30 August 2005

The Democrats' Supreme Conundrum
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 30 August 2005
Reports that Senate Democrats are deeply divided over how to deal with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge John Roberts both oversimplify what's happening and underestimate the conundrums the party faces.
Democrats are less divided than they are uncertain. They worry about doing too little to challenge Roberts, but they also doubt their capacity to stop his nomination.
Most Democrats are certain that Roberts is significantly more conservative than Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom he would replace, and that he will push the court to the right. But they wonder whether that alone can justify a full-fledged fight against him, let alone a filibuster.
Democrats who have studied tapes of Roberts's past congressional testimony have concluded that the nominee is skilled at good-natured evasion. "If he performs as opaquely as he did the last time," said one Democratic staff member close to the process, "he'll probably have the support of the vast majority of Republicans, and Democrats won't have anything to hang on to."
Roberts is also helped by the goodwill he has courted over the years in the Washington legal establishment, which is wary of having his appointment blocked on ideological grounds. "It's as if he has been planning for this moment all his life," said one Washington lawyer. Said another: "There aren't enough hours in the day for anyone to have had as many lunches with Democratic lawyers as Roberts has."

Air Force Bans Leaders' Promotion of Religion
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
NYT, 30 August 2005
The Air Force issued new religion guidelines to its commanders yesterday that caution against promoting any particular faith - or even "the idea of religion over nonreligion" - in official communications or functions like meetings, sports events and ceremonies.
The guidelines discourage public prayers at official Air Force events or meetings other than worship services, one of the most contentious issues for many commanders. But they allow for "a brief nonsectarian prayer" at special ceremonies like those honoring promotions, or in "extraordinary circumstances" like "mass casualties, preparation for imminent combat and natural disasters."
The Air Force developed the guidelines after complaints from cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs that evangelical Christians leaders were using their positions to promote their faith.
The guidelines apply not just to the academy, but also to the entire Air Force. They will be made final later this year after Air Force generals meet and consider recommendations from their commanders.
"We support free exercise of religion, but we do not push religion," said Rabbi Arnold E. Resnicoff, a Navy veteran who was hired this year as a special assistant to the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force, and who helped write the guidelines. "I think many of the people I spoke to maybe should have known this already, but they were operating based on misperceptions."
Rabbi Resnicoff said some Air Force members he had spoken with "mistakenly assumed" that because the military encouraged "spiritual strength as a pillar of leadership," they were given license to promote strong belief in Christianity within it.

Army Contract Official Critical of Halliburton Pact Is Demoted
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NYT, 29 August 2005
A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.
The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq.
The demotion removes her from the elite Senior Executive Service and reassigns her to a lesser job in the corps' civil works division.
Ms. Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq.
Dick Cheney led Halliburton, which is based in Texas, before he became vice president.
"She is being demoted because of her strict adherence to procurement requirements and the Army's preference to sidestep them when it suits their needs," Mr. Kohn said Sunday in an interview. He also said the Army had violated a commitment to delay Ms. Greenhouse's dismissal until the completion of an inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general.

