disturbing the comfortable

Funding urban development and infra-structure like schools, streets, sewer systems, and so forth falls on the property-tax-payers. The people who pay taxes on their homes, not the corporations. Big corporations make sweet-heart deals all over the country, avoiding property taxes and other expenses. With the various economic squeezes hitting cities and counties, they are desperate to get whatever they can out of corporations—and that comes as donations.

So what the corporations do is become civic donors. How simple, how decent. How...clever. Nike lobbied for nearly $17 million reduction in their corporate taxes per year. Over five years, they’ve donated $9 million. Most of that $9 million went to Portland Public Schools—who definitely needed it, sure. The big developers on the east side of the mountains make all kinds of donations: seasonal festivals, parks, libraries, and schools. They don’t donate more than what they avoid paying under Oregon’s tax laws and under county and city agreements. But what they’ve managed to do is hold the various communities hostage to their donations. If they get offended...bye-bye.


http://joesschool.blogs.com/

January 20, 2007

Nike's donation of $9 million over five years to three local school districts, including Portland, has district officials doing cartwheels.

But as Steve Duin points out, corporate donations come at a cost --namely, tax revenue. Like $16.7 million in tax revenue that Nike won't be paying to the state for 2006 because of changes in the corporate tax code that the Beaverton-based company actively lobbied for:

"Nike lobbied viciously, and successfully, for the single-sales factor, which dramatically cut income taxes for companies with significant property and payroll in Oregon but a majority of sales outside the state."

No surprise then that Nike donated nine mill over five years when if saved nearly twice that in a single tax year.

Have the district and its board "viciously" lobbied for corporate tax reform at the state legislature? If they have, they've been doing it largely out of the public eye, probably for fear of offending their allies and sugar daddies in the business world.

The increasing reliance on grants and handouts from the private sector to fund schools is worrisome to me. It raises the question: Who ultimately determines policy for Portland Public Schools? Phil Knight? Bill Gates? Or the public in an open and democratic fashion?

The district's excitement over Nike's million dollar donation goes a long way in answering that question.

Historical perspectives are in short supply. Nobody wants to remember much of anything, it seems, except maybe the last movie seen or who got nominated for a Goofy. Maybe some old resentments about something or other….

There’s a bill in the legislature to make English the “official” language of Oregon.

This makes me nuts. It’s a direct hustle for the vote of those people who believe (I won’t say “thinking,” because that’s not what they’re doing) that America is being innundated with the hoardes of illegal immigrants, sucking up our precious natural essences. That’s an old propaganda piece—the Irish, Italians, VietNamese and various other non-Northern Europeans have invaded our Anglo-Saxon protestant paradise: to arms! to arms! Grab your crosses and torches!

If you start following the links on the English-should-be-official sites, you'll sooner or later come back to the Nasties—the sites advocating the arming of the citizenry, the abolition of equal opportunity laws, outlawing women's rights to their own bodies, and so on. Same ol' same ol'.

Ugh.


Ore. legislators push bill to make English official language
1/20/2007, 1:11 p.m. PT
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-18/1169327956270030.xml&storylist=orlocal
SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Yamhill County's all-Republican legislative delegation and other Republicans have introduced a bill to declare English Oregon's official language.

"While our diversity makes us strong, it takes a common language to bring diverse people together," said Rep. Donna Nelson, R-McMinnville, the bill's sponsor.

The bill would force few if any changes if passed. It stems from a national English-only movement.

When Arizona voters approved adopting English as their official state language by a 3-1 margin in November it became the 28th state to do so.

U.S. English Inc., a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group, said similar legislation is pending in at least seven other states and that it hopes for a federal bill.

Opponents denounced it as opportunistic at best, racist at worst.

Nelson said on Friday that response has been positive.

It could release public agencies from having to provide services or information in other languages unless mandated by state or federal law.

Officials in the legislative and administrative branches said they were unaware of any such requirements in the first place but that many agencies voluntarily offer some materials and services in Spanish as an option for safety reasons in matters such as road rules or pesticide applications.

But Lonn Lon Hoklin, a spokesman for the state Department of Administrative Services, said he was unaware of any requirements to do so.

Critics of English-only legislation regard it as political posturing or worse.

"They're trying to be attentive to their conservative base. Why else would they bring this up?" asked David Molina, a Beaverton businessman who sits on the Oregon Commission for Hispanic Affairs.

Mike Davis, a University of California historian and co-author of the book "No One is Illegal," said the English-only movement feeds on historical misunderstandings and silly paranoia.

English, he said, is the fastest-growing language on the planet and far from endangered.

"Why then English only? Because it allows racists and nativists to pursue their dirty business with the plausible denial that they are not advocating discrimination, only Americanism," he ***
___

Information from: News-Register, http://www.newsregister.com

There was an AP story yesterday, about the number of people hiring United Van Lines so they could move to Oregon. That's just wonderful, yes. Bend is so crowded now the streets are overwhelmed at what we used to laughingly refer to as "rush hour." The thing is, these days, there really is a rush hour here. A lot of big SUVs and pickups, too—the traffic is disgusting. Combine the cars and trucks with bicyclists zipping along, big semi trucks here and there, and getting across town after three-thirty p.m. is an adventure. The city doesn't seem to know what to do, other than look for magic bullets. Round-abouts are the current favorites. The city is planning a round-about with two lanes in each direction. That will be an adventure.

The stunning thing about the article is the mention of "affordable homes" being one of the reasons people move to Oregon. The nearest affordable homes I've seen are in Burns or Condon; ain't none around here, folks.

Sunday, January 28, 2007 - 12:00 AM

Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo, other than personal use, must be obtained from The Seattle Times. Call 206-464-3113 or e-mail resale@seattletimes.com with your request.

Company says Oregon No. 2 destination for moving

The Associated Press

SALEM, Ore. — Oregon is the No. 2 destination nationally for people moving from other states, according to a study by United Van Lines.

***

The migration trend did not surprise Judy Yriarte, the director of relocation services for Prudential Real Estate Professionals in Salem.

"We saw a 58 percent increase in relocations last year over the same period in 2005," Yriarte said.

The majority of the newcomers moved into areas along the Interstate 5 corridor, from Portland to Salem to Medford, with some settling in Bend, she said.

Some of the reasons they cited include the weather, the landscape and quality of life and affordable homes, said Jeri Scott, the executive vice president of Coldwell Banker Mountain West in Salem.

***

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

OK, here’s a news alert about some thieves who are as cold-hearted as Dick Cheney…

This is real, by the way...


Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:10:02 -0800
From: "Axis of Love"
Subject: Axis of Love Alert: Robbers Dressed as DEA Agents Trying to Rob SF Dispensaries

Axis of Love Alert: Robbers Dressed as DEA Agents Trying to Rob SF Dispensaries

Law enforcement in San Francisco are stopping by dispensaries in the city today to warn them that robbers are dressing up as DEA agents and trying to rob dispensaries. Axis of Love received the alert from Hope Net, who were tipped off by San Francisco police.

We'd like to remind everyone that whether it's DEA agents or robbers posing as DEA agents or law enforcement, their goals are the same -- to steal our medicine from us.

JUST SAY NO and close your doors to any DEA agent, real or not!

Don’t ask for the URL on this. I copied it out to send to Tinacoyote, my sister, down in Santa Fe. Sent her my congratulations, too.

Beneath Bush’s folksy-bullshit there’s as much contempt for the electorate as Cheney demonstrated in the CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. Neither Bush nor Cheney care what people think. They don’t have to: they’re in power and that’s that.


Lawmakers call for Bush impeachment, NM

04:34 PM Mountain Standard Time on Wednesday, January 24, 2007

By Deborah Baker / Associated Press

SANTA FE (AP) -- Two New Mexico lawmakers have introduced a measure calling on Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

State Sens. John Grubesic of Santa Fe and Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque, both Democrats, said the resolution is a serious effort to try to trigger impeachment proceedings.

New Mexico, where lawmakers are meeting until March 17, would be the first state to pass the resolution, they said.

The measure alleges that Bush and Cheney conspired with others to intentionally mislead Congress and the public about the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify the war.

It also cites the administration's warrantless wiretapping program and alleges the torture of prisoners and the denial of constitutional rights to enemy combatants.

***
A state can't mandate impeachment, but impeachment charges from a state can be forwarded to the U.S. House of Representatives and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, according to impeachment advocates.

Of course I have a list of politicians I intensely dislike. Sometimes all it takes is to look at the morning newspapers, and the list gets longer—well, that’s how I got the list in the first place.

Close to Tommy-boy, though, is Newt. Somehow, after utterly disgraceful behavior toward his then-wife, Gingrich has managed to resurface through the scum. Now he’s promoting himself as a possible conservative candidate for president. The excerpt down below, is from a speech he made at a group called ProEnglish which should properly be called Pro-Anglo-American or maybe, Pro-White Folks. Their links lead you to various pro-south, anti-civil-rights, conservation web pages. My belief is that both these guys are closer to the spirit of David Duke than John Adams.

I have to admit, though, Tom Tancredo, Paleo-Re(pub)actionary, since Dick Pombo is gone, is close to the top of the heap. So I put the excerpt about Tancredo first. Newt is below that.



MSNBC.com
Tancredo: Abolish black, Hispanic caucuses
Calls Congress hypocritical for sanctioning caucuses based solely on race
The Associated Press
Updated: 12:43 p.m. PT Jan 25, 2007

WASHINGTON - White House hopeful Tom Tancredo said Thursday the existence of the Congressional Black Caucus and other race-based groups of lawmakers amounts to segregation and should be abolished.

"It is utterly hypocritical for Congress to extol the virtues of a colorblind society while officially sanctioning caucuses that are based solely on race," said the Colorado Republican, who is most widely known as a vocal critic of illegal immigration.

"If we are serious about achieving the goal of a colorblind society, Congress should lead by example and end these divisive, race-based caucuses," said Tancredo, who is scheduled pitch his longshot presidential bid this weekend in New Hampshire.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16812597/
© 2007 MSNBC.com

Jan. 25, 2007, 9:33AM
Gingrich pushes for English as official language
Possible GOP presidential candidate says it's key to assimilation
http://www.rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chron.com%2Fdisp%2Fstory.mpl%2Ffront%2F4497265.html
By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — American civilization eventually will collapse if government doesn't do a better job assimilating immigrants into society, possible GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Wednesday as he urged Congress to enshrine English as the nation's official language.

The former House speaker said political correctness and multiculturalism are clouding the debate about language.

"If you are pro-immigration to America, you should be pro-assimilation into English as the common language because in fact your children and grandchildren will have a dramatically better future if they are part of the common commercial civilization," Gingrich said.

He spoke at a news conference organized by ProEnglish***

The admiinistration does not want good health care for all Americans, period. It has no qualms about it’s rich friends having good health care, but it really doesn’t give a shit for the poor. 47 Million without health care insurance—men, women, children. Almost all of those uninsured are at or below the poverty line; Bush’s tax plan won’t help them one bit—what it will do is tax those in the middle (who continue to pay for their own insurance). It helps build some nice intra-class hostility. And it will benefit the insurance companies—which is no surprise.

Here in Bend we have to clinics for those without insurance—it’s a long wait to get into either one. Otherwise, people wait until medical emergencies and then head for the ER over at St Charles. This isn’t unusual at all in our country. We need a health care plan for all Americans; like Canada has, Japan has, England has, Germany….Those countries have one government agency that handles medical insurance; just like Medicare does. Medicare works and there’re reasons to expect it to work just as well as an agency for insuring all Americans, and save money.


Gold-Plated Indifference
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/printer_012207HA.shtml
Monday 22 January 2007

President Bush's Saturday radio address was devoted to health care, and officials have put out the word that the subject will be a major theme in tomorrow's State of the Union address. Mr. Bush's proposal won't go anywhere. But it's still worth looking at his remarks, because of what they say about him and his advisers.

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should "treat health insurance more like home ownership." He went on to say that "the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance."

Wow. Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it's like to be uninsured.

Going without health insurance isn't like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It's a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don't need an "incentive" to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can't afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

Of those uninsured who aren't low-income, many can't get coverage because of pre-existing conditions - everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won't solve their problem.

The only people the Bush plan might move out of the ranks of the uninsured are the people we're least concerned about - affluent, healthy Americans who choose voluntarily not to be insured. At most, the Bush plan might induce some of those people to buy insurance, while in the process - whaddya know - giving many other high-income individuals yet another tax break.

While proposing this high-end tax break, Mr. Bush is also proposing a tax increase - not on the wealthy, but on workers who, he thinks, have too much health insurance. The tax code, he said, "unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need."

Again, wow. No economic analysis I'm aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul's premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have "gold plated" health coverage please raise their hands?

According to press reports, the actual plan is to penalize workers with relatively generous insurance coverage. Just to be clear, we're not talking about the wealthy; we're talking about ordinary workers who have managed to negotiate better-than-average health plans.

What's driving all this is the theory, popular in conservative circles but utterly at odds with the evidence, that the big problem with U.S. health care is that people have too much insurance - that there would be large cost savings if people were forced to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket.

