God, Militarism and the Corporate State

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ARCHIVE
15 - 30 April 2005
Excerpts from print and broadcast media, blogs,
think tanks, policy and advocacy groups.


   

  National 
'Culture of  Life  Lies'
DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post, 24 April 2005
The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.
DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.
House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists. DeLay, who is now House majority leader, has said that his expenses on this trip were paid by a nonprofit organization and that the financial arrangements for it were proper. He has also said he had no way of knowing that any lobbyist might have financially supported the trip, either directly or through reimbursements to the nonprofit organization.
The documents obtained by The Washington Post, including receipts for his hotel stays in Scotland and London and billings for his golfing during the trip at the famed St. Andrews course in Scotland, substantiate for the first time that some of DeLay's expenses on the trip were billed to charge cards used by the two lobbyists. The invoice for DeLay's plane fare lists the name of what was then Abramoff's lobbying firm, Preston Gates & Ellis.
Balancing business and rightwing evangelicals
Frist Initiative Creates Rift in GOP Base
By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
LA Times, 24 April 2005
The country's leading business lobbying associations, close GOP allies in recent legislative efforts and political campaigns, have told senior Republicans that they would not back the Frist initiative to force votes on President Bush's judicial nominees. Business leaders say they fear the move would lead to a shutdown of Senate action on long-awaited priorities — as Democrats have threatened if Frist moves ahead with a rule change that they say would drastically alter the traditions of a body designed to respect the rights of the minority party. "If we do that, then all else is going to stop," Thomas J. Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said during a meeting with reporters Friday. He then reeled off a list of business priorities that could be delayed for months in the resulting partisan uproar. He expressed the same concerns directly to Frist's office in recent days. The lack of support from business presents a dilemma for Frist, who wants to build ties with the Republican base ahead of his likely 2008 presidential bid but now must balance competing demands from two pillars of Republican politics: evangelicals, who can marshal millions of voters, and businesses, which donate millions of dollars. Both groups played pivotal roles in securing Bush's reelection last year and expanding the GOP majority in Congress — and both have made clear that they expect to be rewarded.
And Dems finally return to the real argument...
G.O.P. Senator Casts Doubt on U.N. Nominee
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 25 April 2005
In contrast to optimistic statements from the White House, a top Republican senator said Sunday that John R. Bolton's prospects of winning Senate confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations were "too close to call."  The doubts expressed by the Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who spoke on the CNN program "Late Edition," came as Democratic critics sharpened attacks aimed at portraying Mr. Bolton as someone who sought to politicize intelligence judgments. Four of 10 Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have expressed concern about Mr. Bolton, on a panel where one Republican vote against him could keep the nomination from reaching the Senate floor. As new complaints emerged from several quarters about Mr. Bolton and his harsh treatment of subordinates and colleagues, Senator John Kyl, Republican of Arizona, issued a strong defense of Mr. Bolton, saying on the ABC News program "This Week" that the nominee had attracted Democratic criticism "because he's a tough guy who supports the president's policy." But leaders of the Democratic opposition to the nomination made clear that they intended to turn the focus back to what they have portrayed as their stronger case. They said Mr. Bolton's nomination should be judged on whether he inappropriately sought to use or shape intelligence reports to bolster his political views on Cuba, Syria, Iran and other issues. The issue is "not whether he's a nice guy or not," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said of Mr. Bolton, in an appearance on "This Week." Mr. Biden added, "This is about whether or not you try to alter intelligence data, alter what intelligence data says, or intimidate experts in the intelligence community to say something different than you want said."
Quality public broadcasting on the way out...
Recasting PBS?: Questions for Ken Ferree
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
NYT Magazine, 24 April 2005
Isn't the president trying to cut the budget of public broadcasting by about 15 percent?
In the president's budget there were some changes that would result in a net cut to us of about $60 million. We need to be better at telling the story of public TV and radio on the Hill so that Congress will be less inclined to look at public broadcasting as an easy place to find extra dollars.
What PBS shows do you like?
I'm not much of a TV consumer. I like ''Masterpiece Theater'' and some of the ''Frontline'' shows. I like ''Antiques Roadshow'' and ''Nova.'' I don't know. What's your favorite show?
It would probably be the ''NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.''
Yes, Lehrer is good, but I don't watch a lot of broadcast news. The problem for me is that I do the Internet news stuff all day long, so by the time I get to the Lehrer thing . . . it's slow. I don't always want to sit down and read Shakespeare, and Lehrer is akin to Shakespeare. Sometimes I really just want a People magazine, and often that is in the evening, after a hard day.
For the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you don't sound like much of a PBS viewer. Perhaps you prefer NPR, which your organization also finances?
No. I do not get a lot of public radio for one simple reason. I commute to work on my motorcycle, and there is no radio access.
Can't you install a radio on a motorcycle and listen with headphones?
One probably can. But my bikes are real cruisers. They're stripped down deliberately to look cool, and I don't want all that electronic gear.
A Tax Benefit for Big Donors Often Bypasses Idea of Charity
By STEPHANIE STROM
NYT, 25 April 2005
George B. Kaiser, a publicity-shy oilman who built a fortune estimated at $4 billion by snapping up busted petroleum businesses in Oklahoma, set aside roughly $1 billion for charitable endeavors from 2000 to the end of last year. In exchange, he can now deflect taxes on much of his own income over the next several years. But it turns out that only $3.4 million of the money he set aside has gone to charities. The rest is sitting in an obscure philanthropic entity called a supporting organization, so named because it is created to support a specific charity or charities. Supporting organizations are attractive to donors because they offer the generous tax benefits associated with donating directly to charities and operate much like private foundations, but without a foundation's more onerous requirements. Donors get those perks because they agree to relinquish control over the money. But since they appoint the organization's board, they can retain a great deal of influence over it. Regulators and lawmakers suspect that many wealthy people have used these organizations more for tax planning than for any charitable aim and are pushing for tighter rules as part of a broader crackdown on charitable tax exemptions.
Surprise Terror Plea Leaves Unresolved Issues
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 24 April 2005
...By pleading guilty to all six counts of conspiracy to engage in terrorism, Mr. Moussaoui became the first person to be convicted in a United States court in connection with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But when he offered his surprise plea, the courts and lawyers in his case were still figuring out whether it was possible to balance his right to a fair trial against the government's need to withhold information it deemed essential to national security. Mr. Moussaoui had demanded to question senior Qaeda operatives in United States custody in secret locations abroad. He said they would provide evidence and testimony to prove he was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather in other plots not yet executed. The government has resisted providing information from the captured terrorist leaders.
...Judge Brinkema initially threw out the death penalty charges as a sanction against the government when it refused to provide Mr. Moussaoui with videotaped depositions of the captured Qaeda leaders. But a federal appeals court reinstated the death penalty and ordered the judge and the government to find some other way to accommodate Mr. Moussaoui's rights. When the Supreme Court refused to intervene last month, the issue was left unresolved. But it is possible that the issue will resurface in the death penalty trial, for which a date has not been set. Although he pleaded guilty on Friday, Mr. Moussaoui said he was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but in a different plot to fly a plane into the White House on another date. He told Judge Brinkema that he wanted to make that argument so he would not be blamed for the deaths of Sept. 11 during the death penalty trial. She said that his arguments "were still highly relevant to the sentencing phase," when the jury must decide if there are any mitigating factors that would spare him the death penalty. Mr. Moussaoui, a 36-year-old French citizen of Moroccan heritage, was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations. He said Friday that he was supposed to be the pilot of a plane that would have flown into the White House if the United States refused to release Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim scholar who is serving a life sentence for conspiracy to blow up New York bridges and tunnels and other landmarks in 1993. His account adds to confusion over what his role was in Al Qaeda's terrorist plots. Government officials initially said he was supposed to be the "20th hijacker" on Sept. 11, then said they believed he was to fly a fifth plane that day. The report of the Sept. 11 commission weighed several possibilities but strongly suggested that he was to be a back-up pilot for the Sept. 11 plot.
Bolton 'Bullying' Be Damned, the Real Point is the Politicization of Intelligence
 Boltonized Intelligence
John Prados
TomPaine.com, April 21, 2005
John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author of Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).
Nomination hearings last week for John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations brought into sharp focus a key issue that bedevils us today: the politicization of intelligence. The newly appointed director of national intelligence is charged by law with responsibility for producing objective intelligence, and the law explicitly targets politicization. Yet Bolton's confirmation hearings and other recent developments show we do not even understand what "politicization" is.
...Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's defense of Bolton as exactly the man the United States needs at the United Nations today, whatever else it means, indicates that Washington intends a coercive rather than diplomatic approach at the world body. But the dangers of politicization of intelligence—not foreign affairs strategy—should determine the action in this matter. Something Carl Ford said at the Bolton hearings jogged this writer. Ford thinks that no politicization occurred in the events that brought him to oppose John Bolton's promotion. (For those joining us late, Bolton attempted to present especially incendiary charges against Cuba as the considered judgment of U.S. intelligence but was torpedoed by an INR analyst. Bolton then attempted to have the INR man fired or transferred—for many months after the events in question—and then prohibited the man from dealing with him. He made the same efforts to get rid of a senior CIA analyst when the latter briefed Congress that Bolton's final speech did not represent the opinion of U.S. intelligence.)
Chilling indeed. But Carl Ford maintains no "politicization" took place because the INR analyst stood his ground and Bolton's speech lost its original incendiary language. Clearly, this is what Ford believes—he said it three times, in slightly different words, to senators Lincoln Chaffee, John Kerry and Christopher Dodd. As Ford puts it, politicization is "A team sport. It requires someone to pressure [analysts] and what I refer to as a weasel in the intelligence community to act inappropriately to that pressure." In other words, politicization exists only if the pressure works. The commissioners of President Bush's commission on intelligence on weapons of mass destruction must have had something similar in mind. In their recent report, they described instances of CIA analysts being threatened or transferred for protesting mishandling of agents or analysed data, and then declared in the next sentence or page that no evidence of politicization could be found. This is a phenomenon with a history...
SEE ALSO:
 Released E-Mail Exchanges Reveal More Bolton Battles
 By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT,  25 April 2005
The correspondence provided to the Senate committee also includes a Feb. 12 message sent to Mr. Bolton by Mr. Fleitz, who disparages what he calls the "already cleared (wimpy) language on Cuba" that Mr. Westermann had recommended be used by Mr. Bolton in his planned speech. It made clear that Mr. Westermann had proposed language that reiterated existing, consensus assessments by American intelligence agencies, rather than the stronger assertions that Mr. Bolton had been pressing to make about possible efforts by Cuba to obtain biological weapons, which Mr. Bolton contended were borne out by some highly classified intelligence reports. "I explained to Christian that it was a political judgment as to how to interpret this data, and the I.C. should do as we asked and sanitize my language as long as sources and methods are not compromised," Mr. Fleitz wrote to Mr. Bolton, referring to the intelligence community. Mr. Fleitz said of Mr. Westermann, "He strongly disagrees with us." The e-mail messages also make clear that Mr. Westermann and others within the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, known as I.N.R., were not the only intelligence officials to resist Mr. Bolton's request, and that objections also came from the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and others.
A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 24 April 2005
Tonight is the much-awaited "Justice Sunday," the judge-bashing rally being disseminated nationwide by cable, satellite and Internet from a megachurch in Louisville. It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry." These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher, "was born to be a senator," we now have senators who are born to be Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched plans to be beamed into tonight's festivities by videotape, a stunt that in itself imbues "Justice Sunday" with a touch of all-American spectacle worthy of "The Wizard of Oz."
...The only major religious leader involved with "Justice Sunday," R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a "false and unbiblical office" but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that "any belief system" leading "away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil."
Tonight's megachurch setting and pseudoreligious accouterments notwithstanding, the actual organizer of "Justice Sunday" isn't a clergyman at all but a former state legislator and candidate for insurance commissioner in Louisiana, Tony Perkins. He now runs the Family Research Council, a Washington propaganda machine devoted to debunking "myths" like "People are born gay" and "Homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals are." It will give you an idea of the level of Mr. Perkins's hysteria that, as reported by The American Prospect, he told a gathering in Washington this month that the judiciary poses "a greater threat to representative government" than "terrorist groups." And we all know the punishment for terrorists. Accordingly, Newsweek reports that both Justices Kennedy and Clarence Thomas have "asked Congress for money to add 11 police officers" to the Supreme Court, "including one new officer just to assess threats against the justices." The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has requested $12 million for home-security systems for another 800 judges. Mr. Perkins's fellow producer tonight is James Dobson, the child psychologist who created Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs media behemoth most famous of late for condemning SpongeBob SquarePants for joining other cartoon characters in a gay-friendly public-service "We Are Family" video for children. Dr. Dobson sees same-sex marriage as the path to "marriage between a man and his donkey" and, in yet another perversion of civil rights history, has likened the robed justices of the Supreme Court to the robed thugs of the Ku Klux Klan. He has promised "a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea" if he doesn't get the judges he wants.
SEE ALSO:
Frist Draws Criticism From Some Church Leaders
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 22 April 2005
As the Senate battle over judicial confirmations became increasingly entwined with religious themes, officials of several major Protestant denominations on Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, of violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church and urged him to drop out of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as "against people of faith." Dr. Frist's participation has rekindled a debate over the role of religion in public life that may be complicating his efforts to overcome the Democrats' use of the filibuster, a parliamentary tactic used by Congressional minorities, to block President Bush's judicial nominees. Dr. Frist has threatened to change the Senate rules to eliminate judicial filibusters, and in response Democrats have threatened a virtual shutdown of the Senate. A confrontation had been expected as early as next week, but it now appears that the showdown may be delayed. Religious groups, including the National Council of Churches and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, plan to conduct a conference call with journalists on Friday to criticize Senator Frist's participation in the telecast. The program is sponsored by Christian conservative organizations that want to build support for Dr. Frist's filibuster proposal.
Crust Almighty! Rome Delivers a Pope to Domino's
The Bush Beat by Ward Harkavy
Village Voice, 20 April 2005
I know. You might say, "It's just another pope. And so he's conservative. And so he has friends, allies, and disciples way high up in the U.S. government and power structure. So what? Stercus accidit." But this is deep stercus for all of us—more warfare, more religious warfare, more fanatically religious warfare on battlefields and in courtrooms and classrooms. For the first time in centuries, right-wing Catholics and right-wing Protestants (like Ashcroft and the Bushes) are openly, publicly joining hands in their march to political power. If you're a demon, or you engage in any demon-like behavior, you'll get a lot of exorcise—you'll be running away quickly from the coming "moral" crusade. For all the smoke about morality, this surge of fundamentalist Catholicism is about power. And when it comes to its battle with Islam, that's a war of numbers. During Pope John Paul II's long reign, Catholics fell to No. 2, behind Islam, in adherents. Only yesterday—even before this new ill papa was picked—three reporters at the Wall Street Journal teamed up to write a riveting preview of the battle between Islam and Catholicism—a battle that also threatens those of us who aren't Muslims or Catholics. For now, what's fascinating are the new alliances between right-wing Catholics and right-wing Protestants. The Schiavo circus was just the latest to bring these former enemies under the same big tent. Monaghan sold Domino's for a huge fortune and now devotes practically all of his money to political endeavors, like building his chain of right-wing Catholic colleges.
Bush clamps down on science, again
Climate Research Faulted Over Missing Components
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 22 April 2005
The Bush administration's program to study climate change lacks a major component required by law, according to Congressional investigators. The program fails to include periodic assessments of how rising temperatures may affect people and the environment. The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, conclude in a report to be released today that none of the 21 studies of climate change that the administration plans to publish by September 2007 explicitly address the potential effects in eight areas specified by a 1990 law, the Global Change Research Act. The areas include agriculture, energy, water resources and biological diversity.
Passing the Buck
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 22 April 2005
The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it? An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.
According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries - but because we rely much more heavily than anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher. ...Isn't competition supposed to make the private sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don't compete by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they "compete on the basis of risk selection" - that is, by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.
Bush Backs His U.N. Nominee, but Powell Warns of Volatility
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 22 April 2005
President Bush on Thursday issued a strong new defense of John R. Bolton, his nominee as ambassador to the United Nations. But associates of Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, said he had expressed reservations about Mr. Bolton in conversations with at least two wavering Republican senators.
Pax Christi USA Criticizes Sen. Bill Frist’s Participation in Conservative “Justice Sunday”
PaxChristiUSA, 21 April 2005
“Justice Sunday” a partisan attempt to narrow the definition of faith, says Pax Christi USA
Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace movement, strongly criticized Sen. Bill Frist’s participation in the upcoming “Justice Sunday,” on April 24, saying that the event is a partisan attempt to narrow the definition of faith to fit a conservative political agenda.
