Rice at the first two gatherings. The OSCE gets Undersecretary R. Nicholas Burns , who, an announcement said, will "deliver a message of strong U.S. support for the OSCE."

Really, really strong support.

Lightweight.

No Dancing Music

FEMA, Round Two

Monday, December 5, 2005; Page A20

THIS TIME around, it's happening in slow motion. But that doesn't mean that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to the evacuee crisis in the months after Hurricane Katrina is going any better than that first, panicked, non-response to the hurricane itself three months ago. To be fair to the agency, the scale of the current crisis remains unprecedented in American history: Some 1.5 million people were displaced from southern Louisiana. The agency has provided $4.4 billion to evacuees and continues to pay hotel bills for about 50,000 families. It isn't FEMA's fault that continued uncertainty about the future of New Orleans and other cities in the Gulf Coast region is preventing many evacuees from either returning home or readjusting to their new lives and moving on.

Nevertheless, it has become increasingly obvious that neither FEMA nor the states that house the evacuees have any medium-term plan for them. Meanwhile, the agency is sending conflicting signals. Several weeks ago, FEMA warned hurricane victims living in every state except Louisiana and Mississippi that it intended to stop paying for hotel rooms by Dec. 1. Then, realizing that thousands of people would be put onto the streets, the agency reversed itself, saying it would continue to pay for rooms in eight other states until Jan. 7. The agency says it plans to stick to the new date, but critics point out that mere ignorance of deadlines is not what is preventing those in hotels from finding apartments. Rents have risen in many Gulf cities, such as Baton Rouge, La., and Houston, yet FEMA subsidies remain capped.

FEMA also remains afflicted by an overly heavy bureaucracy and, it seems, inexperience. Landlords and their advocates complain that FEMA long ignored their offers of greater cooperation. Information has sometimes been transmitted to evacuees in garbled form. Long lines for trailers remain.

Think about this: Katrina was a disaster different in scope, but not in type, from those which preceded her. Scaling up to deal with the scope would have predictable bumps, but not the complete incompetence this agency has evinced over the last three months. Planning for a disaster like pandemic infectious disease....I simply shudder to think of it.

I'm listening to a C-Span broadcast of a pandemic flu event sponsored by HHS and Homeland Security. I'm hearing the words, but there isn't any music.

"My Daddy"

We're getting into some deeply Jungian territory with this tactic. The Repub's timing is way off. You don't get into the parental units until the hearings, when there is no time to go digging.

Court Nominee Presents Father as Role Model

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: December 5, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 - When a Democratic senator asked the Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. why he might empathize with the plight of minorities or the poor, he had his answer ready: the example of his late father, an Italian immigrant who in college once defended a black basketball player from discrimination on the team.

When other Democrats pressed Judge Alito about why he had once disagreed with the Warren Court decision that established the "one person, one vote" standard for state districts, he again recalled the legacy of his father, Samuel A. Alito, who worked for three decades as the director of research for the New Jersey Legislature.

In his bedroom at night as a boy, Judge Alito told senators, he could hear his father clicking away at a manual calculator as he struggled to redraw the state's legislative districts with equal populations, people present for the conversations said.

To some senators, Judge Alito has said his father taught him to "revere" the legislative process. He has pointed to his father as a model of bipartisanship. And he has happily told them that many people say he takes after his father. Two senators openly discussed the conversations, and aides who had been instructed not to speak to the press described them on condition of anonymity.

As Judge Alito prepares for his confirmation hearings next month, the elder Mr. Alito is emerging as a larger-than-life hero in the story his son presents to the public. Their relationship provides the kind of humanizing details that political advisers often encourage Supreme Court nominees to offer. And Judge Alito has often invoked his father's legacy to help deflect questions from skeptical Democrats.

Still, some colleagues and friends of the elder Mr. Alito, who died in 1987, said they had never heard some of the stories his son has recounted, including the episode about his support for the black student and the fact that his father immigrated from Italy as a child. Some of the elder Mr. Alito's colleagues said they first learned that he was born in Italy when President Bush mentioned it in announcing the nomination.

The elder Mr. Alito did not want to be called "Italian-American," said Arthur Applebaum, his longtime deputy in the legislative research service. "He just didn't care for hyphenated groups," Mr. Applebaum said, suggesting that Mr. Alito may have seen special consideration for certain ethnic groups as a sort of "reverse discrimination."

Colleagues of Judge Alito said he might have inherited the conservative sensibility his father displayed in private, including an instinctive cautiousness and a traditionalist approach to family life and social matters. Until the 1980's, for example, the elder Mr. Alito forbade women who worked for him to wear pants to the statehouse, long after other offices had accepted it, said Laurine Purola, a political consultant who worked with Mr. Alito in the 1970's and 80's.

"He was very particular about our dress," Ms. Purola said. "He just had a generally conservative, old-school approach."

Now, there is a line of enquiry for some enterprising reporter. Since the crack investigative unit is at the Toledo Blade these days, I suggest that they sharpen their word processors.

The Cold, Clear Eye

via The Agonist:

RPT-Arab nations deeply suspicious of US motives -poll
02 Dec 2005 15:36:10 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Refiles with dropped word ...doubted... in 7th paragraph)

By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Arab nations are acutely suspicious of the Bush administration's "democracy" agenda in the Middle East and believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq has made the region less secure, said a poll released on Friday.

The poll, conducted in six Arab countries in October, found 78 percent of respondents thought there was more terrorism because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with four out of five saying the war had brought less peace to the region.

Asked which countries posed the biggest threat to their nations, a majority chose Israel and the United States.

"The one fascinating outcome of this study is that the respondents view the United States and its policies through the prism of Iraq and Israel," said Professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, who conducted the poll with Zogby International in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Rather than being a model to inspire Arab nations to adopt democratic goals, Telhami said respondents felt the opposite was true of the United States, whose human rights image has been tarnished by scandals involving abuse by U.S. forces of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at a U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Bush administration has made spreading democracy in the Middle East a centerpiece of its foreign policy. The State Department in July appointed a special envoy, Karen Hughes, to improve the U.S. image abroad, especially in Islamic nations. However, during her trips to the Middle East, Hughes has come face to face with Muslim anger over the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq.

In the new poll, 69 percent of those surveyed doubted that spreading democracy was the real U.S. objective. Oil, protecting Israel, dominating the region and weakening the Muslim world were seen as U.S. goals.

"America's presence in Iraq is seen as a negative. It is scaring people about American intentions and having the opposite intended impact on Arab public opinion," Telhami told Reuters.

Asked what their biggest concerns were about Iraq, a third feared the country would split up because of sectarian divisions, while 23 percent worried the United States would dominate the country after the transfer of power and 27 percent fretted that instability would spill over into the region.

FRANCE AS SUPERPOWER

More than half -- 58 percent -- said Iraq was less democratic than before the war and three of four said Iraqis were worse off.

Asked which countries they would like to be the superpower, the most popular choice was France with 21 percent, followed by China with 13 percent, Pakistan and Germany tied with 10 percent, Britain with 7 percent, the United States with 6 percent and finally Russia with 5 percent,

France, which opposed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, was also seen as the country where people had the most freedom and its President Jacques Chirac, was the leader most admired by respondents. Others included, by late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

You've got a bit of work to do, Karen, particularly since the facts are against you and most ordinary people can see it.

Soup, Beautiful Soup

I'm thankful for Jimmy's contact (and I'll be ordering a pallet of soup today) but you can make your own.

Here's the recipe.

Building a soup or stew from scratch is as satisfying as making bread. This is sturdy food you can freeze down. And the day you spend making it will have you singing around the kitchen, while the house fills up with good smells. Enjoy.

From Northern Waters

My favorite vacations take place with my tent and my sleeping bag in the car when I head north to Maine and Atlantic Canada, the Maritimes. There is a campground on the island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy which is one of my favorite places on the planet, in no small part because there is a lobster roll stand right outside the park gate. I have a very nice propane campstove and generally cook most of my own meals while on these trips (any Canuck who can get me a mail-order source for Habitant French-Canadian Pea Soup gets the difference in the exchange rate for thanks) but locally made lobster rolls are a reason for a trip to that slice of heaven that is Maine and the Maritimes. You can make lobster rolls at home, but it is so much nicer to head for Grand Manan! Cooked lobster meat from the store is, um, kind of congealed in texture. You really have to do this from scratch, or it is a *fabulous* way to use up left over lobster (yeah, right...) after you've had a lobster feast with friends. Hey, it could happen.

I can't say enough good things about Grand Manan. I love visiting island cultures as they tend to turn less into the mass culture over time, and GM is no exception. The islanders have their own dialect of Canadian English which took me a couple of days to learn to hear. The island is located smack-dab in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway and I'm a birder, so it is heaven for birdwatching. The island is also scattered with fields of lupins, the prettiest flower in North America in my book. The local dining is sturdy, simple and fairly priced. The bed and breakfasts and hotels on the island cater to the birders and other ecotourists. There is nothing glitzy here, there are no chain restaurants or fast food places (YES!), the local industry is aquaculture (mostly sardines) and dulse, a tasty seaweed that the locals use like we do potato chips or corn chips. It is an acquired taste (Kelseigh, so is donair sauce. Trust me on this.) It's a quiet island where the people stick to their trades but are uncommonly hospitable to traveling tourists who find their little place caught in an earlier time. The car ferry from Black's Harbour, off the coastal road in New Brunswick, takes two hours. You may see dolphins and whales, I usually do. For the ecotourist, whale and pelagic bird boating tours (I have done both) to see the puffins, ospreys and the North Atlantic Right Whales that populate the summer waters of the Bay of Fundy can be had from North Head port. The old lighthouses on the island, still working places, are worth a trip themselves. I had one of the most amazing days of my life whaling in a 52' two masted schooner that landed in the middle of a pod of Right Whales. They came out and played with the boat. A mama whale brought her baby out to play and this was silly and delicious.

If you go in July (after the black flies are done, thank you very much) ask the rangers if they've seen that Yank chick who travels alone. I might be in the park. They'll know; when I'm camping alone I always check in with the rangers to let them know I'm on my own. From Maine northward, they'll keep an extra eye on a single female. This is not primitive camping, of which I've done my share, but it is an afforable way to see a charming part of our continent that most people would pass by. With a good cooler, a decent tent and a Thermorest mattress, you'll have a wonderful time on Grand Manan. Take your binocs, your spotting scope (I did some owling) and a bird book. The IGA grocery in North Head has fair prices on good grocries and the hardware store next door will take care of all the things you forgot to bring. The nine-volt battery lantern I bought there is still what I put out for storms. But they did find it a little strange to find a single Yank female "tenting" alone on their island.

Note to the file: Canadian provincial parks, of which The Anchorage is one, charge for showers. A Canadian quarter will get you about 7 minutes of hot water. And you wondered why I have such short hair...

TARRAGON LOBSTER SALAD

This lobster salad is wonderful on its own—but piled onto a hot dog bun it becomes a perfect lobster roll.

Active time: 1 hr Start to finish: 2 hr

4 (1 1/2-lb) live lobsters
1/4 cup finely chopped shallot
(1 large) 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh tarragon

Accompaniment (optional): hot dog buns (preferably top-split), buttered and grilled or toasted if desired

Plunge 2 live lobsters headfirst into an 8-quart pot of boiling salted water. Loosely cover pot and cook lobsters over moderately high heat 9 minutes from time they enter water, then transfer with tongs to sink to cool.

Return water to a boil and cook remaining 2 lobsters in same manner.

While lobsters are cooking, combine shallot, lemon juice, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a large bowl and let stand at room temperature 30 minutes.

When lobsters are cool, remove meat from claws, joints, and tails. Discard tomalley, any roe, and shells (or save for another use). Cut meat into 1/2-inch pieces.

Whisk mayonnaise, tarragon, and 1/4teaspoon black pepper into shallot mixture. Add lobster meat and toss gently to coat.

Cooks' notes:
• Lobsters may be cooked and shelled 1 day ahead and chilled, covered.
• Lobster salad may be made 1 day ahead and chilled, covered.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

In Maine and the Maritimes, lobter rolls are serve in the split top buns you can find there. For the rest of us, a hot dog bun will do. Line it with lettuce first to keep the dressing from making the bun soggy. And then overstuff it to make sure it runs down your fingers so you have to wash up after you've eaten. It's better that way.

There is a provincial liquor store on the island (what? You didn't stop at the duty free shop on the way into the province, Yanks?) and the local Nova Scotia and New Brunswick wineries are making nice progress. Very nice progress.

Enjoy this around the lobster pot on your propane stove. The maritime air makes them taste better. I swear.

Save the shells and innerds for lobster bisque.

It's the Sauce

It's the chili-lime cream sauce which makes this appetizer. It's worth a little effort to try to find the panko, white bread crumbs aren't nearly as light, panko soak up less oil.

SHRIMP CAKES WITH CHILI-LIME CREAM SAUCE

6 uncooked large shrimp (about 1 pound), peeled, deveined
1 large egg
1 green onion, sliced
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon minced fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pinch of ground black pepper
2 cups panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)

2 tablespoons (or more) peanut oil

Coarsely chop shrimp in processor. Add egg, green onion, lemon juice, mustard, cilantro, hot pepper sauce, salt, and pepper. Blend in using on/off turns. Add 1 cup panko and blend in using on/off turns. Form mixture into twelve 3-inch-diameter cakes. Roll cakes in remaining 1 cup panko; transfer to waxed-paper-lined baking sheet. Refrigerate 10 minutes. (Can be made up to 4 hours ahead. Cover and refrigerate.)

Heat 2 tablespoons peanut oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Working in batches, fry cakes until cooked through and golden brown on both sides, adding more oil to skillet as needed, about 6 minutes.

Spoon 3 tablespoons Chili-Lime Cream Sauce onto each of 6 plates. Place 2 shrimp cakes on each and serve immediately.

Market tip: Unseasoned Japanese breadcrumbs called panko, give these shrimp cakes a light, crispy coating. Dry white breadcrumbs make a good substitute. Panko is available in the Asian foods section of some supermarkets and at Asian markets.

CHILI-LIME CREAM SAUCE

1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon chopped peeled fresh ginger
1 tablespoon minced shallot
1/3 cup whipping cream
2 tablespoons chili-garlic sauce*
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

Combine first 4 ingredients in heavy small saucepan. Boil over high heat until reduced by half, about 3 minutes. Add cream and boil until reduced by half, about 2 minutes. Reduce heat to low. Mix in chili-garlic sauce. Add butter, 1 piece at a time, whisking just until melted before adding next piece.

*Available in the Asian foods section of many supermarkets and at Asian markets.

Makes about 2/3 cup.

This would make corrugated cardboard taste good. Go ahead, use the whole shallot. You'll want to drink this out of the pan.

It's great over pasta, vegetables and just about anything I can think of. Scatter minced parsely and cilantro before serving. On fish, it is a dream come to life. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm considering baking dover sole in it.

Makes 6 first-course servings.

