Observations on current events

Chalabi's Return:

William Rivers Pitt: The Crawling King Snake Returns
"...A thief, liar, fraud and spy now runs the Oil Ministry in Iraq. Just when you think Bush administration foreign policy cannot produce any more farcical sideshows, something like this happens and we realize that the bottom of the barrel has not yet been reached. This is democracy in the modern American style, it seems.
There are some domestic parallels. Yesterday, the House of Representatives folded under intense pressure and voted 406-20 to reinstate the ethics rules that had been cast aside only weeks before. The move to get rid of the rules was done to protect House majority leader Tom DeLay, who stands accused of a series of truly epic ethics violations. Now that the rules are back in place, DeLay is going to face a withering investigation of how he has operated.
My suggestion: DeLay should skip the country, head to Iraq, become a Shia and take that open position as Minister of Human Rights. It would be par for the course, and as far as ethics go, he would be in good company with Mr. Chalabi..."


The Senseless War on Drugs:

The 800 lb. gorilla that nobody talks about in Colombia is OIL. Oil pipelines are a prime target for the FARC, who oppose the privatization of Colombia’s national resources (how dare they?) The coca eradication is primarily an attempt to deprive the FARC of cash.

NY Times: Americas > Anti-Drug Gains in Colombia Don't Reduce Flow to U.S.
"Five years and $3 billion into the most aggressive counternarcotics operation ever here, American and Colombian officials say they have eradicated a record-breaking million acres of coca plants, yet cocaine remains as available as ever on American streets, perhaps more so..."


On Torture:

Bob Herbert: On Abu Ghraib, the Big Shots Walk
"When soldiers in war are not properly trained and supervised, atrocities are all but inevitable. This is one reason why the military command structure is so important. There was a time, not so long ago, when commanders were expected to be accountable for the behavior of their subordinates.
That's changed. Under Commander in Chief George W. Bush, the notion of command accountability has been discarded. In Mr. Bush's world of war, it's the grunts who take the heat. Punishment is reserved for the people at the bottom. The people who foul up at the top are promoted..."


Health Care In The World's Richest Country:

Paul Krugman: A Private Obsession
"...The most striking inefficiency of our health system is our huge medical bureaucracy, which is mainly occupied in trying to get someone else to pay the bills. A good guess is that two million to three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck to other people.
Yet any effort to reduce this waste would hurt powerful, well-organized interests, which have already demonstrated their power to block reform. Remember the 'Harry and Louise' ads that doomed the Clinton health plan? The actors may have seemed like regular folks, but the ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, an industry lobbying group that liked the health care system just the way it was.
But vested interests aren't the only obstacle to fixing our health care system. We also have a big problem with ideology.
You see, America is ruled by conservatives, and they have a private obsession: they believe that more privatization, not less, is always the answer. And their faith persists even when the evidence clearly points to a private sector gone bad..."

On Torture:

Democracy Now! - UN Human Rights Investigator in Afghanistan Ousted Under U.S. Pressure
"CHERIF BASSIOUNI: ...Everybody approved the [first report submitted to the UN General Assembly] and was very happy with it. A second report was in April to the Commission on Human Rights, and again everybody agreed with everything, including President Karzai and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Khalilzad, with whom I had discussed the report before. And everything seemed to be so well, in fact, that the resolution of the Commission unprecedentedly for ten pages adopted almost every recommendation I had.
But, when it came to inquiry into what the U.S. forces are doing, there a stone wall was put. And I suspect it has to do with the fact that in the last two months the U.S. has been moving prisoners from Guantanamo to Afghanistan, and that soon we will see the D.O.D. open up Guantanamo for international inspection. And by then the worst cases will have been transferred to Afghanistan; Guantanamo will have been repainted, recarpeted, and would look very nice, and people who would go to inspect it there will find nothing wrong. But, of course, that means that those people who have been transferred from Guantanamo to Afghanistan could not be interviewed or seen by anybody else. So, I speculate (but I think there's valid reason to make such speculation) that the reason that the mandate was not renewed was really to avoid having somebody like myself, and certainly myself, if I were to be renewed, insisting on going into the prison facilities and talking to the people, which would in this case have included those transferred from Guantanamo..."

Reuters: Human Rights Watch: Abu Ghraib Abuses 'Tip of Iceberg'
"A rights watchdog said on Wednesday the abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were just the 'tip of the iceberg' of U.S. mistreatment of Muslim prisoners.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger pattern of U.S. rights violations of detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, New York-based Human Rights Watch said.
Its summary of accusations of abuses came on the eve of the first anniversary of publication of photos showing humiliation and mistreatment of prisoners at the Iraqi jail.
'Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg,' Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
'It's now clear that abuse of detainees has happened all over -- from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to a lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent prisoners. And probably quite a few other places we don't even know about.'
The group said it was concerned the United States had not stopped the use of what it called illegal coercive interrogation.
It said nine detainees were known to have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. At least 11 al Qaeda suspects have also 'disappeared' in U.S. custody, with no evidence of where they are being held.
It said there was growing evidence that prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of links to radical Islamic groups 'have suffered torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment,'..."


Iraq, As Not Heard On The Corporate Media:

Democracy Now! - Iraq Through the Eyes of Unemebedded, Independent Journalist Dahr Jamail
"...AMY GOODMAN: Our guest in studio, Dahr Jamail, who runs the blog, DahrJamailIraq.com,
just returned from Iraq, was there for eight months and reported to us on a somewhat regular basis. You are talking about Fallujah. What about the use of chemical weapons there? Last November, you reported the U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah. How do you know this?

DAHR JAMAIL: Many of the refugees I interviewed throughout November, just after the beginning of the siege, and then people who had been coming out of the city even into December, continued to report the use of chemical weapons in Fallujah, but really, one of the most important sources I have for this is an Iraqi doctor that I interviewed on the outskirts of Fallujah, and he said that he had worked as a medic during the Iran-Iraq War, he had treated Iraqi soldiers who had been hit with Iranian chemical weapons, so he knew what these types of injuries look like. And he said that he had treated people from Fallujah with the same types of injuries, as well as another Iraqi man that I had interviewed who went into the city, brought in by U.S. soldiers to help bury bodies, and that he had seen many bodies that he believed to have been hit by chemical weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: On March 3, Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli of the Iraqi Health Ministry held a news conference accusing the U.S. of using internationally banned chemical weapons, including nerve gas, during the assault. Do you have any more information on that?

DAHR JAMAIL: That report, actually, yes, I have read that and am aware of that. And it's just further confirmation of the fact that the -- another, related to that what the doctor said that I had interviewed was that he was willing to go in and try to dig up some of these bodies that they were forced to bury by the U.S. military there in Fallujah, because he said that he is 100% certain that these types of weapons had been used, and he, among so many other people inside the city, are pleading for an international investigation of the types of these -- of what illegal weapons were used there, because they are absolutely certain they were chemical weapons, cluster bombs, fleshettes, types of napalm and various other weapons, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Dahr, on your blog, you continually talked about everyday Iraqis and the kind of obstacles they faced, what it was like just to live there. Give us that full picture that we so rarely can get.

