Friday, February 20, 2004
Politicizing Science: James Glanz's NY Times piece captures the degree to which the Rove Team has politicized much more than global warming.
More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.
The sweeping accusations were later discussed in a conference call organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. On Wednesday, the organization also issued a 38-page report detailing its accusations.
The two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.
According to the report, the Bush administration has misrepresented scientific consensus on global warming, censored at least one report on climate change, manipulated scientific findings on the emissions of mercury from power plants and suppressed information on condom use.
The report asserts that the administration also allowed industries with conflicts of interest to influence technical advisory committees, disbanded for political reasons one panel on arms control and subjected other prospective members of scientific panels to political litmus tests. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19RESE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Moyers Retiring: The rumors had been there; now it's official. From the AP report:
Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine "Now" on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.
His next venture: Writing a long-planned book about Lyndon Johnson, whom he served before and during Johnson's presidency.
"It isn't because I feel old," Moyers, 69, told The Associated Press of his decision to move on, which was made official Thursday. "It's because I feel compelled to do something else now, that only I can do - which is that book." http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040219/ap_on_en_tv/tv_bill_moyers_3
Jobs: Decent take from Bob Herbert in today's NY Times reminding us that this is not just a Democrat-Republican issue, that neither party has the answers:
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do, not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/opinion/20HERB.html?hp
Jobs, II: Jonathan Weisman's article in the Washington Post mined a similar vein: Democrats Can't Get Firm Grip on Jobs Issue:
Democratic presidential candidates have made the loss of U.S. jobs to international competition the centerpiece of their campaigns, but even some of the candidates' economic advisers acknowledge that remedies offered -- such as closing tax loopholes on overseas income and offering tax breaks for domestic hiring -- would probably do little to stop the bleeding.
The movement of jobs to low-wage countries such as China, India and Mexico has been driven by powerful forces of economic globalization that may be beyond a politician's control, economists say. The two leading Democratic candidates have fallen back largely on one economic factor that Washington does control: the tax code.
http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=e3dca0a9bcc70ee75d728092b0ad0146&lat=1077201923&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05DC0B51C4672B7593E55E74D
Jobs, III Rove Team Retreats: Richard Stevenson's NY Times piece summarized:
The Bush administration backed away on Wednesday from a forecast it made public only last week predicting average job gains of more than 300,000 a month for 2004 but said it remained confident of robust though unspecified job growth for the year.
In two news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, repeatedly declined to endorse the forecast, which was in the Economic Report of the President, a 417-page book sent to Congress last week under Mr. Bush's signature.
"The president is not a statistician," Mr. McClellan said at one point.
Asked why he would not stand behind the forecast, Mr. McClellan replied: "I think what the president stands behind is the policies that he is implementing, the policies that he is advocating. That's what's important." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19BUSH.html
Environmental Re-write: Grist magazine illustrates how the Rove boys improve our environment.
Just before Valentine's Day this year, the Bush administration gave the North Dakota electric industry a sweetheart deal, agreeing to a plan that will pave the way for new coal-fired power plants to be built in the state near Theodore Roosevelt National Park -- the same picturesque terrain where its namesake discovered his calling as the godfather of the American conservation movement.
Since 1999, the U.S. EPA and North Dakota officials have sparred over air quality in the park, with the EPA saying that pollution has exceeded federal clean-air standards and state and industry representatives trying to refute the charge. According to state air-evaluation reports from 1999, the region's power plants were pumping out about 66,000 tons more sulfur dioxide each year than permitted under federal rules. In 2000, EPA officials in Region 8, which includes North Dakota, confirmed this finding. But suddenly, as of Friday, North Dakota's power-plant emissions have been deemed acceptable by the Bush EPA -- despite the fact that no significant efforts have been made to reduce pollution in the state.