The administration also believes, for some reason, that people should be pushed out of employment-based health insurance - admittedly a deeply flawed system - into the individual insurance market, which is a disaster on all fronts. Insurance companies try to avoid selling policies to people who are likely to use them, so a large fraction of premiums in the individual market goes not to paying medical bills but to bureaucracies dedicated to weeding out "high risk" applicants - and keeping them uninsured.

I'm somewhat skeptical about health care plans, like that proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that propose covering gaps in the health insurance market with a series of patches, such as requiring that insurers offer policies to everyone at the same rate. But at least the authors of these plans are trying to help those most in need, and recognize that the market needs fixing.

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is still peddling the fantasy that the free market, with a little help from tax cuts, solves all problems.

What's really striking about Mr. Bush's remarks, however, is the tone. The stuff about providing "incentives" to buy insurance, the sneering description of good coverage as "gold plated," is right-wing think-tank jargon. In the past Mr. Bush's speechwriters might have found less offensive language; now, they're not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of less-fortunate Americans.

Bush's SOTU speech is all over the internet this morning. Everyone has a take on it. My take was:

boilerplate blah-blah cliche blah boilerplate
blah-blah-blah cliche blah blah
boilerplate cliche boilerplate blah
blah blah blah
cliche—platitude!—cliche blah
blech!
...barf

One of the weirder news stories was about “bugged” Canadian coins. It was an outlandish rumor, but then so is a president as awful as Bush.

The story was that the Defense Department said there were Canadian coins with teeny-little radio transmitters installed in them. Those sneaky liberal Canadians! What did we expect from a country with socialized medicine? And all those tar sands in Alberta...maybe we should do a little pre-emptive invasion….

Wasn’t true. Didn’t think it was.

Friday, January 19, 2007 - 12:00 AM

Canadian spy coins never existed
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003531586&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=coins19&date=20070119
By Ted Bridis
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Reversing itself, the Defense Department says an espionage report it produced that warned about Canadian coins with tiny radio-frequency transmitters was not true.

The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has begun an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns.

The service had contended since late June that such coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

"The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter," the agency said in a statement published on its Web site last week.


Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

I realize that the anniversary of Roe v Wade was a day in which all us good bloggers would speak out for women's right to decide just when and where and if they wanted to have children. I missed it. It is something I believe in.

But, I didn't post anything.

If Bush's appointees to SCOTUS have anything to do about it, Roe v Wade is going to be ancient history. And since Congress approved those guys...What I say or do wouldn't have made much difference.

Last night, I started talking about British history. I like history, but it teaches me a great deal about the present. Particularly British history: our legal and legislative systems derive from it. And so, sadly, does our current situation in Iraq.

Iraq is a near-repeat of an earlier British adventure. After World War One, the allies broke up the Ottoman Empire, picking and choosing among themselves about who wanted what. The Brits got, among other plums, Iraq. Before the war, what we now call Iraq was a collection of nomadic and settled tribes—Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Jews, Turkomen. The allied powers drew some lines on the map and created Iraq. It had no more a national history than did Yugoslavia.

What it did have, of course, was oil. Barry Lando, in this piece for AlterNet, does a good job of summarizing that history; I urge everyone to read all of it.

AlterNet
Surging to Baghdad-The Blockbuster Remake
By Barry Lando
Posted on January 14, 2007, Printed on January 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lando/46705/

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia [Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…..We are today not far from disaster.”

So wrote Colonel T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) in the London Sunday Times, August 1920.

Indeed, reviewing the historical record of British attempts to rule first Mesopotamia and then Iraq you get the feeling you’re watching an old Hollywood black and white classic that has been reshot for an American audience with digitalized sound, computer animation, and the “United States” substituted for “England.”

***

Hmm. Saturday again. And, as usual, on a slow news week-end, the domestic news is about the number of knuckleheads who have announced their campaigns for the presidency. The news channels on TV and the political blogs are ga-ga over all the candidates; that will save them the trouble of actually covering anything of substance between now and next year's elections. The coverage of the Golden Globs was enough, thank you.

The "progressives" are a-twitter over Obama's candidacy; the conservatives have fired up their slime machines. Obama's a machine Democrat. As such he's about as much a threat to the system as, say, Jimmy Carter was. The "system," our methods of governance, is extremely self-protective. Nobody who's a real threat stands a chance of getting elected: nobody. There's too much money involved, too many payrolls, too many bribes, campaign war chests—we're stuck with the current system of corporate-capitalism until the whole country crashes. Chances are, the country won't crash without taking the rest of the industrial world down with it—and it would probably turn the 21st Century into a techno-version of the 14th Century.

One of the people I am coming to truly dislike—maybe even despise—is our current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. His concept of presidential powers is...well, it’s sort of 17th Century; he would have fit right in with the crowd surrounding, say, James II of England. The man has never read history, or if he’s read it he didn’t have his glasses on.

After the English Revolution (#1), the nation was in turmoil: the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell was a disaster. England restored the Stuarts to the Throne. Unfortunately, the Stuarts were Catholic and closely aligned with England’s long-time enemy, Louis of France. James II, of England, was a fool. His overt manhandling of the government, the replacement of army officers, judges, and local administrators with Catholics angered the Protestants. The Protestants and those in favor of a restricted kingship—that is, the power of Parliament rather than the absolute power of a monarch—were Whigs. Tories were royalists, believers in the ultimate and almost-mystical power of whoever it was wearing the Crown. Many of them were Protestants, followers of the Church of England.

The Church of England—”Anglican Church”— was essentially divided into two factions: High Church and Low Church. The High Church was and is nearly Catholic. “Nearly” is the key word. Low Church is nearly indistinguishable from innumerable mainstream Protestant churches; indeed, in Canada, it’s become part of the “United Church of Canada.” However.

England was passionately nationalistic in the 17th Century; James’ religion and his ties to France were considered increasingly dangerous. Mainland Europe was still struggling with the fall-out of the Reformation. Scandinavia and Holland and many German principalities saw France as the leading actor in the Counter Reformation, the attempts to return all of Europe (as well as England) to the Catholic Religion.

The threat posed by James’ alliances alienated more and more Tories.

Essentially, what James was attempting was to assert himself as being more powerful than Parliament. Parliament might enact laws, but it was, according to James, the King’s prerogative as to enforcing them. He might, also, create laws as he saw fit. He was, as historians put it, the King above Parliament, rather than the King in Parliament as was the customary situation.

Parliament’s gig was to enact laws and the King’s duty was to enforce them. It was not, however in writing. James began issuing edicts that were more Catholic than Protestants. Some English Bishops objected.

James had them arrested and hauled to the Tower of London. They were brought to trial and acquitted, essentially by popular acclaim. James didn’t see the writing on the wall.

Various high-ranking Englishmen approached William of Orange and his wife, Mary. Mary was a daughter of James, but she was Protestant; his other children were Catholic. William and Mary were offered the throne of England, if they would “invade.”

They did, and James fled to France. He never returned. This became the Second English Revolution. England put some legal customs, like the relationship of King to Parliament, to paper. The result, essentially, was the way Great Britain is today ruled. The King (or Queen, yes) must act in accordance with Parliament; he or she is not the ultimate judge of what is legal and illegal. Judges are a separate branch and it’s their job to interpret and pass on or throw out laws.

That’s one of the traditions of our own legal system, more or less. We have three parts to government: Congress, the Executive, and the Judicial. The Executive is claiming the privilege of creating and enforcing laws without consulting Congress. The Attorney General claims that judges and members of Congress aren’t smart enough to know what needs to be done.

Sounds like James II and his pals defying Parliament.

Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_011907D.shtml
Friday 19 January 2007

In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales questioned whether the U.S. Constitution grants habeas corpus rights of a fair trial to every American.

Responding to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, Gonzales argued that the Constitution doesn't explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; it merely says when the so-called Great Writ can be suspended.

"There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there's a prohibition against taking it away," Gonzales said.

Gonzales's remark left Specter, the committee's ranking Republican, stammering.

"Wait a minute," Specter interjected. "The Constitution says you can't take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there's a rebellion or invasion?"

Gonzales continued, "The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended" except in cases of rebellion or invasion.

"You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense," Specter said.


AlterNet
Gonzales: We Know Best
By Barbara OBrien
Posted on January 17, 2007, Printed on January 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/obrien/46869/

You'll like this one. Suzanne Goldenberg writes for the Guardian:

***

In remarks made after a talk at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank, the attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales, said: “I don’t think that a judge is equipped at all to make decisions about what is in the national security interest of our country.”

Mr Gonzales’s comments come a few days after a Pentagon official provoked a national backlash after suggesting large corporations boycott law firms that defend detainees at Guantánamo.

***
The Associated Press reports,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says federal judges are unqualified to make rulings affecting national security policy, ramping up his criticism of how they handle terrorism cases.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. He also raps jurists who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences.”


© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/obrien/46869/

I hate to say “I told you so,” especially since I really didn’t say anything—but I thought it.

The hit Fox show, "24," is back with us, showing us how much we need someone who doesn't have to be constrained by the laws. These, we're reminded, and evil times and tens of thousands of evil people (along with thousands of well-meaning terrorist-fellow-travelers) are trying to destroy All That Is Sacred. Again.

It's the Lone Marauder gone anti-terrorist.

The Lone Marauder is an old American stand-by. It’s John Wayne, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Mickey Spillaine—the list could go on for page or two. The Lone Marauder stands, at best, beside the law. He—or she, but I can’t think of any female analogues—is outside the law because The Times Are Bad and Regular Law Is Powerless, or something like that. Steven Seagull karate chopping the bad guys, Mike Hammer blasting them with his .45, add your own anti-hero.

Jack Bauer is another in the long line of such characters. We love them. In our hearts, we feel scared and powerless (thanks to shows like “24”!) and we want those evil bastards to go down. Hard.

But...Yeah: we got along fine for years and years. At least until the authoritarians got what they needed in the way of power and excuses. And now, over and over, we’re being told this is the way it has to be.

Bull puckey.


AlterNet
Fox Show "24": Torture on TV
By Jon Wiener, TheNation.com
Posted on January 15, 2007, Printed on January 17, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46757/

"24" is back on Fox TV -- the hit show starring Kiefer Sutherland, which premiered Sunday night, once again features at least one big torture scene in every episode -- the kind of torture the Bush White House says is necessary to protect us from you-know-who.

The show is much more convincing than the White House at making the case for torture; its ratings have gone steadily up over the last five years, while Bush's ratings have gone steadily down.

In "24," Sutherland plays special agent Jack Bauer, head of the Counter Terrorism Unit. He fights some of his biggest battles not with the dark-skinned enemies trying to nuke L.A., but rather with the light-skinned do-gooders who think the head of the Counter Terrorism Unit should follow the rules.

Back in season four, for example, the bumbling bureaucrats released a captured terrorist before he could be tortured -- because a lawyer for "Amnesty Global" showed up whining about the Geneva Conventions. Jack had to quit the Counter Terrorist Unit and become a private citizen in order to break the suspect's fingers.

It's especially unfortunate to see Kiefer Sutherland play the world's most popular torturer -- because his father, Donald Sutherland, has been a prominent antiwar activist since Vietnam days and starred in some great films critiquing fascist politics, including "MASH" and Bertolucci's "1900" -- and also because Kiefer's grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was Canada's first socialist premier, and was recently voted "the greatest Canadian of all time" -- because he introduced universal public health care to Canada. The grandson meanwhile is being paid $10 million a season by Rupert Murdoch to shoot kneecaps, chop off hands, and bite his enemies to death (Sunday's special thrill).

The show's connection to the Bush White House and the conservative establishment became explicit last June, when Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff appeared alongside the show's producers and three cast members at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation to discuss "The public image of US terrorism policy." The discussion was moderated by Rush Limbaugh. The C-SPAN store sells a DVD of the event--price reduced from $60 to $29.95. Sunday night's two-hour premiere again argued not just that torture is necessary but that it works -- and it's also really exciting to watch. The show as usual made the "ticking time bomb" case for torture: we need to torture a suspect, or else thousands, or millions, will die in the next hour.

It's the same case made by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who proposed that judges ought to issue torture warrants in the "rare 'ticking bomb' case," and by University of Chicago law professor and federal judge Richard Posner, who has written, "If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used." He added that "no one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."

Thanks to "24," tens of millions of TV viewers know exactly what Dershowitz and Posner are talking about. As Richard Kim pointed out in The Nation in 2005, those are the cases where "the stakes are dire, the information perfect and the authorities omniscient." Of course that's a fantasy of total knowledge and power, and of course the U.S. has never had a real "ticking time bomb" case -- but Jack Bauer faces one every Sunday night on Fox.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/46757/

A couple of days ago, I posted a news story about Idaho’s governor planning on a wolf hunt that will kill, at least, 5/6ths of Idaho’s population of grey wolves. He’s a tool of ranching and development interests, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.

Here, for your edification, is a little story about how much of that “ranching” is about as real as Dick Cheyney’s hunting trips. They're places where people can kill animals so they can hang their heads on the walls of their dens and brag to their pals—and or business associates. It's trophy hunting, pure and simple. It's purely and simply revolting, too.

January 15, 2007
http://www.idahostatesman.com/101/story/67640.html

How to get a trophy elk: Point, shoot, pay

When John Martone spotted a huge bull elk on a forested slope, he immediately knew it was a trophy, but that killing it would add thousands more dollars to his hunt.

