Consider Stephen Bryen, under investigation for espionage (for Israel) in 1979 and subverting technology transfer rules (for Israel) in 1988, only to find himself in 2001 on a commission to investigate illegal technology transfer (by Israel) to China.

Or consider Michael Ledeen, who in the mid-80's was classified by official CIA documents as an "agent of influence" of Israel. Michael, it seems, has a long history of discomforting his co-workers by hanging around when documents he wasn't cleared to see were present and even asking for those documents by the classified names of then he was not even supposed to know.

And then there are the principles, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, who have not avoided their own investigations and keep bringing both Bryen and Ledeen back in. At every turn, all of these men seem to be under investigation for some sort of security breach or illegal technology transfer. At every turn, they seem to be losing their Top Secret access. And at every turn, they seem to be conspiring with each other to regain that Top Secret access. But most of all, they all have that access now, and until Richard Perle's resignation last week, they were all employed by or consult to the Bush administration's defense policy apparatus.

A lengthy but alarming exposé. Don't miss it!

Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.

Chalabi, if I may interpret, means to say that words and facts have no intrinsic value, but only instrumental value, as a means to an end. Words don't have to mean anything, and facts exist only to be described in such a way to ensure we get what we want. For neocons and other pre-logic humans, getting what one wants is the only thing that matters.

In fact, like three-year-olds, neocon "thought processes are characterized by great awareness; yet these islands of sophistication exist in a sea of uncertainty. Children during this period still understand relatively little about the world in which they live and have little or no control over it. They are prone to fears and they combat their growing self-awareness of being small by wishful, magical thinking."

Hanging around people like this, and getting his policy advice from them, it’s no wonder Secretary Higgins, er, Rumsfeld is often confused about what we know, don’t know, think we know, think we don’t know, and know we don't think we know. Don’t get me started with what we know now, and what we now know we don’t know.

BOSTON (Reuters) - The chairman of American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer by market value, on Tuesday called lawyers opposed to tort reform "terrorists" and said class-action lawsuits are a "blight" on the United States.

AIG Chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg's remarks came a day after U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige sparked an uproar when he called the nation's largest teachers' union a "terrorist organization" during a meeting with U.S. governors. The White House said he later apologized.

In remarks to business executives in Boston, Greenberg likened the battle over reforming class-action litigation to the White House's "war on terror." AIG insures corporations against multibillion-dollar claims of damages in asbestos lawsuits, for example.

"It's almost like fighting the war on terrorists," Greenberg told Boston College's Chief Executives' Club. "I call the plaintiff's bar terrorists."

Roberts and his Republican colleagues decided to preclude the possibility that some recalcitrant senator might ask why INR was able to get it right on Iraq when everyone else was wrong.

This is actually pretty astonishing when you think about it. This is an annual briefing, presumably to provide background needed to guide this committee's work in the coming year. One would think then that the committee would want as thorough a briefing as possible, and that would require the inclusion of the INR. What Chairman Roberts has effectively done then is to place national security concerns second behind protecting the President's backside.

And this is the party that claims to be tough on defense? Tough on defending Bush's image perhaps, but the rest of us? We're only second.

Just one clip: "Reality has never been a constraint" to Neoconservatives. "They are not the kind of people that America as a nation are proud of."

[NOTE: My link above is high bandwidth. If you are on dial-up, you might want this link instead.]

Few people realize that voting rights are left up to the states -- a legacy of the South's post-Civil War effort to prohibit newly freed slaves from voting.

California's voting laws, however, are relatively liberal compared to the 14 states that permanently bar ex-felons from voting and the 29 states that prevent criminals from voting while on probation. Only two states -- Maine and Vermont -- follow the European pattern of allowing all inmates and ex-convicts to vote.

You're probably thinking this has nothing to do with you. But you would be wrong. It could affect your troubled teenager. As New York defense attorney Andrew Shapiro has noted, "An 18-year-old first-time offender who trades a guilty plea for a nonprison sentence may unwittingly sacrifice forever his right to vote."

• "It's part of the punishment." ~ But isn't the threat of punishment supposed to be the deterrent? Has anyone ever not committed a crime because they feared losing their right to vote?

• "Well, murderers might vote to legalize murder!" ~ So what? How can anyone entertain the sillyness that murders will ever have enough votes to elect a pro-murder candidate?

The bottom line on felony disenfranchisement is that it is a tool being used by the Republican Party to lower opposition voting. Let's call a spade a spade.

[From Black Box Notes.]

Leave it to Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to stir the political pot. Theoretically above politics, Greenspan has more influence on the political class than almost any human being, presidents -- perhaps -- excepted. This week Greenspan did something no Democrat could do: He made Social Security an issue in the 2004 election.

Dionne well places the issues on this: If we are going to keep these outrageous tax cuts, Social Security as we know it is out the door. The problem is that this is not what Greenspan said. Greenspan acted as if the two were separate issues, and the Bush campaign will use its money to promote that quite rediculous spin.

Dionne sees this as a good wedge issue for the Democrats and it well should be. Are we willing to trade the retirements of the poor and middle class for the benefit of the rich? Classic class warfare.

And that's the problem. Today's Democratic Party hasn't figured out how to fight the class warfare fight yet. And if they fight it poorly here, we might as well just carve the tombstone for our social safety net.

Why did George W. Bush insist -- with such fanatical certainty, despite the well-established, clearly-stated doubts of his own intelligence services -- that Saddam Hussein was hoarding a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction? Why the insistence on this pathological disassociation from reality, which led directly to the death of thousands of innocent people? Why did he tell such lies, such cynical lies, such horrible lies, lies dripping blood, lies breeding more lies like rats on a plague ship?

That's easy -- his family was making money from it.

Viet Dinh has been called a "political pit bull" and "a foot soldier" for Attorney General John Ashcroft. But the 36-year-old author of the Patriot Act prefers to be called an "attendant of freedom."

In May 2001, the professor of law at Georgetown University was tapped by the Justice Department to work for two years as an assistant attorney general, working primarily on judicial nominations for the department. But three months later the World Trade Center towers collapsed, and Dinh was drafted to work on the USA Patriot Act, a bill that would give the government some of its most controversial surveillance powers. The bill, coupled with the government's subsequent treatment of immigrants and native-born citizens, prompted critics to charge the administration with overthrowing "800 years of democratic tradition."

• To the claim that 5,000 people have been detained using the Patriot Act with only five being actually charged under it and only one conviction, he responds that the number is probably closer to 500. Wonderful. Apparently it is OK to arrest 100 people for each person actually charged. Viet Dinh justifies all of the rest of these as anticipatory fishing expeditions.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, stepping into the politically charged debate over Social Security, said Wednesday the country can't afford the benefits currently promised to the baby boom generation.

He urged Congress to trim those benefits to get control of soaring budget deficits, which he said threatened a "very debilitating" rise in interest rates in coming years. ...

The central bank chairman also repeated his view that Bush's tax cuts should be made permanent to bolster economic growth. He said the estimated $1 trillion cost should be paid for, preferably, with spending cuts so the deficit would not be worsened.