Serve this as a first course and your guests won't care if you plate Franco-American spaghetti and franks next.

Lobstah!

My favorite vacations take place with my tent and my sleeping bag in the car when I head north to Maine and Atlantic Canada, the Maritimes. There is a campground on the island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy which is one of my favorite places on the planet, in no small part because there is a lobster roll stand right outside the park gate. I have a very nice propane campstove and generally cook most of my own meals while on these trips (any Canuck who can get me a mail-order source for cases of Habitant French-Canadian Pea Soup gets the difference in the exchange rate for thanks) but locally made lobster rolls are a reason for a trip to that slice of heaven that is Maine and the Maritimes. You can make lobster rolls at home, but it is so much nicer to head for Grand Manan! Cooked lobster meat from the store is, um, kind of congealed in texture. You really have to do this from scratch, or it is a *fabulous* way to use up left over lobster (yeah, right...) after you've had a lobster feast with friends. Hey, it could happen.

I can't say enough good things about Grand Manan. I love visiting island cultures as they tend to turn less into the mass culture over time, and GM is no exception. The islanders have their own dialect of Canadian English which took me a couple of days to learn to hear. The island is located smack-dab in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway and I'm a birder, so it is heaven for birdwatching. The island is also scattered with fields of lupins, the prettiest flower in North America in my book. The local dining is sturdy, simple and fairly priced. The bed and breakfasts and hotels on the island cater to the birders and other ecotourists. There is nothing glitzy here, there are no chain restaurants or fast food places (YES!), the local industry is aquaculture (mostly sardines) and dulse, a tasty seaweed that the locals use like we do potato chips or corn chips. It is an acquired taste (Kelseigh, so is donair sauce. Trust me on this.) It's a quiet island where the people stick to their trades but are uncommonly hospitable to traveling tourists who find their little place caught in an earlier time. The car ferry from Black's Harbour, off the coastal road in New Brunswick, takes two hours. You may see dolphins and whales, I usually do. For the ecotourist, whale and pelagic bird boating tours (I have done both) to see the puffins, ospreys and the North Atlantic Right Whales that populate the summer waters of the Bay of Fundy can be had from North Head port. The old lighthouses on the island, still working places, are worth a trip themselves. I had one of the most amazing days of my life whaling in a 52' two masted schooner that landed in the middle of a pod of Right Whales. They came out and played with the boat. A mama whale brought her baby out to play and this was silly and delicious.

If you go in July (after the black flies are done, thank you very much) ask the rangers if they've seen that Yank chick who travels alone. I might be in the park. They'll know; when I'm camping alone I always check in with the rangers to let them know I'm on my own. From Maine northward, they'll keep an extra eye on a single female. This is not primitive camping, of which I've done my share, but it is an afforable way to see a charming part of our continent that most people would pass by. With a good cooler, a decent tent and a Thermorest mattress, you'll have a wonderful time on Grand Manan. Take your binocs, your spotting scope (I did some owling) and a bird book. The IGA grocery in North Head has fair prices on good grocries and the hardware store next door will take care of all the things you forgot to bring. The nine-volt battery lantern I bought there is still what I put out for storms. But they did find it a little strange to find a single Yank female "tenting" alone on their island.

Note to the file: Canadian provincial parks, of which The Anchorage is one, charge for showers. A Canadian quarter will get you about 7 minutes of hot water. And you wondered why I have such short hair...

TARRAGON LOBSTER SALAD

This lobster salad is wonderful on its own—but piled onto a hot dog bun it becomes a perfect lobster roll.

Active time: 1 hr Start to finish: 2 hr

4 (1 1/2-lb) live lobsters
1/4 cup finely chopped shallot
(1 large) 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh tarragon

Accompaniment (optional): hot dog buns (preferably top-split), buttered and grilled or toasted if desired

Plunge 2 live lobsters headfirst into an 8-quart pot of boiling salted water. Loosely cover pot and cook lobsters over moderately high heat 9 minutes from time they enter water, then transfer with tongs to sink to cool.

Return water to a boil and cook remaining 2 lobsters in same manner.

While lobsters are cooking, combine shallot, lemon juice, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a large bowl and let stand at room temperature 30 minutes.

When lobsters are cool, remove meat from claws, joints, and tails. Discard tomalley, any roe, and shells (or save for another use). Cut meat into 1/2-inch pieces.

Whisk mayonnaise, tarragon, and 1/4teaspoon black pepper into shallot mixture. Add lobster meat and toss gently to coat.

Cooks' notes:
• Lobsters may be cooked and shelled 1 day ahead and chilled, covered.
• Lobster salad may be made 1 day ahead and chilled, covered.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

In Maine and the Maritimes, lobter rolls are serve in the split top buns you can find there. For the rest of us, a hot dog bun will do. Line it with lettuce first to keep the dressing from making the bun soggy. And then overstuff it to make sure it runs down your fingers so you have to wash up after you've eaten. It's better that way.

There is a provincial liquor store on the island (what? You didn't stop at the duty free shop on the way into the province, Yanks?) and the local Nova Scotia and New Brunswick wineries are making nice progress. Very nice progress.

Enjoy this around the lobster pot on your propane stove. The maritime air makes them taste better. I swear.

Promote the general welfare

I know my priorities are screwed up. Really. Apparently I'm one of the few people that who doesn't preface the rebuilding of New Orleans with "Well... those people wouldn't be in this situation if....".

I guess it's ok to look down on a group of people so long as they are a) poor and b) black but it's not ok to talk like that when a person loses their beach condo at Topsoil Island (Hurricane Magnet, NC) for the 3rd time in 6 years and expects the government to help them rebuild it.

Consequently, it's easy to tell why this article on Louisiana's Image just burned me up. Ok, the state is known for its corrupt government, but so is New York City (Tammany Hall anyone?) and we won't even discuss Chicago. And yes, I did work the phone lines against David Duke in 1991 and still own a "Vote for the Crook, it's Important" bumper sticker, but to use that stereotype as an excuse to not provide the funding and leadership to rebuild the city with the largest port in the United States just blows my mind. Look at these comments froma Senator from Idaho:

"Louisiana and New Orleans are the most corrupt governments in our country, and they have always been," Craig told a newspaper in his home state. "Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in Louisiana as well."

Excuse me?? You are going to imply a connection between a failed state, courtesy of Bush Co Homewreckers and Plunders, and a state that got hammered by a Category 4 Hurricane and was then ignored by the Federal Government just after it was hit ? I've got to give you credit, that takes courage or craven stupidity. So why are you ignoring them now?

Others have implied that the reason no one wants to help Louisiana is because they are too... outspoken or too Democratic, which may as well be same. The fact that Sen. Landrieu dared to take the Congress and President to task for not doing squat upset some of her fellow politicians.

They single out Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), who has made angry speeches on the Senate floor and kept the chamber in session overnight in October, holding up other legislation, as she pressed her colleagues for more aid. Some Republicans say her tone, which they describe as "shrill," has alienated her colleagues and undercut her efforts.

Privately, lawmakers unfavorably compare Landrieu's in-your-face approach to that of the senators from the other heavily Katrina-damaged state, Mississippi. Republicans Thad Cochran and Trent Lott have gotten high marks for working quietly behind the scenes to steer resources to their constituents.

Of course she's shrill. Y'all just sat on your hands and listend to Brown tell you how wonderful things were going. Meanwhile, the largest city in her state was almost wiped off the map and she was worried sick about them while the President vacationed. It's called leadership.

Look, if you are serious about rebuilding the city, then get to it! There is so much work to be done and the longer the delay, the less likely that many people will want or be able to return to the city. Of course, that might be the plan, who knows. I do know that there are jobs down there just waiting for people to take them, but how can you expect businesses to start back up and employ people when there isn't anywhere to live and basic services still haven't been restored?

If we had real leaders, instead of craven politicians, a concentrated Federal relief effort would be taking place instead of this free market mumbo-jumbo and pork. As the article says, the farther we get from the flood, the harder it's going to be to fix things.

Winter Fruit

If you've never cooked with persimmons, you are missing a real treat. This fruit is available only for a few weeks in the winter (like, right now) and is unlike anything else you will ever eat. You can make all of the predictable baked goods from it that you would with any sweet fruit, but this recipe is a little different and very tasty. I'm not a big fan of pork but this preparation is, well, extraordinary and surprising.

Hachiya and fuyu persimmons, the two most common commercial varieties, are easy to tell apart. The fuyu is round, like a tomato; the hachiya is slightly elongated and resembles an acorn.

BRAISED PORK WITH FUYU PERSIMMON

Active time: 35 min Start to finish: 2 1/2 hr

2 1/2 lb boneless pork shoulder, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 celery rib, chopped
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
2 cups water
4 plum tomatoes (3/4 lb total), peeled (see cooks' note, below) and chopped, or 1 (14- to 16-oz) can whole tomatoes, drained and chopped
1 1/2 lb firm-ripe Fuyu persimmons, peeled, seeded if necessary, and cut into 1/4-inch-thick wedges
1/2 cup chopped scallion greens

Accompaniment: cooked white rice
Put oven rack in lower third of ovenand preheat oven to 350°F.

Pat pork dry with paper towels, then sprinkle with salt. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a wide 6-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then brown pork in 3 batches, turning, about 5 minutes per batch, transferring to a bowl as browned. (Add more oil to pot as needed between batches.)

Pour off all but 1 tablespoon fat from pot. Add onion, bell pepper, and celery and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until softened, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in garlic, cumin, coriander, turmeric, and cayenne and cook, stirring, 1 minute. Add pork with any juices accumulated in bowl, water, and tomatoes and bring to a simmer.

Cover pot, then transfer to oven and braise pork until very tender, about 1 3/4 hours.

Scatter persimmons over pork and braise in oven, partially covered, 10 minutes more. Stir in scallion greens and salt and pepper to taste.

Cooks' notes:
• Stew can be made, without persimmons or scallions, 1 day ahead and cooled, uncovered, then chilled, covered. Reheat in a preheated 350°F oven, about 30 minutes, before proceeding.
• To peel a tomato, first cut an X in the end opposite the stem and immerse in boiling water 10 seconds. Transfer to ice water, then peel.

Makes 6 servings.

Serve with a salad of romaine lettuce, thinly sliced Granny Smith apples, crumbled bleu cheese and chopped walnuts dressed with a lemon vinaigrette.

This is the Gourmet base recipe. I find it a little bland and add some lemon juice, more garlic, cumin and coriander to that final braise. How much? I can't tell you. I do it by eyeball. Maybe double. This is another one of those dishes whose final braise benefits from a Roemertopf, the clay pot I use for damn near everything.

This is an easy recipe to halve and it will keep in the fridge for 3-4 days after cooking.

You can do the intial prep and then freeze it in single serving size containers for the final cooking on the day you want to eat it. Roemertopf makes a small, loaf sized pan which is great for single servings.

If you are using a clay pot for the final braise, lower the heat to 325 when you take the lid of for browning at the end.

Site News

Sorry I've been away so long. Today has been a very intense planning and communication day. Big changes are coming to Bump and I wanted to let you know what some of them are.

First, pogge and I will be upgrading the platform to the current build of Movable Type. The new build eliminates spam in comments and trackbacks, which have been an enormous time waster for both pogge and me. We may make some tweaks to the design, but I don't think you'll see much in the way of changes other than the fact that it will be easier for you to post comments.

The bigger change is that you will be hearing a wider variety of voices and hearing them every day. The demands of my new job mean that I'll be having to cut back on the time I spend on Bump. I'll still manage a few posts a day, but nothing like the 10-12 post a day rate that I've kept up on this site for more than two years (this is one tired blogger, by the way.) So, I'm turning the formerly "guest posters" loose as full cooperative managers and posters to Bump. We took a meeting by IM this afternoon and all are excited about the change and looking forward to their expanded roles. I think you will enjoy getting to know their distinct voices and interests, they are a great group of people to work with and I look forward to stepping back and letting them shine. All of them are excited about the change and looking forward to taking responsibility for the direction Bump takes. I'm very fortunate to have collected such a talented, compassionate and dedicated group of posters over the last couple of years. I'm proud to work with these people.

My new job (about which I'll tell you more as we get closer to my start date at the beginning of January) will make the intensity of the work I do at Bump look like a vacation. With that thought in mind, I'm going to take a little time off before the end of the month to get some rest. I haven't had a vacation, or even more than two days off, since Bump went live on November 15, 2003. I need to recuperate a little before I start a very demanding but very rewarding new job. This is going to change my life in ways I can't imagine right now, but also in ways I can. Bump, and you, will be in very good hands. I'll be around and posting a couple of times a day. The new crew are a trustworthy group with whom to share this blog and it's time for me to get over my control issues. Questions? Leave them in comments or email me at
[email protected]. We're all going into this together and I want to make sure everyone is fully informed. I believe in transparent process and you all deserve it.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Jonathan Chait: Logic isn't flip-flopping

IT'S BEEN TRUE for a while that the American public has a better idea of what Republicans stand for than what Democrats stand for. Conservatives say this is because they have won the war of ideas. I say it's because Republicans have reduced their ideas to a few simplistic bromides that they repeat endlessly and never subject to evidence or reexamination.

Case in point: the debate over Iraq.
....
Where to begin? Let's start with this flip-flopping business. It's a flip-flop to change your mind when the basis for the decision hasn't changed. But in the case of Iraq, the basis for the decision has changed. Before the war, most Iraq hawks based their support for war on the premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Now that we know this was untrue, admitting we made a mistake is the only consistent position. The flip-floppers are the ones who supported the war to halt Hussein's WMD and then changed their rationale mid-course.

Then there's this notion that it's somehow inconsistent to support the war effort after you've conceded the invasion was a mistake. Here conservatives are falling for what economists call the "sunk costs fallacy."

What this means is that, once you've paid the price for something, you can't let the cost bind your decision. Suppose for your vacation you reserved a few nights at a hotel. But you arrive to find it's raining nonstop, and decide you'd have more fun staying at home. It would be foolish to stay merely because you had already paid for the room. The money is gone, and you should decide based on what's best going forward.

Bush employs this fallacy all the time. "We've had, you know, some of the finest Americans die in Iraq," he said last week. "And one thing we're not going to do is let them die in vain." The real question is whether we can make the situation in Iraq better going forward, and at what cost. The price we've paid is tragic but not germane to the argument.

The flip side of the sunk cost fallacy is that you shouldn't change course just because you initially made a mistake. Take that vacation example. Suppose that instead of driving you flew, and changing your tickets to return early would cost a lot of money. In that case it might make sense to stay, despite the rain. The trip was a bad idea, but leaving early would be worse. (I assume that if you tried this reasoning in a GOP family, you'd be told, "First you wanted to go on vacation, now you're saying it was a mistake, and yet you want to stay anyway. Flip-flopper!") If failing to grasp simple logical concepts is called "winning the war of ideas," then I guess I'd rather be on the losing side.

Everything about Bushco is a logical fallacy.