26 August 2005

The Iraqi Constitution: DOA?
Angry and marginalized, Sunnis are threatening to torpedo Iraq's constitution. Disaster looms, and the Bush administration's blunders are largely to blame.
Juan Cole
Salon, 26 August 2005
On Thursday, the third deadline for finishing Iraq's new constitution passed without agreement, as Sunni leaders balked at Shiite and Kurdish demands for federalism and regional control of oil wealth. In response, Shiite leaders threatened -- yet again -- to bypass the Sunnis, use their majority to approve it in Parliament, and take it to the Iraqi people for a national referendum.
Whether the constitution is sent to the Iraqi people without Sunni approval or is once again returned to the election committee for negotiations is almost irrelevant. The divisions are so intractable that the Sunnis are going to be marginalized, and enraged, in any event. The upshot: America's political vision for Iraq lies in tatters, and the Bush administration has largely itself to blame.
...the Kurds and Shiites could compromise in part because they both saw the benefits of regional confederations with claims on local resources, given that both have petroleum. The Sunni Arabs fear that such a system will leave them only with "the drifting sands of Anbar province." A system like Alaska's, in which oil profits are shared as royalties with all citizens equally, might have sidestepped some of the disputes over the prerogatives of provincial confederations, but the American Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq for a year did not institute that system when it had the chance. The Americans were still dreaming then of privatizing everything in Iraq for the sake of U.S. corporate profits (including the air Iraqis breathed, if possible.) Moreover, the long string of Bush administration mistakes in Iraq, along with the rejectionism of many in the Sunni leadership strata, had so alienated most Sunni Arabs that their negotiators -- unlike the populist Kurdish and Shiite leaders -- lacked much of a base of popular support, fatally weakening the Sunni bargaining position.
Parliament can clearly ram the draft constitution through at will, since the Shiites and the Kurds dominate it. In fact, the Kurdistan regional Parliament approved the federal constitution on Aug. 24, even before the federal Parliament had. But the real question now is whether the constitution can survive the referendum. The Sunni Arabs dominate Anbar and Salah al-Din provinces, and almost certainly can muster a two-thirds "no" vote on Oct. 15 in both. They may also be able to pull off a rejection in Ninevah province. In that case, Parliament would dissolve, new elections for Parliament would be held in December, and the entire process would begin all over again -- a nightmarish prospect. Meanwhile, the Sunni Arab guerrillas continue their macabre war against a new order that cannot seem to get its act together.

Summer of Our Discontent
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 26 August 2005
...when your numbers tell you that people should be feeling good, but they aren't, that means you're looking at the wrong numbers.
American families don't care about G.D.P. They care about whether jobs are available, how much those jobs pay and how that pay compares with the cost of living. And recent G.D.P. growth has failed to produce exceptional gains in employment, while wages for most workers haven't kept up with inflation.
About employment: it's true that the economy finally started adding jobs two years ago. But although many people say "four million jobs in the last two years" reverently, as if it were an amazing achievement, it's actually a rise of about 3 percent, not much faster than the growth of the working-age population over the same period. And recent job growth would have been considered subpar in the past: employment grew more slowly during the best two years of the Bush administration than in any two years during the Clinton administration.
It's also true that the unemployment rate looks fairly low by historical standards. But other measures of the job situation, like the average of weekly hours worked (which remains low), and the average duration of unemployment (which remains high), suggest that the demand for labor is still weak compared with the supply.
Employers certainly aren't having trouble finding workers. When Wal-Mart announced that it was hiring at a new store in Northern California, where the unemployment rate is close to the national average, about 11,000 people showed up to apply for 400 jobs.
Because employers don't have to raise wages to get workers, wages are lagging behind the cost of living. According to Labor Department statistics, the purchasing power of an average nonsupervisory worker's wage has fallen about 1.5 percent since the summer of 2003. And this may understate the pressure on many families: the cost of living has risen sharply for those whose work or family situation requires buying a lot of gasoline.
...You may ask where economic growth is going, if it isn't showing up in wages. That's easy to answer: it's going to corporate profits, to rising health care costs and to a surge in the salaries and other compensation of executives. (Forbes reports that the combined compensation of the chief executives of America's 500 largest companies rose 54 percent last year.)
The bottom line, then, is that most Americans have good reason to feel unhappy about the economy, whatever Washington's favorite statistics may say. This is an economic expansion that hasn't trickled down; many people are worse off than they were a year ago. And it will take more than a revamped administration sales pitch to make people feel better.

20 August 2005

Rightwing 'democracy in Iraq'
Bush Administration and 'Democratic Process' In Iraq: The Dark Details Revealed
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 19 August 2005
An informed reader writes:
' From the now-unclassified State Department Report to Congress – 15 December 2003:
“On November 15, the CPA and the Governing Council (GC) agreed to and announced a plan to expedite the process of transferring authority to the Iraqi people. [!?] Under this plan, the GC, in cooperation with the CPA, is expected to establish a political process that will lead to a representative transitional national assembly to assume full sovereign powers by July 2004. The agreement also provides, in connection with the wishes of the Iraqi people, for the drafting of a permanent constitution ….”
...This was and is serious stuff, and the “picture” of the five most powerful people in the US Government throwing together in haste basic documents with respect to the future of Iraq, amid confusion with respect to, if not intentional distortion of by some, the facts and applicable legal and political principles, is not a good one.
It is more than understandable that other governments were unwilling to get involved then, and may be (are) reluctant to do so even now.
The last point is the most important of all, and is continuing.