“There is a huge problem when politicians and religious leaders manipulate the teachings of their faith to force people to vote a certain way,” said David Robinson, Executive Director of Pax Christi USA. “What we’re seeing in ‘Justice Sunday’ is a partisan attempt by religious conservatives to declare war on judges that don’t rule in accordance to a right-wing political agenda. Shamefully, in their attempt to bring down those they label as activist judges, they are also branding as unfaithful anyone who disagrees with them. This is disingenuous and dangerous, and an insult to people of faith who view many of the positions supported by the Bush administration– whether it be the death penalty, the war in Iraq, or economic policies that favor corporations over people – as contrary to their moral values.”  ...Justice Sunday is being organized by the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, two staunchly conservative faith-based organizations, to generate a backlash against what they allege as an “activist” federal judiciary.
Nailing the Hammer?
by Arianna Huffington
Common Dreams, 21 April 2005
The Hammer was in a steely mood this weekend. Moments before brandishing a rifle over his head, embattled House Majority Leader Tom DeLay told a crowd of gun lovers at the National Rifle Association's annual convention, "When a man is in trouble or in a good fight, you want to have your friends around--preferably armed."
The NRA members, who had paid $75 to dine on sirloin steak with peppercorn cognac sauce and hear DeLay wax romantic about firearms--"If you want to empower women in America, give 'em a gun"--responded with thunderous applause. I wouldn't be surprised if the judges in the Terri Schiavo case, whom DeLay had warned would have to "answer for their behavior," responded by running out to buy bulletproof vests.
Among the friends who have gathered 'round DeLay is Rep. Roy Blunt, the number-three ranking Republican in the House, who appeared on "Meet the Press" the morning after DeLay's NRA speech to defend his colleague. No word on whether Blunt was packing heat.
Jeffords to Leave the Senate, Setting Off Vermont Scramble
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 21 April 2005
Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont, the Republican-turned-independent whose party switch in 2001 delivered control of the Senate to Democrats for 19 months, announced on Wednesday that he would not seek re-election next year, citing concerns about his health and that of his wife. ..."Unequivocally, Governor Dean will not run for the Senate," the spokeswoman, Karen Finney, said. "He's committed to his job here at the D.N.C. rebuilding the Democratic Party."  That leaves Mr. Sanders, who has served in the House since 1991, and has said repeatedly that he intended to run if Mr. Jeffords retired.
Upward Christian Soldiers?
Non-Christian Air Force Cadets Cite Harassment
By David Kelly
LA Times, 20 April 2005
The Air Force Academy, still recovering from rape and sexual harassment scandals, is facing charges that some Christian cadets have bullied and berated Jews and students of other religious backgrounds.
School officials said Tuesday they had received 55 complaints over the last few months and were requiring students — and eventually all employees — to attend a course on religious tolerance.
"Some complaints had to do with people … saying bad things about persons of other religions or proselytizing in inappropriate places," said academy spokesman Johnny Whitaker. "There have been cases of maliciousness, mean-spiritedness and attacking or baiting someone over religion."
About 90% of the academy's 4,300 cadets identify themselves as Christians; the school's commandant, Brig. Gen. Johnny A. Weida, describes himself as a born-again Christian.
Mikey Weinstein, an academy graduate and a lawyer in Albuquerque, said that his son Curtis — a sophomore at the academy — had been called a "filthy Jew."
...Colorado Springs is home to more than 100 evangelical Christian organizations, including Focus on the Family, the International Bible Society and New Life Church, whose pastor, Ted Haggard, heads the National Assn. of Evangelicals. Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family, denounced any acts of bigotry but said it was Christians who were facing discrimination.
"If 90% of cadets identify themselves as Christian, it is common sense that Christianity will be in evidence on the campus," he said. "Christianity is deeply felt and very important to people … and to suggest that it should be bottled up is nonsense. I think a witch hunt is underway to root out Christian beliefs. To root out what is pervasive in 90% of the group is ridiculous."
Energy Bill Includes $2 Billion Incentive for Gulf Drilling
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 20 April 2005
Backers of energy legislation that the House plans to take up Wednesday like to emphasize its potential benefits for consumers. It has substantial rewards for energy producers as well. A little-noted provision backed by Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority leader and an ally of the oil industry, would bypass Congress's normal spending process to funnel up to $2 billion over 10 years into research for recovering oil and gas from the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
FOX objective is to undermine all news organizations
Fox's Sandstorm
By William Raspberry
Washington Post, 18 April 2005
The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects.
The first is that the popularity of the approach -- Fox is clobbering its direct competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) -- leads other cable broadcasters to mimic it, which in turn debases the quality of the news available to that segment of the TV audience.
The second, far more dangerous, effect is that it threatens to destroy public confidence in all news.
The latter, I admit, is more fear than prediction, but let me tell you what produces that fear. Fox News Channel -- though the people who run the operation are at great pains to insist otherwise -- is deliberately partisan. It is as though right-wing talk radio has metastasized into cable and assumed a new virulence.
The main difference is that radio's Rush Limbaugh, for instance, doesn't pretend even-handedness. As he has said, he doesn't seek to be balanced but to balance the rest of the media, which he sees as generally dominated by left-of-center attitudes.
Part of the FNC approach, on the other hand, is to promote itself as "fair and balanced." I suppose it does so with a wink and a nod to its far-right audience, who must know it isn't balanced. Certainly those near the center of the political spectrum know it.
So why would I consider Fox such a generalized threat? Because I think the plan is not so much to convince the public that its particular view is correct but rather to sell the notion that what FNC presents is just another set of biases, no worse (and for some, a good deal better) than the biases that routinely drive the presentation of the news on ABC, CBS or NBC -- and, by extension, the major newspapers.
Taking a Harder Look at Possible Gasoline Price-Gouging
The research director of Public Citizen's Energy Program says the press is too quick to conclude that price increases are simply due to supply and demand. Reporters, he says, aren't asking the right questions.
By Tyson Slocum
Nieman Watchdog.org, 19 April 2005
As oil and gasoline prices continue their steady climb, lots of stories are written concluding that the increases are attributable to supply and demand, pure and simple, and that the only solutions –- increasing domestic supply or reducing domestic demand –- are long-term, so we're simply forced to deal with higher prices in the meantime. And OPEC gets branded as a primary culprit.
But that's not the whole story.
One of the first things to examine is the relationship between the record profits enjoyed by U.S. oil companies and the higher prices for consumers and American industry. For example, in 2004, ExxonMobil –- the product of the 1999 merger between Exxon and Mobil –- chalked up the world's biggest-ever profit for a single company: $25.3 billion.
Is it possible that ExxonMobil and other U.S. oil companies are making part of their profits off price gouging? It is possible that, just like Enron constricted supply in California by ordering power plants offline in order to create supply shortage to jack prices up, U.S. oil companies are keeping supplies offline and waiting to release those supplies until prices rise enough to make it worth their while?
The potential is there.
Is John Bolton Going Down?
An amazing afternoon at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 19 April 2005
Could it be that John Bolton is about to go down?
Something amazing happened at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this afternoon. In nearly 30 years of watching Congress, off and on, I can't remember anything quite like it. Bolton, the most dreadfully ill-qualified candidate ever to be nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has nonetheless been an odds-on favorite to be confirmed because the committee enjoys a Republican majority and because George W. Bush's White House has a knack for iron party discipline. But that majority is only 10-8, and it's been the Democrats' hope to turn just one of those Republicans. That would turn the vote to a 9-9 tie, which would prevent the nomination from going to the floor (where, given the Republicans' vaster majority, he would win easily).
(Fred Kaplan has thrice made the case against Bolton.)
Psst ... Justice Scalia ... You Know, You're an Activist Judge, Too
By ADAM COHEN
NYT, 19 April 2005
Not since the 1960's, when federal judges in the South were threatened by cross burnings and firebombs, have judges been so besieged. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, set off a furor when he said judges could be inviting physical attacks with controversial decisions. And last week the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, called for an investigation of the federal judges in the Terri Schiavo case, saying ominously: "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts."
Conservatives claim that they are rising up against "activist judges," who decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law. They frequently point to Justice Antonin Scalia as a model of honest, "strict constructionist" judging. And Justice Scalia has eagerly embraced the hero's role. Last month, after the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for those under 18, he lashed out at his colleagues for using the idea of a "living Constitution" that evolves over time to hand down political decisions - something he says he would never do.
The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Justice Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth. Justice Scalia has been more than willing to ignore the Constitution's plain language, and he has a knack for coming out on the conservative side in cases with an ideological bent. The conservative partisans leading the war on activist judges are just as inconsistent: they like judicial activism just fine when it advances their own agendas.
Senate Primary in Pennsylvania Offers Progressive Choice
Pennacchio2006
There is a clear choice in the 2006 Democratic U.S. Senate Primary.
Many have hoped that an alternative to Bob Casey Jr. will jump in the race. There is a choice, and that candidate is Chuck Pennacchio.
Chuck Pennacchio is a candidate you can be proud to vote for, instead of just voting against Rick Santorum. But the time to act is now, if you choose to wait, we will all be left in May of 2006 thinking, "what would have happened if we just would have gotten involved in April of 2005?"
  • Contribute monetarily to our effort. You can do so HERE