Insiders & Outsiders

via truthout

All the President's Flacks

By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 04 December 2005

In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.

What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.

Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.

Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby are omnipresent in the narrative, and Mr. Woodward says now that his notes show he had questions for them back then about "yellowcake" uranium and "Joe Wilson's wife." But the leak case - indeed Valerie Wilson herself - is never mentioned in the 400-plus pages, even though it had exploded more than six months before he completed the book. That's the most damning omission of all and suggests the real motive for his failure to share what he did know about this case with either his editor or his readers. If you assume, as Mr. Woodward apparently did against mounting evidence to the contrary, that the White House acted in good faith when purveying its claims of imminent doomsday and pre-9/11 Qaeda-Saddam collaborations, then there's no White House wrongdoing that needs to be covered up. So why would anyone in the administration try to do something nasty to silence a whistle-blower like Joseph Wilson? The West Wing was merely gossiping idly about the guy, Mr. Woodward now says, in perhaps an unconscious echo of the Karl Rove defense strategy.

Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli.

In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern "inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960." White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."

INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war."

Not to mention the lefty blogosphere.

Crimes Abroad

Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake
German Citizen Released After Months in 'Rendition'

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 4, 2005; Page A01

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country's interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA's Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

The Masri case, with new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Unlike the military's prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

It's not enough that the the Bushies are committing crimes against American citizens, they think they have the right to do it all over the globe.

Unintelligent Bad Design

Laurie Goodstein doesn't have the scientific background to write this story. As a result, it is a mess. The Times should be ashamed of this one. The reason why even the seminaries don't want to teach Intelligent Design is that it isn't even very good theology. There is a difference between systematic theology and mythology, which is what ID is, but Goodstein, who is on the religion beat for the NYT, doesn't have enough theology to know that, either.

Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: December 4, 2005

TO read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.

In Kansas last month, the board of education voted that students should be exposed to critiques of evolution like intelligent design. At a trial of the Dover, Pa., school board that ended last month, two of the movement's leading academics presented their ideas to a courtroom filled with spectators and reporters from around the world. President Bush endorsed teaching "both sides" of the debate - a position that polls show is popular. And Pope Benedict XVI weighed in recently, declaring the universe an "intelligent project."

Intelligent design posits that the complexity of biological life is itself evidence of a higher being at work. As a political cause, the idea has gained currency, and for good reason. The movement was intended to be a "big tent" that would attract everyone from biblical creationists who regard the Book of Genesis as literal truth to academics who believe that secular universities are hostile to faith. The slogan, "Teach the controversy," has simple appeal in a democracy.

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.

On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated in comparison to evolution.

It's bad science and bad theology. It's not surprising that the academy isn't interested. It's not a scholarly project.

Disaster Recovery for Republicans

Blanco Releases Katrina Records
La. Governor Seeks to 'Set the Record Straight'

By Joby Warrick, Spencer S. Hsu and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 4, 2005; A01

Thousands of documents released by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco Friday night shed new light on clashes between state officials, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and the Bush administration as they struggled to respond to Hurricane Katrina.

Among the more than 100,000 pages of newly released records, which ranged from after-action reports to hand-scrawled notes written at the height of the storm, are memos showing Blanco frustrated and angered over delays in evacuations and the slow delivery of promised federal aid.

"We need everything you've got," Blanco is quoted in a memo as telling President Bush on Aug. 29, the day Katrina made landfall. But despite assurances from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that 500 buses were "standing by," Blanco's aides were compelled to take action when the FEMA buses failed to materialize, documents show. "We need buses," Andy Kopplin, chief of staff to Blanco, said in an e-mail to Blanco staffers late on Aug. 30, the day after the storm hit. "Find buses that can go to NO [New Orleans] ASAP."

Two days later, on Sept. 2, Blanco complained to the White House that FEMA had still failed to fulfill its promises of aid. While cloaked in customary political courtesies, Blanco noted that she had already requested 40,000 more troops; ice, water and food; buses, base camps, staging areas, amphibious vehicles, mobile morgues, rescue teams, housing, airlift and communications systems, according to a press office e-mail of the text of her letter to Bush.

"Even if these initial requests had been fully honored, these assets would not be sufficient," Blanco said. She also asked for the return of the Louisiana Army National Guard's 256th Brigade Combat Team, then deployed to Iraq.

Tensions between state leaders and the White House seemed at times near the boiling point. At 3:49 p.m. on Sept. 2, after spending three hours to appear with Bush at a Mississippi news conference, Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) wrote Blanco's staff, "I am returning home to baron[sic] rouge in hoping I can accomplish something for the people I represent other than being occupied with PR."

He added that Bush's "entire effort on behalf of the federal government has been reflected in his and his people's nonchalant attitude to the people of LA. You may give him this to read."

The documents, which were posted on the Internet late Friday, also provide the most detailed account yet of the harrowing conditions at the storm's epicenter, as state officials and emergency workers fought to retain control amid rising floodwaters and failing communications systems. Their release comes amid new efforts by Blanco to defend her government's much-criticized response to the nation's costliest natural disaster.

Raw and frequently conflicting, reflecting the chaotic conditions in the initial hours after the storm hit, the records paint an intimate portrait of a state struggling to overcome extremes of weather and bureaucratic incompetence as the storm ripped its way across the state.

The documents were prepared in response to requests by two congressional committees investigating the federal response to Katrina. Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said the governor decided to release the documents "publicly not to vindicate herself, but to set the record straight."

"You can see the requests that were made, day after day, hour after hour," Bottcher said yesterday.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said she has not seen the documents, but noted multiple reviews of the week of the storm are underway, "and all levels of government have a responsibility to take stock of what happened, act on it, and then make sure it doesn't ever happen again."

How is it that Florida got all the help it needed when it got hit by four storms in 2004? Two words: Jeb Bush.

Posturing

Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 4, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush's Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."

Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.

That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."

"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Dr. Gelpi said he had not discussed the document with Dr. Feaver, who declined to be interviewed.

Dr. Feaver, 43, who is also a lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve, wrote three books on civilian-military relations. He worked on military issues on President Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994, but he has written critically of Mr. Clinton and other Democrats and sympathetically of President Bush in The New York Times and other publications.

Last year in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, noting Mr. Bush's determination to invade Iraq in 2003 in the face of doubts, Dr. Feaver wrote, "Determined commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in spite of the political climate and military resistance."

What Bushco and Feaver share is a view that this is all political theater, rather than flesh and blood lives. This is despicable posturing. Dr. Feaver may be a tenured poli sci prof, but he doesn't know much about war fighting.

A Little Preaching

My friends the reveres like to write a "Sunday Sermonette" against religion every Sunday morning. I don't comment on these because my brief is for the life of faith and of the spirit, which is not the same as "religion," at least not as the reveres see it. I'm a spiritual director, this is a ministry which doesn't really care much about sectarian boundries, and I suspect the reveres and I will find ourselves on the same page in that regard. Were we to discuss it, I'm fairly sure that the god the reveres don't believe in and the ones that I don't believe in would be very similar.

That said, as a minister without portfolio, I deal in ultimate things, and when a friend is dying, as is true this morning, my frame of reference is a spiritual one. My radio brought me the words I needed to hear this morning, a beloved poem by Mary Oliver. I offer it to you, in whatever state you find yourself this day.

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

AAAchoo

I think I swallowed enough zinc yesterday to attract magnets. I'm fighting a cold and I *think* I'm winning, but if posting is light today it means that I got tired of sneezing and went back to bed.

This Is America, 2005

In Newly Released Documents, a View of the Storm After Katrina
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - It was Thursday, Sept. 1, three days after Hurricane Katrina had ripped across the Gulf Coast. As New Orleans descended into horror, the top aides to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana were certain the White House was trying to blame their boss, and they were becoming increasingly furious.

"Bush's numbers are low, and they are getting pummeled by the media for their inept response to Katrina and are actively working to make us the scapegoats," Bob Mann, Ms. Blanco's communications director, wrote in an e-mail message that afternoon, outlining plans by Washington Democrats to help turn the blame back onto President Bush.

With so much criticism being directed toward the governor, the time had come, her aides told her, to rework her performance. She had to figure out a way not only to lead the state through the most costly natural disaster in United States history, but also to emerge on top somehow in the nasty public relations war.

Drop the emotion, the anger and all those detail-oriented briefings, Ms. Blanco's aides told her. Get out to the disaster zone to visit emergency shelters, and repeat again and again: help is on the way.

"She must temper her anger and frustration," Johnny Anderson, Ms. Blanco's assistant chief of staff, wrote a day after it became widely known that large crowds were suffering at the New Orleans convention center. "We have work too hard to lose the public relations battle."

These candid exchanges are just a few of the glimpses inside Louisiana's highest leadership that emerged late Friday in an extraordinary release of about 100,000 pages of state documents detailing the response to Hurricane Katrina by Ms. Blanco and her staff. The state compiled the documents - including e-mail messages, hand-written notes, correspondence with the White House, and thousands of offers of assistance and desperate pleas for help - at the request of two Congressional committees looking into the state's preparedness and response.

"As we move forward, I believe the public deserves a full accounting of the response at all levels of government to the largest natural disaster in U.S. history," Ms. Blanco said in a statement about the release of the documents.

She said the documents demonstrated "hard-working, sleep-deprived public servants operating under enormous pressure and rapidly changing circumstances." They also show that as Hurricane Katrina approached and inundated New Orleans, Ms. Blanco's top aides realized how quickly it was becoming both a human and a political nightmare.

"This is absolutely the worst-case situation we have long feared," Andy Kopplin, the governor's chief of staff, wrote in an e-mail message to the Blanco administration's top aides the day before the storm hit New Orleans. "Pray for Louisiana citizens as this storm nears."

The correspondence released on Friday apparently received almost no editing, other than the blacking out of certain names and telephone numbers for people not associated with the state government. It includes handwritten notes, audio recordings of conference calls and even a few doodles on legal pads.

Most of the material was scanned into a computer and placed on a state Web site, but access was restricted to members of the news media.

The documents and correspondence put in full light the rivalry between the White House and the governor, a Democrat, along with the rising anger in Louisiana as requests for federal assistance went unanswered.

"We need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts - that the federal response was anemic and had been shortchanged by budget cuts and avoiding responsibilities like protecting Louisiana levees and wetlands," Mr. Kopplin wrote in one e-mail message a week after the storm hit.

"The governor needs to stay on message, and that is getting people out of New Orleans, provide stability for them and rebuild," Mr. Anderson wrote on Sept. 1. "The governor must look like the leader at all times."

Dana M. Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Bush never tried to single out Louisiana for blame. But she added that all government agencies bore some fault.

"President Bush has been very clear that all levels of government could have done a better job," Ms. Perino said, "and we are focused on completing our lessons learned and making sure we understand what went wrong and that it never happens again."

The documents also demonstrate the enormous sense of frustration that overcame Ms. Blanco's staff members as they fielded thousands of desperate calls, few of which they were able to act on effectively.

"Whoever is in charge needs to get control of the situation regarding the thousands of people (including elderly, babies, infirmed, etc.) up on I-10 in New Orleans," according to one e-mail message a Blanco aide received from his cousin on Aug. 31, two days after the storm hit. "They need food and water to start with. They seem to be in need of specific direction from the 'powers that be,' at the very least."

The response of another Blanco aide to this plea was similarly exasperated. "I am getting these calls too, and I have buses and water but can't get word on where and how to send," wrote Kim Hunter Reed, director of policy and planning.

As a disaster response and risk communication professional, I read this differently than a journalist would. I want to know about lessons learned and what is going to be done differently next time, because there will be a next time. New Orleans is still a horror, and that's the honest truth, and there are reasons why, some of them political. But the city of San Diego should be looking at this situation and sitting up straight. Fargo/Moorehead already has gotten their lesson. Milwaukee, are you paying attention? A tornado could do the same thing to you. Norman, Oklahoma, I'd like to see your disaster preparedness plan. Quad Cities, Iowa and Illinois, hello?

State of Florida, you have an excellent hurricane plan. But have you thought about pandemic contagious disease? No? I didn't think so.

Katrina is a walk through for all of the things our local, state and federal agencies haven't thought through. The holes give me nightmares.

What the Katrina survivors are living through is unsufferable. And nearly no one is paying attention.

Blue states and blue cities should be paying particular attention. This has become a political issue. I note that Jeb Bush's Florida and Haley Barbour's Mississippi are doing rather better in hurricane recovery than blue state Louisiana.

Appetizer Goodies

You may have figured out that yer bloghostess has a thing about garlic. Yup, it's true. I adore all varieties of tapenade but I've never made this blanche version before. Make both the blanc and noir versions and serve them side by side with a nice baguette next time you have company for dinner. Both freeze nicely.

TAPENADE NOIR

1/2 c. pitted Nicoise olives
4 anchovy fillets
2 tbsp. capers
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 tbsp. Herbes de Provence (this is a combination of thyme, rosemary, oregano, bay leaves and fennel seed, ground up. This mixture is available in better delicatessens and European food shops)
1/3 c. virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. cognac (optional)

Place the pitted olives, anchovies, capers, garlic and herbs into a blender and begin to puree the contents. Slowly add the olive oil, stopping occasionally to scrape down the sides and stir the mixture with a rubber spatula. Add enough oil to make a slightly runny mixture. Turn out of the blender and into a small dish. You may add cognac for a smoother, more elegant flavor, but for a lusty flavor, it may be omitted. Spread the tapenade, after letting it sit for about an hour, into small slices of baguette loaves. You may lightly toast the slices if you want.

TAPENADE BLANCHE

3/4 to 1 lb. fennel bulb
25 to 30 pitted green olives (recommend Picholino olives)
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/2 c. cre'me fraiche (sour cream is ok, but delute it with some Halfand Half for the right flavor)
2 tbsp. mayonnaise
1 tbsp. lemon juice (fresh is preferred)
Salt and pepper to taste
Pernod or other French pastis aperitif to taste (an anitelle syrup, suchas Vedrenne, may serve as an non-alcoholic substitute, in which case you should increase the lemon juice to off set the sugar in the syrup)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Cut the fennel bulb in half, removing the short green stalks. (Retain the stalks.) Rub the bulb halves with salad oil, place in a baking dish, and put in the oven at mid-level. Allow the bulb to soften (use a cover) for about 40 minutes, longer if necessary. Meanwhile, finely chop the green stalk and save 1/4 cup. Remove the softened fennel and let it cool. Then chop the fennel into coarse dice and place in a food processor with the all purpose blade installed. Add the pitted olives, cayenne, cre'me fraiche, mayonnaise and lemon juice. (Don't forget to save the chopped stalks, and be sure Not to put them into the processor.) Process the mixture until it produces a smooth spreadable texture-not like peanut butter, but smooth nonetheless. Add more mayonnaise and cre'me fraiche in a 1-to-4 proportion if you need more liquid to make the mixture more spreadable, but don't let the mixture get too creamy. Correct the seasoning with salt and pepper. Then add anywhere from 1 to 3 tablespoons of Pernod. The idea is to import a subtle suggestion of anise, not to produce a licorice-flavored spread. Then add and blend in the chopped fennel stalks by hand, not with the processor blade in a fresh bowl.

