Busted Blogger II

I'm taking the rest of the night off, the appendages are still aching. I got a good wrist rest for the mouse hand yesterday and it helps a lot, but the body just doesn't recover at my age quite as fast as it did a few years back. The trackball mouse is on order and should be here in a day or two and I hear it really helps.

I'll be mostly out of touch on Friday and Saturday, the Flu Wiki mods are meeting in Connecticut near DemFromCT to plot the future of Flu Wiki and to meet in real time: I'm the only one who has laid eyes on three of the five of us and it is time to get to know each other if we are going to be a crisis team in the event of a flu pandemic. Besides that, the boys have become my closest friends in the last year, I'm anxious to get to know anon_22 and have us all spend a little party, planning and bullshit time together. The conference calls have been great, but being there in person doesn't really have any substitute.

In the interest of bodily integrity (and avoiding getting chewed out by the reveres) the rest of the week will be light posting by me and additional work by what ever the co-bloggers can contribute. Believe me, the reveres can be very, uh, convincing when they chew you out.

A trip down SoftRAM lane...

OK, we need something lighter.

For all you folks that think every little IT-ish doodad is the coming of the millenium (or the apocolypse), the following is a preview of just how reliable some ballyhooed technological solutions can be.

The Enemy is On the Screen

"Media Matters";
by Jamison Foser

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruthlessness or the tactical and strategic superiority of the Republicans, and it is not your favorite theory about what is wrong with the Democrats.

The dominant political force of our time is the media.

Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.

Consider the last two presidents. Bill Clinton faced near-constant media obsession with his "scandals," while George W. Bush has gotten off comparatively easy.

Even many members of the media have stopped contesting this painfully obvious point, instead offering dubious justifications. Bill Clinton's "scandals" made for better stories than George Bush's, we are told, because they were simpler and easier for readers and viewers to understand. "Sex sells," while George Bush's false claims about Iraq are much harder to explain.

This excuse is simply nonsense.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden comments:

This is not the same old American same old. It’s a new phenomenon in our history. The commanding heights of our mass media are in the iron grip of a class of people as unreflective, as foolish, as corrupt, and as utterly divorced from normal life as the 19th-century Russian aristocracy. This is what has put us at the mercy of the wolves. This is what our enemy looks like.

As I type, CNN is wall to wall with a kidnapped white woman in Birmingham, as if there is no other news going on. Disgusting.

More Bad News

New Orleans sinking faster than expected

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP SCIENCE WRITER

WASHINGTON -- Parts of New Orleans are sinking far more rapidly than scientists first thought, more than an inch a year, new research suggests.

That may explain some levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and raises more worries about the future.

The research, being published Thursday in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking - from overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts - four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.

"My concern is the very low-lying areas," said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. "I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt."

For years, scientists figured New Orleans on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said.

As the grounds in those rapidly sinking areas shift downward, the protection from levees also falls, scientists and engineers said.

For example, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, built more than three decades ago, has sunk by more than 3 feet since its construction, Dixon said. That, he added, explained why water poured over the levee and part of it failed.

"The people in St. Bernard got wiped out because the levee was too low," said co-author Roy Dokka, director of the Louisiana Spatial Center at Louisiana State University. "It's as simple as that."

The subsidence "is making the land more vulnerable; it's also screwed up our ability to figure out where the land is," Dokka said. And it means some evacuation roads, hospitals and shelters are further below sea level than emergency planners thought, he said.

So when government officials talk of rebuilding levees to pre-Katrina levels, it may really still be several feet below what's needed, Dokka and others say.

"Levees that are subsiding at a high rate are prone to failure," Dixon said.

The federal government, especially the Army Corps of Engineers, hasn't taken the dramatic sinking into account in rebuilding plans, said University of Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea, part of an independent National Academy of Sciences-Berkeley team that analyzed the levee failures during Katrina.

"You have to change how you provide short- and long-term protection," said Bea, a former engineer in New Orleans. He said plans for concrete walls don't make sense because they sink and can't be easily added onto. In California, engineers are experimenting with lighter weight reinforced foam-middle levee walls, he said.

The Dutch figured this out decades ago. Why can't we?

Tropical Forecast

Hurricane expert Dr. Gray updates his predictions

Fort Collins, Colorado — Researchers say the 2006 hurricane season in the Atlantic will be active, but fewer major storms are likely to make landfall than last year.

An updated forecast from a team led by William Gray with Colorado State University calls for 17 named storms between tomorrow and November 30th. The team says nine storms are expected to become hurricanes, and five of those are expected to develop into major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 miles-per-hour or greater. Those predictions are unchanged from April.

Last year, the Atlantic had 28 named storms, 15 hurricanes and seven major hurricanes. Long-term averages are just under ten named storms, six hurricanes and two intense hurricanes.

Gray, who has headed the hurricane forecast team for 22 years, says Atlantic hurricane seasons are likely to be active for 15 to 20 more years but another season as busy as 2004 and 2005 is statistically unlikely.

What Dr. Gray is forecasting is 195% of normal.

Ink-Stained Wretches

What You Don't Know About the Immigration Bill

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, May 31, 2006; A19

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

One job of journalism is to inform the public about what our political leaders are doing. In this case, we failed. The Senate bill's sponsors didn't publicize its full impact on legal immigration, and we didn't fill the void. It's safe to say that few Americans know what the bill would do because no one has told them. Indeed, I suspect that many senators who voted for the legislation don't have a clue as to the potential overall increase in immigration.

Democracy doesn't work well without good information. Here is a classic case. It is interesting to contrast these immigration projections with a recent survey done by the Pew Research Center. The poll asked whether the present level of legal immigration should be changed. The response: 40 percent favored a decrease, 37 percent would hold it steady and 17 percent wanted an increase. There seems to be scant support for a doubling. If the large immigration projections had been in the news, would the Senate have done what it did? Possibly, though I doubt it.

I'm beginning to think that there needs to be a statute of limitations on the Washington press corps. Living inside the Beltways seems to be pernicious to being able to report on Washington. I've been reading the immigration bill stories in the usual suspects and all of this is news to me. All of the "reporting" has been inside-baseball, elbow in the ribs speculation. If what passed for the press corps here had to go back to Minneapolis or Bangor after a ten year term, maybe they wouldn't get quite so ingrown.

Give them the Old Razzle Dazzle

US to publish Iraq deaths probe

BBC
2006/05/31

The US government has promised to make public all the details of inquiries into the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by US marines last November.
Washington made the pledge following claims that the killings of 24 people in the town of Haditha were covered up.

A White House spokesman said President George W Bush was concerned by the reports, but wanted the military to complete their inquiries first.

The Iraqi prime minister said earlier Baghdad would investigate the claims.

Nouri Maliki told Reuters news agency there was "a limit to the acceptable excuses" for civilian casualties.

The Pentagon is close to ending its two separate inquiries into the killings and the cover-up in Haditha, initially attributed to a clash with militants.

According to initial US military reports, 15 civilians and eight insurgents died after a bomb killed a marine in Haditha, a militant stronghold in Anbar Province.

But the army now says it is investigating a total of 24 deaths.

Observers say the incident on 19 November could deal a more serious blow to US standing than the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

A member of the Iraqi parliament and former foreign minister, Adnan Pachachi, says Iraqis were stunned by the allegations.

"I think it has created a feeling of great shock and sadness and I believe that if what is alleged is true - and I have no reason to believe it's not - then I think something very drastic has to be done," he told the BBC.

"There must be a level of discipline imposed on the American troops and change of mentality which seems to think that Iraqi lives are expendable."

So what are the chances that any high ranking officials will be charged with the cover up? Yeah, that's what I thought too. Still, if we can parade some low-level grunts in front of the camera, have a military layer challenge them about not handling the truth, then it's all done and we're sorry. At least then CNN can return to covering non stories as these nations crumble around them.

The Hurricane Coast

As Hurricane Season Looms, States Aim to Scare
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, May 30 — Convinced that tough tactics are needed, officials in hurricane-prone states are trumpeting dire warnings about the storm season that starts on Thursday, preaching self-reliance and prodding the public to prepare early and well.

Cities are circulating storm-preparation checklists, counties are holding hurricane expositions at shopping malls and states are dangling carrots like free home inspections and tax-free storm supplies in hopes of conquering complacency.

But the main strategy, it seems, is to scare the multitudes of people who emergency officials say remain blasé even after last year's record-breaking storm season.

To persuade residents to heed evacuation orders, the Florida Division of Emergency Management is broadcasting public service announcements with recordings of 911 calls placed during Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

"The roof has completely caved in on us," a woman cries as chilling music swells, only to be told that rescuers cannot come out during the storm.

Speaking of the tactics, Craig Fugate, Florida's emergency management director, said last week at a news conference in Tallahassee, "We're going to use a sledgehammer."

This save-yourselves approach comes after government agencies were overwhelmed by pleas for help after last year's storms and strongly criticized as not responding swiftly or thoroughly enough to the public need. Now, officials have said repeatedly, only the elderly, the poor and the disabled should count on the government to help them escape a hurricane or endure its immediate aftermath.

Mississippi, where more than 200 residents died in Hurricane Katrina, unrolled a "Stay Alert. Stay Alive" hurricane awareness campaign in April. State officials told residents what to pack in a "go-kit" for evacuating (flashlight, radio, nonelectric can opener) and, like many others, commanded them to stockpile at least three days' worth of water and food.

Horry County, S.C., home to Myrtle Beach, held a hurricane exposition last month and is giving similar presentations at Kiwanis clubs and homeowners associations.

"The big shortfall is complacency with the community," said Randall Webster, director of Horry County Emergency Management. "Our main theme is, take interest as an individual and make preparations."

But will it work? Emergency management officials groaned this month at a poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc., which found that of 1,100 adults along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, 83 percent had taken no steps to fortify their homes this year, 68 percent had no hurricane survival kits and 60 percent had no family disaster plan.

"I can't rightfully say I see any increased sense of people getting ready," said Larry Gispert, emergency management director in Hillsborough County, Fla., home to Tampa. "It's like a psychological issue — 'If I don't think about bad things, bad things won't happen.' "

This is irresponsible reporting. How is it a "scare tactic" to tell the people who live in hurricane prone areas to have three days of food and water on hand? That's prudence, not "scare tactics."

The final quote in this excerpt is true, up to a point: yes, people prefer denial to accurately assessing how much risk they bear. There is another piece, however: simple laziness. It takes a little work to do risk assessment and stock up. Most are too damn lazy to be bothered.

Stockpiling is easy if you just pick up a couple of extra things on every trip to the store.

Busted Blogger

I'm having so much pain from overuse injuries in my hands and arms that I've been ordered by the reveres to take the rest of the day off of the computer. I've also been ordered to make a trip to Staples to reconfigure my setup for less stress on my body, so don't expect to hear more from me before tonight.

The Year Ahead

After Katrina, New Fear Along Coast
Once-Confident Residents Now Wary in Face of Hurricane Season

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; A01

VIOLET, La. -- When the floodwaters of Katrina reached the second floor of his home, Jesse Reed decided it was time to flee. He grabbed a shotgun, climbed onto the roof from a second-floor dormer window and jumped into his bass boat, which he kept nearby just for that purpose.

The 51-year-old, an outdoorsman and a plumber by trade, was proud of having ridden out previous storms with a certain woodsy elan.

Now, he says, "I wouldn't stay here for a goddarn hard rain."

All along the coast of the southeastern United States, even in those places untouched by its rage, Hurricane Katrina has obliterated long-held certitudes. Last year's destructive storm eroded the almost innate self-confidence of residents who once viewed hurricanes as tempests that could be weathered, not unimaginable catastrophes.

On the verge of what forecasters say will be a "very active" hurricane season, the result is a hovering fear. The wariness is a key but often unspoken cause for the slow recovery in towns wrecked last year -- residents are too afraid to return -- and a source of widespread anxiety everywhere else along the southeast coast.

Tony Fernandez, a sheriff's office official for St. Bernard Parish here, said that throughout the community there is a new reverence for "nature's strength and fury."

"Before we were all like doubting Thomases -- we had to see it," he said, shrugging. "Now we saw it."

The new faith is pervasive. Since Katrina, emergency managers from Houston to Biloxi, Miss., to Charleston, S.C., have chucked or revised evacuation plans that were long thought to have been adequate.

Dillard University in New Orleans has moved the start of classes from mid-August to late September to miss most of hurricane season. Some Florida residents have banded together to buy enormous generators capable of running entire households.

And civil engineers from around the country are similarly gripped by a new sense of the perils. They have reported widespread and long-standing flaws in the New Orleans levees, called for investigations into every levee in the United States and identified flaws in the dike that keeps Lake Okeechobee from overflowing South Florida.

"Katrina was a defining experience for many people, and that's no less true for engineers," said Steven G. Vick, a Colorado engineer and one of the investigators who reported that the Lake Okeechobee dike is unsafe. The news spurred state leaders this month to create an evacuation plan for thousands of nearby residents who had long thought there was nothing to fear.

A friend in SW Florida reports that the super-heated Florida real estate market has fallen through the floor, post Katrina. Insurers are cancelling policies as far north as Long Island and Long Island Sound. I live far enough inland that storm surge isn't an issue, but one of my regular grocery stores was destroyed in 2003's Isabel, who was only a Cat 1 storm when she arrived here.

When contemplating natural disasters it is worthwhile to notice how fragile < a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_In_Time">just in time supply chains are. While I'm on the alert for avian influenza, I'm preparing for the hurricane season with even more urgency.

As WaPo's Gene Robinson notes, natural disasters are bad enough. Human incompetence in the follow up is an even greater danger:

The Catastrophe Wasn't Katrina

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; A17

The evidence, by now, is overwhelming: Beautiful, decadent New Orleans wasn't doomed by Hurricane Katrina but by decades of human incompetence and neglect. As far as the drowned city is concerned, the greatest natural disaster in the nation's history would have been just a messy inconvenience if not for the fumbling hand of man.

The mortal threat to New Orleans, as Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast, was not the powerful winds -- Mississippi took the brunt of those -- but the massive storm surge the hurricane generated. We now know that the levees, floodwalls and other barriers protecting the city were, for the most part, plenty tall enough and theoretically strong enough to keep the waters at bay. On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.

What happened instead was "the single most costly catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history," according to a report issued last week by the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation.

We are on our own.