What gives? Well, what always gives when industry demands run up against pollution standards these days? The standards. The EPA agreed to let North Dakota change the methods it uses to estimate air pollution, altering the criteria within its pollution modeling software that dictate what baseline years are used and how the pollution data is averaged. http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck021904.asp
What's Happening, Iraq: The New York Times ran an excellent editorial on Tuesday concerning the Administration's politicizing of intelligence. William E. Jackson, Jr. takes them to task, however, as they, like most of the U.S. media, failed to question the obvious distortions perpetrated by the Rove Administration.
The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.
However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat.
Times reporters and editors bear a heavy responsibility, as far back as September 2002, for having raised the nuclear specter that could materialize in the form of a "mushroom cloud." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney took some of their talk-show lines on the nuclear danger from the Times article of Sept. 8, 2002 by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts."
Moreover, over the years, the Times had frequently reported that the threat from Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs was real and ominous. Defectors and exile groups, such as the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, were prime sources for the Times.
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler recently reminded us that the press is about the only way to find out more than what the government chooses to tell us ("Not Everyone Was Wrong," Feb. 14). Therefore, it is disingenuous of the Times to now place the burden of blame for bad intelligence at the feet of the intelligence community, as the Bush administration is doing, or even to hold solely responsible the senior policymakers for misuse of same. It seems fair to ask: who hoodwinked whom in the process of what Sen. Bob Graham has called "incestuous amplification?" http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2093445
What's Happening, Iraq, II: The Disappearing of the Dead:
Kudos to the Boston Globe for reporting on the Project for Defense Alternatives' report, Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a "New Warfare," which is a an indictment of the Pentagon's calculated "perception management" campaign to disguise the real human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon pretends to not track civilian deaths, so there is ostensibly nothing to report, and it extols its "precision warfare" to reassure us that such casualties must be minimal. From the original:
During the course of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts the US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted "perception management" campaigns that obstructed the public's appreciation of the wars' human toll. The casualty issue was not alone in suffering such treatment during the prologue to the Iraq conflict. Distortion and miscalculation affected the official discourse on many of the key issues surrounding the war, including: the nature, magnitude, and immediacy of the threat; the likely financial cost of the war; the troop requirement for both the combat and post-war phases of the operation; and the difficulty and expense of post-war reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
The casualty issue is one of strategic import. In addition to US and allied losses, approximately 18,000 Afghan and Iraqi combatants and non-combatants were killed during the main combat phases of the two wars. (About one-third of the total were non-combatants.) This toll bears directly on (1) the threat environments in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan; (2) the regional and global reactions to US operations, (3) the prospects for building multinational security cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism; and, (4) the appeal, influence, and growth of terrorist organizations and extremist movements.
Official efforts to shape the public's appreciation of the issue may have included the pre-war placement of suspect stories meant to cast doubt on subsequent casualty reports. During the wars, perception management included efforts to "spin"or frame casualty incidents and stories in ways that minimized their significance, cast doubt on their reliability, or shirked responsibility for the occurrence of casualties. DoD and armed services officials often (but inconsistently) refused to divulge casualty estimates, although relevant intelligence was available at every level ranging from the Office of the Secretary of Defense down to field units.
DoD and other US officials also promoted more general concepts to frame public discussion and media coverage of the casualty issue. One of these frames -- the concept of a new low-risk "precision warfare" -- created unrealistic expectations that war would produce very low casualties on all sides. Another frame -- what might be called "casualty agnosticism" -- implied that it was impossible to derive usefully accurate estimates of casualties, despite the presence of prodigious investigative resources in the field (both governmental and non-governmental). DoD was fairly successfully in projecting these framing concepts into US media coverage of the wars and war casualties. http://www.comw.org/pda/0402rm9exsum.html
The Globe report (Bryan Bender)
By refusing to make public its estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has undercut international support for the US campaigns in those countries and has made the postwar stabilization of the two societies more difficult, according to an independent report to be released today that accuses the Pentagon of appearing indifferent to the civilian cost of war.
The analysis by the Project on Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, concludes that the Pentagon has not fully disclosed in recent years accidental deaths and injuries inflicted upon civilian populations by American military forces. Its failure to do so has made it more difficult to predict how local populations will receive the United States after a conflict, the report said.