"My plans were to shoot a bull a lot smaller than the one I actually did shoot," said Martone, an options trader from Seattle who after several minutes decided to pull the trigger.

The antlers on Martone's elk measured a whopping 374 and 4/8th points in Safari Club International record book scoring. That bumped the price up to $8,000 at the 1,200-acre Mountain View Elk Ranch, a private facility near Riggins surrounded by high fences where farm-raised elk are bred to produce giant antlers, and hunters are guaranteed the biggest elk they can afford.

Martone's hunt was part of the burgeoning "shooter bull" industry in Idaho, which draws hunters from across the country to stalk farm-raised elk.

"We have a lot of people who are just tired of hunting (on public land) and all they see is wolf tracks," said Ken Walters, owner of Mountain View Elk Ranch. "There's just too much competition out there and there aren't that many elk in the wild."

But what some call the hunt of a lifetime to others doesn't deserve to be called hunting. Idaho's elk ranches themselves are in the cross hairs after the escape of up to 160 domestic elk near wildlife-rich Yellowstone National Park last summer.

Among hunting organizations, the Boone and Crockett Club "condemns the pursuit and killing of any big game animal kept in or released from captivity to be killed in an artificial or bogus ‘hunting' situation."

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation worries that domestic elk could hurt wild herds by spreading disease. Safari Club International approves of canned hunts, as they're called, but frowns on hunting farms that guarantee a kill because that violates the principle of "fair chase," which in essence means the animal being pursued has a sporting chance to escape.

"What is fair chase?" said Ken Sedy, a retired deputy sheriff from Arlington, Wash., who paid $4,000 to shoot a bull that scored 298 Safari Club points. "If you don't see a fence, it's just like hunting in the wild, but you're guaranteed to go home and eat elk meat."

About 15 Idaho elk farms allow hunting. The practice ranges from letting an individual elk go in a small patch of woods to be shot, to large, rugged enclosures where elk can be hard to find. Price charts tell hunters exactly how much a trophy will cost, with deals sometimes made right before the kill.

Bull elk that tally a rare 400 points typically cost about $10,000. Walters said elk with even larger antlers are "negotiable," and the most expensive he has heard of in Idaho was $35,000.

"Out of 10 elk raised on a ranch, maybe only one will have the capability of reaching 400," said Bill Rasmussen, who runs Thunder Mountain Elk Ranch in southeastern Idaho. "It takes a lot of years (six to seven) to raise a bull to that size."

Neither Martone nor Sedy shot the biggest bull in the enclosure.

"I saw one I didn't dare ask the price," said Sedy. "It looked like you could put a bale of hay between his antlers."

Backers of the enclosed elk hunting ranches cite private property rights in defense of their farms, and leave the fair chase ethics up to the hunter.

"It's in the eye of the beholder," Walter said. "Why should I make the decision for someone else if they want to go get an elk in a 5-acre pasture or in a 5,000-acre pasture?"

Still, to retain customers, some elk farm operators are searching for the right balance between offering an authentic fair-chase hunting experience and making sure of a kill.

In a hunt at a different ranch, Martone said he was disgusted at having an elk essentially delivered into his cross hairs.

"They let the animals go in a big yard, and that's the wrong way to do it," Martone said.

His more recent hunt was different, and he said he plans to return.

"You have to hunt them down. You have to sneak up on them. It's traditional hunting," Martone said. "If you're not physically fit, you're going to have a hard time at it."

Both Walters and Rasmussen release 40 to 60 elk, mostly bulls ranging from 1 to 9 years old, in the spring into rugged, forested terrain of about 1,000 acres. By fall, the elk have become skittish around people, they said, making it more challenging for hunters.

"I've got a couple wild bulls that I doubt anybody will ever shoot," Walters said.

Elk that survive return to lower elevations of the ranch in winter, where they are fed until the following spring. Some bulls are kept for breeding.

Idaho's domestic elk hunting industry took a hit in August when an estimated 160 elk escaped from an eastern Idaho elk hunting ranch, prompting then-Gov. Jim Risch to order an emergency hunt, saying the elk could spread inferior genes or disease to wild herds.

Sharpshooters killed at least 36 of the escaped animals from Rex Rammell's Chief Joseph hunting preserve near Rexburg. After the elk escape, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer blasted Idaho for jeopardizing the health and genetics of Yellowstone National Park elk herds. Montana and Wyoming both banned elk-hunting ranches.

Risch has asked Idaho lawmakers to consider doing the same. That seems unlikely given that in 2002 Idaho lawmakers voted to forgive $750,000 in fines the Idaho Department of Agriculture gave Rammell for not properly tagging his farm-bred elk.

"Ultimately it's a social question," said Brad Compton, state big game manager for Fish and Game. "It's just what society wants to offer."

One of real earthquakes of my life happened about fifteen years ago, when we visited Bear Butte, South Dakota. Bear Butte is a monolith that sits fifteen or twenty miles north of the Black Hills, out on the plains. It’s close to the town of Sturgis, where tens of thousands of “motorcyclists” (we used to call them “bikers” until we realized how much money they represented) congregate every summer.

Bear Butte is sacred to both the Cheyenne and Sioux Nations. It is where the Cheyenne recieved their Sacred Arrows from Sweet Medicine. It is where, for generations, the Sioux have gone for vision quests and retreats.

We stayed three nights in the ceremonial campground. The butte is a state park, and in general, no camping is permitted. We were there to do some ceremony, so we were allowed to stay at the Butte. We camped in a swale where Crazy Horse and his band used to camp. You can feel it. The trails up the butte are lined with signs: “Indians praying: please be respectful.” Every night we heard hand-drums from vision questers singing their prayers. Day and night there were sweat lodge ceremonies going on at the ceremonial campground.

It was amazing.

But, like most amazing and non-white things, it’s being developed to death. It may be, however, that steps are being taken to protect Bear Butte. I hope so.


Zoning rules may protect Bear Butte
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414349&na=1601
STURGIS, S.D. - The sacred mountain Bear Butte may get some relief from additional biker bars and mega-entertainment venues, with the help of Ellsworth Air Force Base. The Meade County commissioners are considering zoning restrictions to protect the base, and the zoning could also be extended to the area around Bear Butte.

Protesters have camped and prayed at Bear Butte in attempts to stop the growth of large biker bar venues that could attract thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts that attend the largest biker rally in the nation. American Indians have testified at county commission hearings and spoke against any more liquor licenses, with little effect.

A few mega-entertainment venues, in the form of amphitheatres that will seat upwards of 30,000 people, have opened; more are in the planning stages.

American Indians from across the Great Plains consider Bear Butte a sacred mountain and use the area for prayer. People praying on the mountain would be disturbed by the sound of the bikes and the music, zoning restriction advocates claim. Local residents and ranchers have joined the effort to stop growth of the mega-biker bar phenomenon in the county.

Ellsworth AFB is located in Meade County just east of Rapid City. Rezoning would curb residential and commercial development to within a one-mile buffer around the base. Zoning restrictions around Bear Butte would also curtail commercial development.

The county has attempted in the past to zone certain areas in other parts of the county, but the effort was defeated by strong opposition. The region has a deep-rooted individualistic attitude, and land-owner's rights have taken precedence in the past.

South Dakota lawmakers passed a law that allows rezoning in five-square-mile sections. Mead County has one of the largest land areas of any county in the United States.

The August Motorcycle Rally at Sturgis attracts 500,000 bikes for a week or more.

On the home front… Bend’s run-away growth has far out-distanced the support systems of the city. More pavement equals more water run-off, but the storm drains are too small and too far between. More streets mean more maintenance and, in the winter, plowing. More traffic requires street widening. More population, more cops, fire-fighters, schools and school-teachers...

The city charges developers development fees, but the fees to not meet the added costs. The developers and their pals are the geese laying golden eggs for the city; the problem is, those golden eggs aren’t quite large enough...But, nobody wants to say, uhh, fellas, you’re costing us more than you’re paying us. If the city presses the developers, the business community flips out. Bend is in hock to the land-barons and builders.

Developers and sub-dividers have already spread out to other central Oregon towns: Prineville, Madras, La Pine, Redmond, even Sisters have subdivisions and expansion problems. Bend is going to be the Beverly Hills of central Oregon, and the other communities are going to house the workers.

In the meanwhile, Bend’s city government has shown itself more than capable in mastering the art of using weasel-words to muddy up the problems. All these fancy phrases do is distance city government from the citizens—at least from the citizens who pay any attention.

I think this phrase deserves some sort of award for bad writing:

"The city will maximize utilization of user charges in lieu of property taxes for services that can be individually identified and where the costs are directly related t the level of service."

They all speak this way: bureaucrats, social workers, graduate students, even elected officials.
…


Bend's 'stress points' will take $$$ to solve

Growth paying its own way has become a slogan in fast-growing Bend over the years, and with needs outstripping dollars, everyone will be asked to share in burden.
Updated: 11:57 AM, Jan. 15, 2007
http://www.ktvz.com/story.cfm?nav=news&storyID=18046
By Barney Lerten, KTVZ.com

To tackle what Bend officials call "financial stress points" and a long list of spendy transportation, sewer and water projects, residents of the still-fast growing community are likely to face new or higher utility and development fees - and also be asked for millions of road dollars at the polls in coming months and years.

City councilors this week will take up recommendations from staff on how to meet those needs, ranging from road maintenance and infrastructure to sewer and water system growth, a requirement to add storm water (runoff) facilities and the like.

A special finance committee will be the first, on Tuesday night, to review the city's five-year financial forecast and likely make recommendations to the full council.

The good news in the forecast: the city's "generally discretionary revenues are sufficient to afford increasing costs of police and fire, and likely, very real service level increases."

But the report goes on to say, "To assure this, the operational financial stress points" - transportation system maintenance, the storm water program and public transit operations - "need review for prioritization and level of funding."

City finance officials point to, among other things, the council's established policy: "The city will maximize utilization of user charges in lieu of property taxes for services that can be individually identified and where the costs are directly related t the level of service."

As Bend moves to a new two-year, biennial budget planning cycle this spring, the forecast says the city "is currently experiencing financial stability and health, but the levels of services desired by the growing citizenry of Bend, as recognized by the city council, will increase and broaden."

"Trends indicate that the current revenue structure will not cover the costs of desired service levels and special projects (e.g. Mirror Pond (dredging/silt removal), expanded accessibility, various city facilities) and maintain adequate reserves beyond several years," the report states.

For those "operational stress points," the staff is recommending formal creation of a storm water utility and that a fee be brought before councilors before June budget adoption, noting part of that program to better deal with runoff is state and federally mandated.

The staff also urges the city to "recommend a public transit district to Deschutes County for referral to the voters in November 2008, including a vote for a new permanent tax rate for funding transit operations."

City officials also recommend a study of a "transportation utility fee" to support street maintenance, "for potential implementation before the end of the 2007-09 biennium. (Local gas tax is also a funding option.)"

As for other, infrastructure-based "stress points," the staff proposes the city "refer a local option (tax) levy to voters for specific transportation improvement projects plus certain accessibility infrastructure corrections/expansions."

It's also proposed that sewer and water reclamation system development charges be "upgraded ... to reflect the appropriate impact fee from development." To cover sewer system improvements, the staff proposes issuing revenue bonds, "supported by increased rates."

And for another sticky issue - converting areas from septic system to city sewer - the staff proposes that the city "choose city-mandated local improvement districts, or enact as a matter of policy the city-wide support through increased rates (potentially financed by revenue bonds, although this option would have equability [sic] issues associated with it)."
***

For a few years, I’ve been arguing with the Right that the police state is as big a threat to them as it is to the left...Hmm, maybe they know something I don’t? Like, the Left ain’t ever going to get a chance to persecute the Right. Old Lenin story: Lenin was discussing ‘communism’ with one of his associates; “but, Comrade, there have been ‘communists’ for centuries.” Yes, Lenin said, “but nobody has ever heard of them, and after we get done, nobody will ever hear of them again.”

Authoritarianism knows no ethnic, sexual, or national boundaries.

Today, it seems like the authoritarians who threaten our country are all on the Right. At least they’re the ones supporting police state activities. I guess they could be deluded enough to think their paltry collections of weapons will fight off any threats to their freedoms...Who has the biggest and meanest guns? Right: it’s the government. Always. Hitler’s suppression of the S.A. is today’s lesson...

This is from Digby. He carries more blogging weight than I do. Dammit.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_digbysblog_archive.html#116873210351012644

We have thrown so much money away on the Department ofHomeland Security that they can't even account for billions in missing funds. Small towns in the Alaskan Bush are putting camera's on every street corner with their free money from Uncle Ted Stevens. (To catch the terrists, dontcha know.)

We are building a well funded national police state apparatus at the same time that we are giving unlimited money and power to our military and foreign intelligence agencies to operate in the United States. This is incredibly dangerous and I can't help but wonder why there is so little effort on the part of anyone in public life to educate the public on the inherant dangers of such powerful, unaccountable institutions. This is why we had a revolution to begin with. It's why we fought two world wars in the last century. (Where is the Al Gore of civil liberties?)