Rightwing 'democracy in America'
What They Did Last Fall
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 19 August 2005
By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.
In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."
Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.
But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy. If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly divided than ever.
Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.
...Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

18 August 2005

Blood Runs Red, Not Blue
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 18 August 2005
You have to wonder whether reality ever comes knocking on George W. Bush's door. If it did, would the president with the unsettling demeanor of a boy king even bother to answer? Mr. Bush is the commander in chief who launched a savage war in Iraq and now spends his days happily riding his bicycle in Texas.
This is eerie. Scary. Surreal.
The war is going badly and lives have been lost by the thousands, but there is no real sense, either at the highest levels of government or in the nation at large, that anything momentous is at stake. The announcement on Sunday that five more American soldiers had been blown to eternity by roadside bombs was treated by the press as a yawner. It got very little attention.
You can turn on the television any evening and tune in to the bizarre extended coverage of the search for Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba in May. But we hear very little about the men and women who have given up their lives in Iraq, or are living with horrific injuries suffered in that conflict.
If only the war were more entertaining. Less of a downer. Perhaps then we could meet the people who are suffering and dying in it.
For all the talk of supporting the troops, they are a low priority for most Americans. If the nation really cared, the president would not be frolicking at his ranch for the entire month of August. He'd be back in Washington burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out how to get the troops out of the terrible fix he put them in.
Instead, Mr. Bush is bicycling as soldiers and marines are dying. Dozens have been killed since he went off on his vacation.
As for the rest of the nation, it's not doing much for the troops, either. There was a time, long ago, when war required sacrifices that were shared by most of the population. That's over.
I was in Jacksonville, Fla., a few days ago and watched in amusement as a young woman emerged from a restaurant into 95-degree heat and gleefully exclaimed, "All right, let's go shopping!" The war was the furthest thing from her mind.
For the most part, the only people sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families, and very few of them are coming from the privileged economic classes. That's why it's so easy to keep the troops out of sight and out of mind. And it's why, in the third year of a war started by the richest nation on earth, we still get stories like the one in Sunday's Times that began:
"For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents."Scandalous incompetence? Appalling indifference? Try both. Who cares? This is a war fought mostly by other people's children. The loudest of the hawks are the least likely to send their sons or daughters off to Iraq.

15 August 2005

Making the world safe for democracy Islamic Republics
U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq
Administration Is Shedding 'Unreality' That Dominated Invasion, Official Says
By Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post, 14 August 2005
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

14 August 2005

Birth of a Puppet?
U.S. Builds Pressure for Iraq Constitution as Deadline Nears
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 13 August 2005
The United States ratcheted up its pressure Saturday on Iraqi negotiators who are trying to meet a deadline for writing a draft constitution set for Monday.
Speaking by cellphone from a meeting with Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq, a Sunni Arab member of the Iraqi constitutional committee compared the document to a meal that had not finished cooking. "We are still in the kitchen now, but there is nothing yet," said the Sunni member, Haseeb Aref. "There are only pressures on us." Mr. Aref then apologized and said because of the meeting with the ambassador he did not have time to say anything else. But another Sunni member of the committee, Saleh A. Mutlak, said that most of the American pressure was expended on urging the Sunnis to agree to the demands of the other two major parties, the Shiite Arabs and the Kurds.
The Americans have been eager to include Sunni Arabs in the constitutional process, in hopes of placating some of the Sunnis who are thought to be the main source of the insurgency in Iraq. The Shiites and Kurds, though, have routinely said the constitution would be written with or without Sunni involvement. "It's only the Americans who want us to be involved," Mr. Mutlak said.
A Kurdish member of the committee, Mahmoud Othman, also acknowledged the American pressures and said there had been constant meetings involving Mr. Khalilzad and many Iraqi officials, including the president, the speaker of the National Assembly and the president of Iraqi Kurdistan. But Mr. Othman said the pressure had been focused primarily on forging a constitution by the deadline.
"Without any doubt, there is American pressure on everybody," Mr. Othman said. "The U.S. wants to reach a solution and finalize an agreement, and they say that the date of Aug. 15 is sacred."