According to the report -- "Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a `New Warfare' " -- the Pentagon's stance has also distorted the national debate over whether to go to war.
The report says the US military has wrongly given the impression that its high-tech form of warfare is extremely low risk, creating unrealistic expectations that war produces very low casualties.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2004/02/18/report_says_military_distorts_war_deaths?mode=PF
Edwards the Populist?:
Perhaps not of the progressive type. Kerry has returned to his previous stiff, stentorian manner, many of us in Massachusetts have been at least disappointed in him for years, and Edwards is both an impressive campaigner and has a solid Two Americas message. But me thinks Edwards (and Hillary) voted for the awful bankruptcy bill that strips protection for "average Americans". [Kerry voted against it].
-R
More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.
The sweeping accusations were later discussed in a conference call organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. On Wednesday, the organization also issued a 38-page report detailing its accusations.
The two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.
According to the report, the Bush administration has misrepresented scientific consensus on global warming, censored at least one report on climate change, manipulated scientific findings on the emissions of mercury from power plants and suppressed information on condom use.
The report asserts that the administration also allowed industries with conflicts of interest to influence technical advisory committees, disbanded for political reasons one panel on arms control and subjected other prospective members of scientific panels to political litmus tests. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19RESE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Moyers Retiring: The rumors had been there; now it's official. From the AP report:
Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine "Now" on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.
His next venture: Writing a long-planned book about Lyndon Johnson, whom he served before and during Johnson's presidency.
"It isn't because I feel old," Moyers, 69, told The Associated Press of his decision to move on, which was made official Thursday. "It's because I feel compelled to do something else now, that only I can do - which is that book." http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040219/ap_on_en_tv/tv_bill_moyers_3
Jobs: Decent take from Bob Herbert in today's NY Times reminding us that this is not just a Democrat-Republican issue, that neither party has the answers:
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do, not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/20/opinion/20HERB.html?hp
Jobs, II: Jonathan Weisman's article in the Washington Post mined a similar vein: Democrats Can't Get Firm Grip on Jobs Issue:
Democratic presidential candidates have made the loss of U.S. jobs to international competition the centerpiece of their campaigns, but even some of the candidates' economic advisers acknowledge that remedies offered -- such as closing tax loopholes on overseas income and offering tax breaks for domestic hiring -- would probably do little to stop the bleeding.
The movement of jobs to low-wage countries such as China, India and Mexico has been driven by powerful forces of economic globalization that may be beyond a politician's control, economists say. The two leading Democratic candidates have fallen back largely on one economic factor that Washington does control: the tax code.
http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=e3dca0a9bcc70ee75d728092b0ad0146&lat=1077201923&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW1RH05DC0B51C4672B7593E55E74D
Jobs, III Rove Team Retreats: Richard Stevenson's NY Times piece summarized:
The Bush administration backed away on Wednesday from a forecast it made public only last week predicting average job gains of more than 300,000 a month for 2004 but said it remained confident of robust though unspecified job growth for the year.
In two news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, repeatedly declined to endorse the forecast, which was in the Economic Report of the President, a 417-page book sent to Congress last week under Mr. Bush's signature.
"The president is not a statistician," Mr. McClellan said at one point.
Asked why he would not stand behind the forecast, Mr. McClellan replied: "I think what the president stands behind is the policies that he is implementing, the policies that he is advocating. That's what's important." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/politics/19BUSH.html
Environmental Re-write: Grist magazine illustrates how the Rove boys improve our environment.
Just before Valentine's Day this year, the Bush administration gave the North Dakota electric industry a sweetheart deal, agreeing to a plan that will pave the way for new coal-fired power plants to be built in the state near Theodore Roosevelt National Park -- the same picturesque terrain where its namesake discovered his calling as the godfather of the American conservation movement.