Serve after allowing to chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour. Add more salt, if required. Then spread on toasted (optional) rounds of baguette loaves. Melba toasts are surprisingly good for this.

Fun Movies

My wife and I simply love Netflix. We often can find the strangest and most offbeat stuff on it. Recently, a friend lent me their copy of Rikki Tikki Tavi on VHS and it was one of those programs that I have a vague childhood memory of, but couldn't tell you much more than that. Of course, I had the same problem with the Star Wars Christmas Special until I found a bootleg copy at a comics convention and discovered that it really did exist.

Rikki Tikki Tavi is from the Jungle Book and was animated in the 1970's by the great Chuck Jones with voice work from people like Orson Welles. It was so much fun to watch that I ordered the DVD for my kids for Christmas this year. Seeing this got me on an animation kick again. So, my wife got the Triplets of Beleville for us to see again.

We caught this delightful film when it came out back in 2003 because it mixed her French culture (she majored in French and has visited France twice) with my animation addiction. If you haven't seen this movie, go rent it soon. It's a short movie and is wonderfully surrealistic, like any great European art film.

The neat thing about the film is there are almost no spoken words in it, most of the characterization and plot is told visually or with the music (the soundtrack is amazing). The director, Sylvain Chomet, also creates such distorted and almost obsene characters that it's hard not to be distracted by them. Plus, there is the dog Bruno, who is one of the funniest dogs I've ever seen in the movies.

Are there any quirky movies that you are falling in love with again?

The Cycle

Jeebus. Enough already.

Hurricane Epsilon strengthens despite cool waters
03 Dec 2005 22:35:04 GMT
Source: Reuters

MIAMI, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Hurricane Epsilon, the 14th hurricane of a record-breaking Atlantic storm season, defied expectations it would weaken over cool Atlantic waters and strengthened on Saturday as it churned slowly eastward.

Epsilon's maximum sustained winds reached 80 mph (130 kph) by 4 p.m. (2100 GMT), comfortably over the threshold for a tropical storm to be categorized as a hurricane, and it was about 930 miles (1,495 km) west of Portugal's Azores islands, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

But the cyclone posed no threat to land, and the hurricane center said in a bulletin that Epsilon could not maintain that intensity for much longer.

Hurricanes are normally spawned over warmer Atlantic waters further south. They need warm water to gain power and higher than normal sea surface temperatures this year have helped the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally ended on Wednesday, enter the record books in a multitude of ways.

Epsilon, the sixth hurricane to occur in December since records began in 1851, was named like its four predecessors for a letter in the Greek alphabet after the official list of storm names for 2005 was exhausted.

This season has witnessed the most tropical storms on record -- 26. It has seen the most hurricanes, with 14. The highest number of hurricanes previously on record was 12, in 1969, and the highest number of named storms was 21, in 1933.

The long-term average is 10 storms per season, six of which become hurricanes.

This year also set a record of three Category 5 storms -- the top rank on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity -- including Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and killed more than 1,200 in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Lovely to contemplate along with increasing violence of storms on their decadel cycle. I'm thinking about buying hurricane insurance.

Shirred Eggs, 21st Century Version

Since I've got this breakfast theme going, let me give you something for singles and couples that is similar to the strata below. This is easy. This is another recipe I learned from my brother the chef.

In individual heatproof ramekins (I use those oldfashioned Pyrex glass cups, I can buy them at the local grocery):

Spray them with Pam, bottom and sides

Line the bottoms with a couple of tablespoons of reduced fat sour cream

Break two eggs into each ramekin

Salt and pepper to your own standards and use a toothpick to break the surface of each yoke (intact yokes can explode in the microwave. Learn from my mistakes, Bumpers.)

Cover with grated cheddar cheese, parmegiano/reggiano or jalapeno jack cheese

Nuke in the microwave until the whites are set, about 1:30 minutes for a 1000 watt microwave. If you are cooking two or more ramekins together, you'll need 2:00-2:30 per each pair of ramekins.

Like everybody else in the Baby Boom generation, I'm careful about cholesterol and only eat eggs a few times a year. As a result, I want them to be really good. This recipe reaches that standard.

Starting the Day

This strata is nice if you have to feed a crowd at breakfast or brunch. For a slightly different effect you can substitute 3/4 of pound of bacon, rendered and crumbled. Use precooked bacon, chopped, if you need to save time and cut the salt altogether. Serve with melon balls in champagne and cinnamon. Assemble it the night before.

EGG - SAUSAGE BREAKFAST CASSEROLE

1 lb. sausage (cooked, drained & crumbled)
8 eggs, slightly beaten
6 slices white bread, buttered & cubed
2 c. milk
1 c. grated cheddar cheese
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. salt

Mix all ingredients together except bread; pour over bread cubes in a greased 9 x 13 inch pan or glass casserole. Refrigerate 12 hours. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 35 to 40 minutes, until browned and set in center. Can also be made ahead and frozen. Serves 12 to 15.

Irony

I can't believe this headline:

Sales of Impotence Drugs Fall, Defying Expectations

Seven years after Pfizer made Viagra a cultural touchstone and commercial blockbuster, the market for impotence medicines appears to have fallen well short of what was once predicted.

Heavy advertising to consumers, totaling more than $400 million in 2004, has made Viagra and its newer competitors, Cialis and Levitra, among the best-known drug brands in the United States, and their combined global sales reached about $2.5 billion last year. But the number of new prescriptions for the drugs has fallen steadily this year. Doctors wrote about 10 percent fewer new prescriptions in October than they did in October of 2004.

Some of the decline is a result of reports, disputed by some specialists, that linked the drugs to a rare form of blindness, say urologists who specialize in treating impotence. But a more fundamental factor is also hurting sales, these doctors say: many impotent men have chosen not to take the drugs, even though the drugs work about 70 percent of the time and have relatively few side effects.

The drop in prescriptions comes as sales of other heavily marketed medicines, like antidepressants, are also stalling, and it may be another sign of the limits of consumer advertising to drive demand for drugs. In the late 1990's, drug makers used television advertising to introduce treatments for chronic conditions like arthritis and heartburn. But today, with many patients angry about drug prices and worried that companies are downplaying side effects, drug advertising seems to have lost some of its power.

Good news as far as I'm concerned. Maybe Big PHarma will get rid of some of the lousy television ads. The Cialis ads are particularly icky.

Influenza Memesis

One of the things I learned at the Flu Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago was in conversation with one of the public health people who is an expert in risk communication and disaster recovery. He said that, at the level of memetics, the pandemic is already with us. Think about it: we are all thinking about it (even the skeptics/deniers are thinking about it) and significant funds have been incumbered by business and government for planning and research. We've encumbered our personal funds for planning and preps. The amount of my time that is dedicated to risk communication and tending the Flu Wiki eats a significant part of my day. I'm already planning for bandwidth expansion in the days following CNN's special on avian influenza on Dec. 11.

Plan for Graft

Weather Advisory

The little Weather Channel desktop weather accessory bug down in my task tray is flashing. The Mid-Atlantic is going to receive our first couple of winter weather events of any consequence starting with rain-snow-sleet tonight and seguing into accumulating snow tomorrow night into Monday. As I've told you before, the folks around here don't handle this very well and I'll have to make some accomodations for the that. I can't tell yet what it will do to my scheduling...

But I will need to go out and pick up a few groceries and some cash. Power outages are a distinct possibility.

How has the winter weather been for you so far this season.

TSA is at it Again

I really have to wonder who comes up with this stuff. It's almost like the government or the airlines really don't want me to fly anymore. I understand reasonable security measures, but this is silly.

Air Travelers In for Changes Over Holidays

By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 3, 2005

Air travelers planning to take off for the holiday season will face a string of new security procedures and find that old rules no longer apply.

Even travelers who do not set off walk-through metal detectors will occasionally be pulled aside for pat-downs as part of changes that go into effect Dec. 22. A new procedure calls for screeners to routinely touch passengers in the mid-thigh area and arms -- not just their torsos. Security officers, newly trained in "behavior recognition" screening, will scan the crowds for travelers who appear to be nervous and will pull them aside for extra scrutiny.

Translation: If you look like a "terrorist", you're going to get searched. If your name comes up on our magic list, you're going to get searched. If you look lost or confused, you're going to get searched. Remeber, you're guilty until proven innocent. Any questions?

he Transportation Security Administration yesterday announced those and other security measures as part of a new strategy designed to be less predictable to potential terrorists as well as frequent travelers. The changes are the biggest shift in airport security since the agency was created after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"Our goal is to establish flexible protocols based on risk, so that terrorists cannot use the predictability of our security measures to their advantage when planning an attack," Edmund S. "Kip" Hawley, director the Transportation Security Administration, said at a news briefing in Washington yesterday. "In the past, security measures at every airport were pretty much the same. . . . With the changes we are implementing later this month, that predictability is gone."

Several aviation leaders yesterday applauded the changes, such as the decision to again allow small scissors and tools such as screwdrivers and wrenches in carry-on luggage, even though flight attendants and some members of Congress have objected. Security and aviation officials have complained that for too long the federal government spent few resources on the biggest carry-on threats to air travel, such as explosives. But at the same time, airport and travel experts questioned why the agency would make such major changes during one of the biggest holiday travel periods of the year.

Obviously, someone in the airline industry told TSA that those long lines were driving away customers so instead of having barely effective, fig leaf security we get the "we are realy on the job" overblown security. And what happens if they guess wrong and the terrorist gets through? Even better, we'll introduce this at Christmas time so our citizens know how hard the government is working to protect them.

And those puffer machines are just.... strange. I'm sure they do some good, but I don't know what they are. Ah well... I really didn't want to fly back to Texas any time soon.

monsieur Deficit

Greenspan Points to Danger of Rising Budget Deficits

By HEATHER TIMMONS
Published: December 3, 2005

LONDON, Dec. 2 - Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned of the dangers of rising budget and trade deficits in two speeches on Friday.

Speaking at a meeting here of the Group of 7 finance ministers, he said the growing American trade deficit could be "quite painful" for the world economy if it was not arrested. He urged the United States and other countries with trade deficits to stop the "pernicious drift toward fiscal instability."

If that instability "is not arrested and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalization," he went on, "the adjustment process could be quite painful for the world economy."

In a separate videotaped speech to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's policy forum, he said the nation had weathered hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma well and noted that the economy was expanding at a good pace. But he cautioned that the United States budget position "will substantially worsen in the coming years unless major deficit-reducing actions are taken."

Mr. Greenspan, 79, who is leaving his post at the end of January, has been touching on similar themes in recent months. He seems to want to end his career with a firm call for fiscal discipline.

In the videotaped speech, he said that policy makers needed to restore "procedural restraints on the budget making process" that had been "violated with increasing frequency" since the end of the 1990's and were allowed to expire in 2002.

The nation's budget problems will not be solved just by enacting new rules, Mr. Greenspan added. "The fundamental fiscal issue is the need to make difficult choices among budget priorities," he said, and "this need is becoming ever more pressing in light of the unprecedented number of individuals approaching retirement age."

Guess what? We already knew this back in 2001 and 2002 when you were shilling for massive tax cuts that anyone with a calculator knew we couldn't afford. I'm happy that you've rediscovered some basic economic principles, but it's a little late to try and pass yourself off as someone who's worried about budget or trade deficits.

Or shall we simply tell those worried about the poor and retiries to "Let them eat cake!"?

A Flashlight, Not A Spotlight

FBI Is Taking Another Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence
By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.

The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war — and they led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, found little evidence to support such a claim, and the documents were later deemed to have been forged.

But President Bush referred to the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in making the case for the invasion. Bush's speech, Wilson's trip and the role Wilson's wife played in sending him have created a political storm that still envelops the White House.

The documents in question included letters on Niger government letterhead and purported contracts showing sales of uranium to Iraq. They were provided in 2002 to an Italian magazine, which turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

The FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme — and not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, who was identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation.

"This is such a high-profile issue for a lot of reasons, and we think it's important to make sure there aren't lingering questions," said an aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "There's always a chance that you do a little more investigating and you uncover something you hadn't seen before or you hadn't realized."

A senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, confirmed late Friday that the bureau had reopened the inquiry.

If there is a report, it will be classified.

FEMA F-U

If you live in an earthquake zone, read this carefully. If you are thinking about pandemic flu, read this carefully. It is more than three months out from Katrina and Rita and FEMA is competely incompetent. This was a disaster which was both predictable as well as unprecedented in scope. The roadblock here is George Bush's incompetent administration.

Wearying Wait for Federal Aid in New Orleans

By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: December 3, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 2 - They are the faces and voices of a city's desperation. Stepping wearily up to a Federal Emergency Management Agency help center here, all have a similar story of ruin in the past, anxiety over the future and frustration in the present, suffered differently each time.

DeLois Kramer and her 7-year-old daughter, Katlyn, making their way to a FEMA help center in New Orleans Friday. "We're almost begging them, 'Please, bring this trailer before Christmas,' " Ms. Kramer said.

Young, middle-aged and old, these citizens of New Orleans, wiped out by Hurricane Katrina and now urgently seeking government assistance, spoke Friday of sleeping in a truck and on a floor, living out of a car and waiting for the help that never seems to come. Trickling into the crowded center in the Uptown neighborhood here - hoping for a trailer, a loan, cash, anything - they were grimly resigned to waiting, and waiting some more.

"You come to these FEMA centers, you sit all day," said Myrna Guity, 43, whose import business was wiped out by the storm, along with her home in New Orleans East. "You get no answers to your questions. They're evasive. You're constantly 'pending.' What are you going to be doing, 'pending' for the rest of your life? I've lost everything."

Others wondered fearfully what was on the other side of their current privation. "We're almost begging them, 'Please, bring this trailer before Christmas,' " said DeLois Kramer, 43, who said she is "sort of living out of the car" with her 7-year-old daughter, Katlyn.

Three months after the storm, political figures here talk often of the progress that has been made - trash cleared, homes lighted, money spent. Louisiana, they say, is proving its self-reliance. But hidden behind these sometimes rosy declarations are tens of thousands of their constituents, living at the edge of their dwindling resources.

Adding to their anxiety is what these citizens describe as a frustrating paper chase through the bureaucracy of FEMA: repeat visits for help that always seems to be just one or two documents away, but the documents FEMA demands are often ruined, stored in flooded houses.

Many spoke of once-comfortable existences, turned suddenly into an anxious struggle simply to get by.

On Friday morning, in fact, Ms. Kramer realized that there was a way to describe her situation. She was standing in front of the Jewish Community Center on St. Charles Avenue here, where FEMA has set up one of three New Orleans assistance centers, along with several mobile units.