Privatizing Militarism
The Other Army
By DANIEL BERGNER
NYT Magazine, 14 August 2005

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 14 August 2005
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.

13 August 2005

21 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak
ThinkProgress.org, date unknown
The cast of administration characters with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:
Karl Rove
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
Condoleezza Rice
Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card
Alberto Gonzales
Mary Matalin
Ari Fleischer
Susan Ralston
Israel Hernandez John Hannah
Scott McClellan
Dan Bartlett
Claire Buchan
Catherine Martin
Colin Powell
Karen Hughes
Adam Levine
Bob Joseph
Vice President Dick Cheney
President George W. Bush

12 August 2005

Excellent
A Discussion About Why the US Military Response in Iraq Has Been So Counterproductive
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 10 August 2005
To paraphrase: You cannot accomplish the mission if the level of violence in the military response creates three insurgents for every one killed. It is not the "Rules of Engagement" that are the problem. It is the mindset. Not surprisingly, the US is quick to use maximum force to protect its personnel. That may be appropriate for "military action" but not for a "police action." Wouldn't the application of the minimum force necessary be more effective? To gain support of the Iraqi people for freedom, justice and democracy, shouldn't US troops have a mindset more like "police" than "military?"

An Iraqi Constitution
NYT editorial, 12 August 2005
Writing Iraq's constitution would be tough enough without Washington's hard-driving pressure to finish by next Monday. Some of the most basic issues remain hotly disputed, like the division of power between the central and regional governments, the role of Islam in state institutions, and whether women's rights will be protected by civil law.
Since this constitution will help determine whether Iraq holds together and whether the ultimate result of American military intervention will be freedom and democracy or a new religious tyranny, it would have been wiser to allow time for compromise and consensus. As that now seems unlikely, whatever document emerges next week needs to satisfy at least three criteria.
It should be transitional The specific details about regional boundaries, federal powers and the role of Islamic law should not be enshrined in the constitutional text, but left to future elected parliaments.
...It should be nonsectarian Saddam Hussein ran Iraq for the benefit of his own Sunni Arab minority. Shiites and Kurds were discriminated against, terrorized and worse. Now the tables have turned. The current government is dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties and Kurds inclined toward separatism. That leaves a lot of other Iraqis, including people from every group who put their identity as Iraqis ahead of their religious or ethnic affiliations, feeling excluded and unrepresented. And proposals for religiously inspired changes in family law have left millions of Iraqi women fearing that they are about to become second-class citizens.
The new constitution should clearly uphold the human and civil rights of all Iraqis, without regard to religion, ethnicity or gender, and guarantee access for all to the civil legal system and courts.
It should be Iraqi Iraqis have now been through several ballyhooed transitions that have still not left them completely in charge of their own country. The United States' arm-twisting over the Aug. 15 deadline is just the latest example.
While Iraq will never be fully sovereign as long as its government remains dependent on more than 100,000 foreign troops, the country's political leaders ought to be encouraged to stand on their own. With that in mind, the constitution should make it clear that Iraq's elected government must have full authority to decide how long foreign troops should remain in the country, the limits of the authority such troops can assert over Iraq's own security forces and whether any permanent military bases should be conceded to the United States.

A House of Cards
Safe as Houses
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 12 August 2005
I used to live next door to a Russian émigré. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"
The answer, these days, is that we make a living by selling each other houses. Since December 2000 employment in U.S. manufacturing has fallen 17 percent, but membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 58 percent.
The housing boom has created jobs in two ways. Many jobs have been created, directly and indirectly, by a surge in housing construction. And rising home values have fueled a simultaneous surge in consumer spending.
...a fuller answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.
How solid, then, is America's economic recovery? The British have a phrase that applies: "safe as houses." Our economy is as safe as houses. Unfortunately, given current prices and our dependence on foreign lenders, houses aren't safe at all.