Since 1999, the U.S. EPA and North Dakota officials have sparred over air quality in the park, with the EPA saying that pollution has exceeded federal clean-air standards and state and industry representatives trying to refute the charge. According to state air-evaluation reports from 1999, the region's power plants were pumping out about 66,000 tons more sulfur dioxide each year than permitted under federal rules. In 2000, EPA officials in Region 8, which includes North Dakota, confirmed this finding. But suddenly, as of Friday, North Dakota's power-plant emissions have been deemed acceptable by the Bush EPA -- despite the fact that no significant efforts have been made to reduce pollution in the state.
What gives? Well, what always gives when industry demands run up against pollution standards these days? The standards. The EPA agreed to let North Dakota change the methods it uses to estimate air pollution, altering the criteria within its pollution modeling software that dictate what baseline years are used and how the pollution data is averaged. http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck021904.asp
What's Happening, Iraq: The New York Times ran an excellent editorial on Tuesday concerning the Administration's politicizing of intelligence. William E. Jackson, Jr. takes them to task, however, as they, like most of the U.S. media, failed to question the obvious distortions perpetrated by the Rove Administration.
The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.
However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat.
Times reporters and editors bear a heavy responsibility, as far back as September 2002, for having raised the nuclear specter that could materialize in the form of a "mushroom cloud." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney took some of their talk-show lines on the nuclear danger from the Times article of Sept. 8, 2002 by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts."
Moreover, over the years, the Times had frequently reported that the threat from Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs was real and ominous. Defectors and exile groups, such as the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, were prime sources for the Times.
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler recently reminded us that the press is about the only way to find out more than what the government chooses to tell us ("Not Everyone Was Wrong," Feb. 14). Therefore, it is disingenuous of the Times to now place the burden of blame for bad intelligence at the feet of the intelligence community, as the Bush administration is doing, or even to hold solely responsible the senior policymakers for misuse of same. It seems fair to ask: who hoodwinked whom in the process of what Sen. Bob Graham has called "incestuous amplification?" http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2093445
What's Happening, Iraq, II: The Disappearing of the Dead:
Kudos to the Boston Globe for reporting on the Project for Defense Alternatives' report, Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a "New Warfare," which is a an indictment of the Pentagon's calculated "perception management" campaign to disguise the real human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon pretends to not track civilian deaths, so there is ostensibly nothing to report, and it extols its "precision warfare" to reassure us that such casualties must be minimal. From the original:
During the course of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts the US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted "perception management" campaigns that obstructed the public's appreciation of the wars' human toll. The casualty issue was not alone in suffering such treatment during the prologue to the Iraq conflict. Distortion and miscalculation affected the official discourse on many of the key issues surrounding the war, including: the nature, magnitude, and immediacy of the threat; the likely financial cost of the war; the troop requirement for both the combat and post-war phases of the operation; and the difficulty and expense of post-war reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
The casualty issue is one of strategic import. In addition to US and allied losses, approximately 18,000 Afghan and Iraqi combatants and non-combatants were killed during the main combat phases of the two wars. (About one-third of the total were non-combatants.) This toll bears directly on (1) the threat environments in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan; (2) the regional and global reactions to US operations, (3) the prospects for building multinational security cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism; and, (4) the appeal, influence, and growth of terrorist organizations and extremist movements.
Official efforts to shape the public's appreciation of the issue may have included the pre-war placement of suspect stories meant to cast doubt on subsequent casualty reports. During the wars, perception management included efforts to "spin"or frame casualty incidents and stories in ways that minimized their significance, cast doubt on their reliability, or shirked responsibility for the occurrence of casualties. DoD and armed services officials often (but inconsistently) refused to divulge casualty estimates, although relevant intelligence was available at every level ranging from the Office of the Secretary of Defense down to field units.