DAHR JAMAIL: Well, the situation in Iraq is devastating. It's difficult to be there and see it day in and day out where there's no security whatsoever. There's complete lawlessness in the capital city and most other cities. The situation in the hospitals is an ongoing health care crisis. They're lacking medicines and basic supplies and things they need. Then we have the refugee situation where people are all over the city, hundreds of families in various places, trying to survive. It's really quite -- it's the ongoing refugee situation we have that -- over 300,000 there. We have rampant fuel crisis going on where people are waiting one, sometimes two days, to fill the tanks of their cars. We have the military responding to the security situation by closing various streets in Baghdad. At least 100 streets are now closed in the capital city to try to bring some sort of order to the situation. Gas lines stretching sometimes between six and ten miles. People waiting between one and two days to fill the tanks of their cars. Gasoline is being rationed. Even plates one day, odd the next. People are allowed seven-and-a-half gallons when they fill their tanks. Electricity in the better parts of Baghdad is about eight hours. In most places, including up in the north in the Kurdistan region, we have three hours or less of electricity per day and infrastructure is in worse shape in all of the main areas than it was prior to the invasion... "


'Boltonized' Intel or Going To War on a Lie:

Ray McGovern: Bolton Nomination Is More Than Meets the Eye
"President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are casting the trials of John Bolton, their nominee for ambassador to the U.N., as a partisan political squabble. It is much more than that. It is rather a matter of life and death for the endangered species of intelligence analysts determined to 'tell it like it is,' no matter what the administration's policies may be. For them the stakes are very high indeed.
The Bush administration strongly resists the notion that the intelligence on Iraq, for example, was cooked to the White House recipe. And with thepresident's party controlling both houses of Congress and the president appointing his own 'independent' commission to investigate, Bush and Cheney have until now been able to prevent any meaningful look into the issue of politicization of intelligence.
But the Bolton nomination has brought it very much to the fore, and there will be serious repercussions in the intelligence community if, despite his flagrant attempts to intimidate intelligence analysts, Bolton is confirmed by the Senate.
For many, the term 'politicization' is as difficult to understand as it is to pronounce. Indeed, it is impossible to understand, when one assumes, as most do, that all institutions in Washington, DC have a political agenda. Suffice it to say here that, in order to do their job properly, intelligence analysts must at one and the same time be aware of what is going on at the policy level but be insulated from political pressure to conform intelligence to policy. That way, intelligence anlysis can be based on fact (as in 'We have no good evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction'), rather than fiction (as in, 'Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose a grave threat requiring immediate action'). Helpful insight into politicization can be found in John Prados' article of last Thursday, 'Boltonized Intelligence,'..."


Blair and the Illegal Invasion of Iraq:

The Guardian (UK) - Now there's no chance of moving on
"Could this be the smoking gun? In the last US presidential election, Democrats waited desperately for the killer document that would somehow blow a hole in George Bush's case for war on Iraq. Could the Guardian's publication today of substantial parts of the attorney general's advice to the prime minister on the legality of the war play such a role in the final days of this campaign?
There is much in the document that, as Lord Lester writes in today's paper, should be 'devastating' for the government. First, the attorney told the PM that it was for the UN security council, not him, to decide whether Iraq was complying with UN resolutions on disarmament or not. Yet we know it was the PM who took that decision.
The result was a surreal circularity, whereby the attorney ruled that war would be legal if Downing Street was sure Saddam was not complying. Downing Street said it was sure and so the attorney was satisfied. The war was legal - because Tony Blair said it was legal.
Second, Lord Goldsmith stated that the government would need 'hard evidence' of noncompliance: yet we know that Hans Blix and his inspectors were reporting a rising degree of Iraqi cooperation. Third, he said that even an 'unreasonable veto' by a security council member would not allow Britain to proceed as if it had security council backing. Yet when France did block plans for a second UN resolution, the government took that as a green light for action.
Finally, it becomes clear that Blair handled this document the same way he handled the intelligence on Iraq: by stripping out the caveats. The version of the legal advice that Goldsmith presented to the cabinet and parliament was much less ambiguous than the one Blair had seen himself..."

No Wonder The Pharma Industry Spends So Much To Advertise on TV:

CTV: U.S. study: TV ads influence drug prescriptions
"Patients who tell their doctor about a specific medication they saw in a television ad often walk out with an unnecessary prescription, a new U.S. study has found.
In an unusual experiment documented in this week's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, actors made unannounced visitors to doctors..."


The Exploitation of Religion in Politics:

Democracy Now! - God's Politics: Frist Fights Filibuster on Judicial Nominees in "Justice Sunday"
"Jim Wallis: ...religion is being used by some to provide us with what we really long for, which is a kind of easy certainty. But the better use of religion is to provide us a deeper reflection. For example, if we can't see the face of evil on September 11, I suppose we're suffering from some kind of a post-modern relativism or something, but to say they're evil and we are good is bad theology. Jesus said don't just see the log in your adversary's eye, but also the one in your own eye. So that kind of bad theology, they're evil and we're good, leads to bad foreign policy, to preemptive, unilateral and endless war. Fundamentalism exists in all of our religious traditions, and the antidote to it, I think, is prophetic faith. The answer to bad religion, I think, is not secularism but better religion. So, how do we talk about a prophetic faith? In my Christian tradition, I want to talk about Jesus. How did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American? It doesn't make sense. And yet, that's what we're faced with. So, really, a rescue operation is what I think is required now, to take back our faith from those who have made it into a kind of a political weapon and a wedge. The religious right is the political seduction of religion. The religious right was the idea of the political right. They created it. There were meetings. Republican political operatives, TV preachers, a deal was made. Give me your lists. I'll make you famous. It was a Faustian bargain. But what happens is when the progressives concede the entire territory of religion and values and faith to the right, then they get to define it however they want to, and they have in this very narrow, partisan, ideological way. So that's what I want to take back here..."

The Right To Petition Congress:

Mr. Norquist, it needs to be remembered, is constantly promoting the reduction in the size of the US government of about half. Which half, you ask? The DoD's budget is clearly not up for discussion...

The Raw Story: Reed, Norquist subpoenaed in Indian gambling probe
"Organizations headed by two of the best-known figures in conservative political circles, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, have been subpoenaed by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in its long-running probe of GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the paid-restricted Roll Call reveals Thursday..."

The Rule of Law:

NY Times Editorial: Preserving the Right to a Lawyer
"Criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer have the right to have one appointed to represent them. In Michigan, however, some poor defendants are denied appointed counsel at a critical stage: when they want to challenge the sentence imposed on them. The Supreme Court hears arguments today in a challenge to this rule. It should order Michigan to provide defendants in this position with appointed lawyers.
The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1963 case of Gideon v. Wainwright that poor defendants have a constitutional right to appointed counsel. The court has held that this right generally extends to a defendant's first appeal after a criminal conviction.
In virtually every state, poor defendants are appointed lawyers for their first appeals. But in Michigan, they do not have the right to a lawyer on appeal if they have pleaded guilty. Normally, defendants who plead guilty do not appeal, but there are times when they do, like when they want to challenge the sentence that they receive. In the case the court is hearing today, a mentally impaired defendant had to appeal without a lawyer when he was given a prison sentence of up to 30 years that he maintains was improperly calculated.
For the right to counsel to be meaningful, it must apply to the initial trial and to one appeal before a different judge. The American Bar Association, which filed a supporting brief against the Michigan rule, says that denying poor defendants appointed counsel for first appeals can create 'serious problems' for 'the administration of justice,'..."