4 August 2005

Bush Endorses Teaching 'Intelligent Design' Theory in Schools
by Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers via Common Dreams.com, 2 August 2005
President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools.

House Amends Funding Bill to Help Iraqi Christians
By Analiz Gonzalez
Associated Baptist Press, 29 July 2005
The U.S. House of Representatives has amended a funding bill in an attempt to focus attention on the postwar plight of Iraqi Christians.
The amendment, which was added to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act on a voice vote, also asks the Bush administration to work with the United States Agency for International Development and use funding for welfare, education and resettlement of Iraq’s Christian minority.
The House then passed the bill, H.R. 2601.

Pentagon's New Goal: Put Science Into Scripts
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
NYT, 4 August 2005
Tucked away in the Hollywood hills, an elite group of scientists from across the country and from a grab bag of disciplines - rocket science, nanotechnology, genetics, even veterinary medicine - has gathered this week to plot a solution to what officials call one of the nation's most vexing long-term national security problems.
Their work is being financed by the Air Force and the Army, but the Manhattan Project it ain't: the 15 scientists are being taught how to write and sell screenplays.
At a cost of roughly $25,000 in Pentagon research grants, the American Film Institute is cramming this eclectic group of midcareer researchers, engineers, chemists and physicists full of pointers on how to find their way in a world that can be a lot lonelier than the loneliest laboratory: the wilderness of story arcs, plot points, pitching and the special circle of hell better known as development.

2 August 2005

Bible Course Becomes a Test for Public Schools in Texas
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and BARBARA NOVOVITCH
NYT, 1 August 2005
When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.
Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group based in Greensboro, N.C., the council has been pressing a 12-year campaign to get school boards across the country to accept its Bible curriculum.
The council calls its course a nonsectarian historical and literary survey class within constitutional guidelines requiring the separation of church and state.
But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.

While Senate Stalled on Bolton, U.N. Reform Accomplished
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 2 August 2005
Now that he is finally going to the United Nations as ambassador, John R. Bolton is supposed to "provide clear American leadership for reform" there, President Bush said Monday. But American officials say much of their reform agenda at the United Nations has been accomplished during the months while Mr. Bolton's nomination languished.
"Most of the reforms sought by the United States are well on their way to completion," said a senior administration official, speaking anonymously to avoid undercutting the rationale for the Bolton appointment. Another said that because so much had been achieved, there was little concern that Mr. Bolton's combative personality would jeopardize the agenda.

Spanking The CAFTA 15
Jonathan Tasini
TomPaine.com, 29 July 2005
The 15 so-called Democrats who voted for the Central American Free Trade Agreement must pay a heavy price for turning their backs on labor: None of them should receive a dime from labor unions and each one should face a labor-backed primary challenger next year. And the recruitment of good candidates should start now. If the CAFTA 15 do not suffer the political consequences for their vote, labor will look weak and the march of so-called “free trade” will continue.
In 1993, after a small group of Democrats defected to support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), unions threatened to get even. But virtually nothing was done. The message this sent to each elected representative was that labor would make a lot of noise but eventually the waters would grow calm—and no one suffered for casting a vote that hurt workers here and abroad.
And so, as each trade vote loomed, Democrats could contemplate wandering off the reservation, either to protect campaign contributions from large corporate donors or to extort some promise from supporters of so-called “free trade” to build a highway, fund a pet project or place a federal research center in a wavering politician’s district. Votes were for sale. 
Here are the CAFTA 15...drumroll, please...:
Melissa Bean, Illinois (8th District):
Jim Cooper, Tennessee (5th District);
Norm Dicks, Washington (6th District);
Henry Cuellar, Texas (28th District);
Ruben Hinojosa, Texas (15th District);
William Jefferson, Louisiana (2nd District);
Jim Matheson, Utah (2nd District);
Gregory Meeks, New York (6th District);
Dennis Moore, Kansas (3rd District);
Jim Moran, Virginia (8th District);
Solomon Ortiz, Texas (27th District);
Ike Skelton, Missouri (4th District);
Vic Snyder, Arkansas (2nd District);
John Tanner, Tennessee (8th District); and
Edolphus Towns, New York (10th District).