DoD and other US officials also promoted more general concepts to frame public discussion and media coverage of the casualty issue. One of these frames -- the concept of a new low-risk "precision warfare" -- created unrealistic expectations that war would produce very low casualties on all sides. Another frame -- what might be called "casualty agnosticism" -- implied that it was impossible to derive usefully accurate estimates of casualties, despite the presence of prodigious investigative resources in the field (both governmental and non-governmental). DoD was fairly successfully in projecting these framing concepts into US media coverage of the wars and war casualties. http://www.comw.org/pda/0402rm9exsum.html
The Globe report (Bryan Bender)
By refusing to make public its estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has undercut international support for the US campaigns in those countries and has made the postwar stabilization of the two societies more difficult, according to an independent report to be released today that accuses the Pentagon of appearing indifferent to the civilian cost of war.
The analysis by the Project on Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, concludes that the Pentagon has not fully disclosed in recent years accidental deaths and injuries inflicted upon civilian populations by American military forces. Its failure to do so has made it more difficult to predict how local populations will receive the United States after a conflict, the report said.
According to the report -- "Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a `New Warfare' " -- the Pentagon's stance has also distorted the national debate over whether to go to war.
The report says the US military has wrongly given the impression that its high-tech form of warfare is extremely low risk, creating unrealistic expectations that war produces very low casualties.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2004/02/18/report_says_military_distorts_war_deaths?mode=PF
Edwards the Populist?:
Perhaps not of the progressive type. Kerry has returned to his previous stiff, stentorian manner, many of us in Massachusetts have been at least disappointed in him for years, and Edwards is both an impressive campaigner and has a solid Two Americas message. But me thinks Edwards (and Hillary) voted for the awful bankruptcy bill that strips protection for "average Americans". [Kerry voted against it].
-R
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Plame II:
We know of the outing of Valerie Plame, CIA agent, by an Administration source. It was characteristic of this group. Witness this report from the AP about a counter-terrorism case in Detroit where the Asst. US Attorney Richard Convertino is suing Ashcroft for “gross mismanagement”.
A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism…
Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him.
The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and "interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities," the suit alleges. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/17/terror/main600677.shtml
9/11- The Jersey Widows
They go by several names; they are most persuasive advocates for accountability. They make a clear case for Administration incompetence (on 9/11) and intransigence (since 9/11). If you missed it, you can listen via the link. http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/02/20040217_b_main.asp
Jobs:
Economists agree that the economy must produce between 125,000 and 150,000 jobs each month just to keep up with the growing population. Thus, the Bush 4 years needed to create 6 to 7.2 million jobs in that period. Yet, we’re down over 2 million thus far. So, the net loss is 8- 9 million. You’re not going to see that figure in the media, as it’s too discomforting a frame.
The Administration is backing off its expectation of robust job growth for the balance of the year.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow distanced himself on Tuesday from the Bush administration's official prediction that the nation would add 2.6 million jobs by the end of this year.
That prediction, which is far more optimistic than that of many private sector forecasters, was part of the annual economic report released last week by the White House Council of Economic Advisers and was immediately echoed by Mr. Bush himself. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/politics/18JOBS.html?pagewanted=all
Media Concentration: Strange Bedfellows:
A few people may go to this issue after the Janet Jackson show at the Super Bowl. The NY Times’ William Safire remains an ally on this issue. His excellent piece:
If one huge corporation controlled both the production and the dissemination of most of our news and entertainment, couldn't it rule the world?
Can't happen here, you say; America is the land of competition that generates new technology to ensure a diversity of voices. But consider how a supine Congress and a feckless majority of the Federal Communications Commission have been failing to protect our access to a variety of news, views and entertainment.
The media giant known as Viacom-CBS-MTV just showed us how it controls both content and communication of the sexiest Super Bowl. The five other big sisters that now bestride the world are (1) Murdoch-FoxTV-HarperCollins-WeeklyStandard-NewYorkPost-LondonTimes-DirecTV; (2) G.E.-NBC-Universal-Vivendi; (3) Time-Warner-CNN-AOL; (4) Disney-ABC-ESPN; and (5) the biggest cable company, Comcast…
You say the U.S. government would never allow that? The Horatius lollygagging at the bridge is the F.C.C.'s Michael Powell, who never met a merger he didn't like. Cowering next to him is General Roundheels at the Bush Justice Department's Pro-Trust Division, which last year waved through Murdoch's takeover of DirecTV. (Joel Klein, Last of the Trustbusters, now teaches school in New York.)