• Bush: Social Security Shouldn't Be Cut For Near Retirees
• Greenspan: Congress Shouldn't Allow Tax Cuts To Expire
• White House Coy Over Greenspan's Tax Cut Comments
• Greenspan Advises Cutting Spending to Shrink Budget Gap

Note: I have been unable to confirm this by any other source. Officially (via Defenselink), the June 30th date applies only to the return of Iraqi sovereignty, and that Iraqis favor a continued U.S. troop presense beyond that date.

When Richard Perle and his neo-con henchman David Frum decided to write a book about "How to Win the War on Terror," they knew they been successful in persuading President Bush to go to war with Iraq. As their manuscript went to the publisher, it was clear the US-led coalition forces had won a quick and easy victory over Saddam Hussein. All that was left was some mopping up, installing their buddy Ahmad Chalabi as Saddam's successor, and then move on to the next war against the "axis of evil." But by the time the book arrived in the bookstores, it was even clearer that the war they and their Cabal had cooked up was a total mess, with no end in sight to either Iraq's miseries or to the costs to America in blood and treasure. Whoops!

Keep digging, Rick. I'll pick out the headstone.

Totalitarian nations hold elections, but what sets democracies apart is offering real choices in elections. In recent years, contests for the House of Representatives and state legislatures have looked more and more like the Iraqi election in 2002, when Saddam Hussein claimed 100 percent of the vote for his re-election. In that same year in the United States, 80 of the 435 House races did not even include candidates from both major parties. Congressional races whose outcomes were in real doubt were a rarity: nearly 90 percent had a margin of victory of 10 percentage points or more. It is much the same at the state level, only worse. In New York, more than 98 percent of the state legislators who run for re-election win, usually overwhelmingly.

And this is important: It does not matter if the tampering is in your favor. Be it gerrymandering, E-vote tampering, targeted scubbing of voter roles, or any of the other forms of vote rigging, once you figure out that your vote does not matter, you'll stop voting.

[From Black Box Notes.]

Lest any armchair fundamentalists out there get the wrong idea, none of this is stated from a position of areligious "humanism." Each Sunday, in fact, during silent prayer at my church I ask that the anger I feel toward these people be lifted from my heart and that the darkness they have visited upon my land be whisked away in the healing light of truth. And I ask that when George W. Bush and his self-appointed God squad are gone that I never again disturb my gray matter on them. I pray only that they disappear into their inner darkness and leave the rest of us alone.

But, of course, zealots never disappear. Like Dave Koresh, Jim Jones, Osama and Robertson, they're not guided by spiritual generosity but by some deeper pathological condition. There is a sadistic element to their religion, a need to punish and condemn rather than to lift up and inspire.

I consider myself fairly well studied on world religions. As an Atheist (or more formally, a classical pantheist), I find them especially fascinating and often even beautiful. Here are these various groups of people who believe differently than I do. Where are their beliefs different from mine? Where are they the same? Are all of the variations simply "different flavors" of a greater whole? These are the questions that have fascinated me throughout my 30+ years of Atheism and even beyond.

It was about four years back (when I began my "internet life") that I first began conversing with fundamentalists. Now I had ran into evangelicals before (there is overlap between the two groups (fundamentalists and evangelicals), but they are not identical), and mostly I had had no problems with them. So all of this was something new to me. For all of my study of world religion, I realized that I had no idea what it was that drove a person from a more centrist belief in a religion to a fundamentalist belief in that same religion. Certainly this occurred in all regions, but what was it? Was it a single thing across all religions, was it different between religions, or did it vary from individual to individual? I set out to find the answer.

The answer was illusive. I interviewed (via chat rooms and e-mail) many self-professed fundamentalists (mostly Christian, but that was my upbringing), and many of them over long periods of time. I never hid my own Atheism, nor did I hide my goal. Better to be honest up front, I felt, than to be later accused of fraudulent representation. In fact, this proved quite helpful, since none of the fundamentalists I spoke with had ever run into a "real live" Atheist before, and most were as curious about me as I was about them.

But still, my answer was illusive. In my previous studies, I had been concerned about what someone believed, and it is fairly easy to get people to tell you that. Now I was concerned with a quite different question: why did someone believe what they believed?

Try asking someone that question about their religion some time. Here's the answer you'll get: "Because it's true."

But here is what fundamentalists believe. They believe that theirs is the "one true religion". Yet many non-fundamentalists believe the exact same thing. They believe in the primacy of their own religious text (e.g., the Bible, the Koran). Yet many non-fundamentalists believe the exact same thing. They believe that their god will punish those who err and reward those who do not. Yet many non-fundamentalists believe the exact same thing. Where they differ is in their belief that their own religious text is inviolate; that it must be interpreted as the literal truth.

This last item is most curious. Here we have people who will turn on their coffee pots each morning, knowing full well that science says that the flow of electrons through the wires will heat the water that makes their coffee. Here we have people who will drive their cars across a long bridge, knowing full well that it is science that prevents them from falling into the waters below. Here we have people who will board a jet and fly across the country, knowing full well that it is science that even allows that jet to get off the ground. And yet these very same people (Christian fundamentalist, in this case), when presented with scientific evidence that the earth is more than 6,000 years old, invent excuses as to why that very same science is wrong. These very same people, when presented with scientific evidence that human beings evolved from earlier species, invent more excuses as to why that very same science is wrong.

Here is something else fundamentalists believe: They believe that science is a religion. And that as a religion, it competes with their own. To the extent that they can drink their hot coffee, cross rivers, and travel thousands of miles through the air, that "religion" is fine. To the extent that it refutes their sacred texts however, it is nothing less than evil itself.

Of course, they misunderstand entirely what science is (as do most people). Science is not some assembled body of "truths". Science is merely a methodology. It is a methodology that simply asks that those who propose "truths" do so in a fashion that they might be tested as such by independent analysts. It is nothing more. "Scientists" are allowed to propose "truths", but these same "truths" are open to refutation by anyone who choose to try. This is hardly the trappings of a "religion" however. Refutations of religious doctrine by outsiders is simply not allowed by the religious "elders", at least not in Western monotheism. But this leaves us nowhere, because the question is really why fundamentalists, who quite regularly avail themselves of the benefits of science, suddenly abandon it in favor of their contrary religious beliefs.

My search for an answer as to why fundamentalists take such extreme beliefs actually lasted the better part of three years, and it was almost accidental when I fell upon the answer. I was reading an article about Osama bin Laden, and suddenly drew the extremely important parallels between his fundamentalism and the fundamentalism of the many Christians I had interviewed over this time. It was my third point about what fundamentalists believe (above, "(t)hey believe that their god will punish those who err and reward those who do not") that was the operating principle behind what draws people to fundamentalism. Theirs is a god of fear. It is not a god of love.

What drew my conclusion here was my previous work with people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). If you have never encounter a sufferer of this, here is how they re-act. The PTSD sufferer imagines a threat. They believe this to be threat quite real. We who do not suffer from this disease of course quickly recognize the imagined threat to be exactly that: imagined.

But this is where it gets critical. If you act in any way before the PTSD sufferer that suggests to them that you do not also believe their imagined threat to be real, they will attack you (even physically) as if you are the very embodiment of that fear itself.