And the most laughable thing is that all of this is apparently perfectly acceptable to the principled right wingers and "libertarians" who spent decades railing against the jack booted government thugs --- at least until a Republican administration was wielding the power. It seems that unless the target in question is buying weapons or explosives (in which case they come roaring in to protect the only amendment in the Bill of Rights they care about) these people are just fine with all this. After all, only the "right" people are being spied upon --- Muslims, war protestors, liberals, Democrats and other enemies of the state.

But guess what? That could change. The list of enemies will grow longer. It always does. And you never know who might land on it. This is not a partisan issue and it's tragic that there are so few on the right who can't extricate themselves from their pep club and cheerleader team sport world to consider that this is one issue we civil libertarians and at least some conservatives should be able to agree upon. I can say with absolute confidence that if a Democratic administration were institutionalizing spying on Americans and building a new all-powerful unaccountable police state apparatus, I'd be screaming just as loudly.

This exposes the right's total intellectual bankruptcy as nothing else has, in my opinion. They are nothing more than rich authoritarian thugs whose only real mission is to maintain their prerogatives. One of these days somebody is going to find a reason to think they are unamerican too --- and they are probably going to use that very same police state power against them. Then they'll screaming too --- but it will be too late.

I hope this is good news. Underneath the cynicism...I’m still an optimist.

Sidebar: my dad worked in the movie industry most of his life. He was a film editor, starting back in the ‘forties when they were called “cutters.” A book was written about one of the movies he worked on, and described him as “crusty.” I like to think...you get the idea.

At the risk of alienating those friends who are Jews, I want to say that what happened to American Indians was genocide. No way around it. Not as efficient as the one the Germans created, but America is a young culture and hasn’t yet had time to perfect those skills.

How many separate acts of genocidal terror are there in Dee Brown’s book? How many massacres, murderous deceptions...a lot more than can be put into a 2 ½ hour TV special. If they tried to put half of the ones into a movie it would leave audiences gasping, revolted, feeling horribly guilty. Yeah, they should! How else can a nation face up to it’s past without avalanches of emotional pain? It would certainly promote a field day for the pharmaceutical industry…

HBO’s retelling of the real American epic won’t be anywhere near as horrible as, say, the real Trail of Tears or The Long March or Sand Creek… But maybe it will wake up a few people to how America is really a parasite living off the still living hosts...

washingtonpost.com

Dick Wolf Makes Time for 'Wounded Knee'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/AR2007011202303_pf.html
By Lisa de Moraes
Saturday, January 13, 2007; C01

PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 12 Dick Wolf, the network-saving, moneymaking machine, is doing his first work for HBO, an upcoming 2 1/2 -hour adaptation of the early 1970s book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," which documented the subjugation of Native Americans during the latter half of the 19th century.

"I'd do anything HBO wants me to, given the strictures I'm under contractually," Wolf, the brain trust behind NBC's "Law & Order," told the media at Winter TV Press Tour 2007. Wolf's production house is set up at NBC Universal, which doesn't leave him a lot of time to do work elsewhere.

Working with HBO was "an amazing experience. I'd love to send some network people to intern there for a while," he said, getting a laugh from the crowd.

One critic wanted to know what the broadcast network interns would learn. He admitted he'd been flip, adding, "It's a little unfair -- they're two completely different business models."

He said: "The attention to detail on every level at HBO is different than a network, but a network has 22 hours to be filled every week. It's a completely different set of parameters. But I can say it's wonderful to be with people whose only aim is to get on the screen the best possible film they can get up there.

"The networks have a tendency -- they're in the numbers game, the daily numbers game. . . . It leads to decisions that are not necessarily artistic."

HBO isn't nearly as rushed to get product on-screen as are the broadcasters, he said, noting that this project was five years in the making.

"I'm not kidding. I think this picture was fast-tracked at HBO." HBO, he said, is "famous and notorious for taking a great deal of time between the first meeting and [my being] up here talking to all of you. The reality is, they end up doing it right. Sometimes it's way too expensive, like 'Rome,' but 'Rome' was one of the most awesome TV [projects] in the last 20 years. You look at it and say, 'Wow, they really didn't care how much it cost!' "

"Wounded Knee" is scheduled for a May premiere on HBO. It stars Aidan Quinn, Adam Beach, August Schellenberg and -- as President Ulysses S. Grant -- former Republican senator and "Law & Order" regular Fred Thompson.

Wolf said he hopes "Wounded Knee" not only "affects people's way of thinking about this part of our history" but also gives them pause when thinking about "other things this nation becomes involved with."

One TV critic asked him if he was referring to Iraq. "If Iraq was the only thing you could reference, maybe," he said. "When any society says to another group, whether indigenous, offshore, next-door, that our way of life will be better for you and we have a better way than you have, you get into real trouble. That's why the world is multicultural and multicolored. What works here is not necessarily going to work there."

* * *

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

Bush may have said “mistakes were made,” but that doesn’t mean the spin machine isn’t trying to stick the blame for Iraq somewhere else.

Where we're lucky—very lucky—is that 90% of this spin control is people trying to out-intellectualize each other. It's like the arguments the Marxists love to get into: Who's fault is it that we lost? Until the Right gets some shock troops out on the street—which they've done a couple of times, but never with any numbers—this is bloviating, contributing to global warming by adding a lot of methane.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070129/alterman

by Eric Alterman
Iraq and the Sin of Good Judgment

[from the January 29, 2007 issue]

The Bush/Cheney war in Iraq has proven to be even more catastrophic than those who had the good sense to oppose it could have predicted. It has killed Americans and Iraqis, destroyed a functioning, albeit unfree nation, increased the threat of terrorism, destabilized the region, empowered our enemies--particularly Iran and Syria--inspired hatred of the United States across the globe and will ultimately cost American taxpayers upwards of a trillion dollars. It is, almost certainly, as Al Gore has noted, "the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States."

The problem the war creates for the punditocracy and the rest of the political establishment is twofold. First, the leaders they backed have not only been wildly incompetent but also impervious to reality. Offered a face-saving exit by the Baker Commission, Bush, Cheney & Co. prefer instead to double down on disaster. Second, there is the problem of the pundits' individual reputations. If William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Lawrence Kaplan and David Brooks et al. are so smart, why were they so wrong about something so crucial? And why, given their sorry records, do they and their editors still think anybody ought to keep listening to them? At the very least, those they misled are entitled to an explanation.

Even those who have offered up their mea culpas have often sought refuge in what The American Prospect's Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias have aptly termed "The Incompetence Dodge." Almost all the most prominent prowar neocons featured in Vanity Fair's recent report, for example, blamed the Bush Administration for failing to execute its beautiful war plans more efficiently.

Accompanying this tactic has been a corollary effort to smear the liberals who got it right rather than renounce the calumny that was heaped on their heads during the run-up to the invasion (from "pacifist" and "isolationist" to "anti-American" and even "pro-terrorist"). I first noticed this tendency when, in June 2005, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times's extraordinarily influential foreign affairs columnist whose analysis of the war proved completely misguided, accused liberals of "deep down" wanting America to fail in Iraq "because, with a few exceptions...they thought the war was wrong." He presented no supporting evidence and named no names. More recently, Time's McCarthyite columnist Joe Klein explained that in "listening to leftists...it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure." Andrew Sullivan has opined that antiwar liberals were "objectively pro-Saddam." Slate editor Jacob Weisberg dismissed those whose analysis proved correct as "the isolationist left," as if idiotic wars were the only means this great country has to engage the rest of the world.

The purest embodiment of this tendency, perhaps, is a recent screed by Roger Cohen, formerly the foreign editor of the Times, now the editor at large of the International Herald Tribune, author of the "Globalist" column and international writer at large for the Times. According to Cohen, writing in the IHT and on the Times website, the people who tried to save America and the world from the horrific catastrophe we must now endure are nothing but "hyperventilating left-liberals [whose] hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window." We are "so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases...[we] have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein." We are "America-hating, over-the-top rant[ers] of the left--the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda." And for good measure, we also "equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship."

To support these amazing charges, Cohen quotes exactly one person: Scottish MP George Galloway, last seen making an ass of himself on the reality TV show for washed-up gossip fodder, Celebrity Big Brother. Galloway, who was thrown out of the Labour Party, can be said to represent the "left-liberals" here and abroad about as well as, say, ex-KKK Grand Wizard and Holocaust denier David Duke represents the right.

Naturally curious about the actual evil-doers he had in mind, I e-mailed Cohen and politely asked for specifics. He was on vacation with his family and replied by BlackBerry that he would not be able to respond. A few minutes later, however, he apparently changed his mind and replied with a lengthy and rather hostile set of questions regarding my own views on Iraq, including: "What makes you think you can express an informed opinion...?"

The same Cohen column that inveighed against Bush-bashers contained an endorsement of what he called "an expression of moderate sanity," a document titled "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto," which, he explained, "precisely because of its sanity...has received too little attention." Cohen celebrates this manifesto--which, naturally, embraces the incompetence dodge--as an alternative to "sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced 'hindsighters' poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism."

Again, on the identities of these "hindsighters," "screamers," anti-Americans and anti-Semites "masquerading as anti-Zionists," Cohen was silent. Had he taken a look at the 232 manifesto signatories, meanwhile, he'd have had trouble identifying more than three, counting generously, actual liberals. The roll is dominated by the likes of Walter Laqueur, Martin Peretz, Ronald Radosh and, I kid you not, Iran/contra adventurer Michael Ledeen.

So what's the point of the exercise? Simple: Again, it is to discredit those on the left who were right about Bush and Iraq and remain so today. Shortly after the invasion, Bill Kristol tried to smear war opponents as "the Dominique de Villepin left." Today such smears ought to be a badge of honor. There are few forces so powerful as the will to evade responsibility for one's mistakes. Too bad it's our brave young soldiers who must die for them.

When all else fails, try direct intimidation. Apparently it isn’t enough for Right wing blogs to try to frighten the Left—hell, even the center-Left—and stir up antagonism toward anyone not going along with the Party Line. The administration let slip the dogs at the Pentagon. It’s about fear, folks. It’s about trying to discourage anyone from standing up against the neo-McCartyite—nah, make that the neo-fascist—administration and it’s henchpeople. I guess the question is, How much support will the administration’s bully-boys (and girls) give to people who want to try a little direct action?

And, if you notice, in the middle of this article, the Pentagon spokesthug said, "others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.” What a flashback: HUAC, McCarthy, J.Edgar Hoover, all those folks assuming that their position is so morally clear and unambiguous, the only reason people would oppose it is because they're being financed by some sort of international conspiracy...

The more it changes, the more the thugs' tactics remain the same...


The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/washington/13gitmo.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print
January 13, 2007
Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”

In an interview on Friday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said he had no problem with the current system of representation. “Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases,” he said.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson’s view. His comments “do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership,” a senior Pentagon official said. He would not allow his name to be used, seemingly to lessen the force of his rebuke. Mr. Stimson did not return a call on Friday seeking comment.

The role of major law firms agreeing to take on the cases of Guantánamo prisoners challenging their detentions in federal courts has hardly been a secret and has been the subject of many news articles that have generally cast their efforts in a favorable light. Michael Ratner, who heads the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based human rights group that is coordinating the legal representation for the Guantánamo detainees, said about 500 lawyers from about 120 law firms had volunteered their services to represent Guantánamo prisoners.

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Lawyers expressed outrage at that, asserting that they are not being paid and that Mr. Stimson had tried to suggest they were by innuendo. Of the approximately 500 lawyers coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, no one is being paid, Mr. Ratner said. One Washington law firm, Shearman & Sterling, which has represented Kuwaiti detainees, has received money from the families of the prisoners, but Thomas Wilner, a lawyer there, said they had donated all of it to charities related to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Mr. Ratner said that there were two other defense lawyers not under his group’s umbrella and that he did not know whether they were paid.

Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton who represented an Uzbeki detainee who has since been released, said: “We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to counsel. Any suggestion that our representation was anything other than a pro bono basis is untrue and unprofessional.” Mr. Moore said he had made four trips to Guantánamo and one to Albania at the firm’s expense, to see his client freed.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to President Bush on Friday asking him to disavow Mr. Stimson’s remarks.

Mr. Stimson, who was a Navy lawyer, graduated from George Mason University Law School. In a 2006 interview with the magazine of Kenyon College, his alma mater, Mr. Stimson said that he was learning “to choose my words carefully because I am a public figure on a very, very controversial topic.”

In the course of day-to-day absurdity-searching, I came across an arrest in Seattle. An elementary school principal got busted and...

Well, he can probably find a job as a politician or at Homeland Security.


SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/298914_principal09.html

Principal's a flasher, police say

Man to plead not guilty to indecent-exposure charge

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

By JESSICA BLANCHARD
P-I REPORTER

Even before he became principal at North Seattle's Whittier Elementary School three years ago, police believe, Alex Coberly had been occasionally driving by women and exposing himself.

Last week, the City Attorney's Office filed an indecent-exposure charge against Coberly, 33. He has been on paid administrative leave from the school since Dec. 7.

***

Vogel [Coberly's lawyer] said Coberly was very concerned he'll lose his job at Whittier Elementary over the criminal misdemeanor charge.