  • Sign up to volunteer with the campaign. There is a lot of work to be done.

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    Insurance Industry Ad Makes Fishy Claim About Lawyers
    Lobby groups fight like animals over health care costs - implausible statistics vs. fact-free sterotypes.
    FactCheck.org, 19 April 2005
    Summary
    The insurance industry makes an implausible and poorly documented claim in a new ad saying "lawsuit abuse" by trial lawyers costs every household "$1200 in higher medical bills." The figure is based mainly on a single academic study of a narrow group of patients - the results of which have been contradicted by virtually all other research.
    The ad portrays trial lawyers as a shark in a feeding frenzy. The trial lawyers responded in kind, launching their own ad comparing "Big insurance and HMOs" as a huge alligator "ready to pounce" on consumers, but without offering any facts. Both ads are fishy.
    A Time for Disobedience
    Faced with Bush's lockdown on information, reporters have to stand up
    by Sydney H. Schanberg
    Village Voice, 19 April 2005
    "The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it."
          —Henry David Thoreau, 1848
    The press is now looking squarely at a perversion of government. The administration of George W. Bush has raised secrecy and information control to a level never before seen in Washington. The falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction that gave the White House the public support to wage war in Iraq may be the most vivid example of the perversion, but the practice permeates all corners of the Bush government. The press has been grappling with how to cope with this extreme control and distortion of news, some reporters and editors more than others. One possibility they might consider is civil resistance, as in quiet, nonviolent, respectful rebellion.
    Using the fake crisis of Social Security to mask the real crisis of health care...
    America's Health Crisis
    Robert Reich
    TomPaine, 18 April 2005
    Medicare, the government’s giant health care program for the elderly, is heading toward bankruptcy much faster than Social Security. Its future unfunded liabilities are seven times larger than Social Security’s. Social Security is projected to be in financial trouble maybe four decades from now. Medicare’s doomsday is right around the corner, within the next 10 years.
    Medicaid, the government’s health care program for the very poor, is also in trouble. Its costs are rising so fast that the White House now proposes to whack it by $40 billion. But the nation’s governors don’t want Medicaid cut. They don’t want to face the specter of millions of poor families with no other alternative but hospital emergency rooms, at a far higher cost.
    Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans lack health insurance. Ten years ago, when Bill Clinton’s proposal for universal health care tanked, 38 million Americans lacked health insurance. Now, 44 million are without it. And Americans who get health insurance through their employer are suffering sticker shock as companies shift the escalating costs onto their employees through higher co-payments, larger deductibles and soaring premiums. Companies that can’t do this are in trouble. Unless General Motors get health care costs under control, for example, it may not be around that much longer. ...With the middle class squeezed by soaring health care costs, big companies reeling under the pressure, and governors screaming, it’s the perfect time to tackle the nation’s health care crisis. But because this would require an active role for government, the Bush administration is ideologically opposed. They know the nation can pay attention to only one big domestic crisis at a time. So they’re using the fake crisis of Social Security to mask the real crisis of health care.
    Un-American activities...
    At the Front of the Fight Over No Child Left Behind
    By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
    NYT, 17 April 2005
    In 2003, as Betty J. Sternberg was about to be named the first woman to run Connecticut's Department of Education, one local newspaper sized her up as an accomplished insider whose one drawback was her "limited experience in the political arena." The last few months have provided an unexpected crash course on politics, as Dr. Sternberg has emerged as a national leader in the fight against provisions of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 law pushed by President Bush that requires students to take annual proficiency tests.
    Connecticut is challenging the frequency of those tests and the limited exemptions the law provides for more than 5,000 of the state's special education students and 28,000 who are learning English.
    Seeking to persuade policymakers to be flexible in carrying out the law, Dr. Sternberg has taken her campaign to Washington - and anywhere else she can. In an address to students at Danbury High School on Friday, the topic was violence in schools, but she managed to insert a few digs about the law into her remarks and discussed how it felt to be called un-American for taking on the Bush administration.
    Moderate right ignored too...
    The Missing Energy Strategy
    NYT, 19 April 2005
    The House is moving quickly and with sad predictability toward approval of yet another energy bill heavily weighted in favor of the oil, gas and coal industries. In due course the Senate may give the country something better. But unless Mr. Bush rapidly elevates the discussion, any bill that emerges from Congress is almost certain to fall short of the creative strategies needed to confront the two great energy-related issues of the age: the country's increasing dependency on imported oil, and global warming, which is caused chiefly by the very fuels the bill so generously subsidizes.
    What's maddening about this is that there is no shortage of ideas about what to do. Step outside the White House and Congress, and one hears a chorus of voices begging for something far more robust and forward-looking than the trivialities of this energy bill. It is a strikingly bipartisan chorus, too, embracing environmentalists, foreign policy hawks and other unlikely allies. Last month, for instance, a group of military and intelligence experts who cut their teeth on the cold war - among them Robert McFarlane, James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney Jr. - implored Mr. Bush as a matter of national security to undertake a crash program to reduce the consumption of oil in the United States. ...Changing the way this country produces and uses energy will require a determined national effort organized by the president, but Mr. Bush, so far, has been content to remain at the rear of a parade he ought to be leading. It will also require a far more adventurous approach from a Congress whose solicitude for special interests has greatly exceeded its concern for the national interest.
    SEE ALSO:
    Unbridled Capitalism: The 'Constitution in Exile' Movement
    The Unregulated Offensive: Justice Thomas's Other Controversy
    By JEFFREY ROSEN
    NYT Magazine, 17 April 2005
    If you think back to Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, what most likely comes to mind are the explosive allegations of sexual harassment made by the law professor Anita Hill. Years from now, however, when observers of the court look back on the hearings, they may well focus on a clash that preceded Hill's accusations -- an acrimonious exchange that few remember today. Early in the hearings, Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voiced a concern about Thomas's judicial philosophy. In particular, he singled out a speech that Thomas gave in 1987 in which he expressed an affinity for the ideas of legal scholars like Richard A. Epstein. A law professor at the University of Chicago, Epstein was notorious in legal circles for his thesis that many of the laws underpinning the modern welfare state are unconstitutional. Thomas tried to assure Biden that he was interested in ideas like Epstein's only as a matter of ''political theory'' and that he would not actually implement them as a Supreme Court justice. Biden, apparently unpersuaded, picked up a copy of Epstein's 1985 book, ''Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain,'' and theatrically waved it in the air. Anyone who embraced the book's extreme thesis, he seemed to be suggesting, was unfit to sit on the court.
    At the time, it was impossible to know whether Biden was right to worry. He was surely right, though, that Epstein was promoting a legal philosophy far more radical in its implications than anything entertained by Antonin Scalia, then, as now, the court's most irascible conservative. As Epstein sees it, all individuals have certain inherent rights and liberties, including ''economic'' liberties, like the right to property and, more crucially, the right to part with it only voluntarily. These rights are violated any time an individual is deprived of his property without compensation -- when it is stolen, for example, but also when it is subjected to governmental regulation that reduces its value or when a government fails to provide greater security in exchange for the property it seizes. In Epstein's view, these libertarian freedoms are not only defensible as a matter of political philosophy but are also protected by the United States Constitution. Any government that violates them is, by his lights, repressive. One such government, in Epstein's worldview, is our government. When Epstein gazes across America, he sees a nation in the chains of minimum-wage laws and zoning regulations. His theory calls for the country to be deregulated in a manner not seen since before Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
    After Thomas joined the Supreme Court, Biden's warnings seemed prescient. In 1995, echoes of Epstein's ideas could be clearly heard in one of Thomas's opinions. By a 5-4 majority in United States v. Lopez, the court struck down a federal law banning guns in school zones, arguing that the law fell outside Congress's constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. Lopez was a judicial landmark: it was the first time since the New Deal that the court had limited the power of the federal government on those grounds.
    Thomas did not cite Epstein directly in his opinion. But to anyone familiar with Epstein's writings, the similarities were striking. Indeed, Thomas's argument closely resembled one Epstein had made eight years earlier in ''The Proper Scope of the Commerce Power'' in the Virginia Law Review -- so closely, in fact, that Sanford Levinson, a liberal law professor at the University of Texas, accused Thomas of outright intellectual theft. (''The ordinary standards governing attribution of sources -- the violation of which constitutes plagiarism -- seem not to apply in Justice Thomas's chambers,'' Levinson wrote in the Texas Law Review.) Biden's fear that Epstein's ideas might be written into law had apparently been realized.
    Riotous Real Estate
    By Mike Davis
    TomDispatch, 18 April 2005
    As the real-estate bubble reaches its peak, George Bush may discover that he has been surfing a tsunami and that a towering cliff looms ahead. The bubble has already burst in San Francisco, and the April 11th issue of Business Week headlined fears that a general deflation – perhaps of international magnitude – is nigh. What will life be like in the United States (or Britain or Ireland) after the home-equity ATM shuts down?
    The business press, as always, reassures passengers that they are headed for a "soft landing," a slowdown rather than a crash, but even a mild jolt may be sufficient to end the current anemic recovery and throw all the dollar-pegged economies into recession. More ominously, some eminently respectable Wall Street economists, like Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, have been warning of a dangerous negative-feedback loop between the foreign-subsidized housing bubble and the huge U.S. trade and budget deficits. ("The funding of America," he has written, "is an accident waiting to happen.")
    At the end of the day, American military hegemony is no longer underwritten by an equivalent global economic supremacy. The housing bubble, like the dot-com boom before it, has temporarily masked a mess of economic contradictions. As a result, the second term of George W. Bush may hold some first-class Shakespearian surprises.
    Judges Battle Transcends Numbers
    Republicans already rule most federal courts. The issue is how far right the GOP can take them.
    By David G. Savage
    LA Times, 17 April 2005
    The looming battle over President Bush's nominees to the U.S. appeals courts might derail the Senate, but it probably won't make much difference in the federal courts. That's because Republican appointees already dominate them. Ninety-four of the 162 active judges now on the U.S. Court of Appeals were chosen by Republican presidents. On 10 of the 13 circuit courts, Republican appointees have a clear majority. And, since 1976, at least seven of the nine seats on the U.S. Supreme Court have been filled by Republican appointees. Even if Bush wins approval for the dozen disputed nominees who have been blocked by Senate Democrats, only one circuit would change its ideological balance — hardly a seismic shift. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, now evenly divided, would become 10-6 Republican. Though it remains a staple of conservative rhetoric that the courts are "out of control" and driven by "liberal activists," the GOP's control of the White House for 24 of the last 36 years has given Republicans — if not conservatives — a firm grip on the federal judiciary.
    A Whiff of Stagflation
    By PAUL KRUGMAN
    NYT, 18 April 2005
    ...unemployment statistics only count those who are actively looking for jobs. Every other indicator shows a situation much less favorable to workers than that of the 1990's. A lower fraction of the adult population is employed; the average duration of unemployment - a rough indicator of how long it takes laid-off workers to find new jobs - is much higher than it was in the 1990's.
    Above all, the weak job market leaves workers with no bargaining power, so they aren't getting ahead: wage increases have been minimal, and haven't kept up with inflation.
    Underlying these disappointing numbers is sluggish job creation. Private-sector employment is still lower than it was before the 2001 recession.
    Things could be, and have been, worse. But those whose standard of living depends on wages, not capital gains - in other words, the vast majority of Americans - aren't feeling particularly prosperous. By two to one, people tell pollsters that the economy is "only fair" or "poor," not "good" or "excellent."
    Why, then, has the Fed been raising interest rates? Because it is worried about inflation, which has risen to the top end of the 2 to 3 percent range the Fed prefers.
    What's driving inflation? Not wages: labor costs have been falling, because wages are growing less than productivity. Oil prices are a big part of the story, but not all of it. Other commodity prices are also rising; health care costs are once again on the march. And a combination of capacity shortages, rising Asian demand and a weakening dollar has given industries like cement and steel new "pricing power."
    It all adds up to a mild case of stagflation: inflation is leading the Fed to tap on the brakes, even though this doesn't look or feel like a full-employment economy.
    Public Opinion Watch
    by Ruy Teixeira
    Center for American Progress, 13 April 2005
    Three new polls are unanimous: Bush and his agenda continue to slide in popularity in all kinds of ways.
    A Radical in the White House
    By BOB HERBERT
    NYT, 18 April 2005
    Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. ...That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few. To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. ...Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed." Among these rights, he said, are:

    "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

    "The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

    "The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

    "The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.

    "The right of every family to a decent home.

    "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

    "The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

    "The right to a good education."

    ...Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear. The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.
    "The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
    Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?

    Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time
    By FRANK RICH
    NYT, 17 April 2005
    ...As Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition lobbyist who later jumped to the Democratic Leadership Council, told me recently, "We now see the meaning of Judeo-Christian values."
    The values alleged so far in this scandal - greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - belong to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. They are not exclusive to either political party. But the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.
    It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a "body bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a joke.
    SEE ALSO:
    DeLay Money Machine Rolls On
    By SUZANNE GAMBOA
    SF Chronicle, 16 April 2005
    The ethics troubles of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have not hurt his ability to raise money for his re-election. In the first three months of this year, DeLay's personal campaign committee took in $438,235, including $100,000 he borrowed personally for his campaign, according to the latest records from the Federal Election Commission.
    The loan was from Southern National Bank in Sugar Land, Texas, according to his quarterly campaign finance report filed late Friday. DeLay still owed $88,330 on the loan at the end of March. The Texas Republican also paid off some large bills, including $67,237 to American Express, $48,931 paid to Richardson Consulting Group of Washington, D.C., and $16,986 to Conquest Communications Group in Virginia. The latter two are political and media consulting firms.
    By comparison, DeLay raised just $181,236 in the first quarter of 2001 and $94,407 in the first quarter of 2003, for his last two re-election campaigns, said Kent Cooper, operator of PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks campaign finances.
    "Congressman DeLay continues to enjoy broad and deep support," Dan Allen, DeLay's spokesman, said Saturday.
    ...More than half of DeLay's contributions, $221,000 were from corporate political action committees or trade associations. The National Association of Convenience Stores political committee gave $10,000 and Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries donated $7,500. Donors of $5,000 included political committees of energy companies TXU Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp. and Velero Energy Corp., and pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. and California-based ChevronTexaco.
    "He's continued to fund raise at regular levels. It does not appear it hurt him in any way and a lot of the big players showed strong support with contributions in February and March," Cooper said.
    Among the individual contributors were Tony Rudy, a former DeLay aide, and his Rudy's wife, Lisa, who each gave $2,000. Rudy made the contribution while working for Greenberg Traurig, the former law firm of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. A grand jury and two Senate committees are investigating work Abramoff did for several Indian tribes.
    Bob Perry, a longtime backer of conservative causes, and his wife, Doylene, contributed $8,000 to DeLay. Perry was a financial backer of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that campaigned against Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., during the 2004 presidential election.
      International   
    Is democracy here, yet?
    A Private Copter Crashes in Iraq; 6 Americans Die
    By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ROBERT F. WORTH
    NYT, 22 April 2005
    Eleven people, including six Americans from the security firm Blackwater USA working for the United States military, were killed Thursday when a commercial helicopter crashed near the capital, according to officials from Blackwater and the company that chartered the aircraft.  ...Also on Thursday, new reports emerged about scores of bodies recovered from the Tigris River in Suwaira, south of Baghdad, adding to the dispute over whether the dead were from a mass kidnapping of Shiites that the new president, Jalal Talabani, had said occurred in the town of Madaen last weekend.
    Mr. Talabani said more than 50 hostages were killed and their bodies thrown into the Tigris, an account disputed by other Iraqi leaders and Iraqi Army officials. The police in the area said that many of the bodies turned up as long as six weeks ago, according to one news report, while an Interior Ministry official said that bodies had been recovered at the rate of several per day since April 6. American officials say they do not know whether there was a mass killing. "We are talking to as many people as we can to find out what the truth is," Mr. Callahan said.
    The suspected attack on the helicopter and the recovery of so many Iraqi bodies - whether or not they were killed in a single episode last weekend - speak to the continued virulence of the insurgency. A relative calm prevailed for a time and attacks against American troops fell sharply after the Jan. 30 elections. But violence against Iraqis has been rising, and there have been many recent strikes on American patrols.  "It is a fact that in the last week or two, there's been an uptick," the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Thursday.
    Observations of an 'ex- war fighter'
    The Normalization of War
    By Andrew J. Bacevich
    TomDispatch, 21 April 2005
    At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might. ...Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.
    The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War
    by Andrew Bacevich
    ...the most coherent analysis of how America has come to its present situation in the world that I have ever read. Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton. And he is retired military officer. This background makes him almost uniquely qualified to comment on the subject.
    The New Pope and Journalism's Crisis of Faith
    by Norman Solomon
    Common Dreams, 21 April 2005
    The papacy of Benedict XVI confronts journalists with a key question: How much critical scrutiny is appropriate when a religious leader gains enormous power?
    So far, most American media outlets seem to be walking on eggshells to avoid tough coverage of the new pope. Caution is in the air, and some of it is valid. Anti-Catholic bigotry has a long and ugly history in the United States. News organizations should stay away from disparaging the Catholic faith, which certainly deserves as much respect as any other religion.
    At the same time, the Vatican is a massive global power. Though it has no army, it is more powerful than many governments. And in the present day, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church is the capital of political reaction garbed in religiosity. Many dividing lines between theology and ideology have virtually disappeared.
    After more than two decades as a Vatican power broker, Joseph Ratzinger is now in charge as Pope Benedict XVI. He is extremely well-positioned to push a longstanding agenda that includes hostility toward AIDS prevention measures, women's rights, gay rights and movements for social justice. No one in the hierarchy was more committed to stances like vehement opposition to condoms while millions of people contracted cases of AIDS that could have been prevented. And he has been the commander of the Vatican's war on liberation theology.
    During the 1980s, it was Ratzinger who led the charge from Rome against the wondrous spirit and vibrant activism that galvanized Catholics and others across Latin America. While many priests, nuns and laity bravely joined together to challenge U.S.-backed regimes inflicting economic exploitation, intimidation, torture and murder with impunity, Ratzinger used the Vatican's authority to undermine such community-based resistance. He silenced outspoken Church officials and installed orthodox clergy who would go along with the deadly status quo. ...everything we know about Ratzinger's extensive record during the last quarter-century tells us that he is a reactionary zealot who is determined to shove much of the world's history of progressive social change into reverse. He is a true believer whose ideological theology accepts scant diversity and no dissent. ...Journalists should not let any pious proclamations intimidate them. When the policies of a president or prime minister result in suppression of human rights or fuel public-health disasters, the news media should not hesitate to expose the consequences. And the policies of a pope should be no less scrutinized.
    US Accused of Trying to Block Abortion Pills
    Sarah Boseley
    Guardian, 21 April 2005
    The US government is trying to block the World Health Organisation from endorsing two abortion pills which could save the lives of some of the 68,000 women who die from unsafe practices in poor countries every year. The WHO wants to put the pills on its essential medicines list, which constitutes official advice to all governments on the basic drugs their doctors should have available.
    Last month, an expert committee met to consider a number of new drugs for inclusion on the list. They approved for the first time two pills, to be used in combination for the termination of early pregnancy, called mifepristone and misoprostol. In poor countries where abortion is legal, doctors currently have no alternative to surgery. The Guardian understands that the US department of health and human services has been lobbying the director general's office at the WHO to block approval of the pills, in line with President George Bush's neoconservative stance on abortion.
    While the availability of pills might make abortion easier and could increase the number choosing it, the experts want them listed to reduce the deaths and damage caused by surgery. Every year, 19 million women have unsafe abortions - 18.5 million of those take place in developing countries. An estimated 68,000 women die as a result of botched or unhygienic surgery, while many others suffer long-term damage, including sterility. The WHO's own department of reproductive health proposed the addition of the abortion pills to the list. In a review of the drugs for the committee, a Brazilian professor of pharmacology, Lenita Wannmacher, wrote: "There is great concern about the effectiveness and safety of surgical methods that may be less effective and may increase the risk of infection, uterine perforation, cervical laceration, incomplete evacuation, haemorrhage, miscarriage, future sterility and even death."
    The risk of death from abortion in developing countries is 100 times higher than in countries such as the UK, where mifepristone has been licensed since 1991. The pills were licensed in the US in 2000.
    Militants: Iranians Volunteer for Attacks Against US
    San Francisco Chronicle, 20 April 2005
    More than 400 young men and women have volunteered to carry out suicide bombing attacks against Americans in Iraq and targets in Israel, a militant group said Wednesday.
    The recruiting effort was detailed during a ceremony organized by the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, a shadowy group that has been seeking attackers for nearly a year.
    AIPAC close ties with Pentagon mistaken for spying
    Israeli Lobby Reportedly Fires 2 Top Aides in Spying Inquiry
    By DAVID JOHNSTON
    NYT, 21 April 2005
    An influential pro-Israel lobbying organization has dismissed two senior employees caught up in a federal investigation of possible Israeli spying in the United States, according to people who have been formally briefed on the case.
    The group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, dismissed its policy director, Steven Rosen, and its senior Iran analyst, Keith Weissman, in recent days.
    The two employees had been on paid administrative leave, according to people close to the organization who have been informed of the action.
    Their dismissals suggest that Aipac is seeking to distance itself from the investigation, which was disclosed last summer, as federal prosecutors and lawyers in the case have engaged in futile efforts to settle the inquiry with a plea bargain.
    The case has cast a shadow over the group's activities. The committee has said that the inquiry is baseless, but that it has nonetheless stirred concern among supporters. Next month, the organization is to hold its annual meeting, featuring an appearance by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has praised the organization's work.
    More Than 50 Bodies Found in River, Iraqi President Says
    AP via NYT, 20 April 2005
    Iraq's interim president announced Wednesday the recovery of more than 50 bodies from the Tigris River, saying the grisly discovery was proof of claims that dozens were abducted from an area south of the capital despite a fruitless search by Iraqi forces. Northwest of Baghdad, witnesses said 19 bullet-riddled bodies were found slumped against a bloodstained wall in a soccer stadium in Haditha. The discoveries came as insurgents unleashed a string of attacks that killed at least nine Iraqis and wounded 21. They included four suicide car bombs -- one of which targeted interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's convoy -- and a roadside explosion in the capital, police said. Allawi escaped unharmed, they said.
    Another blast sent smoke billowing over Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, home to the Iraqi government and foreign embassies. It was not clear what caused that explosion.