Paul Krugman: The Oblivious Right
"...Is the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so: President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all, everyone they talk to says so.
Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins, Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-term president on record.
What's going on? Actually, it's quite simple: Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns..."

Pandering To The Base:

Frank Rich: A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
"...The fraudulence of 'Justice Sunday' begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. 'The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias,' says the flier for tonight's show, 'and now it is being used against people of faith.' In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the 'left's last legislative body,' and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for 'outrageous' judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.
The 'Justice Sunday' mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real 'Justice Sunday' agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the 'Tonight' show last week: ' 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay.' The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight.
To paraphrase the 'Justice Sunday' flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.
Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of 'people of faith.' But 'people of faith,' as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight's presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to 'sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers,' according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. 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,'..."


Judicial Nominations At Any Cost:

William Rivers Pitt: Filibusted?
"The GOP leadership is still going to talk about 'activist judges.' They're still going to flood the talk-show airwaves with talk of a 'judiciary that is out of control.' They're still going to ally themselves with the worst elements of the extreme right in an effort to kill the filibuster in the Senate, so they can ram through 12 thoroughly inappropriate judicial nominees along with whatever else they feel like.
The GOP leadership is still going to do that, but for the time being, it appears possible the push to take the 'Nuclear Option' and get rid of the filibuster has hit the reef.
The Associated Press reported Thursday on some private, internal polling done by the GOP on this matter. According to the scant information released by an anonymous party official, only 37% of Republicans polled support getting rid of the filibuster. Only 20% of Republicans polled believed the statement by party officials that Bush is the only President who has had his nominees filibustered. The secrecy of the overall poll numbers is telling; when the GOP has numbers that help their arguments, they break their legs rushing it out to the airwaves..."


The Rule of Law:

James Ridgeway: The Silencing of Sibel Edmonds
"The unsettling story of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds took another twist on Thursday, as the government continued its seemingly endless machinations to shut her up. The U.S. Court of Appeals here denied pleas to open the former FBI translator's First Amendment case to the public, a day after taking the extraordinary step of ordering a secret hearing.
Edmonds was hired after 9-11 to help the woefully staffed FBI's translation department with documents and wiretaps in such languages as Farsi and Turkish. She soon cried foul, saying the agency's was far from acceptable and perhaps even dangerous to national security. She was fired in 2002.
Ever since, the government has been trying to silence her, even classifying an interview she did with 60 Minutes.
Oral arguments in her suit against the federal government were scheduled for this morning, but yesterday the clerk of the appeals court unexpectedly and suddenly announced the hearing would be closed. Only attorneys and Edmonds were allowed in... "


Business Ethics:

NY Times: Evidence in Vioxx Suits Shows Intervention by Merck Officials
"In 2000, amid rising concerns that its painkiller Vioxx posed heart risks, Merck overruled one of its own scientists after he suggested that a patient in a clinical trial had probably died of a heart attack.
In an e-mail exchange about Vioxx, the company's most important new drug at the time, a senior Merck scientist repeatedly urged the researcher to change his views about the death 'so that we don't raise concerns.' In later reports to the Food and Drug Administration and in a paper published in 2003, Merck listed the cause of death as 'unknown' for the patient, a 73-year-old woman..."


Election Reform:

AP: Chairman of Voting Reform Panel Resigns
"The first chairman of a federal voting agency created after the 2000 election dispute is resigning, saying the government has not shown enough commitment to reform.
DeForest Soaries said in an interview Friday that his resignation would take effect next week.
Though Soaries, 53, said he wanted to spend more time with his family in New Jersey, he added that his decision was prompted in part by what he called a lack of support.
'All four of us had to work without staff, without offices, without resources. I don't think our sense of personal obligation has been matched by a corresponding sense of commitment to real reform from the federal government,' he said.
Soaries, a Republican former New Jersey secretary of state, was the White House's pick to join the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states enact voting reforms.
A Baptist minister, Soaries was confirmed by the Senate in December 2003 and elected the independent agency's first chairman by his three fellow commissioners. His term as chairman ended in January 2005 and since then he has stayed on as a commission member.
Soaries and the other commissioners complained from the beginning that the group was underfunded and neglected by the lawmakers who created it.
'It's bad enough to be working under extremely adverse circumstances, but what throws your thinking into an abyss, as it were, is why you would be doing that when, for instance, you have to beg Congress for money as if the commission was your idea,' Soaries said..."

Hats Off To The Bravest Man at NYU:

Democracy Now! - Justice Scalia Confronted On Sodomy laws
"The rightwing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the New York University Annual Survey of American Law's invitation to engage students in a question and answer session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that effectively struck down the nation's sodomy laws. Not satisfied with Scalia's answer, Berndt asked the Justice, 'Do you sodomize your wife?' Scalia demurred and law school administrators moved quickly to turn off the student's microphone. In a post to fellow law school students after the event, Berndt defended his question, saying it was an entirely fair question to pose to a Justice whose opinion--had it been in the majority--would have allowed the state to ask that same question to thousands of gays and lesbians, and to punish them if the answer is yes. Berndt wrote 'How am I to docilely engage a man who sarcastically rants about the 'beauty of homosexual relationships' and believes that gay school teachers will try to convert children to a homosexual lifestyle? Berndt said he asked the question to 'subject a homophobic government official to the same indignity to which he would subject millions of gay Americans,'..."


Hypocricy is OK, When The Ends Fit Bush Policy:

The Independent (UK) - US Broke Own Embargo Selling Arms to Haiti
"The Bush administration has been accused of ignoring its own arms embargo and overseeing the sale of $7m-worth (£3.7m) of weapons to the Haitian government to equip its police force.
Human rights groups say the police carry out routine executions of dissidents and weapons are often illegally funneled to armed militia.
Robert Muggah of the Swiss-based Small Arms Survey, a non-profit group, said that last year the US effected the sale of thousands of weapons to the interim government headed by Gerard Latortue, despite a 13-year arms embargo. 'They are meant to brace up a shaky security force, but the reality is they could actually undermine security by jeopardizing an innovative disarmament effort just getting under way,' said Mr. Muggah, who has spent several months in Haiti interviewing diplomats and UN officials for a report.
The embargo was established after a coup that ousted the elected president Jean-Betrand Aristide, who was forced into exile for a second time last year. Washington, which had long under - mined his presidency, refused to help him. The weapons embargo remains in place..."


Poor Nomination Choice:

Washington Post: Powell Undercuts Bush on Bolton Nomination
"Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell is emerging as a behind the scenes player in the battle over John Bolton's nomination to the United Nations, privately telling at least two key Republican lawmakers that Bolton is smart, but a very problematic government official, according to Republican sources.
Powell spoke in recent days with Sens. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), two of three GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who have raised concerns about Bolton's confirmation, the sources said. Powell did not advise the senators to oppose Bolton, but offered a frank assessment of the nominee as a man who was challenging to work with on personnel and policy matters, according to two people familiar with the conversation..."

The Bolton Hearings:

Ray McGovern: Paying the Price for Getting It Right
"Many have asked how it could be that a comparatively small group of intelligence analysts in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was able to get it right on several key Iraq-related issues, while larger agencies like CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency-with, literally, a cast of thousands-got it so wrong. The answer is simple: INR had the guts to be the skunk at the picnic. That's how. State Department analysts showed backbone in resisting White House pressure, as well as in-house prodding from the likes of Under Secretary of State John Bolton, to cook intelligence to the White House recipe..."