Perfect Finish

I'm not much for sweets and have coffee or tea for dessert when I'm out for dinner. There is one exception: flan carmelho, which I can never turn down.

for 8-10

Caramelized sugar syrup:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup boiling water

Flan:
2 cups half-and-half cream
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup sugar
4 strips orange zest, each about 2-inches long and 1/2-inch wide, pith removed
2 tablespoons caramelized sugar syrup
12 jumbo egg yolks
1/4 cup tawny Port

Special Equipment: Portuguese flan mold or souffle dish

For the caramelized sugar syrup: Place the sugar in a medium-size heavy skillet (not iron), set over moderately low heat, and allow to melt and caramelize to a rich golden brown. Do not stir the sugar as it melts but do shake the skillet from time to time. Add the boiling water, stirring briskly to dissolve the caramelized sugar. Simmer uncovered 8 to 10 minutes until the consistency of maple syrup. Reserve 2 tablespoons of the caramelized syrup for the flan; pour the balance into a chilled, well-buttered, shallow fluted 2-quart mold. Set the mold in the freezer while preparing the flan.

For the flan: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Combine the half-and-half, heavy cream, and sugar in a large heavy saucepan; add in the orange zest and bring to a simmer over moderately low heat, stirring now and then; blend in the 2 tablespoons of reserved caramelized syrup. Beat the egg yolks until frothy; blend 1 cup of the hot cream mixture into the yolks, stir back into pan, and heat, stirring constantly for 1 minute, until it lightly coats the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat and mix in the Port. Strain all through a fine sieve, then pour into the prepared mold. Set the mold in a shallow baking pan and pour in enough hot water to come halfway up the mold. Bake uncovered for 1 1/2 hours, or until a toothpick inserted near the center of the flan comes out clean. Remove from the oven and the water bath; cool for 1 hour, then refrigerate for 4 to 5 hours until firm.

To invert the flan, dip the mold quickly in hot water, then turn out on a dessert plate with a turned up rim; the caramel syrup will come cascading down over the flan. Don't worry if the flan cracks, it will still be creamy and luscious. Cut into slim wedges, if possible, or scoop out, and serve.

I prefer to make this in individual ramekins, which cuts the baking time by about half, follow the instruction for checking doneness.

The Start of Summer

The grilling season begins officially this weekend, and the weather today reminded me why: hazy hot and humid, the quitessential DC summer when you don't want to turn on the stove or the oven. When I'm grilling, I like to cook the entire meal on the grill and keep the heat out of the house.

Here's a delightful appetizer or side that's also great for a potluck if you can get a little room on the grill.

Grilled Green Quesadillas with Cheese and Herbs
serves 4

Vegetable cooking spray
4 large spinach flavor flour wraps, available on dairy aisle of larger markets, 12 inch diameter
3/4 pound brie with herbs, sliced
4 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon leaves
Sour cream, optional garnish
Salsa, optional garnish

Get grill or grill pan hot. Spray 1 side of wraps with cooking spray. Place that side down, char the wraps, as many as will fit on your grill or grill pan at the same time, 30 seconds on the first side. Spray opposite side lightly with vegetable cooking spray and turn. Arrange a layer of sliced brie with herbs across half of each flour wrap. Sprinkle cheese with chives and tarragon fold quesadillas in half, covering cheese. Lightly press down on quesadillas, turn and cook 30 seconds longer. Cut into wedges and serve with sour cream and salsa, if desired.

This cooks so fast that the prep time is longer than the cooking time. If you don't care for brie, this is also sensational with grated monterey jack mixed with jalapeno cheese or yellow cheddar. I also like to add baby spinach, chopped green chiles and diced fresh tomato inside the quesadillas, and add guacamole on top to the salsa and sour cream. With the extras, this can make a light meal with a cup of gazpacho, a refreshing meal on a hot day and the oven never went on.

Speak, Memory

The War in Context's Paul Woodward speaks for me this Memorial Day:

Memorial Day is a day for sustaining many of the myths that make people willing to fight wars.

Is the willingness to die for what one believes in, a virtue? It's certainly courageous, but soldiers, insurgents, and suicide bombers all share a willingness to sacrifice their own lives. No one would suggest that today we should be honoring all their deaths.

Every time an American soldier dies overseas, someone will claim that that death is helping sustain our freedom. Sometimes that has been true, but many times it is not. Honoring the dead shouldn't mean pretending that they always died for a good cause.

Most Americans now belief that going to war in Iraq was a mistake. To remember the dead should also mean admitting that thousands of lives have been wasted in Iraq; draping flags over coffins is just another way of trying to hide the futility of this war.

Reality Bites

From W's current resume:

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record. I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week. I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury. I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history. I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period. I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period. I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market.

In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President. I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations. My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. History, Enron.

My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision. I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip- offs in history.

I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed. I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history. I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts. I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history. I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.

I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history. I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission. I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law. I refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention. I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election). I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television. I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history. I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community. I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families-in-wartime. In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends. I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security. I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD. I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden [sic] to justice.

Webtoys

This website was pointed out to me last night by a friend who was obviously trying to avoid starting to write a paper. I'm a writer, I know every delaying tactic in the world, but this one is rather fun.

The Obvious

The buck stops with Bush, not Rumsfeld
Truman sacked MacArthur. Clinton fired Aspin. It's up to the White House and Congress to make heads roll over mistakes in Iraq.
By Rahm Emanuel, REP. RAHM EMANUEL of Illinois is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
May 29, 2006

ON OCT. 3, 1993, an American helicopter was shot down in Somalia. Efforts to rescue the downed pilots went terribly wrong, and 18 Americans were killed. It was a humiliating incident for the world's most powerful nation. It also devastated 18 American families. When President Clinton was told that his commanders on the ground had requested more troops but had been ignored by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Clinton acted decisively and fired him.

Throughout U.S. history, presidents have sacked military leaders who failed them. Lincoln went through six generals before settling on Grant. Patton was passed over for promotion by Roosevelt. Truman fired MacArthur.

President Bush has chosen a different course. As criticism mounts over the planning and execution of the Iraq war, eight retired generals have come forward in an unprecedented manner to call for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. The president has held firm, stating, "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best."

Now, I am no fan of Rumsfeld — in my view he has failed miserably — but the ultimate responsibility for conducting the Iraq war lies above a Cabinet secretary's pay grade. We can be angry at Rumsfeld; frustrated with his flawed judgment. But our frustration is misplaced if it stops there. Bush is right; he, not Rumsfeld, is the decider. And he has decided wrongly, time after time.

This president had the responsibility to direct the war but deferred to Rumsfeld. Congress had a constitutional responsibility to oversee the president's actions. Instead, it has spent the last three years on the sidelines, approving every funding request — nearly half a trillion dollars — no questions asked. The glaring mistakes made at every stage of the war were ignored in favor of feel-good speeches about staying the course. The retired generals are taking the unusual step of speaking up because for the last three years the Republican Congress has been silent.

The United States has been in Iraq for more than three years. Nearly 2,500 Americans have lost their lives, with nearly 18,000 wounded. The chaos and violence is not subsiding, and what was supposed to be a quick victory has turned into the greatest foreign policy challenge in a generation. There is no doubt that things could and should have been done differently.

Congressman Emmanuel's brief op-ed misses the point that the war never should have happened in the first place, and that the atrocities which have accompanied this one are the stuff of every war, every where. Rep. Emmanuel isn't calling for immediate withdrawal, which means that he continues to miss the point.

Ministry of Truth

Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV'
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 29 May 2006

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.

Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.

The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.

"We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them," said Diana Farsetta, one of the group's researchers. "I would say it's pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air."

Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. "They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like," she said.

The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission's enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group's report.

The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying "Thank you Bush. Thank you USA" in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.

Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer's product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe'en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms; and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel - in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.

Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world's largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. "We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video," said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. "In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure."

The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. "Essentially it's corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news," he said. "The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told."

The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.

Note that you have to read the British press to find this out.

The Real Memorial

Norman Solomon: Media Memorial Day, 2006

Posted on May 26, 2006

By Norman Solomon

People who are concerned about the state of the U.S. news media in 2006 might pause on Memorial Day to consider those who have lost their lives in the midst of journalistic neglect, avoidance and bias.

We remember that while TV and radio news reports tell the latest about corporate fortunes, vast numbers of real people are struggling to make ends meet—and many are in a position of having to choose between such necessities as medicine, adequate food and paying the rent.

We remember that many Americans have lost limbs or their lives in on-the-job accidents that might have been prevented if overall media coverage had been anywhere near as transfixed with job safety as with, say, marital splits among Hollywood celebrities.

We remember that the national and deadly problem of widespread obesity is in part attributable to constant advertising for products with empty calories and plenty of fat.

We remember that despite public claims by tobacco companies, ads that glamorize smoking continue to lure millions of young people onto a long journey of addiction to cancer-causing cigarettes.

We remember that superficial news reports and commentaries, routinely describing war in flat, phony, antiseptic terms, are helpful to the U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq—where the deaths of American troops, while horrific, are small in number compared to the civilian deaths resulting from daily slaughter catalyzed by U.S. military activities.

We remember that each war death takes a precious life, and media outlets rarely convey more than surface accounts of the actual grief of loved ones left behind.

We remember that massive amounts of front-page space and unchallenged airtime on television and radio are used by the president and other top administration officials, who speak glibly about patriotism and sacrifice while their long records of deception continue to underlie insistence that sacrificed lives must be honored by sacrificing more lives.

We remember that lies from the White House, widely parroted and commonly touted as credible by news media, have preceded every major U.S. military action in the last five decades, including invasions of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq.

We remember that after the United States led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia for 78 days in the spring of 1999, more than a few American journalists joined with Pentagon commanders to hype the fact that no American lives were lost in combat during that time—as if the killing of people on the ground was of scarcely any human consequence.

We remember that onslaughts of media spin followed by exuberant coverage of high-tech U.S. air attacks can shift public sentiment drastically almost overnight. That’s why opponents of reckless and deadly policies should draw little comfort from the Pew Research Center’s mid-May report that at the moment “the American public strongly prefers non-military approaches to dealing with Iran’s nuclear technology program,” with just 30% in favor of “bombing military targets in Iran.”

We remember that, no matter how much glorious rhetoric and how many chronic euphemisms are brought to bear on public opinion, most of war’s victims are not—by any definition—combatants or enemies. As New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent, has pointed out, “In the wars of the 1990s civilian deaths constituted between 75 and 90 percent of all war deaths.”

We remember that, although it received scant and fleeting U.S. media coverage when released by the Lancet medical journal in October 2004, a study using sample-survey techniques found that about 100,000 Iraqi deaths had occurred over an 18-month period as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq—and, according to the study’s data, more than half of those who died were women and children killed in airstrikes.

We remember that it’s easy for hot-dogging pundits sitting in TV studios or newsrooms to cheer on the use of cutting-edge technology by the Pentagon. Those pundits leave it to others to bury the dead and to deal with the anguish of losing relatives and friends.

We remember that standard journalism fails to do much to put us in touch with human realities of war.

We have been abandoned by the media. We should return the favor.

Falling Down

This makes no sense:

Science Test
A close look at the latest national test scores shows that reading and math standards pay off.

Sunday, May 28, 2006; B06

AT FIRST GLANCE the latest test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress appear to tell us something we already know, namely that Americans don't do well at science and aren't getting any better. Over the past few years, a number of studies have amply demonstrated the lack of science teachers, the generally poor curriculum, and the failure of most public school systems to require adequate numbers of science and math courses of their students.

But this new set of scores also demonstrates something else: Far from discouraging science education, the new emphasis on reading and math standards in elementary school appears to have helped boost science achievement among younger students. Over five years, fourth-graders improved their science scores across the board, with low-income and minority students in particular making improvements. As the Education Trust hypothesizes, higher reading and math standards may have made science textbooks more accessible to more students.

At the same time the new scores show that the gains Americans make in elementary school are still lost in high school. Science scores among high school seniors have remained flat since 2000, which means that nearly half of high school seniors performed below what the NAEP has called the "basic" level in science. The survey also shows a continuing large gap between African American and Hispanic achievement on one side and that of whites and Asians on the other.

Unlike elementary schools, which have been subjected to the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, many high schools have not yet felt much legal or political pressure to institute accountability measures or to raise requirements. In the past five years, the number of white students taking a full complement of high school science courses has grown by only one percentage point, to 30 percent. The number of black students doing so has dropped, from 25 percent to 22 percent.

Wait a minute: elementary school teachers are not science teachers. They generally have degrees in elementary ed, not science. If high school students are performing poorly in science, I suspect it has more to do with the students than with the teachers.

The Revolving Door

From Public Life to Private Business
Former Pentagon Chief Cohen's Firm Serves Defense Contractors

By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 28, 2006; A01

After more than 30 years in politics, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen was saddled with credit card debt.

The baker's son from Bangor, Maine, was never wealthy, and his government salary went only so far. When the motorcades and military escorts ended in January 2001, his final financial disclosure form listed tens of thousands of dollars of charge-account debts at interest rates as high as about 25 percent.

Within weeks of leaving office, he was living in a $3.5 million McLean mansion with a swimming pool, a cabana and a carriage house.

Cohen's career had entered a classic final phase: the monetizing of the public man.

Instead of returning to Maine, which he had represented in the House and Senate for more than two decades, Cohen followed legions of government officials into the business of consulting and lobbying. Trading on an insider's knowledge, contacts and personal cachet, the former defense secretary created his own Washington firm, the Cohen Group , which works for some of the biggest companies in the defense industry.

During his legislative career, Cohen stood for "purity of the political process," according to the Almanac of American Politics. He made his name as a young Republican voting to impeach President Richard Nixon over Watergate, and, he said in an interview, passed up lucrative options to stay in public life. He sponsored lobbying reforms.

Now, his firm promotes itself by touting its connections.

"We Specialize in Access, Insight and Intelligence into the Defense Industry, DoD and Government programs," the Web site for a Cohen investment advisory service said until recently. The Web site said the Cohen Group's "Competitive Advantage" included "Senior level relationships throughout industry and government."
....
The Cohen Group "is the realization of a dream that I've had for some time," Cohen said.
....
Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University, said Cohen's business raises the question: "Were any of his decisions predicated on the hopes that he would be able to convert his humble public service into significant private gain?"

Missing the Point

Raid Was Tipping Point For an Angry Congress
Simmering Frustration With Bush Erupts

By Peter Baker and Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 28, 2006; A04

Whether out of party loyalty or wartime solidarity, the Republican Congress largely deferred to the Republican president for five years as he expanded executive power.

When President Bush set up his own new military justice system for detainees, or invited industry lobbyists to secretly help shape energy policy, or declared he would ignore bills he signed into law if he deemed them out of bounds, Congress stepped aside.