    ...Also Tuesday, the U.S. military said it regretted an incident in which a Shiite legislator linked to a radical anti-American cleric was briefly held at a checkpoint by American soldiers. Fattah al-Sheik tearfully told Parliament he had been handcuffed and humiliated at a U.S. checkpoint on his way to work. He claimed an American soldier kicked his car, mocked the legislature, handcuffed him and held him by the neck. The assembly demanded a U.S. apology and prosecution of the soldier involved.
    ''What happened to me represents an insult to the whole National Assembly that was elected by the Iraqi people. This shows that the democracy we are enjoying is fake,'' al-Sheik said. ''Through such incidents, the U.S. Army tries to show that it is the real controlling power in the country, not the new Iraqi government.''
    A U.S. military statement said its initial investigation indicated that al-Sheik got into an altercation with a coalition translator at the checkpoint. U.S. soldiers tried to separate them and ''briefly held on to the legislator,'' while preventing another member of al-Sheik's party from getting out of his car. ''We have the highest respect for all members of the Transitional National Assembly. Their safety and security is critically important,'' U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst said in the statement. ''We regret this incident occurred and are conducting a thorough investigation.'' Al-Sheik's small party has been linked to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led uprisings against the U.S.-led coalition in 2004. On his way home after the session, gunmen fired on al-Sheik's convoy, but he escaped unharmed, police and his party said.
    Violent Wave Continues in Iraq With 3 Car Bombs
    By ROBERT F. WORTH
    NYT, 20 April 2005
    Three car bombs exploded today in Baghdad, as a weeklong surge of violence continued in the capital. Two civilians, including a child, were killed when a suicide bomber aimed his vehicle at an American military convoy in the Amiriya district, an Interior Ministry official said. Five people were wounded. ...In southern Iraq, a 51-year-old prisoner died Monday at Camp Bucca, the largest American detainee camp in the country, apparently of natural causes, the American military said. The detainee appeared to be suffering from seizures and was given medical treatment but died soon afterward, the officials said.
    The National Assembly met Tuesday, and much of the session was devoted to angry complaints about the American military after a soldier had been accused of mistreating an assembly member. Fattah al-Sheikh, a member of the dominant Shiite alliance, said an American soldier had handcuffed him, held him roughly by the neck and kicked his car, while mocking the assembly. A number of legislators said the incident typified the mistreatment of Iraqis by American troops, and the assembly adjourned for an hour in protest. The assembly also voted to demand an apology from the American authorities in Baghdad. Gen. William G. Webster, the Army commander with responsibility for Baghdad, expressed his regret to the legislators over the incident and said it would be investigated, American Embassy officials said.
    Benedict XVI
    Habemus the status quo.
    By Jack Miles
    Slate, 19 April 2005
    Cardinal Ratzinger is a great choice for pope--if the church wants to adhere to backward doctrine, alienate more of its followers, and lose influence in the developing world.
    Soldiers' 'Wish Lists' Of Detainee Tactics Cited
    By Josh White
    Washington Post, 19 April 2005
    Army intelligence officials in Iraq developed and circulated "wish lists" of harsh interrogation techniques they hoped to use on detainees in August 2003, including tactics such as low-voltage electrocution, blows with phone books and using dogs and snakes -- suggestions that some soldiers believed spawned abuse and illegal interrogations.
    The discussions, which took place in e-mail messages between interrogators and Army officials in Baghdad, were used in part to develop the interrogation rules of engagement approved by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then commander of U.S. troops in Iraq. Two specific cases of abuse in Iraq occurred soon after.
    Army investigative documents released yesterday, as well as court records and files, suggest that the tactics were used on two detainees: One died during an interrogation in November 2003 while stuffed into a sleeping bag, and another was badly beaten by inexperienced interrogators using a police baton in September 2003. The documents indicate confusion over what tactics were legal in Iraq, a belief that most detainees were not covered by Geneva Conventions protections and alleged abuse by interrogators who had tacit approval to "turn it up a notch."
    Guantanamo Inmates Yield 'Valuable' Data
    by Will Dunham
    Reuters, 19 April 2005
    Interrogations of inmates at Guantanamo Bay have yielded "valuable insights" into the al Qaeda network, including its quest for powerful weapons, a Pentagon document stated, but rights activists on Monday called the document self-serving and untrustworthy. The Pentagon released an unclassified summary of more than 4,000 interrogation reports from the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Detainees have given information to interrogators on people involved in al Qaeda's pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, it stated, but provided scant detail.
    An Advocate for Iraqis Falls. Will U.S. Take Up Her Cause?
    USA Today, 19 April 2005
    ...Iraqis surely are aware that the U.S. carefully counts American deaths and injuries but does not document Iraqi casualties. Ruzicka fearlessly — and naïvely — decided not to beat that same retreat. Her relentless lobbying of the media, diplomats, officials and lawmakers had an impact. It helped win congressional approval of millions of dollars of civilian aid, according to the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Her statistics and detailed documentation helped other organizations compile unofficial records of Iraqi casualties.
    In a piece written for USA TODAY before her death, and printed on the opposite page, Ruzicka spilled out her frustration at the lack of public accounting for the casualties. Quite apart from anything else, she wrote, it was needed "as a reminder of those whose dreams will never be realized."
    Ruzicka's death spotlights the damage done by callousness in war. Perhaps the attention her extraordinary life is now getting may prompt a change of policy. And fulfill at least one of her own unrealized dreams.
    SEE ALSO:
    Two Ibrahims and Two Women
    Four individuals who took on the powerful.
    By Christopher Hitchens
    sLATE, 18 April 2005
    My friend Marla Ruzicka was murdered by a suicide bomber in Baghdad on Saturday night. She had been working bravely and cheerfully to identify and help the civilian victims of the war and had pursued the efforts of her little organization CIVIC, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, long after many humanitarian activists had given up and fled. Politically, she was somewhere between Global Exchange and MoveOn.org, as she had been when risking her life in Afghanistan, and we had some disagreements. But her concern for the victims was deep and sincere (whatever happened to those "human shields" now that they could be useful?), and she and her Iraqi colleague Faiz, apparently slain in the same attack, will be sorely mourned. The "insurgents" couldn't have known that they were murdering her, but then, neither could they have cared.
    Ethnic Rifts in Iraq Worsening
    Juan Cole
    Informed Comment, 18 April 2005
    The United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite religious parties) who now dominate the Iraqi government are insisting on purging the Iraqi government of former members of the Baath Party and trying any who might be associated with crimes. They are also dismissive of attempts to reach out to Sunni guerrilla movements. ...This marginalization will likely prolong and deepen the guerrilla war.
    ...Iraqi President Jalal Talabani favors using Kurdish and Shiite militias against the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The problem with this plan is that it ethnicizes the conflict even further. Creating an Iraqi military that could fight for the nation rather than, as militias do, for a section of it, is the only good option.
    SEE ALSO:
    A Hole in Bush's Iraq Exit Strategy
    Business Week Online, 19 April 2005
    While Iraqi military training is proceeding apace, getting the crucial national police force up to speed is proving much more problematic
    The Bush Administration and senior military commanders have suggested in recent days that the training of Iraqi security forces -- one of the linchpins of America's exit strategy -- is going so well that significant troop reductions may be possible by early next year. On Apr. 12, during a surprise visit to Baghdad, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked up the progress the security forces are making. His position echoed early remarks by General George Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, about substantial drawdowns in U.S. forces by spring of next year. Later that day, President George W. Bush told soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex., that "Iraqi forces are becoming more self-reliant."
    Nonetheless, while the Iraqi army seems to be getting up to speed, the training of the 142,000-member police force -- about half the total security forces supposedly needed -- is moving more slowly and fraught with bigger problems than reports by U.S. officials might suggest
    Say what?..."We started out with a monster master plan that didn't address the need for tangible and quick progress."
    Rethinking Reconstruction: Grand U.S. Plan Fractures Again
    By ERIK ECKHOLM
    NYT, 17 April 2005
    For the third time in nine months, the Bush administration has redrafted its project to rebuild Iraq, forcing planners to cancel more of the water, sewage and power plants that were part of the grand American design to transform the shattered country. Many of the halted projects are now described by American officials as "noncritical" and "long term" because they are scheduled to start two years from now.
    Yep, neocon ideology trumps truth...
    Bolton Often Blocked Information, Officials Say
    Iran, IAEA Matters Were Allegedly Kept From Rice, Powell
    By Dafna Linzer
    Washington Post, 18 April 2005
    John R. Bolton -- who is seeking confirmation as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations -- often blocked then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and, on one occasion, his successor, Condoleezza Rice, from receiving information vital to U.S. strategies on Iran, according to current and former officials who have worked with Bolton. In some cases, career officials found back channels to Powell or his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, who encouraged assistant secretaries to bring information directly to him. In other cases, the information was delayed for weeks or simply did not get through. The officials, who would discuss the incidents only on the condition of anonymity because some continue to deal with Bolton on other issues, cited a dozen examples of memos or information that Bolton refused to forward during his four years as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. ...Publicly, Rice has staunchly defended Bolton's credentials and urged the Senate to quickly confirm him. But privately, officials said, she has kept him out of key discussions on Iran since taking over in January.
    SEE ALSO:
    Delay Is Sought in Vote on U.N. Nominee
    By DOUGLAS JEHL and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
    NYT, 19 April 2005
    The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will ask the panel's Republican majority to delay a vote scheduled for Tuesday on the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, according to Democratic Senate officials.  The Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, will urge Republicans to allow the panel more time to review allegations that Mr. Bolton has acted abusively toward subordinates and others, the Democratic officials said. However, the panel's Republican chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, plans to urge the panel to vote in favor of Mr. Bolton. "I do not think the concerns raised about Secretary Bolton warrant our rejection of the president's selection for his own representative to the U.N.," Mr. Lugar said in a statement.
    Mr. Lugar has said he expects all 10 Republicans on the panel ultimately to vote in favor of the nomination. But Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island has said he is uncommitted, and over the weekend, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said he had some reservations. The panel's eight Democrats are expected to oppose the nomination.
    Iraqi Official Is Assassinated by Gunmen in Baghdad
    By ROBERT F. WORTH
    NYT, 19 April 2005
    A high-ranking adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry was assassinated late Monday night by gunmen at his house in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. The official, Maj. Gen. Adnan Qaragholi, was killed just after 11 p.m. when 10 gunmen forced their way into his house in the Doura neighborhood in southern Baghdad and shot him to death, Interior Ministry officials said.