"We're homeless, that's what we are," said Ms. Kramer, a disabled former substance abuse counselor and nursing aide. Her apartment, near one of the levee breaks, was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

She and her daughter have a floor to sleep on, with "extended relatives," 70 miles away in St. Gabriel. But they must leave early each day; the relatives are increasingly "agitated," Ms, Kramer said. Every day mother and daughter are on the road, in a car packed with their clothing, going from help center to help center. "I'm very frustrated. And it's starting to take a toll on her," Ms. Kramer said, gesturing toward Katlyn.

"Are we being punished?" the little girl asks her.

Rosemary Varnado, 59, and her husband, Charles, 63, a truck driver, slept in one of his rigs for 25 days. It was a "miserable" experience, Ms. Varnado said, "just horrible." She has high blood pressure and an intestinal problem. Their home in the Lower Ninth Ward was destroyed in the flood, and now they are seeking a trailer. "We've been waiting, and waiting," Ms. Varnado said.

"Why is it taking so long? They don't know the suffering we've had to go through," she added. "We're suffering, but they are moving slow. We have no clothes, no nothing."

Ms. Varnado, who worked as a nurse's assistant, said emphatically: "We are people that have worked and paid taxes, all our lives. That's the important thing."

A FEMA spokesman said Friday that the agency was working as fast as it could to aid the thousands still destitute from the storm.

"I don't know if you understand the magnitude of this disaster," said the spokesman, James McIntyre. "Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance, and we're working to help them all."

Mr. McIntyre continued: "We're working as fast as we possibly can to meet their needs, and help them receive assistance for damages from these disasters."

Another FEMA official, the manager of an assistance center in the Lower Garden District here, suggested the mental anguish of many of his clients was now palpable.

Read this LAT story all the way to the end. This is a societal failure.

WaPo frontpages FEMA pulling out of the Lower 9th Ward.

Party Food

It's all in knowing who to read.

HUNDRED CORNER SHRIMP BALLS

These hors d'oeuvres — a dressed-up version of shrimp toasts — are adapted from a recipe by Chinese cooking authority Nina Simonds, a longtime contributor to our pages, says Gourmet.

I have every cookbook Nina Simonds wrote and I use them weekly, says me. These are work intensive but you really will wonder how you grew up without learning to make them. These are to die for.

Active time: 1 hr
Start to finish: 1 hr

1 1/2 lb large shrimp (30), peeled and deveined
8-oz can water chestnuts (1 cup), rinsed and finely chopped
1 large egg white, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons finely chopped chilled fresh pork fat or lard
1 1/2 tablespoons rice wine or Scotch (mirin is Japanese Rice Wine and scotch is not a substitute)
1 tablespoon grated peeled fresh ginger
2 tablespoons finely chopped scallion greens
2 1/4 teaspoons coarse salt
2 tablespoons cornstarch
3 cups panko (Japanese bread crumbs)
About 8 cups vegetable oil

Accompaniment: apricot dipping sauce

APRICOT DIPPING SAUCE

1 3/4 cups apricot jam
2 tablespoons soy sauce, or to taste
3 tablespoons finely chopped scallion greens
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice, or to taste
Dash of Tabasco, or to taste

Start: Melt jam in a small saucepan. Stir in remaining ingredients with salt and pepper to taste and serve warm.
Cooks' note:
• Sauce may be made 2 days ahead, cooled, then chilled, covered. Reheat sauce over low heat, stirring.
Makes about 2 cups

For Shrimp balls:
Pulse shrimp in a food processor until finely chopped. Transfer to a large bowl, then stir in water chestnuts, egg white, pork fat, rice wine, ginger, scallion, salt, and cornstarch. Beat shrimp mixture vigorously with a wooden spoon and throw it against side of bowl until combined well and compacted. Wet your hands with cold water and form teaspoons of shrimp mixture into balls, arranging in 1 layer on a wax-paper–lined tray. Coat balls, 1 at a time, in panko, then arrange in 1 layer on another wax-paper–lined tray.

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Heat oil in a 5-quart pot until a deep-fat thermometer registers 375°F and fry balls in 4 batches, turning, 1 to 1 1/2 minutes, or until golden and just cooked through. (Return oil to 375°F between batches.) Transfer with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain. When all shrimp balls are fried, reheat on a rack set in a shallow baking pan in middle of oven until just hot, about 2 minutes.

Cooks' note:
• Shrimp balls may be coated and fried 1 day ahead, cooled completely, then chilled, covered. Bring to room temperature before reheating. "Panko" are japanese breadcrumbs which are particularly amenable to deep frying. They don't break up. You can find them in most oriental markets or by the internets if you don't have an oriental market near you.

Makes 80 hors d'oeuvres, serving 20

That's Gourmet's estimate. I'll bet they'll eat more than four. I bet they will. This recipe is so good that you will hug yourself.

Best Bite

Have a party coming up? These will disappear so fast that it will unscrew your head from your shoulders.

WHITE CHEDDAR PUFFS WITH GREEN ONIONS

The puffs can be formed and chilled or frozen on baking sheets well ahead of time, then simply popped into the oven.

1 cup water
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, cut into 4 pieces
1/2 teaspoon coarse kosher salt plus additional for sprinkling
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups (packed) grated extra-sharp white cheddar cheese
2/3 cup minced green onions

Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Bring 1 cup water, butter, and 1/2 teaspoon salt to boil in heavy medium saucepan. Remove from heat; mix in flour. Stir over medium heat until mixture becomes slightly shiny and pulls away from sides of pan, about 3 minutes; transfer to stand mixer fitted with paddle. Add eggs 1 at a time, mixing well after each addition to form sticky dough. Mix in cheese and green onions.

Using 2 teaspoons, form dough into 1 1/4- to 1 1/2-inch ovals; drop onto baking sheet 1 inch apart. (Can be made ahead. Wrap in plastic, then foil. Refrigerate up to 2 days or freeze up to 2 weeks.)

Preheat oven to 375°F. Bake cheese puffs until golden, about 30 minutes if at room temperature and 35 minutes if chilled or frozen. Serve immediately.

Makes about 4 dozen.

These are so good that you need to make sure you and your servers don't get carpal tunnel while they get snatched off the serving platters.

Scallops alla Greque

I found this recipe at www.epicurious.com tonight and can't wait to make it. Don't be afraid of phyllo, it isn't difficult to work with. This serves 4 as a first course.

2 cups balsamic vinegar
4 extra large sea scallops
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 lb kataifi filo
4 tablespoons butter, melted
1 tomato, diced
1/4 cup diced scallions
1/4 cup chopped dill

For the butter sauce
1 medium shallot, sliced
1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
1 cup white wine
1/2 lb butter, cut into small bits, thoroughly chilled

In a small saucepan over medium heat, simmer the vinegar until syrupy, about 30 minutes.Heat the oven to 450°F. Season the scallops with salt and pepper. Wrap each scallop in some of the kataifi filo. Arrange the scallops on a baking sheet and drizzle with the melted butter.

Make the butter sauce: In a small saucepan, combine the shallot, thyme, and wine. Simmer until completely reduced and there is no liquid remaining. Over low heat and whisking constantly, add the butter, a few pieces at a time. Allow the butter to become creamy before adding the next few pieces. Do not boil or the butter will melt and the sauce will become oily. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Keep the sauce warm.

Bake the scallops until just done, about 15 minutes.

To serve, cut each wrapped scallop in half and place in the center of the plate. Spoon the butter sauce over the scallops. Drizzle with some of the reduced balsamic vinegar (save the remaining balsamic syrup for another use). Sprinkle the tomatoes, scallions and dill around the scallop.

Scroll down to read the rave reviews at epicurious. This one looks like a real keeper.

Good Grief!

Beethoven score sells for £1.1m

BBC
December 1, 2005

An 80-page handwritten script by Beethoven, which was missing for 115 years, has sold for £1.1m at auction.

An anonymous buyer purchased the score of Grosse Fuge in B flat, which features the composer's changes.

London auctioneers Sotheby's had expected the manuscript to fetch up to £1.5m but a spokeswoman said it had still achieved "an excellent price".

It had not been seen in public since an auction in 1890, before it was found by a librarian at a US religious school.

The German composer wrote Grosse Fuge in 1826 while contending with deafness.

The score, which contains multiple deletions and corrections, was found by librarian Heather Carbo at the Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in July.

Schroeder must be crushed that they didn't wait until Beethoven's birthday to do this. I wonder what other gems are out there for people to discover.

Scandanavian Christmas

In the Upper Midwest, you can buy lefse in the grocery stores at Christmas time. I have to make my own. I love it, served hot with lingonberry jelly and butter.

3 c. mashed potatoes
3 tbsp. butter
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/4 c. sifted flour

Rice potatoes and then mash them. Add the melted butter and mash again. Cool. Add the flour which has been mixed with the baking powder. Work this into the potatoes. Roll thin and bake on lefsae griddle. Use a small amount of dough to roll.

The lefse cakes should be about the size and thickness of a corn tortilla.

Earth First Course

This is a delightful use for an almost forgetten fall vegetable, celeriac.

Celeriac Bisque

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
1 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup coarsely chopped shallots (about 3 large)
2 pounds celery roots (celeriac), peeled, woody parts trimmed and discarded, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (about 5 1/2 cups)
1 10-ounce russet potato, peeled, cut into 1-inch pieces
5 cups low-salt chicken broth
1 1/2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme

1/4 cup whipping cream
Additional chopped fresh thyme

Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add celery; cover and cook until slightly softened, about 3 minutes. Add shallots; sauté uncovered 3 minutes. Stir in celery root cubes and potato, then broth and 1 1/2 teaspoons thyme. Increase heat to high; bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until vegetables are very tender, about 40 minutes. Cool slightly.

Working in batches, transfer soup to blender and puree until smooth. (Can be prepared 2 days ahead. Cool slightly. Cover and refrigerate.)

Stir cream into soup and bring to simmer. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle soup into bowls. Sprinkle with additional chopped thyme and serve.

Makes 8 servings.

No Choice at all

It's nice to see that someone is standing up to this insanity.

Walgreens places 4 pharmacists on leave

By Jim Suhr, Associated Press
December 1, 2005

ST. LOUIS -- Walgreen Co. said it has put four Illinois pharmacists in the St. Louis area on unpaid leave for refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception in violation of a state rule.

The four cited religious or moral objections to filling prescriptions for the morning-after pill and ''have said they would like to maintain their right to refuse to dispense, and in Illinois that is not an option," Walgreen spokeswoman Tiffani Bruce said.

A rule imposed by Governor Rod Blagojevich in April requires Illinois pharmacies that sell contraceptives approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to fill prescriptions for emergency birth control.

Pharmacies that do not fill prescriptions for any type of contraception are not required to follow the rule.

Ed Martin, an attorney for the pharmacists, on Tuesday called the discipline ''pretty disturbing" and said they would consider legal action if Walgreen doesn't reconsider.

At least six other pharmacists have sued over the rule, asserting it forces them to violate their religious beliefs.

Many of those lawsuits were filed by Americans United for Life, the Chicago public interest law firm with which Martin is affiliated.

The licenses of both a pharmacy and that store's chief pharmacist could be revoked if they don't comply with the Illinois rule, Bruce said.

Granted it took the state law to make them do their job but... it will be very interesting to see how the lawsuit turns out. I don't think they have much of a case there, since it doesn't seem like a 1st Amendment case and I can't imagine what other basis there would be, but I'd love to hear from any of the lawyers out there as to what they think.

Obstruction

Top Democrats question Alito's credibility
Say his responses on abortion, funds show lack of candor

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff | December 2, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Key Democratic senators yesterday questioned the credibility of the Supreme Court nominee, Samuel A. Alito Jr., saying that he has not been forthcoming about his involvement in a key abortion case, and that he has been less than candid on other matters.

In a 1985 memo, Alito outlined ways to use a Pennsylvania case to whittle away at the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. But Alito did not mention the case in his answers to the Judiciary Committee's bipartisan questionnaire, which was made public the same day the National Archives released the memo.

The disclosure heightened suspicions about whether Alito and his White House backers are keeping information from the Senate. Democratic lawmakers are concerned that Alito had promised to recuse himself from a case involving Vanguard -- a mutual fund company in which Alito held hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shares -- and did not do so.

''The more I learn about Judge Alito, the more concerns I have. A credibility gap is emerging with each new piece of information," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said yesterday. ''He bears an especially heavy burden at the hearings in January to explain the growing number of discrepancies between his current statements and his past actions."

Kennedy's office noted also that in a 1985 job application, Alito listed his membership in CAP, an organization that opposed admitting women and minorities to Princeton University. Yet, in his questionnaire response released Wednesday, he said he did not remember having been a member.

Another member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat, chided the nominee for what Schumer called ''an important omission" in failing to mention the abortion case.

In the 64-page document -- accompanied by 15 boxes of materials -- Alito recounted his work on 34 specific Supreme Court cases, but he did not mention the memo he wrote on abortion.

That memo was made public by the National Archives and was separate from the papers Alito submitted to the Judiciary panel.

''But for the National Archives release . . . your extensive participation in that case would not have come to light at all, especially given the administration's public comments minimizing your role, and its long-time blanket refusal to release documents like your [abortion] memo," Schumer wrote to Alito.

Democrats have fought with the Bush administration over documents involving three nominees to the high court, including Alito, but the White House has held firm, saying some records are subject to executive privilege and should not be made public.

All of Alito's personal records from his four years in the Justice Department's solicitor general's office have been shielded by the White House.

As my friend Suburban Guerrilla likes to say, "Those who have nothing to hide hide nothing."

Who Thinks W is Strong on Security?

WaPo's Dan Froomkin calls attention to their national security blogger William Arkin, who makes the following observation today:

"Look, it is the President who insists on labeling Iraq as 'the central front in the global war on terror,' as 'an essential element in the long war against the ideology that breeds international terrorism.' He says that 'the fate of the greater Middle East -- which will have a profound and lasting impact on American security -- hangs in the balance.' I don't buy either of these assumptions, but if the administration is serious in its rhetoric, isn't it strange that they are now saying that they are willing to leave Iraq before the insurgency is 'defeated,' that they are willing to entrust the security of THE UNITED STATES to a brand new, unknown, unproven, untested Iraqi military and police force?"

Good point, Bill, but expecting W to be coherent about much of anything is, well, expecting a little much.

Christmas the Trivial, Christmas the Important

This subject is such an achingly familiar one. It's a tired and worn topic that is now ready to rear its ugly head once again: the Christmas rush. (Advent? What Advent?)

But that's just the point: because holiday stress is so familiar, and because Christmas has its meat hooks planted in our psyches, it demands attention.

First, a personal point of reference to set up the rest of this essay...

I am just about to finish up my sixth year of covering national college football on the Internet. (That's why my presence here has been scarce of late; things will pick up in mid-December, and especially after the bowl games of early January...) A sixth consecutive Autumn of watching 20-25 games on 6-8 channels for 12 uninterrupted hours on 14 straight Saturdays is about to go into the history books. All that TV watching? Over bread-and-circus fare? Seems empty, and to a considerable extent, it sure is. You'd be right to say that sports is a trivial subject, balanced against everything else that's happening in the world.