Now I'm not suggesting here that all fundamentalists suffer from PTSD. What I have learned instead is that all real fundamentalists suffer from a pathological paranoia; a fear response that causes them to lash out at anyone who does not share their paranoia of an avenging god, in the exact same fashion that PTSD suffers do. No, not all who suffer from pathological paranoia become fundamentalists. But all who suffer from pathological paranoia who also turn to religion as a comfort will also turn to a fundamentalist version of it.

Fundamentalists are fundamentally paranoid. They are control freaks who sense that they cannot actually control. They are just as mad about this as any pathologically paranoid person would be. And they will always respond against those who do not share their own imagined threats as somehow "real". They will respond with exactly as we are seeing today; a vitriolic hatred of everyone who questions their percieved fear. The exact definition of pathological paranoia.

This is what we have leading our nation now. The pathologically paranoid. This is why we pathologically exaggerate our national threats. This is why we cannot spend too much on a military that is already so far in advance of any of our competitior's.

Because we are ruled by the insane.

• So Ralph Nader is running. Good for him! Look, the Democrats really have no right to ask Nader not to. The party, drawn to the right by years of DLC dominance, was literally dead in the water. It was the Progressives (Nader-types) under Dean (and to a lesser extent, Kucinich) that put life back into it. And what did they get for it? They got a DNC that stood by silent when the media decided to go after Dean like a pack of wild dogs. Note that the DNC is now quite vocal as Kerry is being attacked. What's the difference?

  The difference is that to today's Democratic Party leadership, the Progressives are much like the Blacks, groups of voters the party wants but is willing to do little to get. Indeed, the operating prinicple in the party seems to be to expect these votes because "they have no place else to go." Well, sorry, but now they do.

  Some additional points:

  • As Nader pointed out, he was hardly the only third party candidate to run in 2000; he was simply the most successful. To ask him and not others to stay out of the race is to say that third party candidacies are acceptable only when they are marginal. This is avery dangerous way to think.

  • Special interests. All the main candidates are talking about them, hurling accusations back and forth. Nader didn't use that term. He used the term "corporations", and there's a big difference. Yes, corporations form SIGs, but so do environmentalist, gay rights advocates, pro-life proponents, and many more. All of these latter groups however are people coming together to influence legislation, and that's what people are supposed to do in a democracy. Corporate SIGs are different entirely. They are capital coming together to influence legislation, and we need to decide if this is how we want to run our country.

  Finally, VoteNader.org, and no, that's not an endorsement.

• The "Chickenhawk Defense!" I was wondering what Kerry was going to pull out against the "Hanoi Jane" charge, and this is fairly clever: He's simply pointing out that if the Republicans want to question his Vietnam record, they probably shouldn't be sending out chickenhawk front men to do it. The real question is whether the Republicans actually have any front men who are not chickenhawks to do this. I hardly expect John McCain to be volunteering for the job anytime soon.

  Of course, the RNC is already trying to dodge this bullet, claiming that we really shouldn't "revisit old wounds" from 30 years ago, a faint attempt to sideline both the chickenhawk tag and Bush's own service record. But the fact of the matter is that to many in the far right core of the Republican Party, Vietnam is still very much an issue. These are the people who, in spite of the revealed statements of every President invovled in that conflict, in spite of the more recent admissions of Robert MacNamara, and in spite of the personal testimonies of so many who fought in that conflict, still believe that the only reason we "lost" Vietnam was that we stopped "supporting our troops" there. It was these people after all who dusted off the old "Hanoi Jane" label, and it is these very same people to whom that label is as fresh today as it was when it was first minted.

  The RNC then, when it says we should not "revisit old wounds", is actually being quite disengenuous. The fact of the matter in fact is that many of their base are still living there.

"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot
of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."

~ George W. Bush, June 4, 2003

When President Bush sat down for an interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press he single-handedly proved that affirmative action is a bad thing. George W. Bush is the poster child for affirmative action. He attended prep school at Andover Academy because his father was an alumnus. He didn’t get good grades at Andover but got into Yale because the Bushes were alumni there as well. His father’s connections got him into a National Guard unit and helped him avoid serving in Vietnam. When he didn’t feel compelled to complete his National Guard duty he just walked away and didn’t suffer because of his decision. He then went to Harvard where he earned his MBA. He was admitted to Harvard despite earning only a C average while at Yale.

George W. Bush has participated in a racial preference program his entire life. But after all those years of entitlement and connections to the best America has to offer, George W. Bush has emerged as a man who can’t put together more than two coherent sentences and stumbles and pauses when attempting to express very simple ideas.

Indeed, Kerry has vested interests, usually in the millions of dollars, in almost every aspect of U.S. commerce. Finance, media, electronics, food, energy, health care, agriculture -- the list is staggering in its reach. It will be practically impossible for him to take any action as president that will not have a substantial impact on his family assets. These are conservatively estimated at more than $550 million, dwarfing the combined fortunes of Bush and Cheney -- the most bloated pair of plutocrats ever to rule the country. A Bush-Kerry contest will offer about as much democratic authenticity as Crassus and Pompey bribing their way to consulships in the death throes of the Roman Republic.

Knowledge is strength, and this article provides it.

"The worst president in our lifetime" is how many Americans view George W. Bush.
But Bush is not merely the worst president in recent memory. He's the worst in all US history. And he's won the distinction not on a weakness or two, but in at least nine separate categories, giving him a triple trifecta.

It's a record unmatched by any previous president.

• TRIFECTA ONE: Economy, Environment, Education
• TRIFECTA TWO: Corruption, Constitution, Global Contempt
  
• TRIFECTA THREE: Military madness, Messianic delusion, Macho Matricide

• Scientific Integrity in Policymaking (also below)
• A New Ice Age
• Environmental record may hurt Bush

Then what the hell were they being paid for?

But let's say they get off with that excuse. Sounds to me like the basis of a quite solid class action by Enron shareholders. If they really didn't know what was going on, then why should they have ever been compensated?

But if you're like me, someone who has actually had the pleasure of wearing handcuffs, then you'll delight in seeing a few more pics of Skilling in handcuffs. Glad to oblige! [ 1 ] [ 2 ] And you can actually see the cuffs on the second! Too cool!

Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance.

~ PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH, 1990

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued Wednesday. The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, has documented its findings and accusations in a 38-page report.

From the report's Executive Summary:

The U.S. government runs on vast amounts of information. Researchers at the National Weather Service gather and analyze meteorological data to know when to issue severe-weather advisories. Specialists at the Federal Reserve Board collect and analyze economic data to determine when to raise or lower interest rates. Experts at the Centers for Disease Control examine bacteria and viral samples to guard against a large-scale outbreak of disease. The American public relies on the accuracy of such governmental data and upon the integrity of the researchers who gather and analyze it.

However, at a time when one might expect the federal government to increasingly rely on impartial researchers for the critical role they play in gathering and analyzing specialized data, there are numerous indications that the opposite is occurring. A growing number of scientists, policy makers, and technical specialists both inside and outside the government allege that the Bush administration has suppressed or distorted the scientific analyses of federal agencies to bring these results in line with administration policy. In addition, these experts contend that irregularities in the appointment of scientific advisors and advisory panels are threatening to upset the legally mandated balance of these bodies.