It took federal agents rummaging through file cabinets and computer hard drives inside Congress's own privileged enclave on Capitol Hill to finally rouse the leadership into revolt. The FBI raid on a Democratic congressman's office a week ago may at first have been about the $90,000 in marked bills previously found in his home freezer, but it has quickly morphed into an eruption of resentment born of a dramatic shift in the balance of power during the Bush presidency.

Suddenly, even Bush's chief allies in Congress, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), were decrying executive overreach and defending the prerogatives of the legislature as an equal branch of government. And in a rare move, they faced Bush down, forcing him to take the extraordinary step of intervening in a criminal case to placate irate lawmakers.

"The administration has been pushing the envelope, and Congress hasn't been doing proper oversight," Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said yesterday. "I think some members are going to start to step up to the plate and do more. . . . The executive branch has lost a sense of balance and proportion, and they're just grabbing at everything. And if we were doing more oversight, we might have handled this in a different way."

Yet the protest has exposed Republicans, and Hastert in particular, to Democratic accusations of too-little-too-late hypocrisy. In a letter to the speaker last week, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote that "the Republican Congress remained silent when average citizens raised concerns, but as soon as someone in Congress was targeted, the whole story changed."

Bush took office determined to restore what he saw as the lost authority of the executive branch, and he was encouraged by Vice President Cheney, who often talked about how Watergate emasculated the presidency. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, convinced Bush and Cheney that the executive needed to take a strong hand to fight an elusive new enemy, according to aides, and left many lawmakers unwilling to challenge them for fear of undermining the war effort.

"It's unbelievable what they went along with until now -- a strikingly supine reaction to the most aggressive executive in modern America," said Thomas E. Mann, a Brookings Institution scholar. "The willingness to defer to Bush, the Pentagon, Justice Department, you name it, is breathtaking. When it serves the interest of the majority party, fine. When it doesn't, they suddenly discover the Constitution."

The Sabbath gasbags are still talking about Bill Clinton's zipper. Amazing.

War Crimes

Photos Indicate Civilians Slain Execution-Style
An official involved in an investigation of Camp Pendleton Marines' actions in an Iraqi town cites `a total breakdown in morality.'
By Tony Perry and Julian E. Barnes, Times Staff Writers
May 27, 2006

WASHINGTON — Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, some of them "execution-style," in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials close to the investigation said Friday.

The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.

One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines from Camp Pendleton "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results."

The case may be the most serious incident of alleged war crimes in Iraq by U.S. troops. Marine officers have long been worried that Iraq's deadly insurgency could prompt such a reaction by combat teams.

An investigation by an Army general into the Nov. 19 incident is to be delivered soon to the top operational commander in Iraq. A separate criminal investigation is also underway and could lead to charges ranging from dereliction of duty to murder.

Both investigations are centered on a dozen Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. The battalion was on its third deployment to Iraq when the killings occurred.

Most of the fatal shots appear to have been fired by only a few of the Marines, possibly a four-man "fire team" led by a sergeant, said officials with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The same sergeant is suspected of filing a false report downplaying the number of Iraqis killed, saying they were killed by an insurgent's bomb and that Marines entered the Iraqis' homes in search of gunmen firing at them. All aspects of his account are contradicted by pictures, statements by Marines to investigators and an inspection of the houses involved, officials said.

Other Marines may face criminal charges for failing to stop the killings or for failing to make accurate reports.

Of the dead Iraqis, 19 were in three to four houses that Marines stormed, officials said. Five others were killed near a vehicle.

You think these pictures won't be running 24/7 on Al Jazeera?

Clash on the Right

Gonzales Said He Would Quit in Raid Dispute
By DAVID JOHNSTON and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, May 26 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and senior officials and career prosecutors at the Justice Department told associates this week that they were prepared to quit if the White House directed them to relinquish evidence seized in a bitterly disputed search of a House member's office, government officials said Friday.

Mr. Gonzales was joined in raising the possibility of resignation by the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the officials said. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. McNulty told associates that they had an obligation to protect evidence in a criminal case and would be unwilling to carry out any White House order to return the material to Congress.

The potential showdown was averted Thursday when President Bush ordered the evidence to be sealed for 45 days to give Congress and the Justice Department a chance to work out a deal.

The evidence was seized by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents last Saturday night in a search of the office of Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana. The search set off an uproar of protest by House leaders in both parties, who said the intrusion by an executive branch agency into a Congressional office violated the Constitution's separation of powers doctrine. They demanded that the Justice Department return the evidence.

The possibility of resignations underscored the gravity of the crisis that gripped the Justice Department as the administration grappled with how to balance the pressure from its own party on Capitol Hill against the principle that a criminal investigation, especially one involving a member of Congress, should be kept well clear of political considerations.

It is not clear precisely what message Mr. Gonzales delivered to Mr. Bush when they met Thursday morning at the White House, or whether he informed the president of the resignation talk. But hours later, the White House announced that the evidence would be sealed for 45 days in the custody of the solicitor general, the Justice Department official who represents the government before the Supreme Court. That arrangement ended the talk of resignations.

F.B.I. officials would not comment Friday on Mr. Mueller's thinking or on whether his views had been communicated to the president.

The White House said Mr. Bush devised the 45-day plan as a way to cool tempers in Congress and the Justice Department. "The president saw both sides becoming more entrenched," said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's counselor. "Emotions were running high; that's why the president felt he had to weigh in."

Tensions were especially high because officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. viewed the Congressional protest, led by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House Republicans, as largely a proxy fight for battles likely to come over criminal investigations into other Republicans in Congress.

Would someone please pop more popcorn?

Disaster

Indonesian Quake Kills Thousands

By Ellen Nakashima and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 27, 2006; 11:54 AM

BANTUL, Indonesia, May 27 -- A powerful earthquake shook a densely populated region of the Indonesian island of Java Saturday morning, and early estimates by officials suggested several thousand people were killed or injured and tens of thousands were left homeless.

The epicenter of the magnitude 6.2 quake was about 15 miles southwest of Yogyakarta, a city of half a million, and about 15 miles south of Semerang, a city of over a million. The area is about 250 miles east of Jakarta near the southern coast of the island.

While officials were still assembling casualty reports, all put the number of dead at no less than 1,500 and many estimates were close to 3,000.

Sopar Jaya, of Indonesia's Social Affairs Ministry, said they had received reports of more than 2,900 dead, the Associated Press reported. Other local officials reached by phone and speaking on the radio also spoke of thousands of dead.

Idham Sanawi, the mayor of Bantul, just south of Yogyakarta, said on the radio that there were 2,000 dead in this town alone and that they had already buried 400 people in mass graves. He said 70 percent of the houses in the city were damaged and uninhabitable and that more than 100,000 people were moving into refugee camps.

"We need medicine. We need tents. We need paramedics," he said.

Our TNH friend and colleague Meteor Blades is on the ground in Indonesia on business. We've heard from his wife that he's okay but Indonesia is not. In the midst of an earthquake and volcanic eruption, avian influenza continues to circulate in Indonesia, a perfect storm of disaster.

Hallucinogenic Optimism

The special relationship that squandered a noble cause

Martin Kettle in Washington
Saturday May 27, 2006
The Guardian

This may not be Blair's last visit to Washington as prime minister, but the sense that these visits still shape our times is dying. Blair still retains all the dignities of office. His command on his feet continues to impress Americans embarrassed by Bush's lack of fluency. And he was genuinely impressive at Thursday's White House press conference and again in his foreign-policy lecture yesterday morning. His talents will look more impressive in retrospect than they do at the moment. This week's Washington moments seemed more like occasions for the biographers than for the news reporters. Perhaps that's why the White House press conference on Thursday was scheduled for half past midnight in the UK.

Blair no longer sets the agenda as before. He can propose but he cannot dispose. It was not just the British media that framed this week's visit as a meeting of two weakened leaders. The Americans saw it that way too. Blair's support for American foreign policy guarantees him a large tranche of White House time, and Bush was headline-grabbingly generous in his tributes to Blair, as well he might be. But when the Bush administration looks to the future and seeks a bridge to Europe it now naturally turns to Angela Merkel, not Blair.

All of which is deeply ironic in the light of the defiantly optimistic speech that Blair delivered at Georgetown University yesterday morning. You have to hand it to the prime minister for his cool. Pummeled in parliament, undermined by his colleagues, slumping in the polls, Blair still had the resilience and the confidence to sit down on the flight across the Atlantic and draft a speech of high visionary optimism, honing once again the argument for a values-based interventionist foreign policy that, more than anything else, has brought him to this low stage in his career.

Morally, it is hard to argue with the way Blair depicts the world. His is a view shared by more people than would care to admit it. He sees a wrong that needs righting - be it Saddam's oppression, Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, the killing in Darfur or whatever - and he wants the world to join together to right it. And so it should. But what if the world chooses not to? Blair's answer at Georgetown yesterday is that either the global institutions must change so that they act - the solution he has always preferred - or that the wrong must be righted anyway by those with the power and commitment to do it, thus stirring the kind of controversy about legitimacy that has poisoned the whole Iraq episode.

But politically? It is possible that history may prove Blair right, both in the big interventionist picture painted at Georgetown and perhaps even in Iraq itself. But this is simply not where the politics of the Bush-Blair liberal-interventionist policy now stand. It is all very well to talk about reforming the UN, as Blair did yesterday, but it is simply not going to happen in the way that he advocates. It is a fantasy. China will not allow it, and China is not alone in preferring the comforts of the status quo.

Moreover, far from winning the argument at the popular level, the interventionists have lost there too, in too many parts of the globe, at least for now and at least for the immediate future, perhaps even for this generation. The political reality is that, not just in the Islamic world but elsewhere, Blair's preferred solution has become a rallying point for what he opposes. There is a connection between bombings in Baghdad, backbench revolts in the Commons and the elections in Bolivia. Interconnectedness works in many ways.

All this makes Blair both the best advocate of a value-based interventionist foreign policy and the worst. The unintended consequence of the entire Iraq episode has been to squander, not to enhance, the generally noble cause he supports. The effect of Iraq, as opposed to the intention, has been the collapsed authority of the governments that undertook the war - so vividly displayed in Washington this week. The legacy is that American and British governments, for the foreseeable future, will face much greater domestic and international scepticism and mistrust about seeking to pursue such policies, even in situations where the case for action is more clearcut than it was against Iraq.

Bush & Blair both live in fantasyland.

The Tarnished Age

Rise and Fall of the Enron Boys

William Greider
Published on Friday, May 26, 2006 by The Nation

Justice sometimes proceeds in strange ways. I am opposed to public hangings and other forms of scapegoating, but perhaps this time we need a spectacular ritual sacrifice to amplify the point made by that swift, sure conviction in Texas. These men in the good suits are criminals--criminals!--who must be made to set an example for all ambitious people who toil in business and finance.

These two thugs looted pension funds and destroyed the personal savings of families. They stole money from the rest of us, not to mention from government and other non-glamorous business enterprises. They rigged energy markets to drive up prices and bilk defenseless consumers (an old-fashioned swindle borrowed from nineteenth-century robber barons and newly decriminalized by deregulation). They swallowed viable, productive companies and wrecked them, especially wrecking the livelihoods of their employees. And, worst of all, they were best pals with politicians and political leaders as well as the most prestigious names in banking and finance--connections the Mafia would die for!

Sorry, am I shouting? My exuberance over this verdict is a mixture of joyous fulfillment and lingering doubts about the impact. Since the meltdown of the stock market in 2001 and the avalanche of scandalous revelations that followed from hundreds of corporations, I have thought the political system and the financial system and even the public at large did not sufficiently get the message. The pervasive rot in American capitalism is much deeper than acknowledged. The various forms of fraud by which millions of people are separated from their money continue in practice, often blessed by law itself.

Still flourishing, likewise, are the leading Wall Street firms--Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, to name a few--that showed Lay and Skilling how to do the fancy financial footwork, converting "debt" into "revenue," so that stock analysts could tout Enron's rising "profit". This was fraud too, but nobody from the banks went to prison (they paid millions, even billions, for no-guilt settlements with government and injured investors). Message to America: Don't rob the Seven Eleven with a six-gun. Rob the general public with pen and computer.

Congress, meanwhile, claimed to "toughen" financial laws, but they did not get reform halfway done. Now the Chamber of Commerce and other front groups are back in Washington insisting that the rather mild reform measures be scrapped too. They may very well succeed, if the public is not aroused. The media can take care of that. They will be describing this verdict as "an end of the era."

Wrong again. Thet era of corporate corruption, financial swindling and blue-sky illusions is not over. The players are merely paused, waiting for the marks to re-enter the casino. Perhaps Kenny Boy's conviction will remind people that the game is still fixed and those guys in good suits are the dealers.

Step right up?

Truth Telling

Once again, it is only Froomkin who doesn't participate in last night's little exercise in fiction:

Reality Check

Once again, Bush asserted that it's the incessant images of death on TV that are getting the country down. Can someone tell me what Bush is talking about? I don't think I've seen people in Iraq dying on my TV screen hardly ever, not to mention day in and day out.

Empirically, how often are the major network evening news shows actually showing footage of the carnage in Iraq? How often do they even mention the ceaseless American and civilian casualties?

I would suggest that, quite to the contrary, through a combination of circumstances, the vast, vast majority of the horror in Iraq is in fact being hidden from the American public -- certainly its television viewers.

Why do reporters endlessly quote this talking point in their news reports -- without any indication that it is fantasy?

What we get from TV is 24/7 coverage of missing white women and today's possible gunshots in the House Rayburn Office Building garage. Iraq doesn't exist today.

Paired Delusion

Bush, Blair Concede Missteps on Iraq
But Leaders Say War Was Justified

By Glenn Kessler and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 26, 2006; A01

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair last night acknowledged a series of errors in managing the occupation of Iraq that have made the conflict more difficult and more damaging to the U.S. image abroad, even as they insisted that enough progress has been made that other nations should support the nascent Iraqi government.

In a joint news conference, Bush said he had used inappropriate "tough talk" -- such as saying "bring 'em on" in reference to insurgents -- that he said "sent the wrong signal to people." He also said the "biggest mistake" for the United States was the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which guards photographed themselves sexually tormenting Iraqi prisoners, spawning revulsion worldwide. "We've been paying for that for a long period of time," he said.

Blair, who visited Baghdad this week, said he and Bush should have recognized that the fall of president Saddam Hussein would not "be the rise of a democratic Iraq, that it was going to be a more difficult process" because "you're talking about literally building the institutions of a state from scratch."