"There is no connection between this incident and his job," Vogel said. "It does not involve any children, and it does not involve his work."

***

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

For reasons I don't quite understand, I have a major hassle everytime I try to add a link. I just switched to the new version of Blogger, hoping that it would work easier. No. Not only that, when I get into "edit posts" view, I see a posting I made earlier today, but when I "view blog" that post isn't there.

I know the moon isn't full. I know nobody's thowing a hex on me (we-ll...maybe...). I know I'm tired, and that always makes a difference. I tend to put off hard stuff until a point where I've done everything else to distract myself that is possible, and then I go for the hard stuff. And, surprise, it's harder!

Well, it's Friday night. My shoulders hurt (I've been using crutches to get around with my broken leg), and I should just go drop some Tylenol, maybe half a percoset, and read myself sleepy...Hmm, that seems like a very good idea. I should pay more attention to my good ideas. So I think I will...

“Butch” (ahh, here's those gay dudes saying, “Oh, is he??”) Otter, Idaho’s governor, has announced he will support the killing of 550 grey wolves in that state, leaving, maybe, 100 behind. That’s assuming, of course, that there really are as many as 650 grey wolves in that state. But that’s beside the point: One of Butch’s campaign stands was against the Endangered Species Act (just like Oregon’s rep, Greg Walden).

He’s well-loved by farmers and ranchers, and probably has to dance with those that brought him to the ball. He used to be president of Simplot, the big potato outfit (he was married to the daughter of the founder of Simplot, but had his marriage annulled to marry a former Miss Idaho—yeah, he's Catholic).

And, he’s a reactionary no matter how you look at it.

He’s a popular guy with that twerp in the White House.

Here’s some stats I found:

Rated 17% by the NEA, indicating anti-public education votes. (Dec 2003)

Rated 11% by APHA, indicating an anti-public health voting record. (Dec 2003)

Rated 10% by the ARA, indicating an anti-senior voting record. (Dec 2003)

Rated 5% by the LCV, indicating anti-environmentalist votes. (Dec 2003)

Rated 33% by SANE, indicating a mixed record on military issues. (Dec 2003)

Rated 20% by the ACLU, indicating an anti-ACLU voting record. (Dec 2002)

Rated 0% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record. (Dec 2003)

Rated 67% by CATO, indicating a pro-free trade voting record. (Dec 2002)

Rated 71% by NTU, indicating "Satisfactory" on tax votes. (Dec 2003)

Rated 0% by the AFL-CIO, indicating an anti-labor union voting record. (Dec 2003)

Rated 100% by FAIR, indicating a voting record restricting immigration. (Dec 2003)

Rated 97% by the US COC, indicating a pro-business voting record. (Dec 2003)

Rated 92% by the Christian Coalition, indicating a pro-life, anti-gay marriage voting record. (Dec 2003)

(source: http://www.issues2000.org/

Idaho Governor Calls for Gray Wolf Kill
By Jesse Harlan Alderman
The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070112/ap_on_re_us/wolf_hunting
Friday 12 January 2007

Boise, Idaho - Idaho's governor said Thursday he will support public hunts to kill all but 100 of the state's gray wolves after the federal government strips them of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter told The Associated Press that he wants hunters to kill about 550 gray wolves. That would leave about 100 wolves, or 10 packs, according to a population estimate by state wildlife officials.

The 100 surviving wolves would be the minimum before the animals could again be considered endangered.

"I'm prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself," Otter said earlier Thursday during a rally of about 300 hunters.

Otter complained that wolves are rapidly killing elk and other animals essential to Idaho's multimillion-dollar hunting industry. The hunters, many wearing camouflage clothing and blaze-orange caps, applauded wildly during his comments.

Suzanne Stone, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife in Boise, said Otter's proposal would return wolves to the verge of eradication.

"Essentially he has confirmed our worst fears for the state of Idaho: That this would be a political rather than a biological management of the wolf population," Stone said. "There's no economic or ecological reason for maintaining such low numbers. It's simple persecution."

Wolves were reintroduced to the northern Rocky Mountains a decade ago after being hunted to near-extinction. More than 1,200 now live in the region.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to start removing federal protections from gray wolves in Montana and Idaho in the next few weeks.

A plan drafted by Idaho's wildlife agency calls for maintaining a minimum of 15 wolf packs - higher than Otter's proposal of 10 packs.

Jeff Allen, a policy adviser for the state Office of Species Conservation, said 15 wolf packs would allow "a cushion" between the surviving wolf population and the minimum number that federal biologists would allow before the animals are again considered endangered.

Allen said Otter and state wildlife officials agree on wolf strategy and will be able to reach a consensus on specific numbers.

"You don't want to be too close to 10 because all of a sudden when one (wolf) is hit by a car or taken in defense of property, you're back on the list," Allen said.

Condi Rice comes up with new synonym for “escalation.” And this should make the two-tongued world wrestler dictionary within hours. It’s “augmentation.”

What utter bullshit. Somebody should give her a pair of rubber boots and a shovel and make her clean up after herself.

Anyhow, she was defending Bush's policy in front of a senate panel. Chuck Hagel, bless his little heart, stood up to her when she quibbled with his term "escalation." Then he essentially told her she was lying. Which she was. But, hey, she's the president's pal, so that means it's OK to lie, right?

Wrong.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16579285

In a heated exchange with Hagel, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, Rice disputed his characterization of Bush’s buildup as an “escalation.”

“Putting in 22,000 more troops is not an escalation?” Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and longtime critic of Bush’s Iraq policy, asked. “Would you call it a decrease?”

“I would call it, senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad,” she said.

Back in the days of the One Hundred Years’ War, there were bands of mercenaries roaming Europe. They actually were bandits, organized under leaders, and for sale to the highest bidder, when they weren’t cruising on their own.

Over the last few decades, we’ve seen mercenaries become a world-wide force. They work as good proxies, of course, employed by governments, but unofficially and off the books.

Assuming the current mess in the Middle East will wind down, one way or the other, one hundred thousand or so men (I presume they’re most all men; I don’t mean to be sexist...oh, who cares?) with training in modern weapons and a lack of loyalty (except to the source of their paychecks) is a scary concept.


AlterNet
100,000 mercenaries, the forgotten "Surge"
By Barry Lando
Posted on January 8, 2007, Printed on January 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lando/46429/

What is striking about the current debate in Washington - whether to "surge" troops to Iraq and increase the size of the U.S. Army - is that roughly 100,000 bodies are missing from the equation: The number of American forces in Iraq is not 140,000, but more like 240,000.

What makes up the difference is the huge army of mercenaries - known these days as "private contractors." After the U.S. Army itself, they are easily the second-largest military force in the country. Yet no one seems sure of how many there are since they answer to no single authority. Indeed, the U.S. Central Command has only recently started taking a census of these battlefield civilians in an attempt to get a handle on the issue...

The private contractors are Americans, South Africans, Brits, Iraqis and a hodgepodge of other nationalities. Many of them are veterans of the U.S. or other armed forces and intelligence services, who are now deployed in Iraq (and Afghanistan and other countries) to perform duties normally carried out by the U.S. Army, but at salaries two or three times greater than those of American soldiers.

They work as interrogators and interpreters in American prisons; body guards for top U.S. and Iraqi officials; trainers for the Iraqi army and police; and engi-neers constructing huge new U.S. bases. They are often on the front lines. In fact, 650 of them have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion

Their salaries, are, in the end, paid directly by the U.S. government - or tacked on as huge additional "security charges" to the bills of private American or other contractors. Yet the Central Command still doesn't have a complete list of who they are or what they are up to. The final figure could be much higher than 100,000.

The U.S. Congress, under Republican control until now, knows even less.

Yet these private contractors man their own helicopters and Humvees and look and act just like American troops.

"It takes a great deal of vigilance on the part of the military commander to en-sure contractor compliance," William L. Nash, a retired general, told the Washington Post. "If you're trying to win hearts and minds and the contractor is driving 90 miles per hour through the streets and running over kids, that's not helping the image of the American army. The Iraqis aren't going to distinguish between a contractor and a soldier."

But who, in the end, do these contractors answer to? The U.S. Central Command? Their company boss? Or the official they've been assigned to protect?

A recent case in point: The former Iraqi minister of electricity, who had been imprisoned on corruption charges, managed to escape in broad daylight in the heavily fortified Green Zone. Iraqi officials claim he was spirited away by con-tractors from a private security detail that had been hired when he was minis-ter.

Which raises another question. Who has jurisdiction over these private contractors if they run afoul of the law in Iraq? Also, are they supposed to follow the Geneva Conventions? Or George W. Bush's conventions?

For instance, according to The New York Times, although 20 civilian contractors working in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq - including Abu Ghraib - have been charged with mistreating prisoners, none has ever been successfully prosecuted.

Another point, which brings us back to the discussion about increasing Ameri-can troop levels in Iraq: It would seem that the Pentagon could outsource a "surge" by a simple accounting sleight of hand, quietly contracting for another 10,000 or 20,000 mercenaries to do the job, and the Congress and press would be none the wiser.

Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, is the author of "Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." He also blogs at Barrylando.com.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

The difference between Lyndon Johnson (“Lyndon Johnson told the nation ‘Have no fear of escalation’”) and George Bush (The Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones”), is that LBJ actually cared about the society around him. Bush cares about his rep as a president, his buddies in the oil industry, and that’s about it. I never thought Johnson should have been removed from office, but I think Bush needs to be removed.



« "E-Day": Mad as hell? | "E-Day": It was 40 years ago today

This comes with a huge hat tip to a good Friend of Attytood who was born 40 years ago on this date -- Happy Birthday, dude! -- and as a result is more up to speed on what happened on January 10, 1967, than the rest of us.

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson's State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I'm going to guide you to some excerpts of that address -- exactly 40 years ago tonight. See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush's speech that were just released minutes ago:

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war--a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year--or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside. And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnaped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces. It means bringing to the villagers an effective civilian government that they can respect, and that they can rely upon and that they can participate in, and that they can have a personal stake in. We hope that government is now beginning to emerge.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: This forward movement is rooted in the ambitions and the interests of Asian nations themselves. It was precisely this movement that we hoped to accelerate when I spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in April 1965, and I pledged "a much more massive effort to improve the life of man" in that part of the world, in the hope that we could take some of the funds that we were spending on bullets and bombs and spend it on schools and production.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war--a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time…In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy – by advancing liberty across a troubled region.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: A time of testing--yes. And a time of transition. The transition is sometimes slow; sometimes unpopular; almost always very painful; and often quite dangerous. But we have lived with danger for a long time before, and we shall live with it for a long time yet to come. We know that "man is born unto trouble." We also know that this Nation was not forged and did not survive and grow and prosper without a great deal of sacrifice from a great many men.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship…A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them – and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and grandchildren.

Not much to add here -- the words of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush pretty much speak for themselves.

Two things, though. First of all, only 7,917 American troop had died in Vietnam through the end of 1966, or ten days before Johnson's speech. From the beginning of 1967 though the end of the war, an addition 50,285 -- more than six times as many -- Americans would lose their lives.

Also, and we're not endorsing this action by any means, then or now, but it is interesting to note that in that 1967 SOTU, LBJ also called for a 6 percent surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes to pay for the cost of the war. That's a level of responsibility -- and yes, sacrifice -- for war that our current president is unwilling to take.

Anyone ever see that movie “Runaway Train”? That’s America. We’re the passengers. The engineer is absolutely nuts (echoes of the Grateful Dead's "Casey Jones"—"Drivin' that train, high on cocaine").

There doesn’t seem to be any way to get from the passenger coaches to the engine. There are air brakes, but nobody seems willing to pull the switch. The train crew, in fact, has set up guards so nobody can get to the switches.

I remember Bill Clinton saying “Is this the greatest country or what?” Yeah, Bill, just like the Germany republic was going to last 1,000 years. There are more parallels to Nazi Germany than we like to list.

How do we either stop the train or get off it?

I have nothing to say. But I am giggling and not because I'm stoned.

Boomers and reefers
Are baby boomers flying under radar of drug abuse?
Last Updated January 9, 2007
CBC News


Not long before he died in November 2004, Pierre Berton, then 84, invited comedian Rick Mercer to his home where he demonstrated, on camera, how to roll a perfect joint. Before the interview, Berton told Mercer, "Bring the pot." When the interview ended, the iconic Canadian told Mercer, "Leave the pot."

Berton had been using marijuana since the 1960s. He admitted that he had been a "recreational marijuana user" since then.

"I enjoy the odd joint but I never go overboard," he told the Toronto Star. "I smoke about once a month to help me relax."

Kind of cute and funny, we thought, but there was a serious edge to the story. Berton may not have been your prototypical baby boomer, but he did represent a generation not usually associated with illicit drug use. As with the boomers, Berton's generation tended to fly below the radar of surveys purporting to detail illicit drug use.

This came to light this week in an article in the New York Times titled "This is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad." Writer Mike Males, a senior researcher with the U.S. Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, took issue with some studies on the use of illicit drugs such as marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine cocaine, hallucinogens, and ecstasy by both young and old.
Unaware of rising drug use

Males says society tends to be unaware of a troubling rise in the illicit use of drugs because many of today's drug abusers are in the wrong group. He cites David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale, who says wars on drugs traditionally have depended on "linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society."