Economics:

Robert Reich: The Fed's Preemptive War
"We're fighting an inflation that's not imminent, and low-income workers are taking the heaviest casualties..."


Media and Democracy:

FAIR: Fear & Favor 2004 - Fifth Annual Report
"...The relationship between the press and government should, in theory, be a somewhat confrontational one. When stories surface that local governments are refusing to speak to certain reporters or media outlets, one can only hope that in some way this means the media in question are doing their job, and politicians are angry about it.
Government officials also know that applying a little pressure to the media can go a long way. It's worth remembering that these same media companies are often engaged in high-stakes lobbying, trying to extract favors from federal or state regulators they're also obligated to cover - so even if they don't cave in to pressure, they're not often eager to embarrass the officials who applied it..."

Economic Policy:

Democracy Now! - Naomi Klein On The Rise of Disaster Capitalism


Twisting Science On The Environment

Democracy Now! - Report: ExxonMobil Spends Millions Funding Global Warming Skeptics: "...And a new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that ExxonMobil has spent at least $8 million funding a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming. The magazine has identified 40 think tanks, media outlets and other organizations including the American Enterprise Institute, the Annapolis Center For Science-Based Public Policy, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Media Research Center. The report also names a list of so-called experts that have been paid to publicly question global warming. The list includes Steven Milloy who is a columnist for FoxNews.com. Two groups run out of his home have received $90,000 from Exxon Mobil. Mother Jones also reports that less than a month after President Bush took office, an Exxon-Mobil lobbyist named Randy Randol sent a memo suggesting certain climate experts from the Clinton administration should be 'removed from their positions of influence' A year later the Bush administration blocked one of the scientists - Robert Watson - from his post at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The magazine's report comes as environmentalists are preparing to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Earth Day on Friday..."

...another Global Warming piece in Mother Jones...

Chris Mooney: Some Like It Hot
"Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil..."

The Judiciary:

Adam Cohen: The Psst ... Justice Scalia ... You Know, You're an Activist Judge, Too
"...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.
Justice Scalia's views on federalism - which now generally command a majority on the Supreme Court - are perhaps the clearest example of the problem with the conservative attack on judicial activism. When conservatives complain about activist judges, they talk about gay marriage and defendants' rights. But they do not mention the 11th Amendment, which has been twisted beyond its own plain words into a states' rights weapon to throw minorities, women and the disabled out of federal court..."


Making Sure The DoD Gets What It Wants:

Reuters: Rumsfeld Sends Cambone to Oversee Negroponte
"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked a senior aide to serve as the Pentagon's chief liaison with the incoming national intelligence director, officials said on Friday.
In a move that renewed concerns about a possible power struggle with the new intelligence czar, Rumsfeld signed a memo on March 28 calling on Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone to oversee the Pentagon's intelligence reform efforts.
It designates Cambone's office as the entry point for the intelligence director's dealings with the Defense Department, according to an official familiar with the document.
The memo says the changes are meant to forge a close and productive relationship between the Defense Department and the director of national intelligence.
The document surfaced as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence prepared for next Tuesday's confirmation hearing for John Negroponte, President Bush's nominee for intelligence director..."


The Environment vs. Prosperity: How Long Will Excuses Be Made To Continue To Do Nothing?

AP: Experts counter Bush on warming costs
"Mandatory limits on all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse' gases would not significantly affect average economic growth rates across the country through 2025, the government says.
That finding by the Energy Information Administration, an independent arm of the Energy Department, runs counter to President Bush's repeated pronouncements that limits on carbon dioxide and other gases that warm the atmosphere like a greenhouse would seriously harm the U.S. economy..."

NY Times Editorial: The Missing Energy Strategy
"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.
The consensus on the need for a more stable energy future is matched by an emerging consensus on how to get there. In the last two years, there have been three major reports remarkable for their clarity and convergence, from the Energy Future Coalition, a group of officials from the Clinton and the first Bush administrations; the Rocky Mountain Institute, which concerns itself with energy efficiency; and, most recently, the National Commission on Energy Policy, a group of heavyweights from academia, business and labor..."

Domestic Policy:

Bob Herbert: A Radical in the White House
"...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..."

Paul Krugman: A Whiff of Stagflation
"In the 1970's soaring prices of oil and other commodities led to stagflation - a combination of high inflation and high unemployment, which left no good policy options. If the Fed cut interest rates to create jobs, it risked causing an inflationary spiral; if it raised interest rates to bring inflation down, it would further increase unemployment.
Can it happen again?..."


Yet Another Poor Choice By W To Represent The US:

Melody Townsel: Bolton Accused of Physically Harassing Whistleblower
"Melody Townsel was stationed in Kyrgyzstan on a US AID project. During her stay there, she became embroiled in a controversy in which John Bolton was a key player. She described the incident in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members who are reviewing the Bolton nomination..."

Washington Post: Bolton Often Blocked Information, Officials Say
"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..."


The Right To Petition Congress:

NY Times: Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Is Shaking His Political Faithful
"In 30 years of culture wars, few conservative Christian standard bearers have traveled further in American politics than Ralph Reed. The former head of the Christian Coalition has been a high-priced communications consultant, a top Bush campaign adviser, chairman of Georgia's Republican Party and now a candidate for lieutenant governor here..."


Propaganda On The Public Dime:

NY Times: Inquiry Finds Radio Host's Arrangement Raised Flags
"Officials at the Education Department expressed concerns about a contract with the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams last year, even bringing it to the attention of a White House policy adviser when it came up for renewal, according to an internal department report released on Friday.
The report, by the department's inspector general, found no evidence of unlawful or unethical behavior in connection with Mr. Williams's contract but criticized top department officials for 'poor management decisions' and lax oversight..."


The Environment:

NY Times: Change to the Clean Air Act Is Built Into New Energy Bill
"Deep in the energy bill that was approved by a House committee this week, under a section titled 'Miscellaneous,' is a brief provision that could have major consequences for communities struggling to clean up their dirty air.
If it becomes law, it would make one of the most significant changes to the Clean Air Act in 15 years, allowing communities whose air pollution comes from hundreds of miles away to delay meeting national air quality standards until their offending neighbors clean up their own air.
The provision could especially affect states like New York, which has some of the nation's dirtiest air, and other Northeastern states that have always had difficulty meeting federal standards for ozone, a leading cause of smog, because much of any state's pollution originates in states to the south and west..."


Energy Policy:

Kelpie Wilson and Marc Ash: Report: California "Energy Crisis" II
"California, March 2001: rolling blackouts sweep through major cities, leaving entire communities without power. The explanation offered by private energy generators was simple: 'There is a crisis, and we don't have enough power to meet the demand.'
Three years, hundreds of investigations, and billions of taxpayer dollars later, a web of deceit, corruption and illicit profit are well documented and part of the public record. California State officials now acknowledge that power companies withheld more than enough power to have averted the blackouts, and they did it to drive up prices and profits. In fact, CBS News reported, federal investigators have power plant control room audio tapes of traders from Williams Energy telling plant operators to 'turn off the juice.'
Lesson learned? Apparently not.
The California Public Utilities Commission, charged with protecting California ratepayers and implementing a sensible state energy plan, is about to deliver ratepayers into the hands of oil companies wanting to hook the state into a dependency on expensive, imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) that comes at the end of a long supply chain over which Californians have no control..."