While Bush increasingly has begun to acknowledge missteps in handling the war, his comments last night -- together with Blair's -- represent his most explicit acknowledgment that the administration underestimated the difficulty of the central project of his presidency.

The hour-long news conference came at a moment of acute political weakness for both men, who repeatedly emphasized that Iraq is finally turning a corner and that, whatever their other misjudgments, the decision to attack Iraq remains justified. Blair appeared dour and exhausted during much of the news conference, and both leaders became most animated when talking about their sagging political fortunes.

"No question that the Iraq war has, you know, created a sense of consternation here in America," Bush said. "I mean, when you turn on your TV screen and see innocent people die day in and day out, it affects the mentality of our country." He added: "I can understand why the American people are troubled by the war in Iraq. I understand that. But I also believe the sacrifice is worth it and it's necessary."

In his own recital of errors -- which came in response to a British reporter on the last question of the evening -- Blair cited the process of "de-Baathification" that immediately followed the overthrow of the old government. Many analysts say that decision to remove all of Hussein's loyalists fueled the insurgency because it threw tens of thousands of Iraqis out of work and left an administrative vacuum, and Blair agreed that it should have been done "in a more differentiated way."

The prime minister's examples appeared to be a direct rebuke of both the Pentagon's insistence that a detailed "nation-building" plan was unnecessary before the invasion and the push by key members of Bush's administration for broad de-Baathification.

Bush's approval ratings have sunk to some of the lowest numbers for any president in decades, while Blair's Labor Party took a beating in recent elections. Iraq has played a role in both their troubles as American and British voters tire of the war. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, 32 percent of Americans approved of Bush's handling of the war and 37 percent said it has been worth the cost.

Bush, and especially Blair, made the case that because Iraq now has a permanent government, other nations and international organizations -- such as the United Nations -- that have been reluctant to assist in rebuilding the country now have an obligation to step forward. Speaking of his trip to Baghdad, Blair said, "I came away thinking that the challenge is still immense, but I also came away more certain than ever that we should rise to it.

"What is important now is to say that after three years, which have been very, very difficult, indeed, and when at times it looked impossible for the democratic process to work . . . then it is our duty, but it is also the duty of the whole of the international community, to get behind this government and support it," he added.

I watched this little drama. The whole thing was a straw man. All of our "problems" in Iraq are directly due to the fact that we invaded it. Failing to note that is a sign of intellectual laziness. Bush and Blair are partners in a folie a deux.

Down in the Valley

Military Expected to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians
By THOM SHANKER, ERIC SCHMITT and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

WASHINGTON, May 25 — A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual marines' defenses said they thought the investigation could result in charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.

Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.

Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.

That evidence, described by Congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one Congressional official that the killings were "methodical in nature."

Congressional and military officials say the Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry is focusing on the actions of a Marine Corps staff sergeant serving as squad leader at the time, but that Marine officials have told members of Congress that up to a dozen other marines in the unit are also under investigation. Officials briefed on the inquiry said that most of the bullets that killed the civilians were now thought to have been "fired by a couple of rifles," as one of them put it.

The killings were first reported by Time magazine in March, based on accounts from survivors and human rights groups, and members of Congress have spoken publicly about the episode in recent days. But the new accounts from Congressional, military and Pentagon officials added significant new details to the picture. All of those who discussed the case had to be granted anonymity before they would talk about the findings emerging from the investigation.

If you think this is the only time this has happened, you fundamentally do not understand the nature of war. When you turn your opponent into a non-human, a "hajji," you sanction every kind of war crime as a psychological possibility and a rational probability.

A Jury of our Peers

Ignorance claim did not sway Enron jury

By Vikas Bajaj and Kyle Whitmire
The New York Times
FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2006

One after another, the jurors spoke and, in different voices, it all added up to the same thing.

The jurors said they found the testimony by Lay and Skilling in their own defense - which many legal experts had warned could prove to be their undoing - both revealing and damning.

Freddy Delgado, an elementary-school principal, questioned how the two men could testify that they "had their hands firmly on the wheel" at Enron and then say that they did not know about the improper accounting and the intensifying financial problems?

After all, parents hold him accountable for their children's welfare and safety. "I can't say that I don't know what my teachers were doing in the classroom," Delgado said. "I am still responsible if a child gets lost."

"So I would say that to say that you didn't know what was going on in your own company," Delgado added, "was not the right thing."

After sitting through a 16-week trial and listening to 56 witnesses, the jurors finally had a chance to speak. And gathering together in a sixth-floor room at the federal courthouse here, several blocks from Enron's former headquarters, that's exactly what they did.

In other high-profile cases, many jurors quickly dispersed to avoid reporters. But all of the Enron jurors, including the three alternates, attended the hourlong session. Facing dozens of reporters and TV cameramen, they calmly and patiently answered questions, appearing unburdened and frequently cracking jokes. If they had any doubt or hesitation about the verdict they had reached in the biggest corporate corruption case in recent American history, they didn't show it.

The jury included people of widely different backgrounds - a dairy farmer, payroll manager, two engineers, a ship inspector, county court clerk, personnel manager, retired sales assistant and dental hygienist - but they drew on their own life experiences, making clear that they thought of themselves as responsible for knowing everything about their jobs. Certainly, richly paid corporate executives should, too?

They respected Lay's charitable, civic and political standing in Houston and Washington, they said, but ultimately concluded that he put his own financial welfare ahead of his duties to shareholders and employees.

As for Skilling, jurors said they found his professed memory lapses and unfamiliarity with certain details incredible for someone who prided himself on having command over every area of Enron's operations.

"It is hard to believe," said Deborah Smith, the jury forewoman, "that someone, such a hands-on individual, could not possibly know the things that were going on within the company."

When the verdict was announced, Lay tried to console his sobbing wife while Skilling looked expressionless at the judge, turning briefly to search the faces of the audience.

But Nancy Thomas, who is retired and whose police officer husband is recovering from a stroke, shed a few tears as the verdict was read. Later, she said: "This is an emotional thing, there are too many people involved in it. There are human beings; there are families."

In the end a quiet sense that justice was done.

Vacation Island

Head for Beach at Rush Hour? Might Work

By Steven Ginsberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006; A01

It goes against everything travel experts tell drivers -- leave early, stay late, avoid rush hour at all costs -- but the best time to leave town to avoid traffic on this and every other weekend of summer fun may just be 5 p.m. Friday.

Enough people heed the advice about getaway days that drivers are just as likely to hit a lengthy backup in the morning or early afternoon as they are during the regular Friday rush, traffic experts say. And sometimes a traffic jam snags them the day before or the day after. So drivers are adjusting.

"People are going in what is traditionally the rush hour because it no longer is the rush hour," said John Townsend, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, which predicts that one in 10 Washingtonians will leave the area this Memorial Day weekend. "They're saying, counterintuitively, that what used to be rush hour may be the greatest getaway time because everyone else is going at another time."

That's exactly what Douglas Macintyre is hoping for. He and his family are traveling from Rockville to Virginia Beach today for a weekend softball tournament involving his daughter. His wife wanted to leave about noon to beat traffic, but Macintyre resisted.

"She leans towards taking the kids out of school and getting an early jump," Macintyre said. "I question whether that's even helpful. I think a lot of people leave at noontime. I'm kind of hopeful that leaving at rush hour and taking the HOV lanes will save me some time."

Still, many travel experts warned against leaving during the conventional rush.

Chris Landis, who manages the Virginia Department of Transportation's Smart Traffic Center, agreed that traffic has gotten worse earlier on getaway days. But he said: "I definitely would not condone or recommend people who are traveling to go out of town during rush hour. The only thing you can do is leave even earlier than what was early before."

Kelly Melhem, spokeswoman for the Maryland Transportation Authority, had similar advice for those crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on their way to the beach.

But Melhem said traffic is shifting. The number of people using the bridge on Fridays was down slightly last summer, she said, and a midday Saturday rush began to form.

"We don't want to move traffic from one peak travel time to another," Melhem said. "The goal is to spread out traffic."

Having been caught in the giant backups to the Outer Banks in years passed, I'll guess that travelling on non-holiday weekends is the best bet. It took me ten hours to get to Okracoke the last time I made the trip. Won't do that again.

Evening Music

I love some good jazz to grade papers to. Often some Thelonious Monk or some Miles Davis provides me with enough substance in my music to kee my attention, without completely distracting me from the loads of papers sitting in front of me.

Today, I finally got in my soundtrack to Good Night and Good Luck, a movie I simply adored . While I had heard the name Dianne Reeves before, I had never been exposed to her voice prior to the movie. Yet, she kept demanding my attention during the interludes in the movie where the side band played. Now I remember why.

Wow! If you want to get someone hooked on this style of jazz from the 1950's, this is the right place to start. The Cd is amazing from start to finish and her voice just ressonates in my head. I'm not one to rant about new CD's, but check it out if you are interested in the Ella Fitzgerald style of jazz sound. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Endgame

It's headlines like this that erally make me wonder what dimension the "liberal media" people are in. A liberal news reporter definately would not frame the Enron verdict like this:

Lay turns to God and family after guilty verdict

Thu May 25, 2006
By Dan Whitcomb

HOUSTON (Reuters) - When the guilty verdicts came down, former Enron chief Ken Lay turned to God and family.

Lay, the son of a preacher who has long maintained his innocence to fraud and conspiracy charges in the energy giant's collapse, was convicted on Thursday along with former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling of concealing the energy' giant's crumbling finances as it spiraled toward bankruptcy in 2001.

Before the jury arrived in the courtroom, the man once hailed by Wall Street as a business visionary shook hands with Skilling when the former Enron executive came into the chamber.

Lay then bowed his head, eyes closed, and appeared to pray as the eight-woman, four-man jury entered the courtroom to deliver the verdicts that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Lay, 64, slumped and shook his head, his sobbing wife Linda clutching his arm tightly, as U.S. District Judge Sim Lake read off the jury's decision.

Family members of both men wept throughout the rest of the hearing as Lake set sentencing for the week of September 11.

Skilling left the courtroom quickly after the verdicts were read but Lay, told by the judge that he could not leave the building until he had surrendered his passport, remained in court, surrounded by members of his family.

"God's got another plan right now," Lay could be heard telling each of his five children and other family members.

Honestly, this spin is simply disgusting. So what if Kenny is a PK (Preacher's Kid)? That doesn't make him any better than the rest of us, but maybe I hung out with the wrong people. The guy got nailed for, at best, being incompetent and asleep at the switch and at worst, swindling shareholders out of millions of dollars. Could the media be brought out of their stupor long enough to understand that overt acts of piety (ie: loud praying and moaning) doesn't always equate to real piety. It looks good on TV, but that's not reality.

Torture

Testimony at SoCal man's court-martial centers on use of dogs

By DAVID DISHNEAU

FORT MEADE, Md. - A general visiting Abu Ghraib prison urged guards and interrogators to use dogs "as much as possible" with detainees, a former supervisor testified Thursday.

The statement by Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, a military police reservist who ran the Iraq prison in summer 2003, differed from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller's testimony a day earlier that he encouraged the use of dogs only for custody and control of detainees.

Both men testified at the court-martial of Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, an Army dog handler and military policeman from Fullerton, Calif., accused of having his Belgian shepherd bite one detainee and harass another at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and early 2004.

The jury also heard stipulated testimony _ statements agreed to by both sides _ that rumors were circulating at the prison during that period that Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and his then-top deputy Paul Wolfowitz were scrutinizing intelligence coming out of Abu Ghraib.

Thursday's testimony supported the defense theory that harsh interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, were sanctioned at the highest levels of the Pentagon and communicated ineptly through a muddled chain of command to low-ranking MPs who felt obliged to take orders from freewheeling civilian contractor interrogators.

Phillabaum said Miller, then commander of the U.S. detention center for suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, mentioned dogs during a meeting with Abu Ghraib supervisors in early September 2003.

"Gen. Miller encouraged the use of dogs as much as possible," said Phillabaum, testifying as a defense witness.

Under cross-examination by Maj. Christopher Graveline, chief prosecutor of the Abu Ghraib abuse cases, Phillabaum said Miller "encouraged the use of dogs as much as possible in the normal operations of the confinement operations."

This was policy and it wasn't invented on the spot, the Army and Marines don't work that way, this came from on high.

The media are still ready to burn the little fish and give the generals a pass, however. Both are assholes.

Your Daily Froomkin

A Little Obsessed?

It's often said that President Bush doesn't read newspapers -- or at least not as much as he should. Now it looks like maybe Cheney reads them a bit too much.

During Libby's grand jury testimony on the morning of March 24, 2004, prosecutors asked him how unusual it was for Cheney to clip and save a newspaper column.

"Q. Did you often see him with the actual newspaper column -- actual physical columns from the newspaper?

"A. Yes, he often will cut out from a newspaper an article using a little pen knife that he has and put it on the edge of his desk or put it in his desk and then pull it out and look at it, think about it. That will often happen. . . .

"Q. How long does the Vice-President keep the columns that he cuts out with a pen knife and puts on the corner of his desk?

"A. Sometimes a long time."

It's pretty clear that he's also a vindictive sumbitch. The amount of psychological issues plaguing the leadership team in this administration is really stupifying.

Snooping

Gonzales's Rationale on Phone Data Disputed

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 25, 2006; A08

Civil liberties lawyers yesterday questioned the legal basis that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used Tuesday to justify the constitutionality of collecting domestic telephone records as part of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism program.

While not confirming a USA Today report May 11 saying the National Security Agency has been collecting phone-call records of millions of Americans, Gonzales said such an activity would not require a court warrant under a 1979 Supreme Court ruling because it involved obtaining "business records." Under the 27-year-old court ruling in Smith v. Maryland , "those kinds of records do not enjoy Fourth Amendment protection," Gonzales said. "There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in those kinds of records," he added.

Noting that Congress in 1986 passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in reaction to the Smith v. Maryland ruling to require court orders before turning over call records to the government, G. Jack King Jr. of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said Gonzales is correct in saying "the administration isn't violating the Fourth Amendment" but "he's failing to acknowledge that it is breaking" the 1986 law, which requires a court order "with a few very narrow exceptions."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said, "The government is bound by the laws Congress passes, and when the attorney general doesn't even mention them, it is symptomatic of the government's profound disrespect for the rule of law."

The fact that we are not in the streets with pitchforks over this tells you something about how effective the fear-mongering strategy of Bushco has been. This wiretap program is an outrage.