The quantity and breadth of these charges warrant further examination, especially given the stature of many of the individuals lodging them. Toward this end, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) undertook an investigation of many of the allegations made in the mainstream media, in scientific journals, and in overview reports issued from within the federal government and by non-governmental organizations. To determine the validity of the allegations, UCS reviewed the public record, obtained internal government documents, and conducted interviews with many of the parties involved (including current and former government officials).

1. There is a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies. These actions have consequences for human health, public safety, and community well-being.

2. There is strong documentation of a wideranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration's political agenda.

3. There is evidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about "sensitive" topics.

4. There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.

• Press Release
• Restoring Scientific Integrity (useful links)
• Executive Summary [3 pages, 101 KB, PDF]
• Full Report [38 pages, 657 KB, PDF]

  NOTE: Be patient. The UCS server is being flooded with requests for copies of this report.

• New York Times: Scientists Say Administration Distorts Facts (Mirror)
• New York Times: Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts
• Yahoo! News: Bush Administration 'Distorts Science' -Report
• Toronto Globe & Mail: Bush administration fudging data, top scientists warn
• Guardian (UK): Bush 'bending science to his political needs'

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then, by George, it's an outrageous affront to public integrity.

I'm referring to this incestuous intersection of politics, the judiciary and big business. It's the first place people ought to look whenever Vice President Dick Cheney turns up missing.

Who knows? They just might run into that right-wing ideologue of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia.

This is a story that begs the vexing question: Which is more offensive, the incident or Justice Scalia's reaction?

Yet credible estimates of Iraqi deaths and severe injuries from the war run as high as several hundred thousand, and as Escobar points out:

This means that many Iraqis now know that in the name of their "liberation", the Americans have killed or maimed 200,000 people. When something like this happens, you don't need any help from al-Qaeda to fuel your anger.

As Pepe Escobar concludes:

As for a weakened, disabled al-Qaeda, it is definitely voting Bush next November. Al-Qaeda wants the Iraq occupation to be prolonged, with or without a puppet government: there could not be a better advertisement for rallying Muslims against the arrogance of the West.

"The United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of Great Powers, of what might be called 'imperial overstretch': that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the total of the United States's global interests and obligations is nowadays far too large for the country to be able to defend them all simultaneously."

But while empire in all its imperial, multicolored, geopolitical hues may be an alluring sight, there is one thing to keep in mind. The process of creating and maintaining an empire, like making sausage or passing congressional legislation, is not a pretty process. In fact, it is costly, very costly, in terms of lives, money and liberty. It requires a large military establishment, which can consume a substantial, if not disproportionate amount of the national treasury. And it requires stationing and deploying forces around the world.

At the root of this is a giant climate engine known as "The Great Conveyor Belt," which includes what we call the Gulf Stream. A simple look at mercator projection (flat map) of the world reveals the key element of this: most of Europe lies well to the north of the United States, and it is the Gulf Stream and its warm waters that provides most of the moderating effect that allows Europe to enjoy a climate similar to the U.S. If the Gulf Stream were to slow or even stall, the effect on Europe's climate would be sudden and dramatic, with Europe potentially entering a new Ice Age.

So how exactly might global warming cause such a sudden change in "The Great Conveyor Belt"? A detailed and excellent explanation of this is provided by Thom Hartmann in "How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age..."

Of course, Europe would not be alone in being effected by this. As the heat in the waters of the Gulf Stream failed to be moved to Europe, it would increasing concentrate off the east coast of North America, and this in combination with the rising ocean levels caused by glacial and polar ice cap meltdowns would likely cuase far more severe weather here which would particularly effect the highly-populated low-lying costal areas of the continent. As pointed out in an additional commentary, "Secretive Pentagon Forecasts Climate Wars" (mirror), this could result in large refugee flows from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean, and an ensuing "food war" scenario that has Pentagon planners scurrying to address.

Many additional links on this are provided by the Woods Hole Ocean and Climate Change Institute's Abrupt Climate Change page.

[Thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse for of several links here.]

"The system is in crisis. A quarter of the American public are voting on machines where there's very little protection of their votes. I don't think there's any reason to trust these machines," he said.

Such a system is even vulnerable to fraud byemployees of the machine's manufacturers, who could rewrite the software to rig an election he said.

"It is technically not difficult to do if you bribe a programmer at a major manufacturer. If you ask how likely it is that it could be done, the answer is 100 per cent. If you ask how likely it is to be done, I can't answer that," he added.

And as for how likely? It is inevitable if it has not been done yet. A single rogue operator could swing a state, and a talented one could swing a country ... without being detected.

[Note: Dill was speaking before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As of this writing, the text of his speech is not available there.]

[This article appeared on Black Box Notes. It is time to get involved people.]

State elections officials banned any attempt to recount votes cast on touch-screen voting machines Friday, reversing an earlier decision as counties prepare for the presidential primary less than a month away.

Fast forward to 2004 and the advent of E-votng terminals in some Florida voting districts. State election officials initially decided that it would be left to the individual counties to decide if they wanted their terminals to produce paper ballots for use in audits and recounts. (Note that at the present, no E-vote terminals that produce paper ballots have been certified for use in Florida.)

These same officials however have recently reversed this decision, saying that no counties can produce paper ballots produced by E-vote terminals. Why? The Bush v. Gore decision. Here's the logic. If only some counties produce paper ballots, only those counties will be able to do recounts using those ballots. That creates "different standards" for recounting ballots, something that Bush v. Gore declares to be illegal.

Let's look at what they are saying here because it's important. What they are saying here effectively is that no Florida county can adopt a better voting system than any other Florida county. What they are saying here is that if all Florida counties cannot do a paper recount, then no Florida county is allowed to do a paper recount. What they are saying here is that all Florida counties must adopt the least secure voting system chosen by any Florida county. This is nonsense, and yet it is nonsense mandated by Bush v. Gore; that all recounting of votes must be as bad as the worst recounting of votes!

Is this some sort of conspiracy between the national Bush administration and the Florida Bush administration to sabotage the Florida 2004 election? One could hardly be faulted for noticng the "complimentary" nature of these decisions, but far more likely we are simply seeing a parallel lack of concern for the integrity of our voting systems that is all too common among members of today's Republican Party.

[The article originally appeared on Black Box Notes.]

IT'S HARD TO RECALL a more brazen display of political chutzpah than the Bush campaign's assault on Sen. John F. Kerry as a captive of special interests. ...

Mr. Kerry's fundraising and his relationships with Washington lobbyists are a legitimate topic, ... But -- how can we say this politely? -- let's consider the source.

Mr. Bush's acceptance of special-interest money and his subsequent rewards to the industries doing the giving dwarf anything in Mr. Kerry's record. ... Mr. Bush has raised more than four times as much from lobbyists during the 2004 race as Mr. Kerry has -- $960,000 for Mr. Bush to $235,000 for Mr. Kerry.

My name is Dave Louthan.
I'm the guy who killed that mad cow.

Collins Media Services
Box 100
Mill Valley CA 94942

I just listened to Dave: I got this stuff all over me. I'll probably die from it. I'm OK with that. But maybe I can help some others to live. "It's necessary."

Indeed.