    Insurgents try to assassinate the leaders of Iraq's fledgling military and the police almost daily, and many officers have been killed. It was not clear on Monday night how the assassins, who arrived in three cars, got into General Qaragholi's house, or whether there was a firefight. The gunmen escaped, the officials said. The killing of General Qaragholi was one of at least two on Monday. A businessman who runs a travel agency was also shot dead in the western neighborhood of Ghazaliya at noon, Interior Ministry officials said. The businessman, Tariq Hasoun Khadim, was the manager of the Travel Call Company, based in the Green Zone, the fortified compound that houses Iraq's government. The killings came as Iraqi soldiers continued to search an area south of Baghdad on Monday where mass kidnappings had been reported over the weekend.
    Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank
    By STEVEN ERLANGER
    NYT, 19 April 2005
    They're building away here in Israel's largest settlement, with Palestinian workers laboring on new apartment houses overlooking the red-brown hills of the West Bank. Israel's intentions to keep building next to this suburb about three miles from Jerusalem have set off a small furor with the Bush administration, which is putting pressure on Israel to keep a commitment to freeze settlement growth. But the construction and planning at Maale Adumim and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to pull 9,000 Israeli settlers out of the Gaza Strip this summer are only parts of a far larger and more complex transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, and of Mr. Sharon's policies themselves. In effect, Israel under Mr. Sharon is unilaterally moving to define its future borders with a Palestinian state - with the scheduled withdrawal from Gaza and from four small settlements in the northern West Bank, with the "thickening" of settlements near Jerusalem and the Israeli border, and with a new route for the Israeli separation barrier approved by the cabinet on Feb. 20.
    A Planet on the Brink
    The Archbishop of Canterbury warns that the price of our continued failure to protect the earth will be violence and social collapse
    The Independent, 17 April 2005
    Too often in recent decades, the two big "e" words - ecology and economy - have been used as though they represented opposing concerns. Yes, we should be glad to do more about the environment, if only this didn't interfere with economic development and with the liberty of people and nations to create wealth in whatever ways they can.
    Or, we should be glad to address environmental issues if we could be sure that we had first resolved the challenge of economic injustice within and between societies. So from both left and right there has often been a persistent sense that it isn't proper or possible to tackle both together, let alone to give a different sort of priority to ecological matters.
    But this separation or opposition has come to look like a massive mistake. It has been said that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment". The earth itself is what ultimately controls economic activity because it is the source of the materials upon which economic activity works.
    That is why economy and ecology cannot be separated. Ecological fallout from economic development is in no way an "externality" as the economic jargon has it; it is a positive depletion of real wealth, of human and natural capital. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature.
    Bullies Need Not Apply
    Mark Shields
    Creators Syndicate via CNN.com, 18 April 2005
    Tell me that Father Dan Berrigan, the antiwar Jesuit priest, had just been named commandant of the Marine Corps or that Sir Elton John will be the new president of the Teamsters Union. But don't tell me that the United States Senate, which likes to be called the "the world's greatest deliberative body" will vote to confirm President Bush's pick of John Bolton to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
    Bolton on paper has strong credentials. What John Bolton tragically lacks, according to the first-hand testimony of people who have worked with him, is the human touch or mature temperament so important in a colleague and so indispensable in a diplomat.
    In closed door sessions with the committee, one CIA official and three State Department officials recounted two episodes in which Bolton attempted to remove intelligence analysts who had upset him. They had told him that there was no conclusive evidence to support the claim he intended to make in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation that Cuba had a program of biological weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the United States. While denying he sought to get the analysts fired, Bolton admitted that he did try to get them moved to other jobs.
    Bolton is the classic swaggerer who never served in uniform but conspicuously places on his office desk a brass hand grenade. Carl W. Ford, a self-identified conservative Republican and the former chief of State Department intelligence, testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that John Bolton is a bully, a "serial abuser" of subordinates and a "kiss-up, kick-down" type. In 2005 or any other year, the nation's capital does not need another bully in a position of power. Sucking up to your superiors and mistreating, even tormenting, your juniors is unprincipled but, sadly, not uncommon. Character, or the lack thereof, is revealed in how someone with power treats someone without power and without the capacity to retaliate.
    Arms Equipment Plundered in 2003 Is Surfacing in Iraq
    By JAMES GLANZ
    NYT, 17 April 2005
    Equipment plundered from dozens of sites in Saddam Hussein's vast complex for manufacturing weapons is beginning to surface in open markets in Iraq's major cities and at border crossings.
    Iraqi Leaders Flexing Muscles
    U.S. officials may have limited influence on the direction of the new government, including its stance toward American troops.
    By Paul Richter and Mark Mazzetti
    LA Times, 17 April 2005
     For the last two years, U.S. authorities have had firm control of the mission in Iraq. They have set rules for military operations and worked with Iraqi leaders blessed by Washington. But the arrival of an elected government this month will take the partnership in new directions that the Americans may find difficult to control.
    At Least 17 Killed in Iraq Attacks
    Sify.com (Pakistan), 17 April 2005
    Baghdad: At least 17 people were killed, including two US soldiers and a Turkish trucker, in attacks around Iraq late Friday and Saturday, while two Filipinos were wounded as they headed to work at Baghdad airport, police said. In the ethnically mixed town of Baquba, at least seven people were killed, including three police, in a lunchtime explosion at a restaurant, an Iraqi army officer said. At least five more people were wounded, Colonel Ismail Ibrahim told AFP. He did not immediately know if the blast, which blew out the back of the restaurant, was due to a bomb inside the establishment or to a booby-trapped car outside.
    Kidnappers in Iraq Threaten to Kill 60 Hostages
    Dawn.com, 16 April 2005
    Unidentified men have taken 60 people hostage in an Iraqi town near Baghdad and are threatening to kill them unless Shias leave, said an official who said he was contacted by residents there. "People from the town called me begging the Iraqi government to save their relatives who are hostages. They told me there are at least 60 hostages," the official said. A group of men armed with heavy weapons appear to have taken control of the town of Madaen, just south of Baghdad, and no police or government forces were in sight, the official added.
    SEE ALSO:
    Iraqi and US Forces Search for Hostages
    By Thaier al-Sudani and Majid al-Hameed
    Reuters via SwissInfo, 17 April 2005
    Iraqi troops backed by U.S. forces mounted fresh raids in a town nearBaghdad on Sunday, but failed to find any of the Shi'ite hostages reported to have been threatened with deathby Sunni guerrillas.
    Conflicting statements abounded about what had occurred in Madaen, situated in an area dubbed the"Triangle of Death" due to the frequency of guerrilla attacks. Officials gave varying figures for the number ofhostages ranging from 150 to just three.
    Caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said al Qaeda's wing in Iraq had seized hostages to try to provoke aSunni-Shi'ite civil war. But an Internet statement purporting to come from the group said the hostage crisis hadbeen fabricated as a pretext to raid Madaen.
    Iraq: The Real Election
    By Mark Danner
    NY Review of Books, 28 April issue
    ..."You must realize," a Jordanian security expert told me in Amman, "that as a foreigner the moment you enter Iraq now, you are transformed from human being into commodity—a commodity worth half a million to a million dollars."
    ...The correspondent you watch signing off his nightly report from the war zone with his name, network, and dateline "Baghdad" is usually speaking from the grounds or the roof of a fully guarded, barricaded hotel—a virtual high-rise bunker—and may not have ventured out of that hotel all day, having spent his time telephoning, reading the wires, and scrutinizing footage from Iraqi "stringers" who have been out on the street. When he does leave the hotel it will be in an armored car, surrounded by armed security guards, and very likely the destination will be a news conference or briefing or arranged interview in the vast American-ruled bunker known as "the Green Zone." Sorties beyond Baghdad, or even to "hot" neighborhoods within the capital, can usually be undertaken only by "embedding" with American troops. It is a bizarre, dispiriting way to work, this practice of "hotel journalism," producing not only a highly constrained picture of the country and its politics but, on the part of the journalist, constant fear, anxiety, and ultimately intense frustration. "I am getting out of here, getting out soon," one network correspondent told me. When I asked why—for American foreign correspondents Iraq is, after all, the most important story going—he shrugged: "It's no longer honest work."
    ..."The real problem is the story here can't be shown in images," said my friend, the television correspondent who, disgusted with "hotel journalism," left Baghdad before the election. "You can't show the fear here with a television picture. You can't show the atmosphere of paranoia. The story escapes the images—the tools—that we have to tell it." On Election Day, for example, the images could show clearly the beautiful, intricate ballot, with its hundred and ten–odd parties and coalitions—but not the fact that there were really only three choices, each with enormous sources of money: the Kurdish list, with its funding from the Kurdish autonomous government, in the north; the Shiite list, with its image of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and its funding from the mosques in the south and the Iranians across the border; and the Allawi list, with its control of the interim government and its access to that government's money and television. On Election Day, Kurds voted for the Kurdish list, Shiites voted for the Shiite list, a relative handful, about 12 percent, voted for the Allawi list— and the Sunnis made their presence known by not voting at all. The election, in effect, was an ethnic census.
    ...If the election was to mark the point from which Iraqis would settle their differences through politics and not through violence, it failed; for those responsible for the insurgency— not only those planting suicide bombs but those running the organizations responsible for them and the leaders of the community that has shown itself sympathetic enough to the insurgents' cause to shelter them—did not take part. The political burden of the elections was to bring those who felt frightened or alienated by the new dispensation into the political process, so they could express their opposition through politics and not through violence; the task, that is, was to attract Sunnis to the polls and thereby to isolate the extremists. And in this, partly because of an electoral system that the Sunnis felt, with some reason, was unfairly stacked against them, the election failed.
    The images could not show, finally, the peculiar system of government under which those elected are now struggling to function—a system in effect imposed by the American occupation in the interim constitution, known as the "transitional administrative law." That system demands, among other things, that the national assembly bring together two thirds of its votes to confirm a government, a requirement found in no other parliamentary system in the world. That requirement is an artifact of the larger conundrum of Iraqi politics: it was demanded by America's critical Iraqi ally, the Kurds, who are deeply ambivalent about their connection to and role in an Iraqi state dominated by Shiites, and it was supported by the Americans. In effect the two-thirds requirement, and the political impasse it has fostered, is a legacy of the Americans' reluctance to confront the logical implication of their war to unseat Saddam Hussein and his Sunni elite: that there will come to power in Iraq a government dominated by the Shia, powerfully influenced by Islamic law and favorably inclined toward the United States' foremost enemy in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
    As I will write in a further article, these facts are vital to comprehend-ing the dramatic difference between the encouraging images we are shown and the stubborn and bloody reality on the ground.