On Torture:

News & Observer (N. Carolina) - CIA Agent Seeks to Subpoena Gonzales, Tenet
"A former CIA contractor accused of beating an Afghan prisoner plans to call former agency Director George Tenet and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as witnesses to aid his defense that he was acting under government authority.
David Passaro's witness list was made public for the first time Tuesday along with a score of other documents after The News & Observer, The Associated Press and The Washington Post asked a court to release them. The news organizations had complained that the federal government's prosecution of Passaro, the first U.S. civilian charged under the Patriot Act, was secret because so many documents were under seal..."

The Man Who Would Be The New Intel Czar:

The Washington Post: Negroponte Used CIA Back Channels to Defy Congress
"The day after the House voted to halt all aid to rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte urged the president's national security adviser and the CIA director to hang tough.
The thrust of the envoy's 'back channel' July 1983 message to the men running the contra war against Nicaragua was contained in a single cryptic sentence: 'Hondurans believe special project is as important as ever.'
'Special project' was code for the secret arming of contra rebels from bases in Honduras -- a cause championed by Negroponte, then a rising diplomatic star. In cables and memos, Negroponte made it clear that he saw the 'special project' as key to the Reagan administration's strategy of rolling back communism in Central America.
As Negroponte prepares for his Senate confirmation hearing today for the new post of director of national intelligence, hundreds of previously secret cables and telegrams have become available that shed new light on the most controversial episode in his four-decade diplomatic career. The documents, drawn from Negroponte's personal records as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, were released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post.
The documents were initially declassified and provided to Negroponte in 1998, after his retirement from the Foreign Service, but the vast majority have never been made public. A State Department FOIA official said yesterday that about 100 documents from the collection are still being 'processed.'
The documents offer revealing glimpses into the personality, leadership style and political attitudes of the man President Bush selected to shake up U.S. intelligence in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Negroponte's determination to reverse the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua occasionally put him at odds with fellow envoys and with more cautious State Department bureaucrats..."


Barkruptcy Law 'Reform'

NY Times: House Passes Bankruptcy Bill
"...Supporters of the measure were giddy on Thursday. The National Retail Federation issued-and then tried to rescind-a statement it had inadvertently sent out by e-mail hours before completion of the measure, applauding Congress for approving the bill.
'It feels like we've been waiting as long to pass bankruptcy reform as Washington spent trying to get baseball back in town,' said Steve Pfister, the senior vice president for government relations at the retail federation. 'The House hit one out of the park today. Now we're just waiting for President Bush to cross home plate by signing this bill into law.'
Mr. Pfister said the legislation would lower costs for all consumers because they wind up making up the difference on the unpaid debts of those who abuse the system.
But others disagreed.
Opponents of the legislation said that the move by Congress was a harsh attack on the poorest and most needy and came just one day after the House adopted a measure of huge potential benefit to the wealthiest when it voted to eliminate the estate tax..."


War Profiteers:

Reuters: U.S. Audit Probes $212 Mln in Halliburton Iraq Work

"U.S. oil services giant Halliburton Co. may have overcharged by at least $212 million to get fuel to Iraqi civilians under a no-bid deal with the U.S. military, said Pentagon audits released on Monday.
California Rep. Henry Waxman, a leading critic of Halliburton's work in Iraq, released portions of audits by the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) that identified overcharges and questioned costs for fuel delivered in Iraq by Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown & Root in 2003 and 2004..."


Propaganda:

LA Times: White House Blocking Propaganda Probe
"Education Department investigators looking into the administration's controversial hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams were denied the opportunity to interview some White House personnel because of a White House claim that such interviews could breach long-standing legal traditions.
'By statute, an inspector general's jurisdiction is limited,' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Thursday. 'An IG can request information from other federal agencies but not from the White House office.'
She said the White House did allow the investigators to interview one White House employee who had been on loan to the Education Department when Williams was hired. But it has not granted permission for other interviews.
The White House refusal came to light Thursday after Rep. George Miller (D-CA) said he was told about it by Inspector General Jack Higgins. Miller wrote to the White House asking that investigators have full access to White House personnel so they could get to the bottom of the hiring of Williams..."

What We Get For Our Expensive Health Care:

Paul Krugman: The Medical Money Pit
"...In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.
Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.
What do we get for all that money? Not much.
Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return..."


Technology:

Thomas Friedman: Bush Disarms, Unilaterally
"One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength. At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.
We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism...
...Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word 'broadband,' Mr. Bleha notes, but when America 'dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.
'By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...
'Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month,'..."

Tim Karr: Is Cheap Broadband Un-American?
"We have Big Media to thank for saving Americans from themselves. Just as the notion of affordable broadband for all was beginning to take hold in towns and cities across the country, the patriots at Verizon, Qwest, Comcast, Bell South and SBC Communications have created legislation that will stop the 'red menace' of community internet before it invades our homes.
And to think that Americans might want to receive high-speed access at costs below the monopoly rates set by these few Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Today, monthly broadband packages offered by the national carriers hover above $50, barring access to millions of Americans who can't afford the sticker price. Cities and towns across the country have taken up the task of building a cheaper alternative -- often choosing easy-to-build wireless mesh networks -- to bridge the gap that has kept many on the darker side of the digital divide.
Telecommunications giants have mobilized a well-funded army of coin-operated think tanks, pliant legislators and lazy journalists to protect their Internet fiefdoms from these municipal internet initiatives, painting them as an affront to American innovation and free enterprise.
Their weapon of choice is industry-crafted legislation that restricts local governments from offering public service Internet access at reasonable rates..."

The Right To (Data) Privacy?

NY Times Editorial: Identity Thieves' Secret Weapon
"But for a single innovative law in California, the nation's consumers might not even be hearing some of the more outrageous news about mass heists of supposedly secure computer information from reputedly trustworthy sources: LexisNexis gently announces about 32,000 suspected thefts of identity data, which soon balloon to 310,000. ChoicePoint, a data broker and credit reporting agency with access to 19 billion records, lets 145,000 consumers know their personal data may have been stolen.
These are among hundreds of thousands of warnings to vulnerable Americans surfacing mainly because California has a law requiring that consumers be notified when their personal data are pilfered. There is no such federal law, even though identity theft produces $50 billion a year in personal and business losses. As California's consumers play the canary in the data mines, consumer and law enforcement organizations are putting pressure on loosely regulated data brokers to let the rest of us in on their failures. But this is hardly the way to safeguard the American consumer.
Recent Senate hearings show that no one really knows how deeply hackers and in-house thieves are tapping into our personal records. There was the purloining of Ford Motor Credit reports on 30,000 consumers so street thieves could empty bank accounts and run up purchases. Computer backup tapes were lost at the Bank of America with the Social Security numbers and other vital data of 1.2 million federal workers.
Worthy proposals, starting with upfront, nationwide notification of security breaches, are being offered by senators from some of the most victimized states: Dianne Feinstein of California, Bill Nelson of Florida and Charles Schumer of New York. The nation also needs tight regulation of the security and business practices of data brokers and credit agencies, and a ban on the easy access and sale of Social Security numbers without individual consent. Consumers, not data dealers, deserve controlling interest in their vital information.
Indifferent lawmakers cannot say they have not been warned."