We are talking about people's dinner here. People's lives. I don't care how much money Big Beef loses. I want to enjoy my food not sit there wondering is this meat going to kill me? Is it going to kill my kids? That's a bunch of crap. It's not necessary. All those greedy yahoos have to do is start testing all the beef for BSE. Not some of the beef, all the beef.

So what's wrong with that? Weren't the OSP and the VP's Office effectively a part of the intelligence community that examined pre-war evidence? Well yes, they were (and they are the two parts of that community that are being accused of fraud), but the order goes on to define the "Intelligence Community" by the definition set forth in the National Security Act, and that act references neither the OSP nor the VP's Office. In other words, regardless of what the OSP and the VP's Office played in pre-war intelligence, their actions are beyond the scope of the committee!

Dean sums this up:

Bush's Executive Order only pretends to look at the issue of pre-war Iraqi WMD intelligence. In fact, it does not look at what is really the issue: the use of that intelligence by policy makers. The questions of what the intelligence said, and how it was used -- specifically, was it exploited or distorted? -- are quite separate. Bush's Commission will answer only the first question.

• How the commission has no authority to deliver its findings to anyone but the President.

• Why the commission will not be able to complete even its limited mission by the March, 2005 deadline.

• How Dick Cheney's experience in past administrations suggests his strong hand in the crafting of this executive order.

Bush should be given an honorary membership in the International Brotherhood of Magicians for his latest political handiwork.

Well, that's it then. The show is over. The scales have fallen. The monstrous gears of the dark satanic mills that spewed their poison fog across the land have ground to a halt at last.

George W. Bush's performance in his nationally televised interview this week was so abysmal, so completely divorced from the waking reality of the rest of the world, that even his faithful spear-carriers in the far-right horde -- not mention the power-worshipping poltroons of the mainstream media -- reacted as if they'd been slapped upside the head with a particularly dank and smelly mackerel. They're shocked -- shocked! -- to find incompetence in this establishment!

See also:

• Yahoo! News: Gay Marriage Hopes Kept Alive in Massachusetts
• USA Today: Constitutional amendment on marriage unlikely to pass
• FOX News: When is a marriage not a "marriage"?
• Christian Science Monitor: Gays want the right, but not necessarily the marriage, and America's gay marriage debate enters decisive phase

If there are people out there who still think globalized markets are always a win-win proposition, I invite them to look at the report on worldwide labour rights that was issued this week by Oxfam International.

Titled Trading Away Our Rights: Women working in global supply chains (link [4 MB, PDF] is to the full report, a summary is here [327 KB, PDF]), it depicts the savagely competitive world of global manufacturing and food production, and traces its effect on workers and farmers. It shows that the blessings of unprecedented choice many Canadians currently enjoy in fresh produce and stylish fashions come at a price.

In China, Honduras, Bangladesh, Chile, Kenya, Cambodia or Colombia, the pattern is the same: long hours, pay below minimum wage, increased health risks, intimidation and harassment for the legions who produce these goods. Often they are migrant workers. Increasingly they are women. All of them -- not only workers, but plant owners and middlemen -- are cogs in a system that is largely beyond regulation or control.

Dominated by a few giants -- Wal-Mart is a name that comes up repeatedly -- the global manufacturing industry aims to turn on a dime to find the cheapest possible way of filling orders. Elementary rights such as the freedom to associate, reasonable hours and safe working conditions often go by the board. Even companies that have ethical production standards violate them, sometimes unwittingly, as suppliers cut under-the-table deals with subcontractors to lower costs or satisfy just-in-time demand.

And you women? You're the ones they want first as their slaves. They think you are more controllable. They're probably right.

While I sat at his computer, March helped me open a file containing actual results from a March 2002 primary election held in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. -- a file that March says would be accessible to anyone who worked in the county elections office on Election Day. Following March's direction, I changed the vote count with a few clicks. Then, he explained how to alter the "audit log," erasing all evidence that we'd tampered with the results. I saved the file. If it had been a real election, I would have been carrying out an electronic coup. It was a chilling realization.

[Original Salon link.]

Yet employment as measured by the payroll survey rose by only 112,000 — well short of the increase needed just to keep up with a growing population. If employment were rising as rapidly as it did when the economy was emerging from the 1990-1991 recession, we'd be seeing monthly numbers more like 275,000.

Taking a longer view, the payroll numbers tell a dismal story. Since the recovery officially began in November 2001, employment has actually fallen by half a percent, while the working-age population has increased about 2.4 percent. By this measure, jobs are becoming ever scarcer.

The household survey, on which the official unemployment rate is based, tells a less dismal but far from happy story. (Why the discrepancy? We don't know.) The number of people who say they have jobs has risen since the recovery began — but has still lagged behind population growth.

The only seemingly favorable statistic is the unemployment rate, which has recently fallen to 5.6 percent, the same as in November 2001. But how is that possible, when employment has grown more slowly than the population, or even declined? The answer is that people aren't counted as unemployed unless they're looking for work, and a growing fraction of the population isn't even looking. It's hard to see how this is good news.

Other indicators continue to suggest a grim job picture. ...

In the light of these dreary statistics, President Bush's recent cheerfulness seems almost surreal. ... We expect politicians to place a positive spin on economic news, but to insist that things are going great when many people have personal experience to the contrary seems foolish. ... Why is Mr. Bush — whose poll numbers are a bit worse than his father's were at this point in 1992 — running the risk of repeating his experience?

The answer, I think, is that the younger Mr. Bush has no choice. He has literally gone for broke, with repeated tax cuts that have fed a $500 billion deficit. To justify policies that more and more people call irresponsible, he must claim that wonderful things are happening as a result.

The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.

The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."

"I've got a feeling this report was prepared by the same people who brought us the intelligence on Iraq. I don't think we need a new report about jobs in America. I think we need a new president who's going to create jobs in America and put Americans back to work."

"These people, what planet do they live on?"

"Maybe we will outsource a few radiologists," (Bush Council of Economic Advisors chairman N. Gregory) Mankiw told reporters. "What does that mean? Well, maybe the next generation of doctors will train fewer radiologists and will train more general practitioners or surgeons... Maybe we've learned that we don't have a comparative advantage in radiologists."

"The market is the best determinant
of where the jobs should be."

[Note: Both the NYTimes and the LATimes move articles to paid ($) archives.
  Permanent links: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Bush Supports Shift of Jobs Overseas.]

Let's talk about models for a minute. Models are simplified representations of things. Models leave things out, and do so for a good reason. By leaving things out, you can greatly lower the cost and complexity of testing a design or theory, and that's a good thing. The problem facing the model maker lies in selecting what to leave out of the model without compromising the intended use of the model. You can leave the engine out of a jet and still get a quite useful model for a wind tunnel test, for example, but if you leave the wings off, it's another matter entirely.

Modeling is central to economics. Indeed, without modeling, little if anything of value could be accomplished by economists. There are simply too many variables present in economics to achieve useful results if one attempts to include all of the variables in one's study. But as with other types of models, it is imperative that the economic modeler carefully select which variables to exclude based on what he or she is attempting to test. Exclude the wrong variable, and the most beautiful economic theory in the world becomes meaningless.