Flu Fears

Bird Flu in Indonesian Family May Raise Global Alert Level

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 25, 2006; A21

JAKARTA, Indonesia, May 24 -- The World Health Organization might soon convene an expert panel to decide whether an unprecedented human outbreak of bird flu in Indonesia should trigger a higher global alert for a possible pandemic, health officials said Wednesday.

If the global alert status were increased, international stockpiles of antiviral drugs would probably be shipped to Indonesia and travel from the country would be monitored in an attempt to contain the outbreak.

Indonesian health authorities this week confirmed that the virus had killed at least six members from one extended family on Sumatra island, including a 32-year-old man Monday. A seventh family member also died from what investigators suspect was bird flu, but she was buried before samples could be taken. Another relative is hospitalized with a confirmed case and is recovering.

Maria Cheng, a WHO spokeswoman in Geneva, said the outbreak in the North Sumatran village of Kubu Sembilang, was not only the largest bird flu cluster in the world but also the first in which investigators believe the virus was passed from one person to another and then to a third.

I Nyoman Kandun, Indonesia's director of disease control, said this week that the evidence from Sumatra was "suggestive of a third generation" of infection because of the long intervals between the earliest, middle and most recent cases. The timing of the infections makes it unlikely that the family members contracted bird flu from the same source, such as sick chickens.

I think this is unlikely: a stage four declaration on the part of WHO triggers statutory consequences in the member states which have huge economic ramifications. The very fact that this discussion is occuring right now tells you something about how serious the situation is.

Sick Call

I'm fighting (and mostly losing to) a migraine today so I don't know what the work output is going to look like here. For me, these things combine blinding headaches and gastrointestinal symptoms. I can barely see the screen of my computer. I'll do what I can, but I feel like crap and have no energy in the bargain. Please feel free to use the threads to add your own observations.

Addicted to Oil?

Power Failure Snarls Northeast Rail Service
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:57 a.m. ET

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- A major power outage stranded thousands of rush-hour commuters Thursday between New York and Washington, stopping five trains inside tunnels and forcing many passengers to get out and walk to the nearest station.

Three NJ Transit trains and one Amtrak train were stuck in a tunnel under the Hudson River heading into New York. A fifth train was stuck in a rail tunnel in Baltimore.

Amtrak said it planned to use diesel locomotives to remove them, and was working to restore power along the route.

The outage happened about 8 a.m. along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line, affecting trains from Washington all the way to New York's Queens borough.

Take the train

before the idiots in Washington, DC finally do what many of them – including President Bush and Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta – have wanted to do all along and kill Amtrak. If that happens, we will be worse than a Third World country, because most of them have extensive passenger train service. All aboard!

Exception to the Rules

Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC Rules

Now, the White House's top spymaster can cite national security to exempt businesses from reporting requirements

MAY 23, 2006
By Dawn Kopecki

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official.

FEW ANSWERS. White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said the timing of the May 5 Presidential memo had no significance. "There was nothing specific that prompted this memo," Perino said.

In addition to refusing to explain why Bush decided to delegate this authority to Negroponte, the White House declined to say whether Bush or any other President has ever exercised the authority and allowed a company to avoid standard securities disclosure and accounting requirements. The White House wouldn't comment on whether Negroponte has granted such a waiver, and BusinessWeek so far hasn't identified any companies affected by the provision. Negroponte's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. "What you might hide is investments: You've spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq," which the government wants to keep secret. "That's the kind of scenario that would be plausible," Coffee said.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...

Counting Down to June 1

Why does this just not inspire confidence in me?

Is U.S. Ready for Hurricane Season?
Chertoff Expresses Confidence, but Katrina's Impact Lingers

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 24, 2006; A01

U.S. disaster-preparedness officials declared themselves ready yesterday for the June 1 onset of hurricane season, amid mounting anxiety in Gulf Coast states hit by last year's devastating storms that recovery efforts and repairs to the nation's emergency response system remain incomplete.

Federal authorities have stockpiled four times as much food and ice as they had before hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck last year, supplies capable of sustaining 1 million people for at least seven days, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and top U.S. military commanders said at a news conference. The government has also spent $800 million improving National Guard communications and has forged the closest civilian and military disaster response command structure ever, they said.

"We are . . . much more prepared as a nation than we have ever been to confront a major hurricane," Chertoff said. He called on the nation's 60 million coastal residents to prepare their families for disasters and to heed any warnings that authorities issue.

But the claims came with hundreds of thousands of displaced victims from last year's hurricanes still living in more than 100,000 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi, creating the potential for a new evacuation and housing crisis if another storm strikes. States and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are rushing to overhaul the tracking and movement of disaster supplies, but efforts are uncoordinated, state leaders warn.

FEMA's hurricane operations plan is unfinished, state officials said, and the agency remains 15 percent understaffed. Repairs to New Orleans's levee system by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are incomplete, and a state commission recently warned that 40,000 Floridians could face a catastrophic flood if a storm hits weakened flood-control systems near Lake Okeechobee.

I hear from inside that everybody who was competent enough to get a job on the outside is gone. This is true across the civil service, by the way. My spies inside tell me that there is only one cabinet secretary, Mike Leavitt, who is competent.

It All Depends On Whose Ox Is Getting Gored

Pass the popcorn.

Search of lawmaker's office angers congressional leaders
By Brian Knowlton International Herald Tribune

TUESDAY, MAY 23, 2006

WASHINGTON Republican leaders said Tuesday that the FBI search of the Capitol Hill office of a Louisiana Democrat - who the FBI says was taped elsewhere accepting a $100,000 bribe - was an unacceptable breach of precedent and congressional prerogatives. The unusually sharp protests placed the White House and the Justice Department on the defensive. "We are hoping that there's a way to balance the constitutional concerns of the House of Representatives with the law enforcement obligations of the executive branch," said the White House spokesman, Tony Snow. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said talks with lawmakers were under way to allay their concerns. He expressed respect for the Congress "as a co-equal branch of government." The case against Representative William Jefferson appears unusually strong, even without any evidence found in the extensive weekend search. The FBI said in an affidavit that not only did it have videotape of him accepting the $100,000 meant to secure his support in helping a technology company win contracts but that $90,000 was found last summer in a freezer in his home. Awkwardly for the White House, the issue placed it at odds with Republicans who in the past have often defended its muscular assertions of executive- branch powers. So, while few Democrats defended Jefferson's actions, several Republicans expressed outrage over the search. They included the House speaker, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, and an earlier speaker, Newt Gingrich. Representative John Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, spoke of an "invasion of the legislative branch" and suggested that the matter might reach the Supreme Court. Lawmakers said the search was an unwarranted breach of the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches. Hastert said he knew of no "necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years." Congressional Democrats fear the Jefferson case will undermine their election-year effort to portray Republicans as a party of corruption, and few had much to say about the Jefferson case. The FBI has grown demonstrably more aggressive in pursuit of corrupt public officials; more than 1,000 have been convicted in the past two years, with the 2005 figure one-fourth higher than the 2004 number, the bureau said. Its recent targets have included prominent Republicans, including Representative Randy Cunningham of California, who is serving a prison sentence for bribery, and the former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Still, the search of Jefferson's office raised a different issue. "The case against Mr. Jefferson is pretty bad - it's pretty serious," said Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who heads the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She said of the office search: "I think that'll prove to be pretty impolitic." What made it stand out, she said, was that the FBI had not searched Cunningham's office, even though in supposed contrast to Jefferson, he used it in connection with illegal activities - even writing out a "bribe menu" on congressional stationery. "That looks really bad," said Sloan, "that you decided for the first time in history to do it with a black Democrat, even though you decided not to do it with a white Republican."

Sturdy Northerners

Dan Froomkin reports that the Canadian press has a backbone, something that's rare down here:

A Lesson From the North

A Canadian reader alerts me to this story by Alexander Panetta of the Canadian Press: "About two dozen journalists walked out on Stephen Harper on Tuesday after he refused to take their questions, the latest chapter in an increasingly unseemly spat between the prime minister and members of the national media.

"The scene of reporters boycotting a prime ministerial news conference was described by Parliament Hill veterans as a first. It resulted in Harper being forced to make his announcement on aid to Darfur to a small handful of reporters, photographers and cameramen outside the House of Commons."

See, it turns out that the prime minister's office insists on choosing who gets to ask questions based on a list it compiles.

" 'We can't accept that the prime minister's office would decide who gets to ask questions,' said Yves Malo, a TVA reporter and president of the press gallery. 'Does that mean that when there's a crisis they'll only call upon journalists they expect softball questions from?' "

By contrast, Bush often goes into press conferences with a list of who he will call on, compiled by the press office from a list of attendees.

In fact, at many "press availabilities," Bush limits questions to two journalists (or, when he's appearing with a foreign leaders, to two journalists from each country). Those are almost always the Associated Press and Reuters correspondents, who can be counted on to ask topical, incremental questions.

It does raise the question of why everyone else even bothers to show up, if they're only going to serve as props.

But every so often, Bush veers a tiny bit off script. Yesterday, for instance, he called on Steve Holland of Reuters and -- surprise -- Raddatz of ABC News.

"I have no idea why he called on me," Raddatz told me this morning. She said she had no forewarning. "But you always prepare."

Like the rest of the lefty blogosphere, I've been saying for years that the press corps should just boycott these newsless events. They figured it out above the 49th parallel.

Surprise, Surprise

I think that every number that comes out of the Pentagon is purest fairy tale, but the conflict story isn't Rummy's and has been true for several years, though not much told by the MSM.

Armed Groups Propel Iraq Toward Chaos
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 23 — Even in a country beset by murder and death, the 16th Brigade represented a new frontier.

The brigade, a 1,000-man force set up by Iraq's Ministry of Defense in early 2005, was charged with guarding a stretch of oil pipeline that ran through the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dawra. Heavily armed and lightly supervised, some members of the largely Sunni brigade transformed themselves into a death squad, cooperating with insurgents and executing government collaborators, Iraqi officials say.

"They were killing innocent people, anyone who was affiliated with the government," said Hassan Thuwaini, the director of the Iraqi Oil Ministry's protection force.

Forty-two members of the brigade were arrested in January, according to officials at the Ministry of the Interior and the police department in Dawra.

Since then, Iraqi officials say, individual gunmen have confessed to carrying out dozens of assassinations, including the killing of their own commander, Col. Mohsin Najdi, when he threatened to turn them in.

Some of the men assigned to guard the oil pipeline, the officials say, appear to have maintained links to the major Iraqi insurgent groups. For months, American and Iraqi officials have been trying to track down death squads singling out Sunnis that operated inside the Shiite-led Interior Ministry.

But the 16th Brigade was different. Unlike the others, the 16th Brigade was a Sunni outfit, accused of killing Shiites. And it was not, like the others, part of the Iraqi police or even the Interior Ministry. It was run by another Iraqi ministry altogether.

Such is the country that the new Iraqi leaders who took office Saturday are inheriting. The headlong, American-backed effort to arm tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and officers, coupled with a failure to curb a nearly equal number of militia gunmen, has created a galaxy of armed groups, each with its own loyalty and agenda, which are accelerating the country's slide into chaos.

Indeed, the 16th Brigade stands as a model for how freelance government violence has spread far beyond the ranks of the Shiite-backed police force and Interior Ministry to encompass other government ministries, private militias and people in the upper levels of the Shiite government.

Sometimes, the lines between one government force and another — and between the police and the militias — are so blurry that it is impossible to determine who the killers are.

"No one knows who is who right now," said Adil Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq's vice presidents.

The real story here is that anyone who has read one text of military history could have told you that our illegal, immoral Iraq incursion would result in a guerrilla war. This may have been a surprise to the Times, who flacked for the war with the rest of the media, but it is not a surprise to me. The Gray Lady seems to have lost the ability to read her own back files.

Outsourcing Responsibility

Amnesty Urges U.S. on Iraq Contractors

By DANICA KIRKA
The Associated Press
Tuesday, May 23, 2006

LONDON -- The United States is riding roughshod over human rights by outsourcing key anti-terror work in Iraq to private contractors, who operate beyond Iraqi law and outside the military chain of command, Amnesty International said Tuesday.

It called for tighter rules on the use of contractors in a statement released with its 2006 annual report detailing human rights violations in 150 countries around the world. The rights watchdog said contracting for military detention, security and intelligence operations had fueled violations.

"We're concerned about the use of private contractors in Iraq because it creates a legal black hole of responsibility and accountability," Amnesty's Secretary-General Irene Khan told AP Television News.

"These contractors are protected from being prosecuted under Iraqi law, but they're not part of the U.S. military command. So when they commit crimes, or when they abuse human rights, they're accountable to no one."

Few aspects of the multibillion-dollar U.S. contracting effort in Iraq have been disclosed.

A report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office last year said monitoring of civilian contractors in Iraq was so poor there was no way to determine how many contractors were working on U.S.-related security and reconstruction projects or how many have been killed.

Amnesty's annual report contended the counterterrorism campaign by the United States and other powerful nations had undermined human rights around the world, draining energy and attention from crises afflicting the poor and underprivileged.

Amnesty also called for a change of strategy in Iraq, a stronger push to end rights abuses in Sudan and for closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed the report, saying: "Nobody is being tortured at Guantanamo Bay."

To borrow a favorite line from the Wingers during the Clinton scandals, "What will we tell the children?" How do we teach about international laws and responsibilities if we don't live up to them?

This system of plausible deniability was intentionally set up by Rummy and Co so they could go to war on the cheap and get around all of those pesky international laws. We continue to tumble fom that bright, shining city on a hill to another muddy village with no redeaming ualities. I piy whomever takes over after these clowns, they will have a great deal of work to restore what is left of our credibility.

Bird Flu: What it Means for You

I've been on the phone now for days chasing down the avian flu story. And I've had email from some of you who are trying to parse the news stories and are wondering what the hell it all means. Let me give you a brief summary suitable for non-scientists.

There both is and is not something new going on. There have been a clutch of confirmed new cases in a cluster in Indonesia. What does this mean? In the past, flu illnesses have been caused by close contact between poultry and people (my colleagues, the reveres, notes cases to the contrary). In Southeast Asia, it is not uncommon for people to literally live with their birds and their children treat them as pets and play with them and usually gather the eggs for the family to eat. There is close contact between the birds, the families and feathers and feces. And then they become dinner, at some point. The disease is killed by thorough cooking of the,er, "dinner animals", but customs are different in different countries and some Southeast Asian cuisines feature dishes made with raw poultry blood. Until the past week, disease trackers have been able to confirm by testing that each case was caused by a sick bird, who was either dinner or in close contact with the sick person. In the last few months, we started discovering cases among the family members of those who took care of the sick person. The disease still stayed close to the birds, those who tend them and immediate family.