Greg Palast: Did Wyly Coyotes' Ill-Gotten Loot Buy White House?
"...On Friday, the Manhattan District Attorney's office announced it had captured a couple of Texas varmints, the Wyly Brothers, Charles and Sam. The two have 'fessed to concealing half their holdings in one of the rich boys' companies, Michaels Stores. The grand jury is still out on deciding to indict the two for the crime of fraud upon the stock market.
Who are these guys? The billionaire brothers are 'Pioneers' - not the kind that built little houses on the prairie, but the kind that agreed to raise over a hundred grand for George W. Bush's first Presidential run. Sam anted up more than a quarter million for the Republican National Committee in 2000.
But that's just the tip of the cash-berg for Bush. In 2000, Sen. John McCain was wiping the electoral floor with Bush Jr. in the Republican primaries … until that March when the Wylys secretly put up two and half million dollars for a campaign to smear Bush's opponent just days before the crucial Southern primaries.
They repeated the trick in 2004, putting up cash for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the vicious little snipes who tore apart the Kerry campaign.
So what makes these guys so thrilled with Mr. Bush? There are more than ninety million reasons. While George W. was governor of Texas, investigative reporter Joe Conason discovered, a Wyly family private investment fund, Maverick Capital of Dallas, was awarded a state contract to invest $90 million for the University of Texas endowment..."

The Right To Petition Congress:

When the framers of the Constitution provided for a right to lobby, the state of affairs in our Capitol cannot be what they had in mind? Since the late 19th century, corporations have successfully won the right of 'personhood' that brings with it the right to lobby. These same interests, however, have no desire to assume the tax liability that corporations would be subject to as individuals. It seems they have been successful in achieving the best of both worlds.
I support the right to lobby Congress, but only for individuals. If a commerical interest sees a benefit in certain legislation, then the individuals involved ought to lobby Congress, rather than be allowed to pay a firm to represent its interests.

Washington Post: Officials Fail to Track Lobbying, Report Says
"Washington's lobbying industry has mushroomed over the past decade but the government has fallen behind in keeping track of the billions of dollars a year that lobbyists spend, according to a study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
Lobbying expenditures in Washington have at least doubled in the past six years, the center reported. Last year, corporations, labor unions and interest groups spent more than $3 billion trying to influence the federal government, up from $1.6 billion in 1998.
At the same time, the center said, enforcement of lobbying regulations has been lax. The center estimated that at least 14,000 disclosure documents required under a 10-year-old lobbying law were not filed over the period, including documents that should have come from 49 of the nation's 50 largest lobbying firms.
'Neither the House nor Senate offices responsible for keeping records on K Street's activities have audit or investigative powers,' said Roberta Baskin, the center's executive director. 'It is impossible, for example, to determine how many lobbyists there actually are in Washington.'
The center's report gives only a partial picture of the size and scope of contemporary lobbying. It tallied the spending of registered lobbyists who directly contacted lawmakers and administration officials. That calculation, while accurate as far as it goes, leaves out the faster-growing and probably larger forms of indirect lobbying such as stirring up local contacts from the "grass roots" and buying newspaper, radio and TV ads.
Nevertheless, the report begins to quantify what lawmakers and lobbyists have long suspected: Lobbying is growing very rapidly and largely in the shadows..."


The Environment:

NY Times: E.P.A. Halts Florida Test on Pesticides
"...A recruiting flier for the program, called the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study, or Cheers, offered $970, a free camcorder, a bib and a T-shirt to parents whose infants or babies were exposed to pesticides if the parents completed the two-year study. The requirements for participation were living in Duval County, Fla., having a baby under 3 months old or 9 to 12 months old, and 'spraying pesticides inside your home routinely.'
The study was being paid for in part by the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that includes pesticide makers..."

Energy Policy as Foreign Policy:

Michael T. Klare; Oil, Geopolitics and the Coming War with Iran


Health Care Policy:

Paul Krugman: Ailing Health Care
"...Rising health care spending isn't primarily the result of medical price inflation. It's primarily a response to innovation: the range of things that medicine can do keeps increasing. For example, Medicare recently started paying for implanted cardiac devices in many patients with heart trouble, now that research has shown them to be highly effective. This is good news, not bad.
So what's the problem? Why not welcome medical progress, and consider its costs money well spent? There are three answers.
First, America's traditional private health insurance system, in which workers get coverage through their employers, is unraveling. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that in 2004 there were at least five million fewer jobs providing health insurance than in 2001. And health care costs have become a major burden on those businesses that continue to provide insurance coverage: General Motors now spends about $1,500 on health care for every car it produces.
Second, rising Medicare spending may be a sign of progress, but it still must be paid for - and right now few politicians are willing to talk about the tax increases that will be needed if the program is to make medical advances available to all older Americans.
Finally, the U.S. health care system is wildly inefficient. Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world. (I've encountered members of the journalistic elite who flatly refuse to believe that France ranks much better on most measures of health care quality than the United States.) But it isn't true. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country - 75 percent more than Canada or France - yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality..."


Taxes:

Our system seems to suggest that those who cannot afford to send lobbyists to babysit the Congress deserve the laws that disadvantage them.

San Francisco Chronicle: IRS has become a subsidy system for super-wealthy Americans IRS winks at rich deadbeats
"...Because the news media focus on what politicians say about the tax system, rather than how it actually operates, few Americans realize that:

-- Corporate income tax laws reward companies that move jobs offshore, allowing them to earn untaxed profits as long as the money stays offshore.

-- Widespread cuts in health insurance and pensions for the rank-and- file are driven by a special law that lets top executives defer paying taxes for years, in a way that adds 35 percent to the cost of their bloated pay.

-- The 2001 Bush tax cuts included a stealth tax increase on the middle class and upper-middle class that will cost them a half trillion dollars in the first 10 years and, for 35 million families, wiping out part or all of their Bush tax cuts.

-- The stealth tax boost on people making $30,000 to $500,000 was explicitly used to make sure that the super rich would get their entire Bush tax cuts.

-- A California couple who make $75,000 to $100,000 and have two children face a 97 percent chance of losing part of their Bush tax cuts to this stealth tax increase and overall will lose 42 percent of their Bush tax cuts by next year.

-- If your child becomes seriously ill, Congress, under this same law, will raise your income taxes if you spend more than 7.5 percent of your income trying to keep your child alive.

-- Since 1983, under a plan devised by Alan Greenspan, Americans have paid $1.8 trillion more in Social Security taxes than have been paid out in benefits, money that is used to finance tax cuts for the super rich while robbing the middle class of their capacity to save.

-- A family earning $50,000 this year will have about $1,500 of its money funneled to the super rich because of the Greenspan plan.

-- Since 1993, the income tax burden on the 400 highest-income Americans has been cut 40 percent when measured the way that President Bush prefers, which is by counting how many pennies out of each dollar go to income taxes. In 1993 the top 400 paid 30 cents out of each dollar in federal income taxes. By the end of the Clinton administration in 2000 they were down to 22 cents. Under Bush, their burden is less than 18 cents. Everyone else felt their tax bite rise to 15 cents on the dollar from an average of 13 cents..."

On Torture:

FOIA allows us to see: Gen. Ricardo Sanchez Orders Torture in Iraq: His Memo
"The American Civil Liberties Union has written to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, asking him to open a perjury investigation of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former US Military commander in Iraq.
According to an official memo dated September 14, 2003, and signed by Gen. Sanchez, he personally authorized the use of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. In sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services committee, he denied ever approving such techniques in Iraq.
The ACLU obtained a physical copy of the memo by suing the Defense Department under the Freedom of Information Act..."