    Send questions, comments, suggested links, etc. to

    Click here for articles in our archives.

     
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    COMMENTARIES ON THE IMMORAL MAJORITY

    'Birds of a Feather' - Tom Delay and His Republican House
    Josh Marshall
    Talking Points Memo, 12 April 2005

    Much depends on whether DeLay gets nailed on particular instances of criminal conduct. But he isn't a Majority Leader who happens, possibly, also to be corrupt. The GOP Majority in the House is built on his corrupt practices, his money machine. They define its modes of operation and priorities.

    The oft-mentioned Jack Abramoff may be the prime examplar of that species of Washington operator -- Homo bagmanus. But there are so many more, all cogs in the DeLay machine.

    I don't mean that the Democrats would be in the majority if it weren't for DeLay (though it is worth noting that the Republicans only made their modest advances in the House last year because of the criminal conduct DeLay's lieutenants employed in Texas to get the state redistricted). But the cash-n-carry rules he's used to run the House have compromised most of the leadership of the caucus as well as many of its marginal members. DeLay has built a political machine that runs on corrupt, pay-for-play money -- it's the water that floats the river boats he makes run on time.

    What about Rep. Bob Ney (R) of Ohio, who is knee-deep in the Abramoff/Scanlon Indian tribe shakedown? He's chairman of the Committee on House Administration. How about the Ethics Committee which was purged of all three Republican members who wouldn't change conference rules to help DeLay deal with impending criminal indictments.

    They're right. It doesn't end with DeLay. He and the House Republican party are one and the same.

    ###

    Bush's Believers-Only Speeches
    A St. Petersburg Times Editorial
    Published April 9, 2005

    The Bush administration might not appreciate the difference between campaign events that are paid for through private donations and official events put on with the public's money, but the Constitution surely does.

    Everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, has a legal right to expect equal access to one of Bush's public presidential appearances. The First Amendment guarantees that government will not exclude anyone based on their political leanings. But disturbing reports have arisen around the country that entry into one of the president's Social Security speeches is being manipulated to keep out those who don't already support the president.

    In Denver, three people were ushered out of a recent Bush speech because they had come in a car that sported a "No More Blood for Oil" bumper sticker. The group had done no protesting at the event, but were physically removed by a man who they thought was a Secret Service agent but came to learn was a local Republican staffer.

    A similar incident occurred at the University of Arizona where a student with a "Young Democrats" T-shirt was barred from attending Bush's forum on Social Security. His ticket was crumpled up by a staff member. And in North Dakota, a blacklist of 40 people who were known progressives was used to keep them from attending a Bush speech.

    This mind-set - that events must be sanitized so that no critics are anywhere near the president - permeated Bush's re-election campaign and has infected his administration. When Bush came to the Tampa Convention Center in February to tout his Social Security plan, tickets were passed out primarily through Republican Party groups and the offices of Republican elected officials. A spokesperson for Rep. Jim Davis, D-Tampa, whose district encompasses the Convention Center, said that their office did not receive any tickets for the event and has never received tickets for any event put on by the Bush administration.

    It is apparent that Bush and his handlers are afraid to allow even an inkling of dissent in the audience. By avoiding legitimate questions, sticking with those that are staged and scripted, and filtering out anyone who isn't willing to cheer the the president, the administration creates the illusion that the American people are fully behind the president.

    ###

    Welcome to Doomsday
    By Bill Moyers
    New York Review of Books, 24 March 2005

    ...I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists' fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President "was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God's master plan."

    That will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don't see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush's master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration's multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.

    The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock on environmental policy extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election—231 legislators in all (more since the election)—are backed by the religious right, which includes several powerful fundamentalist leaders like LaHaye. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups. Not one includes the environment as one of their celebrated "moral values."

    When I talk about this before a live audience I can see from the look on the faces before me just how hard it is for a journalist to report on such things with any credibility. So let me put on a personal level what sends the shiver down my spine.

    I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. I confess to having always been an optimist. Now, however, I remember my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered, "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

    I'm not, either. Once upon a time I believed that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe this—it's just that as a journalist I have been trained to read the news and connect the dots.

    I read that the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

    • that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the national Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources;
    • that wants to relax pollution limits for ozone, eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport utility vehicles, and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment;
    • that wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public;
    • that wants to drop all its New-Source Review suits against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies;
    • that wants to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America;
    • that is radically changing the management of our national forests to eliminate critical environmental reviews, open them to new roads, and give the timber companies a green light to slash and cut as they please.

    I read the news and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency plotted to spend $9 million—$2 million of it from the President's friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay poor families to continue the use of pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry concocted a scheme to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

    I read that President Bush has more than one hundred high-level officials in his administration overseeing industries they once represented as lobbyists, lawyers, or corporate advocates—company insiders waved through the revolving door of government to assure that drug laws, food policies, land use, and the regulation of air pollu-tion are industry-friendly. Among the "advocates-turned-regulators" are a former meat industry lobbyist who helps decide how meat is labeled; a former drug company lobbyist who influences prescription drug policies; a former energy lobbyist who, while accepting payments for bringing clients into his old lobbying firm, helps to determine how much of our public lands those former clients can use for oil and gas drilling.

    I read that civil penalties imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency against polluters in 2004 hit an fifteen-year low, in what amounts to an extended holiday for industry from effective compliance with environmental laws.

    I read that the administration's allies at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon-Mobil and others of like mind and interest, have issued a report describing global warming as "a myth" at practically the same time the President, who earlier rejected the international treaty outlining limits on greenhouse gases, wants to prevent any "written or oral report" from being issued by any international meetings on the issue.

    I read not only the news but the fine print of a recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with ob-scure amendments removing all endangered species protections from pesticides, prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon, waiving environmental review for grazing permits on public lands, and weakening protection against development for crucial habitats in California.

    I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer —pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age twelve; Thomas, ten; Nancy, eight; Jassie, three; SaraJane, one. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then the shiver runs down my spine and I am seized by the realization: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

    ###

    Inequality Increasing
    The Economy is Based on Borrowing
    MARK TRAHANT
    SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL, 3 April 2005

    The news about the economy sounded pretty good last week.

    The government reported the economy is on a roll again. The Commerce Department says there's a sharp pickup in the creation of jobs and we are earning more for our work.

    This is good news to some people because it's proof that the Bush tax cuts are working. But there are lots of ways to interpret these facts.

    The numbers I've been reading scare me.

    Start with Thursday's good-news report from the Commerce Department. Yes, there are more jobs and income is up. Other data on Friday show that job creation is slower than expected. But working or not, Americans continue to spend more than we earn. Our income levels rose 0.3 percent while consumer spending climbed 0.5 percent.

    This teeny two-tenths difference is yet another reminder that America -- our government, our companies and our people -- is fueling the economy with debt.

    Slow down. These numbers reflect only a snapshot, not a trend. They don't tell us about the state of work in the United States. So let's look at the trends. The Economic Policy Institute recently compiled its "State of Working America 2004/2005" report.

    "Despite being two and a half years into an economic recovery, many of the problems that beset working Americans in the 2001 recession and protracted jobless recovery persist today," says the opening paragraph of the report. "The 2001 downturn stopped and even reversed most of the positive economic trends that characterized the latter 1990s."

    One reversed trend is the end of a shared American prosperity.

    There was a golden age for the middle class between 1947 and 1973. We worked harder, smarter -- and shared the reward measured by productivity gains and family income. "Yet starting in the mid-1970s, this lockstep relationship broke down," the report says. "From 1973 to 2002, median family income grew at about one-third the rate of productivity."

    Who benefited, then, from this increased productivity? "Those at the top of the income scale ... claimed most of the income growth," says the Economic Policy Institute.

    The country's wealth scale is out of balance. "Using newly available income data that goes all the way back to 1913, income in 2000 was only slightly less concentrated among the top 1 percent of households than during the run-up to the Great Depression, which was the worst period of uneven income concentration in the last century," the report says.

    Where you see the effects is in the shrinking paycheck of median household income. In real dollars, the median household income has declined $971 in 2001, $502 in 2002 and $63 in 2003 -- a cumulative loss of $1,536.

    "As for benefit coverage," the report says, "it declined through the early 2000s."

    Health insurance has declined for all wage groups -- and pension coverage is shrinking, too, down from more than half of all workers in 1979 to about 45 percent in 2002.

    How does a family pay for all these wage and benefit cuts? We borrow more.

    Nearly 18 percent of households showed a zero or negative net worth in 2001 -- and government figures show that many families are paying 40 percent of their income just to keep up with their debt.

    It's also true that home ownership rates are on the rise but the debt side of that picture is troublesome, too. Last week, a mortgage association reported that 36.6 percent of mortgages are based on adjustable rates. As interest rates go up, so will debt obligations -- and the risk of insolvency for any family already on the edge.

    Enough of the bad news. There is some positive news -- at least for a very few Americans -- in the Economic Policy Institute report. "From 1979 to 2000, the wage of the median chief executive officer grew 79 percent, and average compensation grew 342 percent."

    When the recession hit, chief executive officers cut their pay -- a 36 percent decline -- from 2000 to 2003.

    But last week, USA TODAY reported that chief executive pay is back. The newspaper collected data from the 100 largest companies that showed median compensation from pay, stock grants and other incentives was $14 million in 2004, up 25 percent from the year before.

    The median salary was up a healthy 5 percent, to $1.1 million per year.

    There you go. More proof that the Bush tax cuts are working.

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    Institute for Public Accuracy

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