Males says the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans, which he calls "a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation."

Blair T. Longley, leader of Canada's Marijuana Party, says Males is on target with his essay.

"Frequent consumers [of cannabis] are men with relatively high education and income," Longley told CBC News Online "However, it is poor young people who are seen to be the consumers. This social fact is typical in the way that it contradicts stereotypical prejudices. The public perception of pot is a standing misrepresentation.

"People with education and income that consume cannabis are the biggest number, but they are rarely the ones that are seen to be cannabis consumers, and very rarely the ones that are arrested for cannabis crimes. Although young poor people consume less cannabis, they are seen to be doing it, and are those who are most frequently arrested for doing it."

While there are similarities in Canada, Canadians tend to be more tolerant of what Americans call "illicit drug use" or "drug abuse," certainly when it comes to cannabis. Statistics Canada reported in 2004 that some three million Canadians aged 15 or older, or 12.2 per cent of the population, admitted using cannabis — marijuana or hashish — at least once in the previous 12 months (considered "current" users).

Michael Tjepkema, author of the StatsCan study, says this represents a "significant increase in self-reported drug use over the past decade." Basing his estimates on data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), Tjepkema says that in 1989, 6.5 per cent of Canadians reported using cannabis, and by 1994 this figure had increased to 7.4 per cent.

As for drugs such as cocaine/crack, ecstasy, LSD and other hallucinogens, speed/amphetamines, and heroin, the CCHS data in 2004 says 2.4 per cent of Canadians 15 and older used one of these drugs in the previous 12 months — up from 1.6 per cent in 1994. The most commonly used was cocaine/crack, reportedly used by 321,000 Canadians, or 1.3 per cent of Canadians 15 and older.

As for cannabis use among older Canadians, those between 45 and 54, Tjepkema's 2004 study says six per cent admitted indulging in the previous year, which drops to two per cent among Canadians between 55 and 64.
Drug abuse crisis?

Males says in his New York Times article that a "Monitoring the Future" survey on drug use released in December 2006 shows a sharp drop in drug use by U.S. teens over the past decade. John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, says the decline in teenage drug use promises "enormous beneficial consequences not only for our children now but for the rest of their lives."

Not so, says Males in the New York Times, citing a study by the National Center for Health Statistics that shows teenage deaths from illicit drugs have tripled over the past decade.

"What the Monitoring the Future report does have right is that teenagers remain the least part of America's drug abuse crisis," Males says. "Today, after 20 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions of arrests and imprisonments in the war on drugs, America's rate of drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime and social ills stand at record highs."

Longley says if the largest population of drug users are white, middle-aged Americans flying under the radar because they're not considered a threat to society, "it is but one of the tips of the iceberg of the social situation."


Copyright © CBC 2007

Slowly, slowly, the movement for universal health care is advancing. “Creeping” seems to be a better verb, but at least it’s on the move.

Our health care is like an elephant described and designed by who don’t know each other, don’t talk to each other, and are in different parts of the building. Luxembourg is the 2nd highest-spending on health care nation in the world; we outspend them by 24%. We die younger, more of our children die than in other industrial nations, and yet we pay more.
And 47,000,000 of us have no health insurance.

This is insane. The war is insane. The President is insane. What the hell has happened to this country?

From: Progress Report 1/5/07

HEALTH CARE -- PAYING MORE, GETTING LESS: The U.S. health care system is in shambles. Health care costs are increasing faster than wages and nearly 47 million Americans -- 8 million of whom are children -- are uninsured. Millions more are underinsured. Yet the United States continues to spend more on health care per person than any other country, including countries that provide health care coverage to its entire citizenry. According to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2003 alone, health spending per person was at least 24 percent higher than that of Luxembourg (the second highest spending country) and over 90 percent higher than countries considered global competitors. But unfortunately, our health care system spending is not buying us superior health. Americans, on average, die at a younger age compared to the average age of death of comparable nations and the U.S. infant mortality rate is 6.9 deaths per 1,000 live births, while Japan and Sweden have rates below 3.5 deaths per 1,000 live births. Additionally, U.S. health care resources continue to lag. About 70 percent of deaths and health costs in the U.S. are attributable to chronic disease, which are largely preventable. Yet, only half of recommended preventive services are provided to adults.

The United States also has fewer practicing physicians and nurses per 1,000 people than comparable countries. The Center for American Progress has a plan to provide every American affordable health care that emphasizes prevention, while controlling costs and maintaining individuals' choice of doctors and plans.

This is an interesting analysis of the Iraq situation, by a man who is conservative, in the conservative-libertarian tradition, and who even once served a Republican administration. But, like many other Republicans, he’s disillusioned by the crazy war-making thinking of the current administration.

In this case, the thinking is to go after the Shi’ite militias instead of the Sunni/Baathists. Roberts points out that the Sunni are the minority in Iraq; however, with 150,000 troops, we cannot contain them. We can’t even depend on them. The Shi’ia are the majority in Iraq; another 20,000 troops aren’t going to help deal with an enemy made up of both Shi’ia and Sunni. It will simply add fuel to the fires. More active enemies in Iraq are not going to make things any easier.

Roberts believes the main reason for this surge is to eliminate Arab threats to Israel. No doubt the Likud party would like this, as would the Israeli lobby. There is, though, the main treasure of the Middle East: oil. Easy to get, easy to ship. That’s the treasure. Any reduction in the forces of Islam, while desired by the Neo-cons, would simply be gravy.

January 9, 2007
The Surge: Political Cover or Escalation?
by Paul Craig Roberts

The new year began on the hopeful note that Bush’s illegal war in Iraq would soon be ended. The repudiation of Bush and the Republicans in the November congressional election, the Iraq Study Group’s unanimous conclusion that the US needs to remove its troops from the sectarian strife Bush set in motion by invading Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld’s removal as defense secretary and his replacement by Iraqi Study Group member Robert Gates, the thumbs down given by America’s top military commanders to the neoconservatives’ plan to send more US troops to Iraq, and new polls of the US military that reveal that only a minority supports Bush’s Iraq policy, thus giving new meaning to "support the troops," are all indications that Americans have shed the stupor that has given carte blanche to George W. Bush.

When word leaked that Bush was inclined toward the "surge option" of committing more troops by keeping existing troops deployed in Iraq after their replacements had arrived, NBC News reported that an administration official "admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one." It is a clear sign of exasperation with Bush when an administration official admits that Bush is willing to sacrifice American troops and Iraqi civilians in order to protect his own delusions.

The American establishment, concerned by Bush’s egregious mismanagement, moved to take control of Iraq policy away from him. However, recent news reports and analysis suggest that Bush has turned his back to the American establishment and his military advisers and is throwing in his lot with the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby. This will further isolate Bush and make him more vulnerable to impeachment.

In the January 5 issue of CounterPunch John Walsh gives a good description of the struggle between the American establishment and the neocons.

Peter Spiegel, the Pentagon correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reported on January 4 that the neocons have used the failure of the administration’s policy in Iraq to convince Bush to launch an aggressive counterinsurgency requiring the buildup of troop levels by extending deployments beyond the agreed terms.

Raed Jarrar suggests that the Shi’ite militias, such as the one led by Sadr, are the intended targets of the "surge option." There seems no surer way to escalate the conflict in Iraq than to attack the Shi’ite militias. For longer than the US fought Germany in WWII, 150,000 US troops in Iraq have been thwarted by a small insurgency drawn from Iraq’s minority population of Sunnis. It hardly seems feasible that 30,000 additional US troops, demoralized by extended deployment, can succeed in a surge against the Shi’ite militias when 150,000 US troops cannot succeed against the minority Sunnis.

The reason the US has not been driven out of Iraq is that the majority Shi’ites have not been part of the insurgency. The Shi’ites are attacking the Sunnis, who are forced to fight a two-front war against US troops and Shi’ite militias and death squads.The US owes its presence in Iraq, just as the colonial powers always owed their presence in the Middle East, to the disunity of Arabs. Western domination of the Muslim world succeeded by not picking a fight with all of the disunited Arabs at the same time.

Attacking the Shi’ite militias while fighting a Sunni insurgency would violate this rule. If Bush ignores US military commanders and expert opinion and accepts the surge option advanced by the delusional neocon allies of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, US troops will be engulfed in general insurgency. This is why General John Abizaid resigned on January 5. He wants no part of the Republican Party’s sacrifice of US soldiers to sectarian conflict.

In recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, Republican Senator John McCain, who believes in the efficacy of violence and not in diplomacy, pressed General Abizaid to request more US troops to be sent to Iraq. General Abizaid replied as follows:

"Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the core commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no."

Bush is like Hitler. He blames defeats on his military commanders, not on his own insane policy. Like Hitler, he protects himself from reality with delusion. In his last hours, Hitler was ordering non-existent German armies to drive the Russians from Berlin.

By manipulating Bush and provoking a military crisis in which the US stands to lose its army in Iraq, the neoconservatives hope to revive the implementation of their plan for US conquest of the Middle East. They believe they can use fear, "honor," and the aversion of macho Americans to ignoble defeat to expand the conflict in response to military disaster. The neocons believe that the loss of an American army would be met with the electorate’s demand for revenge. The barriers to the draft would fall, as would the barriers to the use of nuclear weapons.

Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz set out the plan for Middle East conquest several years ago in Commentary magazine. It is a plan for Muslim genocide. In place of physical extermination of Muslims, Podhoretz advocates their cultural destruction by deracination. Islam is to be torn out by the roots and reduced to a purely formal shell devoid of any real beliefs.

Podhoretz disguises the neoconservative attack against diversity with contrived arguments, but its real purpose is to use the US military to subdue Arabs and to create space for Israel to expand.

Not enough Americans are aware that this is what the "war on terror" is all about.



Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=10284

Bush sinks in the polls; the war sinks in the polls; both sink in Reality. But war is a mindless force of destruction, while Bush has a mind. I'm not sure what sort of mind it is, however. Damaged, at least.

Something is seriously wrong with our president’s judgement. Iraq is a disaster, a meat grinder for American troops, a killing ground for Iraqis. But Bush will not or, perhaps more accurately, cannot, admit our invasion and occupation of that country is an ongoing mistake. His solution—his and his buddies’—solution is to intensify the conflict by bringing in more troops, which will up the casualty rate. The administration and it’s friends actually believe that more bloodshed will make things better.

It’s bad enough the man can’t admit he blundered—let alone cop to having lied—in the first place, but he also wants to up the body count.

The man is...well, nuts. Mad. Crazed. How do we remove him and his power-bloc from office?

Quagmire of the Vanities
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 08 January 2007

The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq - which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation - is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they're cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be "the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof."

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they're delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration's unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one's losses - the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other people's children.

Well, we don't have to settle the question. Either way, what's clear is the enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush's character flaws.

I began writing about the Bush administration's infallibility complex, the president's Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power - the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his vanity - it's a recipe for disaster.

Consider, on one side, the case of the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief during 2004, who provided accurate assessments of the deteriorating situation in Iraq. "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" asked the president - and according to The Washington Post, at the end of his tour, the station chief "was punished with a poor assignment."

On the other side, consider the men Mr. Bush has turned to since the midterm election. They constitute a remarkable coalition of the unwilling - men who have been wrong about Iraq every step of the way, but aren't willing to admit it.

The principal proponents of the "surge" are William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Now, even if the Joint Chiefs of Staff hadn't given the surge a thumbs down, Mr. Kristol's track record should have been reason enough to ignore his advice. For example, early in the war, Mr. Kristol dismissed as "pop sociology" warnings that there would be conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and that the Shiites might try to create an Islamic fundamentalist state. He assured National Public Radio listeners that "Iraq's always been very secular."

But Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan appealed to Mr. Bush's ego, suggesting that he might yet be able to rescue his signature war. And am I the only person to notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group - Daddy's men coming in to fix Junior's mess, etc. - Mr. Bush turned for advice to two other sons of famous and more successful fathers?

Not that Mr. Bush rejects all advice from elder statesmen. We now know that he has been talking to Henry Kissinger. But Mr. Kissinger is a kindred spirit. In remarks published after his death, Gerald Ford said of his secretary of state, "Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend."

Oh, and Senator John McCain, the first major political figure to advocate a surge, is another man who can't admit mistakes. Mr. McCain now says that he always knew that the conflict was "probably going to be long and hard and tough" - but back in 2002, before the Senate voted on the resolution authorizing the use of force, he declared that a war with Iraq would be "fairly easy."

Mr. Bush is expected to announce his plan for escalation in the next few days. According to the BBC, the theme of his speech will be "sacrifice." But sacrifice for what? Not for the national interest, which would be best served by withdrawing before the strain of the war breaks our ground forces. No, Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities - a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won't admit that they were wrong.

-------

Well, look: it’s pretty obvious Bush and Cheney—and their (il)legal advisors—see the country not as a system of laws, but a system they’re in charge of and can do with it what they want. They want to make—and they do—their own rules as they go along. In other words, it’s a dictatorship. Bush will simply veto any legislation he doesn't like, and if the veto gets voted down in Congress, he'll do some "signing statement" routine and just ignore it. Congress only has, now, as much power as the Executive Branch wants it to have.