Investments:

La Libération: Carlyle Drains Billions from Disappointed Stock Market Investors
"...Most private equity funds have earned annual returns of over 30% in recent years. Their secret? They buy companies, make them fructify by unceremoniously squeezing costs, including via mass layoffs, and then resell them after five or six years, receiving a solid capital gain. Profitability is also assured by financial montage: the funds bring only 30% of the businesses' capital, the rest is supplied by banks as debt. Financiers call that leveraged buying-out, or the leverage effect.
The system is not new, but it wins over more and more adherents. 'Ten years ago, institutional investors put only 1 to 2% of their money in private equity,' deliberates Jean-Pierre Millet, Carlyle Europe director. 'Today some American precursor funds place up to 10% of their managed funds in private equity.' Explanation: the Stock Exchange, which has stagnated the last five years, disappoints investors. And company heads are sick of seeing their share prices massacred while they work to improve results. Since the private equity funds have lost some of their reputation as predatory dismantlers of companies in managers' eyes, some have allowed themselves to be convinced to go partway with these new partners..."


Nukes:

Washington Post: Homeland Insecurity: Nuclear Plants Open to Attack
"Three and a half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government has failed to address the risk that a passenger plane flying at high speed could be deliberately crashed into a commercial nuclear plant, setting off fires and dispersing large amounts of radiation, a long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded.
Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have maintained that such an attack is improbable and that detailed analyses of the consequences of such attacks are unnecessary. Experts at the nation's premier scientific body said those judgments are flawed..."

NY Times: A Fierce Debate on Atom Bombs From Cold War
"For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal.
The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have a fundamental design flaw that could cause them to explode with far less force than intended.
Although the government has denied that assertion, officials have disclosed that Washington is nevertheless considering replacing the W-76 altogether...."

NY Times: Importance of False Data Is in Dispute
"Energy Department officials testified Tuesday that admissions by government scientists that they had falsified information about a Nevada site being readied for nuclear waste storage were not important, because other delays had prevented them from submitting the bad information in a license application.
In more than two hours of testimony before a House subcommittee, Energy Department officials made their first substantive remarks about the department's disclosure last month of internal e-mail messages in which Interior Department scientists discussed how they had made up scientific entries or deleted material they did not understand about how water would flow through the storage site. They said they were only beginning to evaluate whether the information made a difference in the conclusions reached in studies about the safety of the site, Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
But Nevada officials, who oppose the project, said the information had already influenced decisions about the site..."


The Lies Behind The Push For An Unnecessary War:

Robert Scheer: Bush Threw Us a 'Curveball'
"Last October, just weeks before the presidential election, I wrote a column stating that the acting director of the CIA was suppressing a report to Congress that was potentially embarrassing to President Bush's campaign. The report had been completed by the CIA's own independent inspector general four months before the election, yet the agency rebuffed Congress' request that it be made public.
Now, thanks to last week's release of another report, that of the Bush-appointed Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, we learn that the embargoed CIA report centered on the outrageous case of the now-infamous Iraqi informant known by the code name, 'Curveball.'
Unfortunately for the American people, we were to an embarrassing extent persuaded to go to war based on the fantasies of this known liar, the main source of the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had a functioning biological weapons program. It was Curveball, an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected, who was the inspiration for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's statements before the United Nations that the U.S. knew Iraq possessed mobile bio-weapons labs.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the presidential commission's finding that Curveball's unreliability was withheld from the unwitting Powell, even as the administration was pushing him out onto the world stage to trade his prodigious credibility for world support for the invasion..."


The NRA and Guns In The Wrong Hands:

NY Times Editorial: An Insecure Nation: Guns for Terrorists
"If a background check shows that you are an undocumented immigrant, federal law bars you from buying a gun. If the same check shows that you have ties to Al Qaeda, you are free to buy an AK-47. That is the absurd state of the nation's gun laws, and a recent government report revealed that terrorist suspects are taking advantage of it. There are a few promising signs, however, that the federal government is considering injecting some sanity into policies on terror suspects and guns.
The Government Accountability Office examined F.B.I. and state background checks for gun sales during a five-month period last year. It found 44 checks in which the prospective buyer turned up on a government terrorist watch list. A few of these prospective buyers were denied guns for other disqualifying factors, like a felony conviction or illegal immigration status. But 35 of the 44 people on the watch lists were able to buy guns..."


The Establishment Clause:

Steve Weissman: America's Religious Right - Saints or Subversives?
"When Lt. Gen. William G. 'Jerry' Boykin boasted that his God was bigger than Islam's, many people demanded his scalp. But, as angry as his critics were, they dismissed what he said as little more than military machismo, political insensitivity, and bone-headed public relations. How could we possibly win Muslim hearts and minds when this highly decorated Crusader so callously belittled Allah?
Few critics asked the tougher question: What did Gen. Boykin's remarks mean for the U.S. Constitution, which he had sworn to support and defend, and which - in the very first words of the First Amendment - forbids any 'establishment of religion?'
Dressed in full military uniform with his spit-polished paratroop boots, Boykin spoke to at least 23 evangelical groups around the country, proclaiming that America was 'a Christian nation.'
'We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this,' he declared. '[Our] spiritual enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.'
Defending Boykin, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld carefully cast the issue as one of free speech and religious freedom, both of which the First Amendment guarantees..."

The Ethics of Mr. DeLay:

Maureen Dowd: The Passion of the Tom
"...The Washington Post also splashed Mr. DeLay on the front page with an article about a third DeLay trip under scrutiny: a six-day trip to Moscow in 1997 by Mr. DeLay was 'underwritten by business interests lobbying in support of the Russian government, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements.'
All the divisions that President Bush was able to bridge in 2004 are now bursting forth as different wings of his party joust. John Danforth, the former Republican senator and U.N. ambassador, wrote an Op-Ed piece in The Times last week saying that, on issues from stem cell research to Terri Schiavo, his party 'has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement,'..."


The Man Who Would Represent the US at the Organization He Despises:

Newsweek: Did Bolton Try to Intimidate Spies?
"Bush critics in the Senate are hunting for evidence to derail or delay confirmation of State Department official John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Foreign Relations Committee staffers are looking into charges that Bolton attempted to intimidate or victimize two career intelligence officials for what he viewed as their insufficiently alarmist analyses of intel on purported Cuban biological weapons. Committee investigators have contacted both the State Department and the intel community seeking records and witnesses. But Bolton's opponents are unsure if they will be able to make their case in time for Bolton's confirmation hearing Thursday..."


WMD's:

Washington Post: Panel: US Ignored Work of UN Arms Inspectors
"Of all the claims U.S. intelligence made about Iraq's arsenal in the fall and winter of 2002, it was a handful of new charges that seemed the most significant: secret purchases of uranium from Africa, biological weapons being made in mobile laboratories, and pilotless planes that could disperse anthrax or sarin gas into the air above U.S. cities.
By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested - and disproved - by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday.
The work of the inspectors - who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003 - was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community in the run-up to the war, according to the commission led by former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) and retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman.
But the commission's findings, including a key judgment that U.S. intelligence knows 'disturbingly little' about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are leading to calls for greater reliance on U.N. inspectors to test intelligence where the United States has little or no access..."