Yet, because sports have come to attain such psychological centrality in contemporary American society--while also acquiring undue economic and political importance--they now matter in ways they never used to. Sports are unquestionably trivial as a matter of substance, but as a matter of politics, economy and culture, they've become hugely important, a window inside the America you and I inhabit. The fact that millions of people invest more mental and emotional (and in the South, spiritual) energy in sports than in other facets of life makes sports a vehicle through which to educate people about ethics, human decency, good journalism, workplace fairness, and the nature of adult conversations. Quite frankly, we should be investing our energy in living lives that improve our souls and the societies that surround us (and that's precisely the point; more on that in a bit), but since sports are a magnet for the masses, they become important because of that very reality.

Same thing goes for Christmas.

As a Christian feast, it is supremely important for the simplest and most obvious reason: God became one of us in Christ. WOW! God loved us THAT MUCH!

But Christmas the secular entity--as a matter of genuine merit--is as trivial as sports are. Christmas the secular entity is the foundation of our economy, the reason for us to waste astonishing amounts of money and energy on material goods instead of devoting our time, talent and treasure to the transformation of society. Would the Christ child who was denied room at the inn by a profit-motivated manager approve of what we Americans do with Christmas? Christmas the secular entity is trivial.

And yet...

And yet, precisely because Christmas the (trivial) secular entity is so entrenched into the collective American mindset, it--much like organized sports--is important for that very reason. Because the American consciousness of Christmas is so intense, pervasive and intractable, it thereby becomes the most fertile of soils in which to plant new seeds that can give this society--the one in which we happen to live in our one go-round as human beings--the transformation it so desperately needs.

With each passing year, Christmas the secular entity becomes both more repellent and more central as something that, if seen differently, can provide the momentum for this land to regain what it has lost: an identification with being citizens, not consumers.

Citizens are concerned with the welfare of neighbors and communities. Citizens are vigilant (a quality the Advent season promotes above just about anything else). Citizens value honor above profit, ethics above self-interest, and view societies to be as strong as their weakest members.

Consumers take a view 180 degrees different from the citizen perspective. These views are the views that are always dominant in the current winds of American life, and they create hurricane-force winds during Christmas that flood our culture with the destructive force of materialism while tens of millions live under the poverty line, tens of millions more just above that same poverty line, whose legitimacy is quite debatable as a genuine statistical measuring stick.

Each Christmas is the equivalent of a sociocultural and spiritual Katrina. This is so not just because of the reality of astonishing consumption against a backdrop of income inequality and poverty, but also for something much more deeply connected to the soul.

I had the privilege last week of serving Thanksgiving dinner to 266 Seattleites at the soup kitchen where I work. On Thanksgiving Day, our crew is made up of dozens of one-time volunteers who call us as early as mid-September to reserve a volunteer slot at the kitchen. When I talked with these volunteers during tiny lulls in last week's holiday meal, many of them told me that they wished we were open on weekends, so they could volunteer more than just once a year. The not-so-subtle message buried within those words was that these folks just didn't have the time to help us out during the day (2 to 7 p.m.), or at least, they FELT/THOUGHT they couldn't help us during the day.

This, fellow Bumpers, is THE American problem, a problem bigger than anything George W. Bush is doing to destroy our country (though destroying he is, with ruthless [in]efficiency and [in]competence).

We are trapped, or at least, we feel trapped.

We feel we have to do certain things in certain ways. We feel we have to live up to certain standards of wealth and material comfort, that we have to do certain things for our children, like buy them an avalanche of toys in mid-December and go through the steps of wrapping them and putting them under a tree while hanging stockings and making tons of sweets and writing the hundreds of cards and going to the malls and making sure everybody has what they want and going to the concerts and light displays and......... (are you tired yet?)

I'm sure Christmas, for all too many Americans, becomes precisely what was described above: a madhouse with Ken Kesey-like stream-of-consciousness thought due to spoiling kids and immersing oneself and one's family in consumption, instead of living the life that, deep down, one would want to live: a quieter life, a simpler life, a life that has time and space for matters of soul and spirit, a life where children are given a moral education before they're drowned in toys they'll discard within three months (if that), given the ever-shrinking length of the (what?) American attention span.

Living the life that matters. Living the examined life. Living the generous life. Living the life that improves your community and neighborhood. Living the life that enables you to write and talk to your Congressional representatives and your president. Living the life that gives you the assurance that, yes, you have the 10 minutes to talk to the homeless street person and respect his/her dignity instead of walking by.

If all of us as Americans lived the life we could live if we wanted to--no one's holding us at gunpoint, though it would indeed take awhile to restructure our lives if we wanted to pull away from the current levels of consumption and work that occupy our lives--we would have the head and heart space with which to be alert, active, generous citizens in pursuit of our own enrichment and the uplift of others on the deepest, most substantial levels.

This is the opportunity we always have in front of us, no matter what the season. But because it's Christmas, because it's the season when the worst and most damaging elements of American culture emerge in plain sight, it's the best time to bring about the social transformation that can undercut all that's wrong with our country, and restore all that's been great about America since its founding.

Christmas--the secular entity--is trivial. Therefore, Christmas--the secular entity--is important.

More Bad Bugs

Deadly Hospital Germ Is Spreading in U.S.

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 2, 2005; Page A08

A new, more dangerous strain of a germ that has long caused diarrhea in hospital patients is now widespread in the United States, causing severe, sometimes deadly outbreaks around the country, researchers reported yesterday.

Strains of the germ have been detected among people who have not been in a hospital, raising alarm that the infection may be emerging more widely and posing a broader public health threat, the researchers said.

While the infection does not pose a public health emergency, doctors and patients need to be aware of the risk so cases can be identified and treated quickly, and measures can be taken to limit its spread, experts said. They do not yet have good estimates for how many people have been infected.

The germ may have emerged in part from the overuse of antibiotics, the experts added, and its emergence provides another reason to use antibiotics as judiciously as possible.

"We are very concerned about this," said L. Clifford McDonald of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It's still probably an unusual occurrence in healthy people, but we're concerned enough that we want to alert people."

The bacterium is known as Clostridium difficile . It has long been known in hospitals to cause diarrhea, particularly in patients who are taking antibiotics for other reasons. The antibiotics kill other microbes that keep C. difficile in check, allowing it to grow and cause illness. Such infections, however, had usually been easily treatable with other antibiotics.

In recent years, though, unusually severe outbreaks have been reported around the world. In 2003, a particularly severe outbreak among hospital patients in Quebec may have killed more than 200 people.

In three new reports released yesterday by the CDC and the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers identified the strain responsible for the Quebec cases, determined that the same strain is present throughout the United States, and described other cases outside of hospitals.

Taken together, the research indicates that the bacteria poses a widening health problem, researchers said.

"There is a new strain of Clostridium difficile that is causing epidemics in many hospitals in the United States," said John G. Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who co-wrote an editorial in the journal. It was released early, along with two research papers because of their public health importance. "It's a bad bug," Bartlett said.

I've been tracking c. difficile for a few years. There is some other news about it which didn't make it in to this story. Attending physicians have known this bug for years as primarily a nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infection. Over the last couple of years, I've been seeing reports in the secular (i.e. non-medical journals) media of cases cropping up in people who haven't been in a hospital in decades. This new, more pathogenic bug, seems to be the culprit. I checked in with my medical experts this morning to see if this WaPo writer got the story straight and learned that c. difficile has now become a chronic disease in some of those who catch it.

The deeper story here is that pathogens, the things which make us sick, are evolving. Widespread use (often, thoughtless) of broad-spectrum antibiotics is giving us a new generation of germs which are resistent to antibiotics. The microbial world is getting more dangerous, not less.

Blogger Soul

Sean-Paul Kelley at The Agonist blew a gasket on behalf of all bloggers last night.

The Agonist - I find it astonishing that the elite-celebrity journalists keep pointing the finger at "those pesky bloggers" in their "fact free ethical anarchy zones" and all the while we now see that the level of incest between media elite and political elite has reached epidemic proportions in this country.

Just look at them all, circling the wagons on the whole Woodward, Viveca Novak, Luskin revelations of late. All of them pointing their fingers at the "ethics free" bloggers, tut-tutting us and pooh-poohing the story of the century at every media appearance they get. Why? Because they are all up to their eyeballs in it.

The funny thing is, and bloggers see this more than most, deep down they are scared of us and they feel threatened. Because now they are being treated as they have treated others for so long: as objects to be investigated, fact checked and generally distrusted. They are finally being held accountable. And they do not like it.

So, their last best chance, at least they think, is to throw out the ethics card, to insinuate that bloggers are unethical because it is just so tempting to spread unsubstantiated rumors (and yet they all read Drudge), that there is no over-sight and no editorial structure (lot of good that did Ms. Run Amok at the Times). My suggestion to the big celebrity elite journalists is to be very careful what kind of a campaign you wish for. You might just get it.

Avian Influenza, at the Source

Bird by Bird, China Tackles Vast Flu Task

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 2, 2005

LIDAYING VILLAGE, China - Five men on battered motorcycles pulled up at this roadside village from a nearby town and summoned the local headman.

Wearing ordinary clothes and bearing boxes of vaccine from two separate manufacturers, they worked their way from house to house, roughly 300 dwellings in all, to vaccinate every chicken, duck and goose in the hamlet against avian flu.

For the rest of the afternoon, the members of the small team took turns, some briefly explaining the process to the villagers into whose courtyards and homes they entered, others rounding up the fowl and others working their syringes, sticking the birds one by one. For the most part, they failed to take even the most basic hygienic precautions, like wearing surgical gloves or masks.

Teams vaccinating birds in China against avian flu walked door to door recently in a county in Anhui Province. Some teams fail to wear protective masks or gloves, raising the risk of bird flu transmission to humans.

"We set out each morning at daylight, and we stop when we can't see anymore," said Shen Dianchun, a livestock extension worker whose work over 10 days in November had taken him up and down this tree-lined, two-lane country road that cuts through prime farmland in rural Anhui Province. Mr. Shen estimated that his team, one of thousands like it deployed recently, handled about 600 birds on a typical day. This vaccination by retail is part of a crash effort to inoculate the 14.2 billion domesticated fowl that constitute what the government estimates is the total bird population over a year's time.

The mass vaccinations illustrate both the high priority China, the traditional incubator of flu pandemics, has placed on preventing the disease from leaping from birds to humans and the immense challenges involved, including the possibility that the rural health workers themselves might spread the virus, which can be acquired through contact with droppings or secretions from the birds.

China is also worried about its credibility, which was badly tarnished by the outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003, which the authorities initially tried to cover up. But international experts say that Beijing's official figure of only two human deaths from bird flu is suspiciously low, with some speculating that dozens or even hundreds may have died here already.

Since September, when the recent outbreak of avian flu was first acknowledged, Chinese authorities have ramped up production of bird flu vaccines at nine plants around the country, which are operating around the clock. Agriculture Ministry officials estimate that over 100 million doses are now being produced daily in the country, and teams like the one in this village are busy throughout the country, where life in close proximity to domesticated fowl is a common and ancient practice.

According to Chinese news reports, and interviews with people involved in the inoculation effort in several different parts of the country, the vaccination drive is proceeding relatively well in places that have large poultry industries. In the countryside, however, among China's peasantry, vaccine is reportedly in short supply, despite the huge production.

Typically, the extension workers who are carrying out the vaccination campaign have little epidemiological training and, like the ones in this village, take virtually no precautions, even to protect themselves against exposure to the disease.

One of the extension workers, who wore no gloves, face mask or any other protection, climbed inside a coop containing a dozen or so chickens and handed the birds out one by one to two of his co-workers. One of them held the birds while the other swabbed them and applied the needle.

Zhang Rongting, an elderly woman who owned the house, then placed the birds in straw crates, covering them with washbowls to calm them and isolate them until the job was complete. Asked what kind of shots her chickens were getting, she said, "You guys know, we don't."

Toward the end of the afternoon, when the presence of foreigners in the village drew the attention of local officials, the vaccination team donned white smocks for the first time, but continued to handle the birds bare-handed and without masks. After inoculating the geese in one dusty courtyard, the team discarded its used needle on the ground and walked away.

One of the most useful things I did while I was at the flu conference last month was to take part in a "grand round" on avian flu taught by a vet. I learned a lot about flu and other diseases in birds and about the veterinary vaccination industry. And what I learned from that, and what the Times reporter can't tell you because he doesn't know, is that this scattershot Chinese effort (they have 14 billion chickens, do you really think they are going to vaccinate them all?) is going to result in a virus which is resistent to vaccines, particularly those vaccines which are badly crafted.

The Times thinks this is a "good news" story. It isn't.

Wedding Bells

High Court in S. Africa Backs Gay Marriage
# Ruling in favor of a lesbian couple, the justices give Parliament a year to enact changes.

By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — On a continent where politicians, church leaders and traditional figures often harshly condemn homosexuality, a South African lesbian couple who wanted to wed won the case for same-sex marriage in their nation's Constitutional Court on Thursday.

But gay activists who hoped for a bunch of weddings had to wait: Instead of immediately legalizing same-sex marriages, the court gave Parliament a year to bring the country's marriage laws in line with its constitution.

After the long years of apartheid, which denied blacks the vote and other democratic rights, South Africa crafted a liberal constitution in 1996 that outlawed discrimination on grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation.

South African activists have used the charter to steadily consolidate gay rights, in stark contrast with the bulk of African countries where homosexuality is still illegal and gays are often ostracized or brutally attacked.

President Robert Mugabe in neighboring Zimbabwe has frequently vilified homosexuals as "lower than dogs and pigs," while Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has described homosexuality as "unnatural" and ordered police crackdowns.

South Africa stands out on the continent for its constitutional protection of gay rights, but the government has opposed same-sex marriage. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Canada allow gay marriages.

Despite winning a case in the Supreme Court last year supporting their right to marry, lesbian couple Marie Fourie and Cecelia Bonthuys still encountered opposition — from the Department of Home Affairs. Government lawyers appealed the Supreme Court ruling.

But in a unanimous decision, the Constitutional Court ruled Thursday that it was unconstitutional to deny homosexuals the right to marry and warned that unless Parliament amended marriage laws, the court would automatically alter the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex unions.

"The exclusion of same-sex couples from the benefits and responsibilities of marriage … signifies that their capacity for love, commitment and accepting responsibility is by definition less worthy of regard than that of heterosexual couples," Justice Albie Sachs said, according to Reuters news service. The court is the nation's highest judicial panel on matters related to the constitution.

The ruling African National Congress released a statement acknowledging the decision. It also said it would respect the court's verdict.

"The Department of Home Affairs will assess what practical steps will be needed to give effect to the change in the law and make appropriate recommendations to the minister," a one-paragraph statement said.