The question is, what do we do now?

Molly Ivins
It's up to us to stop this war

AUSTIN, Texas (CREATORS) -- The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to us. You and me, Bubba.

I don't know why Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it's time we found out. The fact is WE have to do something about it. This country is being torn apart by an evil and unnecessary war, and it has to be stopped NOW.

This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it's doubly wrong for him to send 20,0000 more soldiers into this hellhole, as he reportedly will announce next week.

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they're arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we've let them do it.

This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I'll write about this war until we find some way to end it. STOP IT NOW. BAM! Every day, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.

So let's take a step back and note, for example, that before the war one of the architects of the entire policy, Paul Wolfowitz, testified to Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife. Sectarian and ethnic strife is a part of the region. And the region is full of examples of Western colonial powers trying to occupy countries, take their resources and take over the administration of their people -- and failing.

The sectarian bloodbath we see daily completely refutes Wolfowitz. And now Bush has given him the World Bank to run. Wonder what he'll do there.

And let's keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong. The event was staged. Taking down the statue was instigated by a Marine colonel, and a PSYOP (psychological operations) unit made it appear to be a spontaneous show of Iraqi joy.

When we later saw the whole square where the statue was located, only 30 to 40 people were there (U.S. soldiers, press and some Iraqis -- and one of several U.S. tanks present pulled the statue down with a cable). We, the television viewers, saw the square being presented as though the people of Iraq had gone into a frenzy, mobbed the square and spontaneously pulled down the statue. Fake images and claims have been a part of this fiasco from the beginning.

We need to cut through all this smoke and mirrors and come up with an exit strategy, forthwith. The Democrats have yet to offer a cohesive plan to get us out of this mess. Of course, it's not their fault -- but the fact is we need leaders who are grown-ups and who are willing to try to fix it. Bush has ignored the actual grown-ups from the Iraq Study Group and the generals and all other experts who are nearly unanimous in the opinion that more troops will not help.

So, like I said, it's up to you and me, Bubba. We need to make sure that the new Congress curbs executive power, which has been so misused, and asserts its own power to make this situation change. Now.


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/05/ivins.bush

It’s unfortunate that Leon Trotsky liked to talk as much as he did. He left a legacy of wordiness to his descendants. It’s very European: blather blather blather. What’s worse is that sometimes the Trots (as we affectionately call them) really score bull’s eyes.

The following piece is right on target. The military-security-industrial conglomerate is madly in love with the idea of perpetual war (I don’t believe they care much about perpetual peace). All that money and all that power. If they convince the rest of country that the war on terror is actually a continuation of some failed Medieval crusade and must go on until every last Muslim is slain or converted, they never have to live in the real world with the plebes.

We’ve seen that the current strategies are failures. The idea of waging war against ideas and faiths is block-headed. Ideas are not defeated by force of arms—or have these guys decided that if you kill all the people with ideas we don’t like will actually eliminate—yeah, sure, look at the budgets they can receive, think of the perks, think of, ahh, the sheer power. Beneath every career military officer’s heart is an authoritarian.

So, bear with the Trotsky-ites, and read on. The article is direct and insightful.


World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/gene-d19_prn.shtml

WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
US general issues warning: politics must not interfere with 100-year “war on terror”
By Bill Van Auken
19 December 2006


One of the Pentagon’s senior uniformed strategists warned last week that the “global war on terror” will go on for another 50 to 100 years and voiced concern that “politics” not be allowed to interfere with the protracted struggle.

The remarks were made by Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, an Air Force commander and the Defense Department’s deputy director for the “war on terrorism.” He made them in an exclusive interview with the Washington Times, the right-wing daily owned by the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

“We’re in a generational war,” he told the paper. “You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they’re attacking you, or prevent them and defend your own homeland,” he said. “But that’s not enough to stop it.”

The Washington Times went on to report, “Gen. Schissler said he is concerned that Washington politics is weakening the will of the nation.”

“I don’t care about the politics,” he told the newspaper. “I care about people understanding the facts of what our enemy is thinking about, what’s our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight.” He added, “They’re absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan.”

“One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration,” the general said. He described this task as “very difficult.”

Difficult indeed. How is the “public will” to wage global warfare for the next century to be maintained, particularly when “politics” gets in the way?

Given the political context of Schissler remarks, his warnings have unmistakable and chilling implications.

Barely six weeks ago, the Bush administration, which initiated the “war on terror” and proclaimed Iraq to be its most important front, suffered a stunning defeat at the polls. The Republican Party’s loss of both houses of the US Congress was the result of mass popular opposition to the Iraq war.

This opposition has only deepened in the intervening weeks, as a series of opinion polls have demonstrated. A CBS News poll, for example, found that just 4 percent of Americans believe that terrorism is the most important problem confronting the country. The same poll found that a record 35 percent believe that the war in Iraq is the principal problem, with 71 percent saying the war is going badly and only 9 percent believing that the US is very likely to succeed in Iraq.

A USA Today poll found that two-thirds believe that the costs of the US succeeding in Iraq outweigh the benefits. A clear majority wants all US troops withdrawn from the country within the next year, while 74 percent say all combat troops should be withdrawn by March 2008.

Not only is the American public unwilling to support a century of wars of aggression, it has reached the conclusion that the three-and-a-half-year-old war in Iraq should never have been launched and should be brought to a speedy end. This is the threat to the “American will” about which Gen. Schissler is so concerned.

This supposed “will” to wage war—what could better be described as a temporary and forced acquiescence—was achieved through political deception and intimidation, by terrorizing the population with the supposed threat of attack in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy.

As all of the pretexts used to promote the war—weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad-Al Qaeda ties, etc.—were exposed as lies, and as the war itself turned into an ever-more bloody debacle, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and either killing or wounding 25,000 US troops, the demand for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq was embraced by millions of Americans, including many in uniform.

The issue posed is not really sustaining the “will” to wage a 100-year war, but suppressing the mass opposition to war that has already found powerful political expression.

Among masses of American working people, there never was a will to wage wars of aggression. That outlook reflected the aims and schemes developed within the corporate and financial elite that rules America. This ruling layer has utilized the “global war on terror,” in which Gen. Schissler is a senior strategist, as the pretext for carrying out a military campaign aimed at imposing US domination over the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as part of American capitalism’s pursuit of global hegemony.

In the aftermath of the 2006 midterm elections, it has become increasingly apparent that this ruling elite has no intention of bowing to the actual will of the people, as reflected at the polls, by bringing an end to the war and withdrawing US troops from Iraq. It is driven by its own economic necessity to offset a declining position on the world market by means of military force. And it fears that a withdrawal from Iraq will expose the underlying weakness of American imperialism, raising the danger of revolutionary crises both at home and abroad.

In his interview with the Washington Times, Schissler said that the century-long struggle he foresees will be waged against extremists determined to establish a global “caliphate” stretching from Spain to Indonesia. While there are, no doubt, a small number of radical Islamists who believe in such a crackpot scheme, this supposed threat has nothing to do with the military interventions now being carried out by Washington in the regions possessing the largest reserves of petroleum in the world.

The attempt to cast the wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq in religious terms has become an increasingly common refrain within the most right-wing sections of the political establishment in Washington, as well as within the military command. There is no doubt that this depiction of events is aimed at solidifying a base of support for war among a layer of Christian fundamentalists.

The most notorious example of this attempt to drum up a religious-based “will” to wage war came to light in 2003 with press reports of speeches delivered by Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to audiences assembled by the Christian right.

Boykin repeatedly told audiences that the war was being waged by a “Christian army” and a “Christian nation” against Islamic forces aligned with Satan. He proclaimed that his own confidence in victory over a Muslim foe was based on the knowledge that “my God was bigger than his . . . my God was a real god and his was an idol.” He likewise declared that George W. Bush was “appointed by God,” despite having failed to win the majority of the votes in 2000, and indicated that he saw himself as answerable only to God’s commands.

While the general’s anti-Islamic bigotry and profoundly anti-democratic remarks provoked outrage, the Republican right and the Bush administration leapt to his defense. The general himself asked that a Pentagon inspector general investigate the controversy. The result was a report that avoided the content of Boykin’s remarks, delivering only the mildest rebuke for his failure to assert that they were his personal opinion and to clear them first with superiors.

General Boykin remains to this day the senior uniformed officer in military intelligence and a top policy-maker in the “war on terror,” overseeing assassination squads, illegal abductions and torture.

Schissler is not known to have delivered any similar religious-political diatribes. His service record posted on the Defense Department’s web site does, however, include the notation that in 1998, while climbing the promotional ladder to the Pentagon’s inner circle, the Air Force officer found time to complete a master’s degree in “pastoral studies.”

The politically protected ravings of Boykin as well as the expressions of concern by Schissler that “politics”—that is, the real will of the people—not be allowed to interfere with the official will to wage war are indicative of the right-wing and authoritarian tendencies that are being nurtured by American militarism and colonial-style occupation.

In the end, imposing upon the American people the “will” to sustain a 100-year war could be achieved only by dictatorial means similar to those utilized by the Nazis in their attempt to generate the “will” of the German people to sustain a 1,000-year Reich.

The danger posed by such right-wing tendencies is not that they have any substantial base of popular support, but that they emerge under conditions of deepening social and political polarization in which the opposition of American working people to war and repression can find no genuine expression within the political establishment and its two-party system.



Copyright 1998-2006
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

I’ll never accuse the Army of not having a perverse sense of humor. It must have been Rumsfeld’s idea. Just a little levity like he used to put into his press conferences. I think it was Jimmy Breslin who wrote a book called “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” The Cheney-Bush administration has made government into a sort of malignant Keystone Kops effort. They’re heavy-handed and often fall off the paddy wagon, but they shoot real depleted uranium bullets.

Army asks dead to sign up for another hitch

Story Highlights
•Letters inadvertently sent out to officers killed in action
•200 wounded soldiers also receive letters
•Invitations intended for soldiers who had recently left service
•Army sending out personnel to personally apologize to families

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.

The letters were sent a few days after Christmas to more than 5,100 Army officers who had recently left the service. Included were letters to about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.

"Army personnel officials are contacting those officers' families now to personally apologize for erroneously sending the letters," the Army said in a brief news release issued Friday night.

The Army did not say how or when the mistake was discovered. It said the database normally used for such correspondence with former officers had been "thoroughly reviewed" to remove the names of wounded or dead soldiers.

"But an earlier list was used inadvertently for the December mailings," the Army statement said, adding that the Army is apologizing to those officers and families affected and "regrets any confusion."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/05/dead.letters.ap/index.html

The nitty-gritty is this: American health care is a failing system. It’s failing at keeping babies alive, obesity under control, and our elders are dying younger than in countries with national health care. And more money is spent in this country, per capita, on health care than in other first world nations.

US Health Care System: Paying More, Getting Less
By Meredith L. King
ThinkProgress.org
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/printer_010507HA.shtml
Thursday 04 January 2007

It is no surprise to hear that the U.S. health care system is in shambles. Health care costs are increasing faster than wages and nearly 47 million Americans - 8 million of whom are children - are uninsured. Millions more are underinsured.

Yet, we continue to spend more on health care per person than any other country, including countries that provide health care coverage to its entire citizenry. According to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2003 alone, health spending per person was at least 24 percent higher than that of Luxembourg (the second highest spending country) and over 90 percent higher than countries considered global competitors.

But our health care system spending is not buying us superior health:

* Americans on average die at a younger age compared to the average age of death of comparable nations. Japan has the highest life expectancy.

* The U.S. infant mortality rate is 6.9 deaths per 1,000 live births, while Japan and Sweden have rates below 3.5 deaths per 1,000 live births.

* The obesity rate among adults in the U.S. is 30.6 percent; the highest rate of developed countries. This rate is nearly 21 percent higher than the rate of the second highest country, Mexico.

Nor does it buy us better health care or more resources:

* About 70 percent of deaths and health costs in the U.S. are attributable to chronic disease, which are largely preventable. Yet, only half of recommended preventive services are provided to adults.

* The U.S. has fewer practicing physicians and nurses per 1,000 people than comparable countries.

Instead, our health care system is pushing millions of hardworking Americans into relentless financial constraints and sends thousands to early graves.

With new policy leaders, the impetus for real health reform is now: we can afford to provide every American affordable health care that emphasizes prevention, while controlling costs and maintaining individuals' choice of doctors and plans.

Everything we do is important. Every little thing we do, every picket line we walk on, every letter we write, every act of civil disobedience we engage in, any recruiter that we talk to, any parent that we talk to, any GI that we talk to, any young person that we talk to, anything we do in class, outside of class, everything we do in the direction of a different world is important, even though at the moment they seem futile, because that's how change comes about. Change comes about when millions of people do little things, which at certain points in history come together, and then something good and something important happens.

—Howard Zinn

Another—yet another—tragedy of the western commons was the over-cutting of the O and C Lands. These were lands that had been granted to a railroad being built between Oregon and California (“O” and “C”). The railroad defaulted and the lands reverted to the federal government. For nearly one hundred years, a share of the revenues from timber cut on these lands, went to the Oregon counties in which the lands were located. The revenues paid for roads and schools, giving many towns and cities schools that required little local financing.