Since the first of the year, we've been seeing more cases where the sick person had no contact with the chicken but have had close contact with the person who got sick from the chicken. In the last couple of weeks, we've begun to see new cases which didn't live with the first two cases, which were typically immediate family members. It's still happening among family members, but not ones who live together and are caregivers for the others. In other words, these are still people who are in extended family members, but don't live in the intimate setting of the immediate family.

What does this mean? Pandemics happen when a virus or a bacteria develops a couple of characteristics: it develops the genetic ability to make humans sick (most human infectious disease is transmitted to us from animals through genetic changes) and it becomes easy to transmit between people. In the last century, we had three big flu pandemics (and a couple of "echo" local epidemics) and we know from history that three or four of these things happen every century. The last was in 1968. There was a huge one in 1918 that killed literally millions of people around the world, estimates range from 25-100 million world wide. You can read about it in a superb book about this medical disaster, The Great Influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history. The title is not hype. This historical event was so horrifying to those who lived through it that they were unable to speak of it and "the great forgetting" began.

The flu virus is the great mocker of what we like to think of as our progress in medical science. In about 1997, a novel flu virus, tagged H5N1 for its genetic markers, emerged in Asia. It was horribly deadly to birds and to the few humans who contracted it from poultry. It caught my attention that year. I was aware of the cycles of human flu infections and knew that it was about time for a new bug to emerge which could infect humans: all human flubugs were first birdbugs. I started following this one back then and first started writing about it here when human cases started make some news in the main-stream media (as opposed to the scientific press) in 2004 and began writing about it here then. This is not the flu virus which circulates in the winter months every year for which we sometimes remember to get a flu vaccine shot. I'm trying to keep the scientific vocabulary out of this piece, but here those words of difference are poetic in their ability to invoke horror: highly pathogenic. What that means is that this virus has demonstrated an ability to cause grave illness and death which literally scares its researchers to take dramatic action to care for their families. There is no vaccine and it is unlikely that there will be one if this virus becomes a human disease. Right now, it kills more than half of the people who get it. In 1918-1919, the Great Influenza killed someplace between 2.5 and 5% of the people who got it and most researchers think that 30-40% of the planet was infected (not all became sick but most did, when novel virus appears, we have no natural immunity.) H5N1 makes 1918 look like a practice swing.

H5N1 influenza is a novel virus of extraordinary lethality. Should it evolve to the point where it becomes easily passed between humans, the level of damage it could do to us and our society is nearly unimaginable. What's the likelihood of this happening? Frankly, we don't know. There is no data. What should you do when it is impossible to calculate the risk, but the risk of what happens if you get it wrong is off the charts? Prepare for the worst case, hope for the best.

Dr. Rob Webster, the dean of flu researchers in the US, has stockpiled three months of food, water and necessary medications for his family. Rob is not a catastrophist or a survivalist, he's a sober-sided scientist who says that this is the scariest virus he's ever seen. In this country and most of the industrialized world, our food, water, pharmacies and other vital infrastructure have gone to "just in time" delivery systems which depend on trucking and shipping. If you think your neighborhood grocery has a big back room full of supplies to restock the shelves, guess again. They and Walmart and all of the other retailers you rely on to meet your daily needs are going to be crippled if 30-40% of their employees and the truckers who supply them are sick or home taking care of sick family members, or simply afraid to go out and maybe get infected. This flu causes grave illness, not a couple of days of aches and a sore throat. The people who get it are sick for weeks. And the rate of death is simply off the charts. The virus is not yet "efficient" at being passed between humans. Will that change? We don't know. There is a probability which is greater than zero which says it never happens. There is also the known ability of all flu virus to demonstrate genetic alteration which it allows it to find more hosts, places where it can replicate and spread, and the flu has loved doing that in people for eons.

Stockpiling non-perishable foods and extra water for a period of 3-6 weeks is not unreasonable, given how long it will take the disease to run and ordinary commerce to resume after such event. Don't expect power outages to be repaired in their normal couple of hours if line employees are on sick call. Don't expect to be able to get to your gas station or ATM. If the power is out, you won't be pumping gas or picking up cash.

In Florida and the other Gulf states, people are told to be prepared for 72 hours of being on our own during hurricane season. Imagine that everything is disrupted for three weeks instead of three days; it happened here after Hurricane Isabel in 2003. Imagine that lasts for months.

This is not a thought exercise. This is a real possibility, one which became closer with the science news out of Indonesia. You can decide how you want to respond.

Face Value

Time for a Debate

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 23, 2006; 1:09 PM

Is President Bush genuinely willing to confront his critics?

Talking about the war in Iraq last week in a brief interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz, Bush said something quite remarkable:

"There are some in Washington that say 'pull out now.' I look forward to debating those voices."

So how about it?

Bush has been getting a lot of positive press over the last several weeks for taking questions from unscreened audiences. And while that's certainly a change from past practice -- in which nonsupporters were frequently not even allowed in the same room with him -- it's a far cry from actually engaging in a dialogue with those who disagree with him on important issues.

The new White House communications strategy is ostensibly to get the president out in public more often, speaking to the press and the public, serving as his own best advocate.

But if yesterday's appearance before the National Restaurant Association in Chicago was any indication -- and it was -- then the plan is not so much for Bush to publicly mix it up with critics as to have him continue repeating his tired old talking points so often that people, hopefully, start to believe them.

Even if, statistically speaking, two out of three people in the room yesterday thought Bush was doing a lousy job as president, the White House can count on the fact that the vast majority of people who get to the microphones at these events are going to be respectful, if not downright obsequious.

Here's the transcript of yesterday's event. Bush devoted 43 minutes to a question-and-answer session, but on account of his extremely long, rambling responses, there were only 10 questions in all. (No follow-ups, naturally.)

Bush chose to ignore the woman who yelled out "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" Instead, his questioners launched into their softballs with such phrases as "First of all, I want to say you're doing a fine job," and "Let me first say, it's an honor to hear you speak. And I'm a proud supporter."

Then there was the guy in the chef's hat who got up and said: "[O]n behalf of all the cooks and chefs in our country, I have to say you're running it the way a chef would run the country, and we're proud of you."

Sure, Bush has gotten the what-for a few times lately. Most memorably, at an event last month in Charlotte , a soft-spoken, 61-year-old real estate broker named Harry Taylor got up and told Bush that "in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington."

But Bush doesn't engage those few critical voices, he just drowns them in those talking points.

So here's my suggestion: It's time for Bush to invite dissenters not just into the room, but onto the stage with him.

How about welcoming Rep. John Murtha to the White House for a public conversation about the war? Or Sen. Russell Feingold, for a discussion of Article II? What about calling a town meeting on global warming and sharing the stage with Al Gore? Or asking Lou Dobbs up to talk immigration?

Or is Bush afraid it wouldn't go so well?

The idea of a president actually facing his critics head on sounds utterly alien today, but as I wrote in my February 8, 2005 column -- after Bush himself compared his Social Security blitz to President Clinton's -- when Clinton held his "discussions" on Social Security, he intentionally brought opponents along with him, spoke before a mixed crowd, and let himself get grilled.

Here , for instance, is the transcript of an April 7, 1998 appearance by Clinton in Kansas City. He invited Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), among others, to join him.

And while the audience was laboriously prescreened, that was so that it would not be one-sided. Members were selected by a market research company to reflect the demographic and economic characteristics of the region.

Craig Crawford wrote last month for Congressional Quarterly that Bush's "recent performances in town hall meetings with average Americans show all the signs of a tired show: formulaic scripts, weak jokes and a waning audience."

Indeed, Bush's meandering, familiar responses to most questions are so unrevelatory, and add so little to the public discourse, that it's hard to see how they're doing the White House any good.

CNN broadcasts these things, even though they are a joke and the political reporters on the WH beat just take dictation rather than doing any fact checking or analysis. Bush habitually uses straw man arguments, but you don't know that unless you read Froomkin, who is the only Postie doing any real reporting on these photo ops.

Bird Flu News

Bloomberg's Jason Gale and John Lauerman have been some of the most consistent reporters on the avian flu beat. As a result of developments in Indonesia over the weekend, I'm raising my personal threat level from green to yellow. We may be at that level for some time. Here's a recap:

Bird Flu Deaths Climb as Scientists Probe Human Link (Update3)

May 23 (Bloomberg) -- The number of bird flu deaths reported this month climbed to 13, the most since February 2004, as scientists investigate whether the virus is able to spread more easily between people.

Limited human-to-human transmission can't be ruled out as the cause of illness in seven members of an Indonesian family with avian influenza this month, Indonesia's Ministry of Health said yesterday. Six of the people died. Investigators haven't found infected poultry or pigs near where they lived.

``An extremely high priority should be to determine whether the virus has undergone any significant genetic changes,'' Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin, a virologist at Australia's Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization in Melbourne, said in a phone interview today.

Any evidence that the lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu has increased its ability to spread among humans may prompt the World Health Organization to consider raising its alert level for a human pandemic, a signal that a deadly outbreak of disease is more likely.

Since late 2003, the virus has sickened at least 217 people in 10 countries, killing 123 of them, according to the WHO's May 19 count. In February 2004, the WHO confirmed 12 deaths in Vietnam and seven in Thailand.
....
Almost all human H5N1 cases have been linked to close contact with sick or dead birds, such as children playing with them or adults butchering them or taking off feathers, according to the WHO. Thorough cooking of meat and eggs kills the virus.

The WHO's pandemic alert now is at the third of six levels, indicating that a new flu virus subtype is causing disease in humans, though not yet spreading efficiently and in a sustainable way among people.

To raise the alert by one level, the WHO would convene a panel of outside officials. The panel would make a recommendation to acting Director-General Anders Nordstrom, who would then order the change.

The lack of H5N1 infections in nurses and those at risk of contracting the virus from infected people may indicate there is no immediate risk of a pandemic strain evolving, said Albert Osterhaus, the head of the Department of Virology at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in a phone interview yesterday.

``The question is, is the virus going to reassort itself or sequentially mutate so that transmission is eased from human to human?'' he said.

I spoke with the reveres about this earlier today. Flu viruses are genetically reassorting all the time, that's one of the hallmarks of the virus. What that means is that living with flu in the environment is always a volitile situation for those species susceptible to illness.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports "Businesses not ready for avian flu fallout, expert warns" in Canada.

Weasel Words

Tumbling Down

New Orleans had a false sense of security. A new report by an independent review panel found that flaws in the manmade levee system were largely responsible for the breaches that caused deadly flooding in and around New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

As John Schwartz reported in yesterday's Times, three dozen engineers and disaster experts studied the region's hurricane protection system and found that the storm system had not been up to the task of protecting the city.

Raymond Seed, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the lead author of the report, put it about as succinctly as anyone has in the nine months since Katrina made landfall. "People didn't die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle," Mr. Seed told reporters, "and people didn't die because the levees were overtopped. People died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost."

I'm sorry, "mistakes were made" doesn't cut it. Who made them? How are they being held accountable? How many of the rest of us are at risk because "mistakes were made?"

Diversionary Tactics

Divisive In Any Language

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006; A17

Yes, let's talk about the English language and how important it is that immigrants and their children learn it.

And please permit me to be personal about an issue that is equally personal to the tens of millions of Americans who remember their immigrant roots.

My late father was born in the United States, and grew up in French Canadian neighborhoods in and around New Bedford, Mass. When he started school, he spoke English with a heavy accent. A first-grade teacher mercilessly made fun of his command of the language.

My dad would have none of this and proceeded to relearn English, with some help from a generous friend named James Radcliffe who, in turn, asked my dad to teach him French. My dad came to speak flawless, accent-free English. He and my mom insisted that their children speak our nation's language clearly, and without grammatical errors.

None of this caused my parents to turn against their French heritage. On the contrary, my sister and I were taught French before we were taught English because my parents took pride in the language of our forebears and knew that speaking more than one language would be a useful skill.

My mom would give free French lessons at our Catholic parochial school to any kid who wanted to take them. When we were young, we'd visit our cousins on a farm in Quebec during the summer, partly to improve our French. (And Parisian French elitists take note: I still love the much-derided accent of the Quebec countryside, which many have compared to the English of the Tennessee mountains.) I tell you all this by way of explaining why I can't stand the demagoguery directed against immigrants who speak languages other than English. Raging against them shows little understanding of how new immigrants struggle to become loyal Americans who love their country -- and come to love the English language.

As it considered the immigration bill last week, the Senate passed an utterly useless amendment sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) declaring English to be our "national language" and calling for a government role in "preserving and enhancing" the place of English.

There is no point to this amendment except to say to members of our currently large Spanish-speaking population that they will be legally and formally disrespected in a way that earlier generations of immigrants from -- this is just a partial list -- Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Norway, Sweden, France, Hungary, Greece, China, Japan, Finland, Lithuania, Lebanon, Syria, Bohemia, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia were not.

E.J. is essentially correct, but he misses the subtext. The whole immigration/English debate has nothing to do with identifying and fixing an actual problem, like, for example, the number of US adults who are functionally illiterate in any language (more than 44 million last time I checked.) This is all election year politics and the curious twisting in the Republican party as they try to find issues which both energize their base while simultaneously trying to attract Hispanic voters. What they seem to have going on here is the 21st century equivalent of the Southern Strategy, instead.

Literalism

Gallup Poll: Better Than 1 in 4 Americans Believe the Bible is the 'Actual Word of God'

By E&P; Staff

Published: May 22, 2006 6:15 PM ET

NEW YORK Better than one in four Americans believe that the Bible is "literally true and the actual word of God," the Gallup organization reported this afternoon.

A Gallup poll taken this month gave 1,002 respondents three choices: The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word; the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally; or the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.

The number of those backing the "literal" view was 28%, with 49% selecting the "inspired word of God" option and 19% the "fables" view.

Not surprisingly, the number of literalists rose somewhat with age, and the highest number live in the South.

By party affiliation, backing the literal word of God view, it broke down as 33% of Republicans, 26% of Democrats and 24% of Independents.

There has been a gradual decline in recent decades of those who believe that the Bible is literally true, but only by a few percentage points.

Well, then, I expect that 28% of the population to be busily studying Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, since those were the languages God appeared to have been speaking.

Summer Forecast

U.S. Predicts Busy Hurricane Season

By Jim Loney
Reuters
Monday, May 22, 2006; 11:03 AM

MIAMI (Reuters) - The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season will be very active, with up to 10 hurricanes, although not as busy as record-breaking 2005, when Hurricane Katrina and several monster storms slammed into the United States, the U.S. government's top climate agency said Monday.