Melanie Judge, program manager of OUT Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Wellbeing, said reactions in the gay community were mixed: There was jubilation that the right to marriage was upheld but also disappointment that the ruling would not take effect immediately.

"The champagne corks can't quite pop yet," she said in a phone interview. "We do come from a history of intolerance where certain groups were excluded on the basis of sexual orientation or race or gender, et cetera, so it takes time for social attitudes to shift and to get used to notions of tolerance, of respect and dignity."

She said that although the ANC government had initiated some legal reforms, activists had had to take the government to court to win rights on issues such as same-sex marriage.

This is breathtaking. South Africa is out in front of the US. Whodathunkit?

How The Other Half Lives

Little to Reclaim in the Lower 9th
# Many residents come up with next to nothing as they pick through their former neighborhood.

By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS — The sun was still burning off the fog Thursday morning when 88-year-old Nelson Meyers climbed five stairs onto a concrete porch he had built four decades ago. The railing was there. The house was gone.

The 25-foot wall of water that burst through the levee forming the western boundary of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina lifted the home off its foundation. The house landed in the neighbor's yard, on top of a car, caked in mud, its lacy curtains shredded into filthy ribbons.

"A man's home is his castle," Meyers said. "And this is what we've got."

Currently living with 28 other relatives in Florida, Meyers and three family members drove to New Orleans to take up Mayor C. Ray Nagin on his offer to sift through the wreckage, to salvage what they could.

The Lower 9th had been closed since the flooding, and residents had grown agitated over not being able to get to their property. Nagin relented, cautioning that the neighborhood — probably the pocket of the city hit the hardest — was not stable enough for people to move back. But, he said: "Everybody can get their stuff."

So for two hours, Meyers and his family rumbled through the Lower 9th in a small convoy, stopping at four family homes that dated back five generations. They all had their wish lists: the lovely picture of Meyers and his wife enjoying a picnic, taken in the '40s. The family Bible. Birth certificates.

They came away with nothing.

Like hundreds of other families, they did not — could not — salvage a single item.

I've been thinking about this a lot in recent days. One might say that I've been nearly obsessed with the aftermath of Katrina, because disaster recovery is some thing we do poorly in this country. Maybe you don't see it, but this could be any of us. A flood in North Carolina, a tornado in Minnesota, an earthquake on the New Madrid fault. Whatever it is, you could be in Blanche du Bois territory in a heartbeat, relying on "the kindness of strangers." And if that happens to you, you'll find out, in a heartbeat what a great heart your neighbors have and how niggerdly is the government.

Maybe it is just me, because I've been homeless as one of the working poor, sleeping in my car and making do with a bathroom when I can find it, but I don't think I'm all that atypical. The "thin veneer of civilization" that some of my fellow intellectuals talk about isn't really about riots and looting: it is really about eating and not eating. Those who don't have enough to eat don't riot, they don't have the strength.

When I was starving, my fellow teachers bought me lunch every day. I bless them for it. But they couldn't see that a crooked system was leaving me hungry the rest of the day and that no one can live on one egg salad sandwich a day.

Katrina takes me back to those days and those people who live like I had to live 20 years ago. Katrina and her aftermath inhabit my flesh. Homeless and hungry, those memories will never leave me.

Unless your imagination enlarges to encompass the unthinkable, you may not think this can happen to you. I've come back from the edge of that precipace to say, "It can happen."

Until you learn to think the unthinkable, you won't learn much.

All it takes is a little break in your earning curve and your credit rating slides to nowhere and you are out on your ass. And then the fun begins.

The Law West of the Pecos

Justice Staff Saw Texas Districting As Illegal
Voting Rights Finding On Map Pushed by DeLay Was Overruled

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 2, 2005; Page A01

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

"The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect," the memo concluded.

The memo also found that Republican lawmakers and state officials who helped craft the proposal were aware it posed a high risk of being ruled discriminatory compared with other options.

But the Texas legislature proceeded with the new map anyway because it would maximize the number of Republican federal lawmakers in the state, the memo said. The redistricting was approved in 2003, and Texas Republicans gained five seats in the U.S. House in the 2004 elections, solidifying GOP control of Congress.

J. Gerald "Gerry" Hebert, one of the lawyers representing Texas Democrats who are challenging the redistricting in court, said of the Justice Department's action: "We always felt that the process . . . wouldn't be corrupt, but it was. . . . The staff didn't see this as a close call or a mixed bag or anything like that. This should have been a very clear-cut case."

But Justice Department spokesman Eric W. Holland said the decision to approve the Texas plan was vindicated by a three-judge panel that rejected the Democratic challenge. The case is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The court ruled that, in fact, the new congressional plan created a sufficient number of safe minority districts given the demographics of the state and the requirements of the law," Holland said. He added that Texas now has three African Americans serving in Congress, up from two before the redistricting.

Texas Republicans also have maintained that the plan did not dilute minority votes and that the number of congressional districts with a majority of racial minorities remained unchanged at 11. The total number of congressional districts, however, grew from 30 to 32.

The 73-page memo, dated Dec. 12, 2003, has been kept under tight wraps for two years. Lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag rule. The memo was provided to The Post by a person connected to the case who is critical of the adopted redistricting map. Such recommendation memos, while not binding, historically carry great weight within the Justice Department.

Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Texas and other states with a history of discriminatory elections are required to submit changes in their voting systems or election maps for approval by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

There is the law, and then there is Texas, which still hasn't decided if it wants to live under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

From the Sub-Continent

I got 'round to researching Indian dosas and found dozens of things I'll need to cook. The story is here/

Try this one:

Makes about 15

* 2 cups (360 g) rice, preferably parboiled
* 1/2 cup (90 g) split and husked Bengal Gram ('Dhuli Urad')
* 1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds (methi dana)
* 2 tsp salt
* Oil for cooking dosas

Method

1. Soak rice, daal, and fenugreek seeds together overnight.
2. Grind these ingredients together to a very smooth consistency.
3. Add the salt and enough water to make into a dropping consistency, and leave to rise for 5-6 hours, or overnight.
4. Check consistency of the batter, and if needed, add enough water to make into a smooth pouring consistency.
5. Heat tava (dosa pan) very hot, splash a little water over it, and with a ladle, immediately pour some batter onto it, spreading it thin, with a circular motion, without pressing too hard. (You will need some practice to get it right).
6. Lower the heat and dribble a little oil around the edges. When edges start browning a bit, it is almost done.
7. Add desired filling and fold over.

One you have all the ingredients in order, dosas and idlis only take a minute. It's rather like cooking crepes.

Pommes Anna

"Pommes Anna" are one of the time-honored ways of presenting potatoes in their earthy finest, with minimal dress-up. This is a classic, usually served with herbed beef tenderloin. This will serve 4.

1 1/2 pounds russet (baking) potatoes
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, melted

Peel the potatoes and, using a food processor fitted with the slicing blade or a mandoline, slice them very thin, transferring them as they are sliced to a large bowl of cold water with a little lemon juice squeezed in to keep it to keep the potatoes from oxidiziding and turning brown. Drain the slices and pat them dry between paper towels. Generously brush the bottom and side of a 9 inch heavy ovenproof skillet, preferably nonstick, with some of the butter and in the skillet arrange the slices, overlapping them slightly, in layers, brushing each layer with some of the remaining butter and seasoning it with salt and pepper. Cover the layered potato slices with a buttered round foil, tamp down the assembled potato cake firmly, and bake it in the middle of a preheated 425 degree oven for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake the potato cake for 25 to 30 minutes more, or until the slices are tender and golden. Invert the potato cake onto a cutting board and cut it into 8 wedges. Serve immediately.

This will cost you a fortune at the better restaurants in Philly and DC but you can make it for dimes if you are willing to turn on the oven.

Your guests will be ecstatic. And you will smile,

Where Corruption Starts

Are high school athletics corupt? What do you think?

Inquiry Begins on Florida School Friendly to Athletes

The Miami-Dade School District and the National Collegiate Athletic Association had requested an investigation, but a spokesman for the attorney general's office, Ed Griffith, said "we had independently started to review it" following a report on the school Sunday in The New York Times.

The Times reported that University High School, a correspondence school based in a small office in south Miami, was awarding high grades and high school diplomas to prominent Dade County athletes as well as its usual clientele of immigrants and people who dropped out of high school more than a decade ago. The school had no classes, no instruction and no independent certification, and offered fast A's and B's in easy course work and open-book tests.

Yet University High School degrees were accepted by the state of Florida, the N.C.A.A. Clearinghouse and at least 11 Division I universities that recruited and gave scholarships to football players who had burnished their grades there.
....
People are saying there's something hokey here," he said. "The first thing is to determine what exactly are we looking at, and then is there anything criminal here."

The state attorney's office is already pursuing a case of widespread academic fraud by Miami-Dade County public school teachers themselves. About 700 teachers have been identified so far as having gained teaching credentials with no-show courses, Griffith said.

More Internet Humor, Part II

Here is something to brighten up your day. Feel free to forward the link to your friends:

Bush's Brain

I only got 3 in there but I might get better with practice.

Why Human Kind Presses Olives, Yum

Here are some recipes for herbed olive oils which I'll suggest in a menu below. This is really good and you'll think of dozens of ways to use it. Note: oils infused with dried herbs will burn if they are used for cooking. Use your most aromatic olive oil for this, but save it for dressing vegetables or for dipping bread if the herbs are dried.

Herbed olive oils as dipping puddles for really good bread are a gift to your table and your dining partners (or those nights when don't eat alone, you dine alone. I'll have some thoughts on the art of dining for one this weekend. Sometimes, you just need to treat yourself the way you wish others would. And you don't have to buy Manolo Blahnik's to do it.)

Makes 1 cup

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Flavoring(s) of choice (see list below)

Place olive oil in small heavy saucepan with flavoring(s)
of choice until oil just begins to sizzle. Remove from heat
and cool to room temperature. Refrigerate in a tightly
covered jar for two days. Strain oil into large glass
measuring cup. Pour through funnel into dry sterilized
bottle; cork and store in refrigerator for up to one month.
(Recipe may be multiplied for gifts or larger batches.)

[ed.: This is a superb Christmas/Hanukah present for foodie friends. One afternoon in the kitchen and most of your gift giving is ready for a cork and a ribbon. Include a page of recipes that use your gift and instructions on storing it.]

For herb oil: Add several sprigs of rosemary, thyme, sage
or any other fresh herbs you like, plus two or three dried
red chiles. Use for a bread dipping sauce, sautes or salad
dressings.

For rosemary oil: Add one-fourth cup fresh rosemary
leaves or one tablespoon crushed dried rosemary. Use for
a bread dipping sauce, sautes or salad dressings.

The rosemary oil, if made with fresh rosemary, makes a fabulous baste for roasted meats.

Use tarragon if you want to use it in salads or over fish and chicken.

Winter Dinner

I serve this as a main course in a vegetarian meal. I like a fruit salad on the side with baked squashes. Halve some seedless grapes and serve in a herby lemon vinaigrette made with walnut oil. The protein component of this dish is pretty high. Serve it with french green beans with tarragon. I love goat cheese, but your mileage may vary. This serves four and is easily halved.

Stuffed Squash with Herbed Goat Cheese

2 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth
3/4 cup quick cooking barley
2 acorn squash (about 1 1/2 pounds each), halved crosswise and seeded
2 teaspoons olive or vegetable oil
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 green bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 teaspoon dried sage
Salt and pepper, optional
4 tablespoons crumbled herbed goat cheese

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

Heat the chicken stock in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the barley and simmer until tender, about 8 to 10 minutes.

Scoop the seeds from each squash half and place, cut sides up, in a microwave-safe baking dish. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and microwave on high for 5 minutes, or until flesh is tender.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add chicken, onion, green pepper and saute 3 minutes. Add sage, salt and pepper, to taste, and cooked barley and stir to coat. Cook, stirring constantly, until chicken is cooked through and mixture is well-combined.

Spoon barley mixture into each halved squash. Transfer stuffed squash to a foil-lined baking sheet or a baking dish and top with goat cheese. Bake for 5 to 7 minutes, or until cheese is lightly browned.

Barley is a highly under-rated grain and one I've learned to use a lot. It is an excellent source of protein and fiber. If barley isn't your thing, wild rice, brown rice or plain white rice make satisfactory substitutions.

I have a thing for goat cheese, not everyone does. You can easily substitute other cheeses, and a colby/jack would work nicely with this. For reasons that are not clear, even to me, I like a sparkling apple/grape cider with this meal.

When You're Too Tired to Cook

Just got home from work? Tired? Long day on the job?

Order a pizza, but next time be prepared to cook yourself something easy and delicious. This is one of my favorites for those nights when my butt is draggin' by 6 PM. You'll need to stop at the store on the way home to pick up fresh clams, but the rest of it you can have around the kitchen. This qualifies as comfort food in my dinette.

Serves 4.

Linguini with White Clam Sauce

4 dozen littleneck clams, scrubbed well
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 pound thin linguine
Salt
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 to 4 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
1 teaspoon hot pepper flakes
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
Freshly ground black pepper

In a large pot combine the clams and white wine and bring to a boil. Cover and steam the clams over moderately high heat about 5 to 10 minutes, checking them after 5 minutes and transferring them as they open to a bowl. Discard any clams that do not open after 10 minutes. Remove pot from heat and reserve the liquid in a measuring cup.

In another large pot bring at least 4 quarts salted water to a boil and cook the linguine until al dente, stirring occasionally. Drain linguine in a colander.

With a small knife remove the meat from 24 of the largest clams, discarding the shells, and in a food processor pulse just until chopped coarse. In a large pot heat the olive oil over moderately high heat and quickly toast the sliced garlic until just golden. Add the hot pepper flakes and stir. Add the reserved cooking liquid from the clams and bring to a simmer. Stir in the pureed clams and simmer for 2 minutes. Add the linguine, parsley, basil, remaining clams in their shells, salt and pepper and toss to combine. Serve immediately.

While you are picking up the clams, grab a package of Italian wild field greens and serve a salad with vinaigrette. Warm up a fresh baguette while the pasta is cooking and serve it with pesto or herbed garlic oil for dipping.

War as Metaphor

Plan: We Win

Published: December 1, 2005

We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.
....
Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory." His strategy document defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure"; and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, and "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."

That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for the region since the vision of Nebuchadnezzar's son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. But after watching the president, we couldn't resist reading Richard Nixon's 1969 Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the Paris peace talks, and Mr. Bush's ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much different from Nixon's plans - except Nixon admitted the war was going very badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn't start it), and he was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.

A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

The war functions as a prism through which you can see virtually everything which is wrong with the Bush administration. I talked to someone yesterday who is much more plugged in than I am. If you think you know how dysfunctional all of the executive branch is right now, you are wrong. It is much, much worse than you could ever imagine.

What Does "Winning" Mean?