Technology:

In case you've not seen it yet, Google Maps is one of the more useful internet maps of the US. Only recommended for broadband users, due to image size.

Campaign Finance:

NY Times: Political Groups Paid Two Relatives of House Leader
"The wife and daughter of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by Mr. DeLay's political action and campaign committees, according to a detailed review of disclosure statements filed with the Federal Election Commission and separate fund-raising records in Mr. DeLay's home state, Texas.
Most of the payments to his wife, Christine A. DeLay, and his only child, Dani DeLay Ferro, were described in the disclosure forms as 'fund-raising fees,' 'campaign management' or 'payroll,' with no additional details about how they earned the money. The payments appear to reflect what Mr. DeLay's aides say is the central role played by the majority leader's wife and daughter in his political career.
Mr. DeLay's national political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, or Armpac, said in a statement on Tuesday that the two women had provided valuable services to the committee in exchange for the payments: 'Mrs. DeLay provides big picture, long-term strategic guidance and helps with personnel decisions. Ms. Ferro is a skilled and experienced professional event planner who assists Armpac in arranging and organizing individual events.'
Mrs. Ferro has managed several of her father's re-election campaigns for his House seat.
His spokesman said that Mr. DeLay had no additional comment. Although several members of Congress employ family members as campaign managers or on their political action committees, advocacy groups seeking an overhaul of federal campaign-finance and ethics laws say that the payments to Mr. DeLay's family members were unusually generous, and should be the focus of new scrutiny of the Texas congressman..."


Judicial Nominees:

NY Times Editorial: The Judges Made Them Do It
"It was appalling when the House majority leader threatened political retribution against judges who did not toe his extremist political line. But when a second important Republican stands up and excuses murderous violence against judges as an understandable reaction to their decisions, then it is time to get really scared.
It happened on Monday, in a moment that was horrifying even by the rock-bottom standards of the campaign that Republican zealots are conducting against the nation's judiciary. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, rose in the chamber and dared to argue that recent courthouse violence might be explained by distress about judges who 'are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public.' The frustration 'builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in' violence, said Mr. Cornyn, a former member of the Texas Supreme Court who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which supposedly protects the Constitution and its guarantee of an independent judiciary..."

Foreign Policy:

Norman Solomon: Little Reporting on Paranoia in High Places
"Journalists often refer to the Bush administration's foreign policy as 'unilateral' and 'preemptive.' Liberal pundits like to complain that a 'go-it-alone' approach has isolated the United States from former allies. But the standard American media lexicon has steered clear of a word that would be an apt description of the Bush world view.

Paranoid.

Early symptoms met with tremendous media applause in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Skepticism from reporters and dissent from pundits were sparse while President Bush quickly declared that governments were either on the side of the USA or 'the terrorists.' Since then, the paranoiac scope of the administration's articulated outlook has broadened while media acceptance has normalized it - to the point that a remarkable new document from the Pentagon is raising few media eyebrows.
Released on March 18 with a definitive title - 'The National Defense Strategy of the United States of America' - the document spells out how the Bush administration sees the world. Consider this key statement: 'Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.'
A high-ranking Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, offered this explanation to reporters: 'There are various actors around the world that are looking to either attack or constrain the United States, and they are going to find creative ways of doing that, that are not the obvious conventional military attacks.' And he added: 'We need to think broadly about diplomatic lines of attack, legal lines of attack, technological lines of attack, all kinds of asymmetric warfare that various actors can use to try to constrain, shape our behavior.'
Translation: They're after us! And 'they' are a varied assortment of individuals, groups and nations bent on harming us while impeding our efforts to do good and protect ourselves. (The Pentagon document says: 'Our leading position in world affairs will continue to breed unease, a degree of resentment, and resistance.') Some want to murder thousands or millions of American civilians, others want the United States to respect human rights and abide by the Geneva Conventions, still others vote the wrong way at the United Nations..."

Mira Ptacin: Revelations from an Insider: Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on the Bush Administration, Civil Disobedience and the Eternal Fires of Hell
"...Ellsberg publicized the Pentagon Papers 30 years ago, helping tip public opinion against our last major attempt at imperial democracy. And on this day in 1973, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, ending the direct involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Now Ellsberg is talking again. Shouldn't we be listening...?"

The Guardian (UK) - 'One huge US jail'
"Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace..."


The Rule of Law:

Reuters: U.S. Citizen Held in Iraq as Suspected Insurgent
"The U.S. military said on Friday it has held since last year an American citizen without charges in Iraq as a suspected top aide to militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, drawing condemnation from civil rights activists.
The man, who U.S. officials at the Pentagon and in Iraq refused to identify by name, possessed dual U.S.-Jordanian citizenship, the military said...
...Air Force Lt. Col. John Skinner, a Pentagon spokesman, said the man, deemed an enemy combatant, had personal ties to Zarqawi and was believed to have served as his personal emissary in several Iraqi cities. The man has not been allowed to have a lawyer, Skinner said.
'I think it's extremely high on the outrageous scale. This is a direct violation of a Supreme Court decision,' said lawyer Rachel Meeropol of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
The justices ruled last June that the government cannot hold an American citizen indefinitely in a US military jail without providing a chance to contest the case against him.
'The Supreme Court decided that an alleged enemy combatant who is an American citizen has the right to challenge the factual basis for his detention, and has the right to do that through counsel. This man has clearly been denied both opportunities,' Meeropol said. ..."


The DoD's Wishlist:

NY Times: Congress Balks at Cost of Rumsfeld's "Future Combat Systems"
"The Army's plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military's strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program's costs and complexity.
Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the 'technological bridge to the future' would equip 15 brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers, or about one-third of the force the Army plans to field, over a 20-year span.
That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond those first 15 brigades.
Now some of the military's advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill..."

Iraq:

Steve Weissman: If You Believe in Freedom, Step Aside
"...The main Shiite alliance had won 70% of the popular vote in the January election, and allowed the puritanical supporters of al-Sadr to rule the streets, shutting down shops that sold alcohol or music and forcing women to wear veils. No way would these firebrand enforcers of their medieval 'Islamic law' permit co-ed picnics, with what they saw as 'dancing, sexy dress and corruption.'
This is one significant reality of Iraq and a nasty portent of its future. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair might sell democracy as a universal delight, but the Shiite majority in Basra apparently have less savory views, more like Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iran under the Ayatollahs.
What, then, should Washington and London do? Knock heads until the Iraqis see the light? Or, get out and let them find their own way?
Neither course of action will produce anything resembling Jeffersonian democracy. Bush, Blair, and the neoconservative ideologues who cheer them on should have realized this before they set out to run someone else's country, let alone the entire Middle East. But, in their arrogant, faith-based rejection of reality, they fell victim to their own lofty rhetoric and the lure of Iraqi oil..."

The Right to Privacy:

Washington Post: Your Social Security Number on Sale for $35
"Want someone else's Social Security number?
It's $35 at www.secret-info.com. It's $45 at Iinfosearch.com, where users can also sign up for a report containing an individual's credit-card charges, as well as an e-mail with other 'tips, secrets & spy info!' The Web site Gum-shoes.com promises that 'if the information is out there, our licensed investigators can find it.'
Although Social Security numbers are one of the most powerful pieces of personal information an identity thief can possess, they remain widely available and inexpensive despite public outcry and the threat of a congressional crackdown after breaches at large information brokers..."