"For the 2006 North Atlantic hurricane season, NOAA is predicting 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher," said retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The most damage is caused by storms that reach Category 3, with winds of 111-130 mph, or higher on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane activity. Scientists were way off the mark in their forecasts of last year's hurricane season. The season starts June 1 each year.

The 2005 hurricane season spawned an unprecedented 28 tropical storms, of which 15 became hurricanes. NOAA had predicted 12 to 15 tropical storms, of which it said seven to nine would be hurricanes. Seven of last year's hurricanes were considered "major," while NOAA had predicted only three to five would reach that level.

A record four major hurricanes hit the United States, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, killed 1,300 people and caused $80 billion in damage. Rita slammed into Louisiana and Texas, and Wilma briefly became the most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. "

Although NOAA is not forecasting a repeat of last year's season, the potential for hurricanes striking the U.S. is high," Lautenbacher said in prepared remarks in Miami.

The Bermuda High, which protects the Northern East Coast of the US in most years, will be weaker and further at sea this year, so the entire Coast is at risk. I'm dreading this.

Home Insurers Embrace the Heartland

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
New York Times

But in places like Long Island and Cape Cod as well as the coasts in the Southeast, insurers are doubling prices for some customers and refusing to sell new policies or renew old ones. Recently, State Farm, the largest home insurer, sought an increase averaging 71 percent for home insurance in Florida.

The insurers have been raising prices and cutting back coverage for homes in Florida and the Gulf Coast for years. But now, they have begun to apply the same measures in coastal areas that have not experienced a devastating storm in decades.

"The insurers simply can't bet the entire farm on insuring the coastal areas," said Robert P. Hartwig, the chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. They "are looking to the rest of the country as an opportunity for profitability."

Everyone Notices

Justice prays for
a Prez in 'real trouble'

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told W's sister, Doro Bush Koch, that he was praying for him.

Just how bad are things for President Bush?

Pretty bad, I'd say, if even Clarence Thomas is worried about him.

The other night at a Washington book party for the President's sister, Doro Bush Koch, the Supreme Court justice arrived with his wife, Ginny, on the tented roof of the Hay Adams Hotel, overlooking the White House, and made a beeline for the author.

"We have to pray for your brother. He's in real trouble," Thomas told a wide-eyed Koch, whose older brother is, indeed, suffering from near-catastrophic public-opinion ratings.

Koch — whose memoir of the first President Bush is "My Father, My President: A Personal Account of the Life of George H.W. Bush" — politely thanked Thomas and kept a stiff upper lip.

Ya think?

Public Safety

Corps' Levee Work Is Faulted
Report says barriers in New Orleans may fail again and mistakes by federal engineers raise questions about their competence nationwide.
By Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer
May 22, 2006

NEW ORLEANS — A wide range of design and construction defects in levees around New Orleans raise serious doubts that the system can withstand the pounding of another hurricane the size of Katrina, even after $3.1 billion in repairs are completed, a team of independent investigators led by UC Berkeley's civil engineering school said Sunday.

The findings undermine assurances by the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers that the federal levee repair program due to be completed in June will provide a higher level of protection to New Orleans, which sustained 1,293 deaths and more than $100 billion in property loss from Katrina.

The team's 600-page report disputed most of the corps' preliminary findings about what caused the levee breaches, saying the investigators had made critical errors in their analysis.

The mistakes raise concerns about whether the corps is competent to oversee public safety projects across the nation, said Raymond Seed, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor who led the investigation, which the National Science Foundation sponsored shortly after Katrina struck.

"People think this is a New Orleans problem," Seed said. "It is a national issue."

Feeling safer yet?

Myths Die Hard

Al Gore's Unlikely Helpers

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, May 22, 2006; A17

Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting.

This is the part I don't get: it was always clear to me that Bush is an arrogant, nasty frat boy who is neither charming nor intelligent. Why anyone would think he's a good guy to have a beer with is beyond me, he's your classic mean drunk. Why is Mallaby perpetuating this canard six years on after we've seen that Bush is an antisocial dry drunk?

For the Moment

"Pressed by U.S., European Banks Limit Iran Deals
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

May 22, 2006

WASHINGTON, May 21 — Prodded by the United States with threats of fines and lost business, four of the biggest European banks have started curbing their activities in Iran, even in the absence of a Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions on Iran for its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Top Treasury and State Department officials have intensified their efforts to limit Iran-related activities of major banks in Europe, the United States and the Middle East in the past six months, invoking antiterrorism and banking laws. They have also traveled to Europe and the Middle East to drive home the risky nature of dealing with a country that has repeatedly rebuffed Western demands over suspending uranium enrichment, and to urge European countries to take similar steps.

Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said: "We are seeing banks and other institutions reassessing their ties to Iran. They are asking themselves if they really want to be handling business for entities owned by a government engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism."

The four European banks — the UBS and Credit Suisse banks of Switzerland, ABN Amro of the Netherlands, and HSBC, based in London — have made varying levels of disclosure about the limits on their activities in Iran in the past six months. Almost all large European banks have branches or bureaus in the United States, units that are subject to American laws.

American officials said the United States had informed its European allies about the new pressure exerted on the banks, and indeed had asked these countries to join the effort. At the same time, the Americans have not publicized the new pressure, partly out of concern it could complicate efforts by European negotiators, who were still talking with Iran about a package of incentives to suspend uranium enrichment.

It is not clear how curbed business with four of Europe's biggest banks could adversely affect Iran. But some outside political and economic experts say it is unlikely to do much damage considering Iran is one of OPEC's leading producers and is earning hundreds of millions of dollars worth of windfall profits daily from $70-a-barrel petroleum.

The American prodding has not yet resulted in any fines or other punishment. But UBS and ABN Amro are no strangers to the sting of American financial penalties for dealing with countries that the United States has wanted to isolate. UBS was fined $100 million by the Federal Reserve two years ago for the unauthorized movement of dollars to Iran and other countries like Libya and Yugoslavia, which were subject to American trade sanctions at the time. Last December, ABN Amro was fined $80 million for failure to comply with regulations against money laundering and with economic sanctions against Libya and Iran from 1997 to 2004.

The banks will put up with this for a while. Putting off new business is not something which they are famously good at. And how good at punishing business is the Bush administration? Hmm?

I See Brown People

Bush Is Losing Hispanics' Support, Polls Show
Surveys Find the Immigration Debate Is Also Alienating White Conservatives

By Thomas B. Edsall and Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 21, 2006; A06

Hispanic voters, many of whom responded favorably to President Bush's campaign appeals emphasizing patriotism, family and religious values in Spanish-language media in 2004, are turning away from the administration on immigration and a host of other issues, according to a new survey.

At the same time, separate polls show that conservative white Republicans are the voting group most hostile to the administration's support for policies that would move toward the legalization of many undocumented immigrants.

Cumulatively, the data underscore the perils for Bush and his party in the immigration debate churning on Capitol Hill, one that threatens to bleed away support simultaneously from the Republican base and from Hispanic swing voters, whom Bush strategists had hoped to make an important new part of the GOP coalition.

A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent.

The poll findings indicate that Republicans are likely to have a hard time replicating Bush's 2004 performance among Latino voters. According to 2004 exit polls, Bush received the backing of 40 percent of Hispanic voters, up from 34 percent in 2000. Other studies have put the 2004 figure somewhat lower, although there is general agreement that Bush made statistically significant gains from 2000 to 2004.

Funny thing, these "values voters" want to keep their families together when they immigrate. They can sniff a racist agenda.

Miserable Failure

Condi is mouthing the current spin on Big Timmeh's show as I type this. She's one of the architects of the recent debacle and she wants to do it again in Iran. Bitch.

Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police
By MICHAEL MOSS and DAVID ROHDE

As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Three years later, the police are a battered and dysfunctional force that has helped bring Iraq to the brink of civil war. Police units stand accused of operating death squads for powerful political groups or simple profit. Citizens, deeply distrustful of the force, are setting up their own neighborhood security squads. Killings of police officers are rampant, with at least 547 slain this year, roughly as many as Iraqi and American soldiers combined, records show.

The police, initially envisioned by the Bush administration as a cornerstone in a new democracy, have instead become part of Iraq's grim constellation of shadowy commandos, ruthless political militias and other armed groups. Iraq's new prime minister and senior American officials now say the country's future — and the ability of America to withdraw its troops — rests in large measure on whether the police can be reformed and rogue groups reined in.

Like so much that has defined the course of the war, the realities on the ground in Iraq did not match the planning in Washington. An examination of the American effort to train a police force in Iraq, drawn from interviews with several dozen American and Iraqi officials, internal police reports and visits to Iraqi police stations and training camps, shows a cascading series of misjudgments by White House and Pentagon officials, who repeatedly underestimated the role the United States would need to play in rebuilding the police and generally maintaining order.

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers. Current and former administration officials said they were relying on a Central Intelligence Agency assessment that said the Iraqi police were well trained. The C.I.A. said its assessment conveyed nothing of the sort.

After Baghdad fell, when a majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Back before the misbegotten war, one of the arguments I made against it (in addition to the moral one) is that none of these people are competent to make life and death decisions. My greater sorrow is that I was right on the latter case.

Re-Inventing NOLA

Nagin Is Reelected In New Orleans
Landrieu Concedes After Tight Race

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 21, 2006; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS, May 20 -- Mayor C. Ray Nagin was reelected Saturday, overcoming a ceaseless barrage of criticism stemming from the chaos of Hurricane Katrina and the stalled recovery to achieve what many considered an improbable victory.

In addition to the frustrations of post-hurricane New Orleans, Nagin had to fend off a strong challenge by Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a politically powerful clan, who outspent him by large a margin.

Surrounded by throngs of cheering supporters, Nagin acknowledged the antagonism he has aroused since Katrina and, to the surprise of many in the room, thanked President Bush.

"I want to thank you Mr. President. You and I have probably been the most vilified politicians in the country," he said. "But I want to thank you for moving that promise that you made in Jackson Square forward."

He cited the billions of dollars for housing and levee construction that Bush has supported, and then urged unity: "This election is over, and it is time for this community to start the healing process."

Many here, such as City Council President Oliver M. Thomas Jr., considered Nagin's victory the "biggest upset ever." Earlier in the day, Thomas and many others had predicted a Landrieu win.

Despite calls by both candidates for unity across the historic barriers of race, the vote split largely along racial lines. Nagin won by gaining the support of about 80 percent of black voters and about 20 percent of white voters, according to election analyst Greg Rigamer.

Yes, racial politics played a role, but I think there was another factor. When you are in a clutch situation, you stay with the devil you know.

Moon Over Mumbai

Quick Tandoori Chicken

Not a true tandoori, but this gives you a gourmet meal on a weeknight. Serve with jasmine rice and coriander chutney (recipe follows.) This is best marinated overnight in the fridge. It's quick to toss together before you head for bed, then cover with plastic and refrigerate. Then, it is quick to cook after work.

For spice paste
1 large garlic clove
3/4 teaspoons coarse salt
1 small fresh red or green chile such as serrano or cayenne
1/3 cup low-fat plain yogurt
2 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons grated peeled fresh gingerroot
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander seeds
3/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup coconut milk

4 skinless boneless chicken breast halves (about 1 1/4 pounds total)
1 small red onion
2 teaspoons vegetable oil

For yogurt sauce
1/2 cup low-fat plain yogurt
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
a pinch cayenne

Make spice paste:
Mince garlic with salt and mash to a paste. Wearing protective gloves, mince chile (including seeds for a spicier paste) and in a bowl stir together with garlic paste and remaining spice paste ingredients.

Make 3 diagonal cuts about 1/4 inch deep in each chicken breast and rub spice paste into cuts and all over chicken. Marinate chicken, covered, 30 minutes at cool room temperature.

Preheat broiler and line broiler pan with foil. Halve onion through root end and reserve 1 half for sauce. Thinly slice remaining onion half, separating layers, and in a small bowl soak onion slices in ice water to cover while broiling chicken.

Arrange chicken without crowding on rack of broiler pan. Brush chicken with 1 teaspoon vegetable oil and broil about 3 inches from heat 8 minutes. Turn chicken over and brush with remaining teaspoon vegetable oil. Broil chicken until lightly browned and just cooked through, about 6 minutes more.

Make sauce while chicken is broiling:
Mince enough reserved onion to measure 1 tablespoon and in a small bowl stir together with all sauce ingredients.

Drain soaked onion and pat dry between paper towels. Top chicken with onion slices and serve with yogurt sauce.

Serves 4.

Coriander Chutney

1 cup finely chopped fresh coriander leaves
¾ th cup freshly grated coconut or dried unsweetened coconut
3 hot green chilies (or as desired for hotness)
2 teaspoons cumin seeds (dry roasted)
2 teaspoons sugar
Juice of 3/4 lime
Salt to Taste
Blend all the above ingredients at high speed in a blender adding just enough water to make a thick pouring consistency. Store in refrigerator. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

This is zippy and great with jasmine rice and yoghurt sauce over rice.

An Indian meal will include breads of some kind and this is a great dipping sauce for naan or papadums. The latter are easy to find in the international food aisle at the grocery and you can cook them quickly directly on a hot range burner, electric or gas. With chutney, they are Indian chips and dips.

Hmm. I think I'm going out for Indian tomorrow night.

Frito Misto di Verdura

This is the Italian version of vegetable tempura. The temperature of the oil is critical to getting a greaseless, crunchy crust, so do the veggies in batches if you have a small pot. This is great with sweet spring veggies and will serve 6 as a side. This is wonderful with roast lamb or chicken. Or serve them instead of fries with burgers.

1/4 pound sweet peas in pod
1/4 pound green beans, ends snapped off
1 head broccoli, cut into thin spears
1 bunch scallions, root ends removed and greens trimmed
1 zucchini, cut into 1/2-inch thick rounds
1 summer squash, cut into 1/2-inch thick rounds
1 sweet yellow bell pepper, cored and cut into 1/2-inch thick strips
1/2 head cauliflower, cut into thin spears
1 bunch aspargus, trimmed of the woody sections
1 peeled sweet potato, juillienned
3 lemons, cut into wedges
2 1/2 cups cornstarch
2 quarts canola oil, for frying
Salt, to taste

Heat the oil in a deep pan with a basket until just smoking. In a wide, shallow bowl, mix half the vegetables and 1/3 of the lemon wedges. Sprinkle with 1 cup cornstarch and toss quickly with hands to coat. Toss into a large strainer with a handle and bat against hands to remove excess cornstarch. Drop the coated vegetables and lemons into the oil and cook until golden brown and crispy (about 2 minutes).