Here are Dan Froomkin's Odds and Endsfor today at washingtonpost.com

Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey write for Newsweek: "The much-hyped 'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq' -- which the White House excitedly described as 'declassified' -- was exceptionally glib in places. 'Our mission in Iraq,' it stated, 'is to win the war.' No, really? If the National Security Council needs to write this in a strategy document, then it really is struggling to find a way out.

"A more likely explanation is that this 'strategy' was never really written for internal consumption."

Wolffe and Bailey also address the credibility issue: "The critical problem for the president is whether the American people believe him. Along with the loss of credibility in the run-up to the invasion, the White House is also suffering from propaganda fatigue on the reconstruction. There have been so many premature declarations of progress, and so many major speeches on Iraq, that this moment sounds much like every other. The challenge now for President Bush lies as much at home as it does in Iraq: to convince Americans that he's being realistic this time without conceding that he hyped the story many times before."

CNN's Wolf Blitzer did a little counting: "The Bush White House is trying to get a fresh start in convincing Americans to stay the course in Iraq. But the president has been talking about Iraq for months. By our account, he's given at least seven major speeches on the war this year and all that talking has not helped his poll numbers."

So did the Think Progress blog, which notes that it took Bush all of 27 seconds to reference September 11.

And blogger Wonkette visually depicts how Bush's message has gone in reverse, from "Mission Accomplished" to "Strategy for Victory" to "Plan for Victory." She wonders if "Brainstorming about Victory" is next.

Some Questions for the Nominee

Marty Lederman was an Attorney-Advisor in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002. He is now in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area, specializing in constitutional and appellate litigation and teaches at Georgetown Law. This is his latest contribution to Balkinization, the blog of Yale Con Law prof Jack Balkin.

Judge Alito and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton

Marty Lederman

There's a good deal of discussion recently about Judge Alito's membership twenty years ago in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a group apparently devoted to the retention of quotas that had long excluded women and minorities from Princeton.

I know very little about CAP and its policies other than what I've read in hilzoy's informative post here. And I know even less about the reasons for, or extent of, Judge Alito's involvement in CAP. (Quick legal question, however: Why wouldn't such quotas have been flatly illegal under title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (race discrimination) and title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (sex discrimination)? I know there's an argument that title IX doesn't bar private, single-sex colleges from receiving federal funds -- although I think the question is much more difficult than most people assume -- but race discrimination? Or quotas aganst women if the college was already coeducational? Didn't Princeton receive federal funds?)

But even if there is an innocent explanation for Alito's CAP involvement, and/or it can simply be chalked up to the mistakes of one's "youth" -- notwithstanding that the person in question was in his mid-30s and had already been representing the United States before the Supreme Court for several years -- shouldn't the following two things be much more troubling than the CAP membership itself?:

First, Alito singled out -- trumpeted, even -- his CAP membership in order to brandish his conservative bona fides when applying for a job as Deputy AAG in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan Administration. That is to say, he took pains to wtite -- presumably with sincerity -- that such membership in an organization of questionable repute -- along with the fact that the "greatest influence on [his] views" included the Bill Buckley National Review of the early 1960's, which was also virulently opposed to the civil rights movement -- demonstrated his ultra-conservative qualifications for a high-level government position in OLC, an office that (as much as any office in the Executive Branch) is supposed to answer legal questions objectively. (As T.R. Goldman writes, "[t]he irony is that Alito's ideologically charged application was for a job in a venerable and long-standing Department of Justice office whose mission usually involves nondescript legal analysis. 'It was the ultimate mismatch between that application and the job Sam and I were asked to do,' notes Pepperdine University law professor Douglas Kmiec, who was a deputy assistant AG at the OLC with Alito. . . . 'OLC was designed to be an objective appraiser of the law, a place inside a political administration where policy people can come and say, "OK, we'll ask the lawyers what the law requires."'" Apparently, Alito's conservatives credentials were suspect because he had spent so much time acting in a nonpartisan capacity in the SG's Office and had attended Yale Law School. Goldman reports Alito's supporters as explaining that "without a political track record, Alito had to put his best conservative face forward"; thus, "the job application's intensely ideological tone." My own favorite bit in his OLC application is the not-so-subtle suggestion that his excuse for having attended Yale was that Alex "Passive Virtues" Bickel was teaching there.)

In his mid-30's, a seasoned Samuel Alito, already having served in a position of great responsibility for the U.S. government for several years, chose to affirmatively brag about -- rather than to apologize for -- his membership in CAP, and about his enthusiastic embrace of the early 1960's National Review, because he thought that, of all his many attributes and accomplishments, those things would serve to demonstrate his credentials for a high OLC post.

Second, and more surprising still, in the completed questionnaire that Judge Alito submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, he writes this about CAP (at page 7):

Concerned Alumni of Princeton . . . was a group of Princeton alumni. A document I recently reviewed [presumably his OLC application?] reflects that I was a member of the group in the 1980s. Apart from that document, I have no recollection of being a member, of attending meetings, or otherwise participating in the activities of the group. The group has no current officers from whom more information may be obtained.

(Hat tip: Orin K.) So, in 1985 he determined that this membership was one of the small handful of facts that most qualified him for one government post in which his job would be to impartially interpret the law; and 20 years later, when applying for a similar, if more important, legal post, he has no recollection of that membership other than from the 1985 application itself?

This seems very hard to believe. From everything I've heard, however, Judge Alito is an honest and straight-shooting fellow; so I'm willing to assume that his CAP membership and participation were so fleeting, so negligible, in the 1980s that he truly does not recall them now, 20 years later. But, if that's indeed the case, what does that say about his citation of his CAP membership on his OLC application back in 1985, in order to demonstrate how died-in-the-wool conservative he was? The whole incident is very odd.

P.S. Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting that being fond of the early-60's National Review as a teenager should disqualify someone for a Supreme Court seat forty years later. But going out of one's way in the mid-80s to emphasize how one's philosophy was formed by that youthful dalliance with such a periodical? And doing so in order to demonstrate one's fitness for an high-level OLC post? Well, that's something else entirely . . .

Posted by Melanie at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

While You Were Sleeping

One of my legal elves sends this link to a rather frightening Mark Fiore animation (needs Flash.) Did you know the Republicans are planning to slice up the Ninth Circuit Court? Yes, Congress has finally gotten around to taking the shears to this favorite right-wing shibbolith.

Link to the video.

World Aids Day

A day of failed promise

TODAY MARKS THE NEW MOON, the first window on an Advent calendar and the birthday of Woody Allen. More important, Dec. 1 is also World AIDS Day. Founded by the World Health Organization in 1988, World AIDS Day is meant to draw attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It's not a holiday — and if it were, there would be precious little to celebrate. Nearly a quarter of a century since the first AIDS case was reported in 1981, the disease is spreading rapidly around the world, and the efforts to fight it have come up woefully short.

The head of the WHO's HIV/AIDS program, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, took the unusual step of apologizing on Monday for failing to meet one of the organization's key goals: putting 3 million people on antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2005. The "3 by 5" initiative has missed by at least 1 million people. New infections are coming at a near-record pace. "I think we have to just admit we've not done enough and we started way too late," Kim said.

Yet the failure isn't just the fault of the WHO; there is more than enough blame to go around. Donor nations — even generous ones such as the United States — can get better results by better coordinating their efforts and not being so insistent on direct aid. And recipient nations and groups need to be more candid and open about the disease and how to prevent it.

On paper, the United States is the leader in the global fight against AIDS. It spends far more on the disease than any other country, and the amount is increasing. This year it contributed $2.8 billion, and next year's budget, if an upcoming bill is approved, includes that much plus $600 million. But what looks good on paper can sometimes be pretty ugly on the ground.

If the proposed $3.4 billion in U.S. spending for next year is approved, slightly more than half of the money — $1.8 billion — will go to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, widely known as PEPFAR. Another $550 million will go the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, with the rest going to various bilateral programs and research.

PEPFAR does good work that has benefited millions. But the money comes with strings attached that have more to do with satisfying narrow political interests in the United States than with meeting the needs of people with AIDS abroad. For instance, PEPFAR requires recipients to adopt policies opposing sex work, hampering them from working effectively with a population that plays a key role in the spread of AIDS. Then there's its approach to abstinence.

Programs promoting abstinence can be effective in stemming AIDS; the problem is, PEPFAR places far too high a priority on them. Of the money PEPFAR dedicates to preventing (as opposed to treating) the disease, 56% is spent on abstinence programs, while the amount dedicated to supplying condoms is decreasing, according to an analysis by the Maryland-based Center for Health and Gender Equity. The highest rates of new infection in sub-Saharan Africa are among young married women, who for the most part are faithful to their husbands; they need condoms for their husbands and for themselves, not lectures on abstinence.

Once again, the Bushies fund ideology over science. The LAT ed board fluffs them. The Bush policy is literally killing people, but the LAT editors don't tell you that.

Fingerprints

The WaPo's headlines this story this morning, which tells you how something about the filibuster sweepstakes. Getting frontpaged in the WaPo means that the Posties are betting on conflict.

Alito Helped Craft Reagan-Era Move To Restrict 'Roe'
Supreme Court Nominee Wrote Memo In 1985 as Justice Department Lawyer

By Amy Goldstein and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 1, 2005; Page A01

As a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. helped devise a legal strategy to persuade the high court to restrict and eventually overturn Roe v. Wade , the historic decision legalizing abortion.

In a memo disclosed yesterday that he wrote in 1985 as an assistant to the solicitor general, Alito recommended that the administration submit a brief to the Supreme Court, asking it to uphold a Pennsylvania law that imposed a variety of abortion restrictions and "make clear that we disagree with Roe v. Wade ."

Alito argued in the 17-page document that stepping into the case, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , would be a more effective strategy for President Ronald Reagan than a "frontal assault" on the landmark case and would not "even tacitly concede Roe 's legitimacy." Disagreeing with the administration's position, the court struck down the Pennsylvania law the following year.

Coming on a day when the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the most significant abortion rights case to reach the court in five years, the abortion memo immediately touched off intense new criticism from Democrats -- and hesitancy among some moderate Republicans -- over Alito's nomination.

The memo was among 336 pages of documents, released yesterday by the National Archives, spanning Alito's six years as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department and three years as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. The White House also released yesterday Alito's 64 pages of answers to questions posed by the Senate Judiciary Committee about his qualifications and views.

Alito was 35 years old and a civil-service lawyer when he wrote the abortion memo in May 1985. It was just six months before he sent a letter to then-Attorney General Edwin Meese III as part of his successful application for a higher-ranking political appointment, saying that he was "particularly proud" of his contribution to cases in which the administration argued "that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

When the job-application letter became public two weeks ago, White House officials played down Alito's work on the Thornburgh case, saying that he had had a peripheral role and had not helped to write the actual brief. But the memo makes clear that, at a time when Reagan's top aides had instructed the department to work to overturn Roe , Alito furnished some of the detailed legal logic and strategy toward that goal.

A co-worker said that Alito eagerly volunteered to help prepare the brief. Albert Lauber, another assistant to the solicitor general at the time, recalls having been assigned to write the portion of the brief defending Pennsylvania's abortion law. Lauber said in an interview that Alito "just walked into my office one day and said, 'You know, this is a big assignment and do you want some help?' "

In the memo, he wrote: "What can be made of this opportunity to advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime of mitigating its effects?" He then urged the department to argue that provisions in the Pennsylvania law "are eminently reasonable and legitimate and would be upheld without a moment's hesitation in other contexts."

He referred to a doctor who performs the procedure as an "abortionist" and railed against a different court decision that had struck down an ordinance that he said was "designed to preclude the mindless dumping of aborted fetuses into garbage piles." He called the decision "almost incredible."

Yesterday's disclosure added fuel to the already-inflamed debate over his candidacy for the court.

We are now off and running.

Iraq Spun

I'm frontpaging this, not because it is good, but because it is on the front page of the NYT. There is a lot wrong with this article which has a great deal to do with the way journalists are shuttered in an ever smaller Green Zone in Baghdad.

For Once, President and His Generals See the Same War

By JOHN F. BURNS and DEXTER FILKINS
Published: December 1, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 30 - For anyone who has spent time in the field with American officers here, President Bush's speech on Wednesday was a watershed: for the first time in the two years since the conflict here turned brutal, the war Mr. Bush described sounded much like the one his generals grapple with every day.

The president acknowledged problems that have hobbled the American enterprise since the 2003 invasion: An American effort to build up Iraqi forces that went through a top-to-bottom makeover after early deployments of Iraqi troops saw them "running from the fight." Iraqi units that are "still uneven," despite the new American effort to train and equip them that has cost more than $10 billion. A Sunni Arab community that remains largely unyielding, despite months of efforts by Americans seeking to draw them back into the corridors of power.

Mr. Bush closed with a vow to "settle for nothing less than complete victory," without saying how that squared with the plan to hand over the main burden of the war to the newly trained Iraqi troops who, American field commanders say, have done well in some recent battles but much less impressively in others. Nor did the president say how his rejection of "artificial timetables" would be sustained politically if the plan for American troops to step back decisively in 2006, and for Iraqi units to step forward, falters in the face of the unrelenting insurgency.

But for all that, Mr. Bush, in some passages of his speech, came much closer than he has before to matching the hard-nosed assessments of the war that have long been made by American commanders here, at least among themselves. While maintaining a stoic confidence in public, many of these commanders, over the past 18 months, have pressed behind the scenes for the Pentagon to move toward a more realistic appraisal of the war than has been common among major administration figures in Washington.

Burns and Filkins have been spun. Bush's speech yesterday reflected very little in the way of a new realism. The NYT itself has reported that the Iraqi units themselves have become death squads who are out of control. "Complete victory" doesn't seem any closer now than it ever was.

Peter Baker's piece in the WaPo is much closer to reality.

An Offering of Detail But No New Substance

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 1, 2005; Page A01

Thirty-two months after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, President Bush's advisers concluded that his message of "stay the course" has been translated by a weary American public as "stay forever." And so yesterday the president tried to reassure the nation that he has a comprehensive vision for beating the insurgency and eventually bringing U.S. troops home.

The message was hardly subtle as the White House posted a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" on its Web site and hung dozens of "Plan for Victory" signs behind Bush as he addressed midshipmen in Annapolis. But it was intended to reshape the argument against critics who have been gaining traction with congressional calls to withdraw troops immediately or at least set a timetable for pulling out.

Instead of sticking to general statements of resolve as in the past, Bush offered specific examples of what he called progress in building an Iraqi army that can take over the fight from U.S. troops. And in a rare move for a president loath to admit mistakes, he admitted some without ever using the word, granting that "we've faced some setbacks" and that "we learned from our early experiences."

But broadly Bush gave no ground to critics who want a major course change, and the plan he released yesterday offered nothing new substantively. Short of changing conditions on the ground, Bush faces enormous challenges in turning around public attitudes on the war. The American people have grown increasingly sour on Iraq in public polls, and most no longer approve of the way the president is handling the war.

Read between the lines in Baker's story. Nothing new, move on.

Knuckle Slapping

E.U. Seeks Details On Secret CIA Jails

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 1, 2005