31 July 2005

The Roots of Prisoner Abuse
NYT's Editorial, 30 July 2005
This week, the White House blocked a Senate vote on a measure sponsored by a half-dozen Republicans, including Senator John McCain, that would prohibit cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners. Besides being outrageous on its face, that action served as a reminder of how the Bush administration ducks for cover behind the men and women in uniform when challenged on military policy, but ignores their advice when it seems inconvenient.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has shown real political courage on this issue, recently released documents showing that the military's top lawyers had warned a year before the Abu Ghraib nightmare came to light that detainee policies imposed by the White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld violated American and international law and undermined the standards of civilized treatment embedded in the American military tradition.
In February 2003, Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, reminded his civilian bosses that American rules on the treatment of prisoners had grown out of Vietnam, where captured Americans, like Mr. McCain, were tortured. "We have taken the legal and moral 'high road' in the conduct of our military operations regardless of how others may operate," he wrote. Abandoning those rules, he said, endangered every American soldier.
General Rives and the other military lawyers argued strongly against declaring that Mr. Bush was above the law when it came to antiterrorism operations. But the president's team ignored them, offering up a pretzel logic that General Rives and the other military experts warned would not fool anyone. Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, the Navy's judge advocate general, said that the situation at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba might be so legalistically unique that the Geneva Conventions and even the Constitution did not necessarily apply. But he asked, "Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"
General Rives said that if the White House permitted abusive interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, it would not be able to restrict them to that single prison. He argued that soldiers elsewhere would conclude that their commanders were condoning illegal behavior. And that is precisely what happened at Abu Ghraib after the general who organized the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo went to Iraq to toughen up the interrogation of prisoners there.
The White House ignored these military lawyers' advice two years ago. Now it is trying to kill the measure that would define the term "illegal combatants," set rules for interrogations and prohibit cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The president considers this an undue restriction of his powers. It's not only due; it's way overdue.

30 July 2005

Oil and Blood; There is No Withdrawal Plan
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 28 July 2005
...The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.
A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."
...The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.
But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.
Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.
That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.

28 July 2005

Military's Opposition to Harsh Interrogation Is Outlined
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 28 July 2005
Senior military lawyers lodged vigorous and detailed dissents in early 2003 as an administration legal task force concluded that President Bush had authority as commander in chief to order harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, newly disclosed documents show.
Despite the military lawyers' warnings, the task force concluded that military interrogators and their commanders would be immune from prosecution for torture under federal and international law because of the special character of the fight against terrorism.
In memorandums written by several senior uniformed lawyers in each of the military services as the legal review was under way, they had urged a sharply different view and also warned that the position eventually adopted by the task force could endanger American service members.

Ex-Warden Tells of Use of Dogs
FORT MEADE, Md.
AP via NYT, 28 July 2005
The former warden of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq testified Wednesday that he attended a meeting in which the commander of the Guantánamo prison recommended using military dogs for interrogation.
The former warden, Maj. David Dinenna, testified at the end of a preliminary hearing for two Army dog handlers accused of abusing Iraqi detainees. Major Dinenna said that at a meeting in September 2003, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the Guantánamo commander, talked about the effectiveness of using the dogs.

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
NYT, 17 July 2005
...Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers - and epitomize why some retail analysts say Mr. Sinegal just might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.
But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.
Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."
Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."

Is There an Extra Ingredient in Nonstick Pans?
By MARIAN BURROS
NYT, 27 July 2005
The question of whether Teflon cookware is safe has moved from Web site chatter to the courtroom. But more than nonstick frying pans are under scrutiny these days. Scientists are examining the chemical makeup of other products like food containers to gauge their potential hazards.
In each instance, the substance being questioned is perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. Studies have shown that PFOA causes cancer and other health problems in laboratory animals, and it is under scrutiny by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
A class action suit filed last week against DuPont in several states, including New York, charges that Teflon releases PFOA under normal cooking use and that the company did not warn consumers about its dangers.
DuPont says that while PFOA is used to make Teflon, none of it remains in the finished product, and all Teflon-coated cookware is safe.