Which gets us to the free trader's mantra: "The market is the best determinant of where the jobs should be." Obviously, this statement is the based on a model that shows this to be the case. But what is that model, or more specifically, does that model include every significant variable needed to make the free trader's claim true in the real world?

Well first, "the market" is simply the exchange of goods (physical of services) for compensation (money or other goods). The free market model obviously must include more than this to produce results, things like the cost of raw materials, the cost of labor, and the cost of moving goods to their markets. These together are the supplier costs and supplier costs are borne by capital before the exchange of goods can take place.

Now, under this model, capital will aways seek the lowest supplier costs, and one would suspect that this would always drive capital in favor of the lowest labor costs. That is fine as far as it goes, but our Economics 101 model (take the course or trust me) shows that it is not the actual labor costs that determine the flow of capital, but rather the relative efficiency of labor that determines where capital goes. In other words, at some point, higher wage areas win out over lower wage areas because they simply do the job better. This really works in the free trade model, and is the basis of the claims of the free marketeers. So where are they wrong?

They are wrong because capital does not move anything anywhere for lower production costs. They are wrong because they have falsely identified the operating variable; that lower costs of production are the motivation for capital (and jobs) transfer. The only motivation for capital transfer is to increase the return on capital investment. Capital will move to the highest labor costs if that move will increase the return on investment.

So how does that affect the free trade model? The model well recognizes the price of labor, but eliminates the conditions of labor. It assumes that the condition of labor is a constant (an eliminated variable), and produces a false result because of this. It assumes that the "rising tide lifts all boats" benefit of free trade is actually realized in every labor market, and this is simply not the case. An important variable has been left out of the free marketeer's case model. So how does this play out in the real world? How is the free trade model wrong?

It is wrong because capital will always favor the labor market in which labor has the fewest rights. Labor rights cost money, and catering to them diminishes profit. And profit (not production costs) is why capital moves. Take the case of China, for it offers even another variable that the free trade model does not encompass.

The "rising tide lifts all boats" mantra of free marketeers assumes that the benefits of new employment actually go to the labor that creates the traded goods. It assumes that labor will use its increased purchasing power to buy products from the markets that they took their new jobs from. But what if these laborers did not actually recieve a just benefit from their new employment? What if their government stripped off all of the profits before labor ever saw them? Then the "rising tide" predicted by the free trade model would fail. And this is indeed what has happened. What we have here is the "rogue operator"; the variable that the free traders avoid in their model. And we have why their model fails.

Conclusion:
The free trade model fails for the same reasons that Socialism, Marxism, and Communism have failed; because it fails to account for the quite human motivation of greed. It has in effect left out that variable from the calculations of its model. It has produced a false result as a consequence. By eliminating the variable of the conditions of labor, it has advanced a quite beautiful theory in which all will benefit. The theory only has one failing. It is wrong.

Passengers were "shocked," said Karla Austin, who had flown on Friday's Los Angeles to New York Flight 34. Some reached for their mobile phones and others used the on-flight phones, she said.

"Just given the history of what's happened on planes in this country, anything can happen at this point. So we weren't sure if something was going to happen at takeoff, if he was going to wait until JFK (John F. Kennedy) to do something," Austin said. "But there was definitely implication there that we felt that something was going to happen."
. . .

He then suggested non-Christians talk to the Christians about their faith.

He went on to say that "everyone who doesn't have their hand raised is crazy", passenger Amanda Nelligan told CBS news.

"He continued to say, 'Well, you have a choice: you can make this trip worthwhile, or you can sit back, read a book and watch the movie'," she said.
. . .

Ms Nelligan said passengers had thought the pilot's behavior was "bizarre" and wondered whether his comments were a threat.

Flight attendants notified ground control.

Perhaps the strangest thing however is that the pilot was identified and interviewed at the conclusion of the flight by The Advocate ("Exclusive: Interview with American Airlines pilot who told Christian passengers to raise their hands"):

"If you have five minutes, I'll tell you why I did it," American Airlines captain Roger Findiesen told Advocate.com as Flight 34 had all but emptied out after its arrival at New York's JFK Airport, on Friday, February 6. "I felt that God was telling me to say something [to the passengers]."
. . .

In the suddenly hushed coach section of the airplane, a few nervous passengers raised one hand, most no higher than shoulder level, none above tops of the seats.

"I want everyone else on board to look around at how crazy these people are," the pilot continued, with an intonation suggesting he was using the word "crazy" in a positive, even admiring manner.
. . .

(Findiesen) went on to explain that he felt God wanted him to witness to the passengers on his first flight upon returning to work for American Airlines after his mission. Despite this feeling, he said, he had decided not to say anything--but then he got another sign from God.
. . .

While Findiesen repeated to (interviewer) Steele that he was sorry his fellow crew members had taken heat for his comments, he expressed no regret for having made them and no regret for not having apologized to the American Airlines customers he was serving on the flight. But, he added, "I won't do it again, if you want to make a big deal of it."

The blogs are also hopping all over this. Pax Nortana thinks that "passengers dialed relatives, perhaps in fear that they'd booked a ticket on a Christian Identity suicide mission." Body and Soul asks us to "try to imagine the response if this guy had been a Muslim.". corrente suggests that "(i)f American doesn't fire hold this guy accountable—say, by firing his ass—we're in for a long season of aggressive SIC proselytization on the airlines." Discount Blogger wonders about "Flying the Fundie Skies". The Secret Tango Dancer believes, "It's the end of the world, really."

And Fuck everything thinks it's "(j)ust what we need, more religious zealots piloting planes," but asks "Where the fuck is al Qaeda when you need them?"

And something I noticed in it: Numerous times in the transcript, there are long gaps without any CAP hyperlinks. Those are fun to read. They're all the times when Bush was stumbling over his words, essentially saying nothing.

[Via Tom Paine's Common Sense blog.]

[An expanded version of this article with additional commentary appears at Benedict@Large.]

Now come a few other "fun facts" about our nation's largest employer:

• Wal-Mart was the second highest campaign contributor in 2002, sending well over $1 million to incumbents' campaign coffers. This is a fairly new thing for Wal-Mart. When founder Sam Walton was still alive, campaign contributions from Wal-Mart were almost non-existent.

• It would take the combined payroll of every single one of the 504,000 Wal-Mart retail clerks to equal the compensation given to Wal-Mart's top 400 employees. Doing the math, that means Wal-Mart's top 400 employees average 1,260 times the compensation of their average retail clerk. Nice job if you can get it.

• Perhaps for this reason, Wal-Mart is instructing their retail employees in how to apply for welfare using the Internet. Now that's employee relations!

• The president's new budget provides only $40 million of the $800 million promised for election improvements at the state level this year.
• The Election Assistance Commission was given only $2 million for its operating expenses this year, not the $10 million it was due.
• Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated for making improvements at the state level, but the commission is too short of cash to distribute it. By law, the money cannot be disbursed until the states' plans appear in The Federal Register, and the commission cannot afford the $800,000 publishing cost.

This article previously appeared on Black Box Notes.

"For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat -- most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

"We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction -- weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning."

[Via BushWatch.]