The goose that laid the golden eggs was, effectively, killed. The cutting was neither well-supervised nor restrained. Legislators were often in the pockets of the timber companies and they made sure there wasn’t much oversight. Timber called the shots in Oregon for many years. Eventually, there just weren't that many big trees. Little trees can be cut, but the timber industry liked big trees because they're easier to cut and transport and mill.

As the flow of big timber slowed since it was being cut much faster than it could replenish itself, counties found themselves with less and less money. Property taxes went up to compensate; schools and counties began to founder. Oregon schools became poorer and poorer. It was pretty foreseeable, if anybody had been looking.

Driving around towns and cities like Klamath Falls, Medford, John Day, Roseburg and even smaller communities, the sites of abandoned sawmills look like old battlefields. Something big and important happened there, but it’s hard to tell exactly what. Those same places are fighting for adequate operating expenses. There ain’t none.

Fight for county timber payments renewed

Reps. Walden and DeFazio, Sens. Wyden and Smith push for seven-year renewal of county 'safety net' payments that lapsed last year.
Updated: 1:16 PM, Jan. 4, 2007
http://www.ktvz.com/printstory.cfm?storyID=17924
By KTVZ.com news sources

WASHINGTON - Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Greg Walden (R-Ore.) announced Thursday the introduction of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Reauthorization Act of 2007, legislation that would reauthorize the successful "county payments" law for seven more years.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) introduced a companion bill in the Senate.

Of Oregon's 36 counties, 32 received payments through the program totaling over $273 million last year. Because of the large amount of timber historically harvested from federal lands in Oregon, Oregon counties have received significant payments from the funding formula, with the Fourth and Second Districts receiving the most federal investment respectively.

"When we first introduced this idea several years ago, the biggest obstacle to the passage of county payments legislation was opposition from the timber industry and environmental groups," DeFazio said. "We sure have come a long way. Organizations from the farthest ends of the spectrum have come together to support this program in a model partnership among local, state and federal interests. Today, the biggest obstacles we face are ever-tightening budgets and growing federal deficits. So we must now redouble our efforts in hand with this unique coalition to reauthorize this legislation. It is the lifeblood of rural counties across America, who serve everyday as stewards of our federal lands."

"Over one hundred years ago, the federal government made a commitment to rural counties, and we intend to see that it maintains it," Walden said. "Together with county and association leaders from across the country and many of our colleagues, Congressman DeFazio and I have led a partnership of education about how vital the county payments program is. We were deeply disappointed that all our efforts last year failed to reauthorize and fully fund the program to replace the funds lost by the decline in federal timber harvest."

"Since first introducing this legislation together two years ago, we've successfully educated both sides of the aisle about the critical nature of this program to rural communities in Oregon and throughout the country. Awareness of this importance is now very high, and it's time for members of Congress to unite behind a revenue stream to fully fund the program. There is no more important issue to the health of rural counties."

Before passage of the county payments law, Oregon counties were receiving payments as the result of 1908 and 1937 laws specifying that the government share 25 percent of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) receipts and 50 percent of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) receipts with counties in any state that hosts Federal land from which timber is cut. These payments had been used to help finance rural schools and roads.

Toward the mid-to-late '90s, however, the principal source of those revenues, federal timber sales, declined by over 70 percent nationwide. Consequently, the corresponding revenues shared with rural counties throughout the country declined precipitously, hurting school and transportation funding.

In 2000, legislation to remedy this imbalance was enacted into law, establishing a six-year payment formula for counties that receive revenue-sharing payments for USFS and BLM lands. The formula established a stable source of revenue, to be used for education, roads and county services in rural areas. The safety net amount was based on historical timber receipts.

If counties elect to use funding for projects on public lands, the projects must be developed by consensus and approved by a Resource Advisory Committee (RAC), a group designed to ensure expanded economic activity for the resource-based communities benefit from this legislation. RACs are made up of individuals from the local area dedicated to directing a portion of the funds for projects in their respective regions. A county may also choose to use funds for search and rescue, community service work camps, easement purchases, forest-related education opportunities, fire prevention, and community forestry.

All over the country, chambers of commerce and various Republicans are yowling that raising the minimum wage will be the End of American Civilization, If Not All of Christianity. None of them, of course, will see anything off-balance in a CEO getting #200+million as a severance package.

And as far as any minimum wage goes, George Will thinks an appropriate minimum wage would be $0.00. The Market should set the wage, he says. Yes, he does. Maybe it's early dementia.

What the hell planet is this, anyhow?


Jan. 4, 2007, 3:51AM
EXECUTIVE PAY
A golden exit at Home Depot
Critics are furious that CEO Bob Nardelli received a $210 million departure package after resigning
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/4443025.html
By PATTI BOND
Atlanta Journal-constitution

A TLANTA — Home Depot investors cheered the end of the Bob Nardelli era on Wednesday, but they had to pay dearly to usher out the chief — $210 million.

***

Big money
By the end of 2005, Nardelli received packages worth $154.3 million, not counting the value of stock options, since becoming CEO. His pay for 2006 hasn't been disclosed.

Now, after six years on the job, Nardelli will get cash severance of $20 million, acceleration of unvested deferred stock awards and options valued at $84 million, vested shares worth $44 million, bonuses and long-term incentives of $9 million, 401(k) payouts of $2 million, retirement benefits of $32 million and $18 million in other entitlements if he abides by no-compete clauses over the next four years.

The total package is seven times the $30 million Home Depot set aside last June for stores and employees that provide good customer service. Home Depot has 2,127 stores and 355,000 employees in the United States, Canada, Mexico and China.
***

The Associated Press, MarketWatch and the New York Times contributed to this report.

Does the President have a kind of “King’s X” that enables him to take whatever powers he wants (or is told to take)? If I remember right, there were several squabbles in England over the powers the king took that rightly belonged to Parliament; the King lost, severely.

Since it’s pretty obvious that Bush knows as much about history as he does about the number of galaxies in the universe, he believes he is above the law. Was it John Adams who said America is a nation of laws, not a nation of men? Bush doesn’t understand this, and that makes him dangerous—and that he can’t seem to learn or change makes him even more dangerous.

And, he's served us with warning—several times, now—that he's going to do any damn' thing he wants to do when it comes to violating the Constitution.

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
W pushes envelope on U.S. spying

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, January 4th, 2007

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/v-pfriendly/story/485561p-408789c.html

WASHINGTON - President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.
***

I've been reflecting on the earlier post about the research being done on "gay sheep" ("and the sheepherders who run with them"??). People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—PETA—publicized some research being done here in Oregon on the brains of rams that liked other rams better than ewes. PETA saw the research as an attempt to eliminate gay sheep. Somehow they got Martina Navratalova to speak out on the rights of sheep to be gay. Honest. It turned out to be a bit different than PETA made it out to be. That's not surprising: PETA really digs publicity and is one of the most publicity-horny groups out there.

Anyhow, I've been thinking about PETA and some of it's alignments over the last few years...

A few unkind words about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—
PETA, of course, got a lot of quick fame for releasing lab animals (where many of them promptly self-destructed), conducting flamboyant campaigns against fur (and leather and basically any animal product including food), and going for the sky-rocket effect: flash, bam! They were sort of environmental martyrs-in-waiting.

Like Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front and Sea Shepherd, they confused publicity with acceptance and progress. I know it worked to an extent—those groups were able to recruit some 2nd-String celebrities and got some financial backing. But the country is diverse, and what plays well in Pasadena doesn’t necessarily play well in Spokane or Pendleton.

I first started paying attention to these groups back when the Makah Indians decided they would resume their traditional activity of ceremonial whale hunting. The pro-animal groups were utterly outraged: their idealized Indians didn’t behave in a way they thought they should. I remember one ALF/PETA/Sea Shepherd-type actually saying the Indians should eat tofu. When the Makah were unconvinced by this argument, the attacks on Indians increased, both philosophic and physical. Lies were manufactured and distributed to the media. Finally, the “pro-animal” front aligned themselves with white racists over the whaling issue. It was shocking. Indian schools in Washington state were threatened; signs appeared “Save a whale: harpoon an Indian!”

That’s when the PETA-symps moved into the realm of fantasy and delusion. There was so much arrogance and pomposity in the west coast versions of those groups that it was inevitable they’d fall. And they did, in a serious of arrents in the last year or so; they had no internal security and they bragged. Crash. Deals were made and sentences handed out; several I remember are now behind the stone walls and iron gates.

No, I don’t have a flood of good thoughts about PETA or any of those groups.

While the stock market is trumpeted as a way for all Americans to invest and make money there’s little evidence of that. Less than 50% of American families hold any stock at all—and that’s including mutual funds and 401k pensions. Only 35% of the stock-holders hold stock worth more than $5,000.

80%—roughly—of the stocks are held by the wealthiest 10% of the population. The poorest 40% of the population—that’s forty percent, nearly half!—hold 0.6% of the stocks.

The defenders of wealth, of course, would say these figures are skewed. Chances all they also consider the AP, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Nancy Pelosi as part of the socialist conspiracy.

The lunar right wing loves to bleat that the founders of this country were devout conservative Christians. I’ve spent a lot of time looking through the writings of Jefferson, Madison, and Adams, among others, and all I can see is that they maintained a rather staid politeness toward churches and churchgoers. They were not overly religious men—spirirtual, perhaps, but not religious. Yet the right wing cycles through their fantasy at least once a year—sort of like their attempts to force a Biblical historical view on everyone. No matter how much evidence you shovel up in front of them, they continue their harangues.

It’s like listening to Maoists.

One of the latest outbreaks of this virus has come from Virginia Senator Virgil Goode. He has been utterly outraged that a newly elected member of Congress said he would take his oath on a copy of the Koran.

It really doesn’t make any difference, Mr Goode. Your intolerance is certainly not sanctioned by the New Testament—on which your hand rested when you were sworn in. Or, say, Rick Santorum. What did Joe Lieberman put his hand on? Did Ben Nighthorse Campbell hold a plains Indian pipe when he took his oath? Does it matter? Of course not.

So the in-coming Keith Ellison chose a copy of the Koran. And the copy he chose once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, who apparently richly annotated it, indicating he had read it. Perhaps Mr Goode could do the same.



But It's Thomas Jefferson's Koran!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010300075_pf.html
By Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts
Wednesday, January 3, 2007; C03

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison's 5th District, was happy to help.

Jefferson's copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson's collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn't the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies -- the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

Ellison will take the official oath of office along with the other incoming members in the House chamber, then use the Koran in his individual, ceremonial oath with new Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "Keith is paying respect not only to the founding fathers' belief in religious freedom but the Constitution itself," said Ellison spokesman Rick Jauert.

One person unlikely to be swayed by the book's illustrious history is Goode, who released a letter two weeks ago objecting to Ellison's use of the Koran. "I believe that the overwhelming majority of voters in my district would prefer the use of the Bible," the Virginia Republican told Fox News, and then went on to warn about what he regards as the dangers of Muslims immigrating to the United States and Muslims gaining elective office.

Yeah, but what about a Koran that belonged to one of the greatest Virginians in history? Goode, who represents Jefferson's birthplace of Albemarle County, had no comment yesterday.

This is from the Seattle P-I. It's relevant to the ongoing discussion about workers and wages. The average CEO makes over 800 times the wages of the average worker, according to one site I came across. I thought it was higher. For what it's worth, Donald Trump makes something like $3,000,000 per episode of The Apprentice. Don Trump couldn't be worth that much if he was plated with 22 carat gold.


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/297765_corppay2ed.html

Executive Pay: Yes, full disclosure

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Chief executives are valuable employees. Just ask them how valuable.

The Corporate Library's CEO Pay Survey shows that the median total compensation for CEOs increased by 30 percent in fiscal 2004, with the average increasing 91 percent. If you think that's a big number, consider that the average was boosted by 27 executives whose compensation increased 1,000 percent from their previous year's pay.

Corporate America long has argued that executive pay needs to be high because it attracts top talent -- and rewards performance. But the problem is many companies reward leaders whose performance was mediocre -- or worse.

Seattle native Franklin Raines, for example, was forced out from Fannie Mae because the company's accounting was misleading. The company already has announced a $9 billion restatement -- and that could go higher. Yet Raines will be paid a pension worth $1.4 million per year for life plus additional awards of stock.

The incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, D-Mass., will introduce legislation that will require full disclosure for corporate premium pay.

"We are not taking anybody's pay or even setting any limits; we just believe these owners should know how their employees (management) are being paid and have some ability to do something about it if they so desire," Frank said.

We agree. Full disclosure, it seems to us, is a minimum standard for a publicly traded company.

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

LaXayam nayka siks,
greeting friends

! hiiyuu hiihii kuupa chii kol yaka Cakuu yakwa alta !
cheers to the new year just arrived

spuus chii kol yaka paL kwan
may it be peaceful

paL taa paL tluuS taam taam
may it be full of spirit and love

spuus hiyuu waawaa kuupa sahaali tayee
full of prayers to the Chief above

spuus paLaC hiyuu tluuS kuupa kaanawii qaa
His blessings to the whole world

waam waawaa kuupa Laas
warm greetings to all

—translation by Scott Tyler; from the Chinook Jargon e-list. Nice job, Scott!