Remove to a plate lined with paper towels to drain. Immediately repeat with the 1/3 of the remaining lemons and all remaining vegetables. Season the hot fried foods with salt and serve immediately with fresh lemon wedges.

Do all of this while your meat is resting prior to carving. These are fun veggies to eat.

Hostile Skies

This is something to look forward to:

Rough Summer Is On the Way for Air Travel
By JEFF BAILEY

CHICAGO, May 20 — Brace yourself for a summer of miserable air travel.

Planes are expected to be packed fuller than at anytime since World War II, when the airlines helped transport troops. Fares are rising. Service frills are disappearing.

Logjams at airport security checkpoints loom as the federal government strains to keep screener jobs filled. The usual violent summer storms are expected to send the air traffic control system into chaos at times, with flight delays and cancellations cascading across the country.

And many airline employees, after years of pay cuts and added work, say they are dreading the season ahead. Those workers — and there are about 70,000 fewer of them than in 2002 — will be handling more than 100 million more passengers this year than they did four years ago.

The friendly skies, indeed.

"Everybody's stressed. Everybody's feeling it," said Bryan Hutchinson, a former baggage handler at United Airlines who now works in a joint airline-union program to counsel workers suffering from stress or other emotional problems.

I've hated flying for years and it is unlikely to change this year....

Guarding the Geeks

I want my IT guy
We may shriek at our information technology people now, but we'll miss them when they're replaced by a software program.
By Eve Conant, EVE CONANT is a freelance writer on science and technology.
May 20, 2006

THEY SAY OUR EYES are the window to our souls. But what about our hard drives? They're the closest thing to a diary most of us will ever hope to keep, religiously updated with our private correspondence, our work and our fantasies. Yet we're anything but intimate with the men and women tasked with keeping them healthy. Instead, our relationship with IT people is more like that of two armies staring at each other across a minefield.

The most dangerous anti-personnel issue of all is security. I was proud of my catchy password, until I discovered that it made me a thorn in the side of all IT-kind. It turns out my all-too-memorable byword is right up there in the "Ask Yahoo" list of no-nos, a virtual "Bring Your Own Hacker" cyberparty invite.

"Not everybody has the kind of mind that can fasten onto passwords," says David Babski, chief IT guy for Energy Intelligence newsletters. To him, the only password worth knowing is 16 characters long and sprinkled with asterisks and whatnots and symbols I'd only use for cursing. Of course, his is un-crackable, even by one of those computer programs that attacks your password by trying every word in the dictionary, and then common and uncommon names. But would it still be secure if filed under P for "Passwords" in your electronic Rolodex — or pasted to your monitor on a Post-It note?
....
Little wonder we can't relate to the people who are supposed to keep our stress-inducing technology running. We rarely see each other face to face. We only dial when desperate, the professional equivalent of the booty call. And when we pick up the phone, emotions are raw. We've accessed that dark, snarling corner of the soul that defies the best therapists and yoga instructors and is only loosed when our computers freeze.

For some reason, many of us resort to craven flattery when in the company of an IT person — until things go seriously wrong.

Robert Stiles, my IT friend with the wonderful title "solutions director," is stunned when seemingly sane users go ballistic, "like we really wanted your machine to blow up, on purpose." I ask him about that reptilian-brain panic we users often reach in the company of IT people. "You mean when you go back to infancy?" he asks. Hmmm.

Blame it on ADT — attention deficit trait. The Harvard Business Review recently published "Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform," about this newly minted neurological malaise caused by technology and multitasking. Core symptoms include "inner frenzy and impatience" resulting in the classic office meltdown: "The brain and body are locked in a reverberating circuit while the frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine." Add a computer malfunction and it's obvious why there's no IT-client socializing.

Yet change is afoot. The techie world is abuzz with a new plan to replace traditional software with "SaaS" or Software-as-a-Service. Instead of licensing and installing software packages, businesses can run applications via the Web. Ditto for maintenance. In the future, companies might have customer databases and word-processing programs all online, needing only the barest IT presence to monitor their hardware and Internet connections. Initially designed for small companies, the SaaS movement is creeping into bigger corporations anxious to slash the cost of their IT departments. Bill Gates has called SaaS the "next sea change." The Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm, listed as a top reason for choosing SaaS in a recent poll: "To avoid the IT department."

I don't avoid the IT department. pogge is the IT department around here and I do what he tells me. It's only been within the last year that I've been able to stop hyperventilating when something goes wrong and describe the symptoms to him in relatively even tones, however

Waking Late

Opposition to Iraq War at 62% in U.S.
May 19, 2006

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – More adults in the United States are disappointed with their government’s decision to go to war in Iraq, according to a poll by TNS released by the Washington Post and ABC News. 62 per cent of respondents think the conflict was not worth fighting, up five points since March.

For the first time since the conflict began, fewer than four-in-ten Americans believe the war with Iraq was worth fighting.

The coalition effort against Saddam Hussein’s regime was launched in March 2003. At least 2,454 American soldiers have died during the military operation, and more than 17,900 troops have been wounded in action. 76 per cent of respondents think there have been an unacceptable number of U.S. military casualties in Iraq.

In December 2005, Iraqi voters renewed their National Assembly. On Apr. 21, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance nominated Jawad al-Maliki for the position of prime minister.

Somebody tell me what the other 38% are thinking.

The Road Ahead

Growing Number of GOP Seats In Doubt
Vulnerability Seen In Unusual Places

By Michael D. Shear and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 20, 2006; A01

VIRGINIA BEACH, May 19 -- When some of the country's top political handicappers drew up their charts of vulnerable House incumbents at the beginning of this year, Rep. Thelma D. Drake (R-Va.) was not among them. Now she is.

President Bush carried her district with 58 percent of the vote in 2004, but strategists say his travails are part of the reason the freshman lawmaker now has a fight on her hands. He swooped into town briefly Friday for a closed-door fundraiser for Drake but made no public appearances.

Drake, who won with ease two years ago, is not alone. With approval ratings for Bush and congressional Republicans at a low ebb, GOP strategists see signs of weakness where they least expected it -- including a conservative, military-dominated suburb such as Virginia Beach -- and fear that their problems could grow worse unless the national mood brightens.

Some veterans of the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress see worrisome parallels between then and now, in the way once-safe districts are turning into potential problems. Incumbents' poll numbers have softened. Margins against their Democratic opponents have narrowed. Republican voters appear disenchanted. The Bush effect now amounts to a drag of five percentage points or more in many districts.

The changes don't guarantee a Democratic takeover by any means, but they are creating an increasingly asymmetrical battlefield for the fall elections: The number of vulnerable Democratic districts has remained relatively constant while the number of potentially competitive Republican districts continues to climb.

Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of a political newsletter, now has 42 Republican districts, including Drake's, on his list of competitive races. Last September, he had 26 competitive GOP districts, and Drake's wasn't on the list. "That's a pretty significant increase," he said. "The national atmospherics are making long shots suddenly less long."

At the Cook Political Report, Amy Walter has revised an analysis of the battle for control of the House, taking into account the sour mood toward Republicans nationally as a potentially significant factor in races that might otherwise turn on local issues, candidate performance or the size of campaign war chests.

"In a nationalized election, the typical laws of gravity get thrown out the window," Walter said. "Under-funded candidates beat better-funded candidates, and entrenched incumbents lose to first-time challengers."

It's six months to the election, which is an eternity in politics. Given the number of scandal investigations and their sequelae currently in the works, the landscape could still change a lot, though I see nothing in the works which bodes well for the GOP.

Death Trap, Suicide Rap

U.N. sharply criticizes treatment of detainees

By Matthew Schofield
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Sat, May. 20, 2006

BERLIN - The U.N. Committee Against Torture said U.S. policies toward suspected terrorists violated international treaties.

A United Nations committee report released Friday that condemned U.S. treatment of suspected terrorists and called for the closing of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and secret terrorist detention centers seemed likely to further divide the Bush administration from close allies in Europe.

The panel's criticism came as military officials at Guantanamo disclosed the most serious disturbances by prisoners there since the camp opened and new suicide attempts that left two prisoners hospitalized and unconscious after overdosing on anti-anxiety medications they had apparently hoarded.

The disturbances, which took place on Thursday, included a violent attack on guards that was put down by anti-riot soldiers firing shotgun blasts and pepper spray, and a melee involving two other groups of prisoners who tore apart their quarters and attacked guards in a showcase unit for the camp's most-compliant inmates.

While human rights advocates praised the report, compiled by the U.N. Committee Against Torture after two days of hearings earlier this month, the findings were greeted frostily in Washington by various officials who showed no interest in complying with the committee's recommendations.

The State Department's top lawyer, John Bellinger, accused the committee of going "well outside its mandate" in discussing Guantanamo and the secret prisons that the CIA allegedly has run in Eastern Europe and Asia. White House spokesman Tony Snow noted that the committee had rejected U.S. invitations to visit Guantanamo and said that the treatment of prisoners there "is fully within the boundaries of American law."

Still, the report was the most authoritative examination yet of Bush administration policies and was certain to fuel the intense international criticism of how the United States deals with suspected terrorists.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, two of Bush's closest European allies, have called for the Guantanamo camp to be closed. The report is likely to put pressure on them and other Western leaders to lean harder on President Bush.

The U.N. committee, which is responsible for reviewing whether countries are adhering to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, is composed of members from 10 countries, including the United States.

The United States sent a large 29-member delegation to the committee's hearings in Geneva, a sign of how important the administration considered its report.

The report slammed the United States for a range of practices, including interrogation techniques "that have resulted in the death of some detainees" and the use of "extraordinary rendition" to seize suspected terrorists in one country and deliver them to another for interrogation and jailing.

Even our closest allies condemn us.

Simple Questions

New Face, Old Evasion
Is 'waterboarding' still practiced by the CIA?

Saturday, May 20, 2006; Page A22

AT THE SENATE intelligence committee hearing Thursday on Gen. Michael V. Hayden's nomination to head the CIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is "waterboarding" an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail." That was the wrong answer. The right one would have been simple: No. Last year Congress banned cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment of detainees; one of its explicit aims was to stop the CIA's use of waterboarding, which induces an excruciating sensation of drowning and is considered by most human rights organizations to constitute torture. So why couldn't Gen. Hayden say clearly that the technique is now off-limits?

Few issues facing the next CIA director are more important than what to do about the agency's network of secret prisons, in which it is holding -- and has been abusively interrogating -- high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives. Gen. Hayden acknowledged in open session that the new law binds the CIA and made clear as well that it requires all federal agencies, including the one he is slated to lead, "to handle detainees wherever they may be located in a way that is not cruel, inhumane or degrading."

Yet in signing the law, President Bush made clear he reserved the right to override it as part of his inherent powers as commander in chief. What's more, his administration has quietly taken the view that waterboarding could actually be consistent with a ban on cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment. Now Gen. Hayden refuses in public to forswear the use of such barbaric treatment. The damage done by such silence to America's global standing and long-term interests is incalculable.

I think the American people are entitled to know what acts are being committed in our name. I found Hayden's tendency to secrecy at his hearing to be very troubling. The idea that there are a select group of people who "know what is good for us" is very frightening.

Friday Night Live

See the CNN story below. I'm dealing with the repetitive motion injuries and taking the rest of the night off to rest my hands and arms. I'm having muscle spasms from the backs of my hands all the way up to my elbows. These arms need rest tonight and I think it is time for me to call the massage therapist. An old injury in my left elbow is throbbing (that one needs an orthopod, but that has to wait on insurance.) My eyes hurt from staring at the screen all day and my hay fever is screaming, the pollen this week has been visible in the air. I'm going to try to have a life tonight.

21st Century Junk

Since you are here, you are at risk.

Growing concern over Internet addiction

Friday, May 19, 2006; Posted: 12:10 p.m. EDT (16:10 GMT)

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- For some, the Internet it has become an addiction, adversely affecting their lives and their family's lives.

While not yet defined as a true addiction, many people are suffering the consequences of obsession with the online world, warns Dr. Diane M. Wieland, who treats patients with computer addiction in her practice in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

For some people, the Internet may promote addictive behaviors and pseudo-intimate interpersonal relationships, reports Wieland in the journal, Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. "Such cyberspace contacts may result in cyber disorders such as virtual relationships that evolve into online marital infidelity (cybersex) or online sexually compulsive behaviors," she writes.

"Obsession with and craving time on the computer results in neglect of real-life personal relationships to the point of divorce," Wieland says.

The prevalence of Internet addiction is hard to gauge at the moment, Wieland notes. Extrapolating from prevalence rates of other addictions, she thinks that 5 percent to 10 percent of Internet users will most likely experience addiction.

Signs and symptoms of Internet addiction include a general disregard for health and appearance; sleep deprivation due to spending so much time online; and decreased physical activity and social interaction with others. Dry eyes, carpal tunnel syndrome, and repetitive motion injuries of the hands and fingers are common.

Internet addicts may also get the "cyber shakes" when off line, exhibiting agitation and typing motions of the fingers when not at the computer.

Many Internet addicts have a history of depression, alcohol or drug abuse, and anxiety disorder, according to Wieland, who is an associate professor at the La Salle University School of Nursing.

"Hello, my name's Melanie and I'm a....."

Commencement Season

Via zig at Today in Iraq:

Protests to greet Condoleezza Rice at Boston school
18 May 2006 23:06:34 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Monica M. Clark

BOSTON, May 18 (Reuters) - Plans by a prominent Boston Jesuit school to award U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree are stirring protests by some students and faculty who say her support for the Iraq war contradicts Catholic teaching.

Boston College theology professor David Hollenbach and Kenneth Himes, the department's chair, issued a petition to the school's president objecting to a planned commencement address by Rice on Monday when she will receive the honorary degree -- a custom for commencement speakers.

One faculty member, Steven Almond, resigned in protest.

"We'll be turning our backs during the honorary degree ceremony," said Sasha Westerman, a graduating student at the college who plans to distribute 1,000 protest armbands along with placards reading: "not in our name."

"No one asked me if I wanted (Rice) to speak and no one asked me if I wanted (the country) to go to Iraq," she said.

Support for Rice was also strong. Some students said a recent rally organized to protest Rice's visit drew only a few hundred of the school's 9,000 students.

Kenny Himes was my moral theology prof. I wonder how he likes the political climate at his new home? When the war started in 2003, Posted by Melanie at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)