• "... Iraq was a threat ..."
  ~ White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, 8/26/03

• "We ended the threat ..."
  ~ President Bush, 7/17/03

• "... the most dangerous threat of our time."
  ~ White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 7/17/03

• "... he was a threat ... He was a threat. He's not a threat now."
  ~ President Bush, 7/2/03

• "Absolutely."
  ~ White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03

• "... the threat from Iraq ..."
  ~ President Bush 4/24/03

• "The threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction ..."
  ~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 3/25/03

• "... threat to the region and the world ..."
  ~ Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, 3/22/03

• "... an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
  ~ President Bush, 3/19/03

• "... a threat to the security of free nations."
  ~ President Bush, 3/16/03

• "This is about imminent threat."
  ~ White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03

• "... a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies."
  ~ Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/31/03

• "... terrible threats to the civilized world."
  ~ Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/30/03

• "... threatens the United States of America."
  ~ Vice President Cheney, 1/30/03

• "... a serious and mounting threat to our country."
  ~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/29/03

• "Well, of course he is."
  ~ White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett responding to the question "is Saddam an imminent threat ... ?", 1/26/03

• "... a threat to the security of our people ..."
  ~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/20/03

• "... a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat."
  ~ President Bush, 1/3/03

• "... the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq ..."
  ~ President Bush, 11/23/02

• "... Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before ... So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?"
  ~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 11/14/02

• "... a threat to America."
  ~ President Bush, 11/3/02

• "... a significant threat to the security of the United States ..."
  ~ President Bush, 11/1/02

• "There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to American ..."
  ~ President Bush, 10/28/02

• "... a serious and growing threat to peace."
  ~ President Bush, 10/16/02

• "... the threat from Iraq stands alone ..."
  ~ President Bush, 10/7/02

• "... a threat of unique urgency."
  ~ President Bush, 10/2/02

• "... a grave threat in Iraq."
  ~ President Bush, 10/2/02

• "... a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined."
  ~ President Bush, 9/26/02

• "No ... greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people ..."
  ~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02

• "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent ... the immediate threat from biological weapons. "
  ~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02

• "... in the face of this mortal threat ..."
  ~ Vice President Dick Cheney, 8/29/02

[Via the Center for American Progress.]

"Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the Estimate.

"They never said there was an 'imminent' threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic -- and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq ... told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them."

We don't need an independent commission for this and we certainly do not need one tasked and appointed like this. A simple examination of the public record can well answer any and all questions an inquiring public might have. What we need here is an independent media.

The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong.

I, for one, was not. I did my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up their allegations regarding Iraq’s WMD and, failing that, spoke out and wrote in as many forums as possible in an effort to educate the publics of the United States and the world about the danger of going to war based on a hyped-up threat.

In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former head of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, has declared that under his direction, Iraq was ‘‘fundamentally disarmed’’ as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed UN weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion in March 2003, stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann, both exposed the unsustained nature of the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s nuclear capability.

The riddle surrounding Iraq’s WMD was solvable without resorting to war. For all the layers of deceit and obfuscation, there existed enough basic elements of truth and substantive fact about the disposition of Saddam Hus sein’s secret weapons programs to permit the Gordian knot to be cleaved by anyone willing to try. Sadly, it seems that there was no predisposition on the part of those assigned the task of solving the riddle to do so.

Bush’s decision to limit the scope of any inquiry to intelligence matters, effectively blocking any critique of his administration’s use — or abuse — of such intelligence, is absurd ...

Did the Bush administration plant this false allegation? We don't know this, but one could be forgiven for suspecting it in light of the Plame affair. The Bush Boys not only play rough, they play fast and loose with the law.

Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here. ...

It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing. ...

The fact that it wasn't [undue influence] tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and we've got to figure out what was there. ...

We simply have no evidence [that Iraq had any stockpiles of WMDs, large or small, in 2002]. We've not uncovered any small stockpiles, that's correct. ...

Well, ... if you want the short answer and the obvious answer, as you probably know, is, "Am I aware of what the vice president was reading [regarding mobile bio-weapons manufacturing capabilities] a week ago?" I'm not. ...

I wouldn't pretend that I know all the answers [as to why were we wrong] or even know all the questions to get at that. ...

KENNEDY: Yesterday, you said, "If anyone was abused by the intelligence, it was the president of the United States rather than the other way around."

[But Greg Thielmann said] "They surveyed the data, picked out what they liked. The whole thing was bizarre."

The secretary of defense had this huge defense intelligence agency and he went around it. ...

Well, do you see -- can you give us any explanation of why these agencies, in retrospect, appear to have had it right and the information that the administration used appeared to have it wrong? ...

KAY: I'll take Senator's McCain's defense of I being a naive in the world of politics. ...

I must say, ... I had a number of former U.N. inspectors working for me. We often sat around and said that, you know, it turned out we were better than we thought we were in terms of the Iraqis feared that we had capabilities and although they took tremendous steps to try to compromise us and to lie, in fact, the U.N. inspection process achieved quite a bit.

... it means that any president, when he's presented with intelligence, has got to make a choice about how much risk he's prepared to run for the nation that he leads.

1. The administration's own quite aggressive National Security Strategy requires a threat to be imminent in order for the pre-emption option to be invoked.

2. The administration told us that Iraq was an imminent threat because it possessed WMDs, and the concept of threat was their almost constant theme.

3. The CIA never told the administration that Iraq was an imminent threat.

4. The CIA was in fact removed from its traditional role of intelligence analysis by the creation of the Office of Special Plans, a unit that was formed to deliberately cast Iraq as an imminent threat, regardless of whether or not that was the case.

5. Anyone outside of the CIA who knew that Iraq was not an imminent threat was effectively silenced by a media in lockstep with the administration.

6. Their were no WMDs in Iraq and had not been for many years. Iraq was simply not an imminent threat, not even to its neighbors.

The administration served up a plate of garbage. The media dutifully served that garbage up to us as if it were gospel. We believed it because it was easier to believe it than not believe it. The administration was wrong. The media was wrong. And we were wrong when we believed them.

Tell me  sweet little lies.

The confession by the Bush Administration's chief arms investigator that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war has sent a thunderbolt of puzzlement through the pundits and politicians of the Anglo-American elite. "How could the intelligence reports have been so wrong?" they cry, wringing their hands in consternation. "Independent" commissions filled with Establishment worthies are now in the offing, as the architects of the war -- and their media sycophants -- pledge to resolve this disturbing mystery.

But of course there is no "mystery." Anyone with a passing acquaintance of recent history knows exactly how, and why, the intelligence data concerning Iraq's nonexistent WMD came to be used as a justification for military aggression. Indeed, this history is so open, so transparent and so widely available -- in news reports, unclassified government documents, think-tank publications, etc. -- that a cynic might suspect that these government-appointed "investigations" are actually designed to obscure the already evident truth.

It began in 1976, ...

Both of these responses raise serious questions of the judicial fitness of both Scalia and Rehnquist. The standard for reclusal is not that a conflict actually exists, but rather that the appearance of a conflict exists. That this does exist and that these justices apparently do not understand this difference does not speak well for their qualifications for our highest court.

And yet there is more. From the Los Angeles Times, Scalia traveled as an official guest of Vice President Dick Cheney. In other words, Cheney literally used his own government expense account to pay for Scalia's trip! If neither of these men can see an "appearance of conflict" in this, neither is fit to be a public servent.

And yet there is more, but now it's personal to me. Cheney is claiming in this law suit that he is covered by "executive privilege". He doesn't give a whit about executive privilege here. He's got stuff in his Energy Task Force that, if revealed, would justify his impeachment, even in a brow-beaten Republican Congress. He is running for his life here, and he will break any rule to save his ass on this. What he has to hide is that bad.

Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect thinks that the birds may finally be coming home to roost with Bush's new budget proposal, a flim-flam so transparent that even many Bush loyalists are pulling their hair out in anger. The Center For American progress thinks that Bush is "Playing With Our Money", and Paul Krugman thinks it's bogus also.

And Karl Rove can't put this one off until after the election.

What quickly becomes apparent when one begins to undertake this reading however is that this is not an administration content to merely respond (negatively) to environmental issues as they arise. This administration actively and aggressively is seeking out environmental regulations to gut. And they don't even have to be large items either. The last caribou herd in the lower 48 states, greatly stressed and down 90% in population over past years? Bring on the snowmobiles. The long-standing ban on importing endangered wild animals -- dead or alive -- as hunting trophies and commercial products? With the Orwellian logic used in the so-called Healthy Forests initiative, the administration claims that allowing poaching will encourage conservation efforts for those species. The list goes on and on until one almost gets the sense that things are being done not for any real reason except to anger environmentalists; as a sort of payback for all of the "trouble" we caused in the past.

These are truly sick people, and they need to go.

The intelligence official whose revelations stunned the Hutton inquiry has suggested that not a single defence intelligence expert backed Tony Blair's most contentious claims on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. ...

Dr Jones, who is expected to be a key witness at the new inquiry, says: "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities." ...

But today Dr Jones makes clear that he was not alone and declares that the whole of the Defence Intelligence Staff, Britain's best qualified analysts on WMD, agreed that the claims should have been "carefully caveated". Furthermore, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which allowed the contentious claims to go into the dossier, lacked the expertise to make a competent judgement on them.

This is nonsense. Jennings well knows of the evidence regarding Bush's National Guard service, and while the characterization of Bush as a deserter may be the harshest interpretation of Bush's record, it is certainly not "reckless".

Jennings' characterization of Moore's comment has been bothering me since he said it, and so I decided to write him and ask him to explain:

In the recent Democratic candidates' debate, Peter Jennings referred to Michael Moore's characterization of the President as a deserter as "reckless". This is a very strong word, and Jennings is a seasoned professional. He did not choose "unsubstantiated", "questionable", or any other softer term. He chose to use the far more inflammatory "reckless". The question is why.

The allegations against the president regarding his National Guard service are long-standing and a matter of public record. In the best of light, they point to questionable conduct by the president during his service obligations. There are five instances where he was explicitly ordered to appear but did not. This is at a minimum called AWOL. Under specific applications of military law, this can also be considered desertion. Whether or not these specific applications of military law apply to the president's situation at the time are debatable, but to argue that they do is certainly not "reckless". Aggressive perhaps, but not reckless.

Which brings me back to why Jennings, in a national forum, characterized Moore's comment as such. Certainly, I cannot speak for Jennings' motivations here, so let me speak to my own impressions as to why he did. Jennings was either trying to cover up the fact that he ignored this story during Election 2000, or he was shilling for the re-election effort of George Bush this year. Neither of these are pretty, but clearly the latter is a much more serious charge.

Mr. Jennings needs to explain himself and his own quite reckless allegation against Michael Moore.

In Communist Russia, everyone knew that the state-controlled media was worthless in its news content. The lies were so obvious that their news media marginalized itself to insignificance. Those who bothered to listen to it did so only to keep abreast of what the latest lies were, and in response, they formed what they called a "samizdat", a way to communicate the real news to each other.

In our country today, we beginning to see our own samizdat forming, and it is called the Internet. On the Internet, we can find what Jennings refuses to report, and we also can find out when what Jennings reports is simply wrong. And we can report that to each other without your help. We are marginalizing Peter Jennings, as we are all of the corporate controlled national news media. We are becoming the American Samizdat.

But Jennings can still explain himself. We of the new samizdat are waiting to report his response.

This is a joke! If Bush is appointing the members of the commission, then he will be controlling who is investigating him. And by expanding the scope dramatically beyond the quality and usage of pre-war Iraq intelligence, he is insuring:

1. That the focus and resources of the commission will be drawn away from pre-war intelligence,
2. That it will be impossible for the commission to report its findings before the election, and
3. That Bush will not have to publicly acknowlege his mistaken rationale for the war prior to the election.

Sources: CNN, MSNBC, LA Times, Contra Costa Times, CBS

He is simultaneously thought of as bumbling preppie, an arrested-development delinquent, the prototypical frat-boy party animal, the kind of middle-aged man who thinks John Belushi's Animal House is the only real film made in the last 30 years, and whose idea of reading is a Tom Clancy novel, or, on less challenging days, the latest issue of Guns & Ammo magazine. ... His enemies scarcely credit him with doing his own breathing, and would comment that if he is breathing on his own, he is surely not conscious of his doing so.

• Wednesday:
  • The Nation: "Exhibit A Against Media Concentration"
  • The Daily Northwestern: Super Bowl ad falls victim to media control
• Thursday:
  • Boston Globe: Political Football
  • San Francisco Chronicle: Let Them Play
  • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: CBS in another spot over Bush spot
  • Hartford Courant: Rejected Ad Gets Super Buzz
  • Yale Daily News: The Super Bowl ad that wasn't
• Friday:
  • Chicago Tribune: Anti-Bush ad rejected by CBS thrown to CNN
  • Los Angeles Times: One Thing That Won't Be Tackled on Sunday: Issues
  • Newsday: CBS' Blacken Eye
  • MSNBC: Censored at the Super Bowl
  • Twin Falls Times-News:Protesters call CBS decision censorship
  • Boulder Daily Camera: Super censored
  • The Batallion (Texas A&M): Conservative interests at work
• Saturday:
  • New York Times: A Superbowl Deficit
  • Berkshire Eagle: Brought to you by . . .
• Sunday:
  • Akron Beacon Journal: Too Rough for Football
  • Baltimore Sun: Even rejected ads get some Super Bowl glow
  • Tallahassee Democrat: Censorship and the Super Bowl
  • Houston Chronicle: What CBS won't show you during the Super Bowl
  • St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Please, CBS, don't decide which ads might upset me
  • And there are lots more ...

So what did CBS get for its fine efforts? Almost half a million angry e-mails and phone calls (their phone bank operators reportedly were getting quite rude, generating even more complaints), and a protest petition signed by over 300,000 MoveOn members.

You'd think they would have known better too. Last year, CBS found itself embroiled in another censorship controversey when it knuckled under to conservative pressure and cancelled "The Reagans", showing even back then that liberals were becoming increasingly intollerant of media pacification of conservatives.

Anyways, if you want to see "Child's Pay" on TV this evening and can afford to miss a minute of the excitement of the Super Bowl half-time show, switch over to CNN at 8:10 PM EST and 8:35 PM EST. CNN, at least, is smiling all the way to the bank.