But what of the Senate, guardian of free speech? There was Powell last week before Chairman John McCain's Commerce Committee, currying favor with cultural conservatives by pretending to be outraged over Janet Jackson's "costume reveal." The F.C.C. chairman, looking stern, pledged "ruthless and rigorous scrutiny" of any Comcast bid to merge Disney-ABC-ESPN into a huge DisCast. Media giants — always willing to agree to cosmetic "restrictions" on their way to amalgamation — chuckled at the notion of a "ruthless Mike."
McCain's plaintive question to Powell — "Where will it all end?" — is too little, too late. This senatorial apostle of deregulation, who last week called the world's attention to the media concentration that helps subvert democracy in Russia, has been blind to the danger of headlong concentration of media power in America. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/opinion/16SAFI.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fWilliam%20Safire
Rest-of-the-World, I: Haiti: Fine summary in The Nation (Amy Wilentz)
The Aristide administration, which has been overthrown once already, has been egalitarian in the lives destroyed during its time: Among its dead can be counted the president's former friends and his foes, democrats and supporters of dictatorship. Among the victims have been policemen and prisoners and politicians; rich men and poor, journalists and slum-dwellers, human-rights workers and doctors and businessmen. Almost no sector has been untouched.
No one can argue that Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidency has been in any way successful other than this: It exists. He was elected in 1990 with enormous hope by an overwhelming majority in a legitimate election--and quickly overthrown by the Haitian Army and its friends. In 1994 he was returned to power through the good will of the Clinton Administration, in the optimistic expectation that he would be able to turn Haiti around. He was not able to do so for a combination of reasons, some political, some personal and most having to do with his inability to conduct a happy relationship either with the Bush Administration or with his own business and intellectual elite. Washington also cut off huge portions of aid, which cannot have helped Aristide's standing. Still, a fatal combination of arrogance and naïveté on his part made Aristide's difficult position much more intractable. Meanwhile, the Haitian opposition has been coddled and pushed toward the depths of intransigence by Aristide's detractors in the US government, in both Haiti and in Washington. By now, with the country well on its way to chaos, many argue that Aristide has exhausted the electorate's patience and must be replaced.
Yet now--as he finally begins to recognize how powerful the opposition has become despite all his political jockeying and playacting--should be the time for all friends of Haiti, especially in the US government, to support Aristide's continuation at the helm: not because he is good but because he is president. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040301&s=wilentz
Rest-of-the-World, II- Cyprus
Kudos to Koffi Annan and the Turks/Greeks who have finally addressed this 40 year conflict…proof that the UN can make a difference.
Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders on Friday accepted Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for ending the decades-long division of Cyprus and pledged to negotiate reunification in time for the island's May 1 entry into the European Union.
The deal between the Greek Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Rauf Denktash, was reached after three days of talks at the United Nations, and brought forth expressions of hope that a solution to one of the world's most intractable conflicts was at hand. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/international/europe/14NATI.html
Bush on the Edge?
Have we reached a tipping point? This Administration is built on lies; its Figurehead is a faux cowboy-business failure towel-snapper who relies on memorized talking points; Senior got off easy despite his involvement in the Iran-Contra, October Surprise and other scandals. (Kerry knows plenty about these chapters.) Kevin Phillips’ book vividly captures what an entitled, non-contributing oily family they’ve been. But they won’t leave on their own accord.
The media are showing increasing teeth, witness this unusually biting piece by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.
But a rereading of the "Meet the Press" transcript suggests that Bush's most critical quality -- certainty -- has oozed from him like helium from a balloon. Here was a man who was continually trying to pump himself up. He used the word "dangerous" over and over again, applying it to Saddam Hussein without ever quite saying why. He repeatedly called the former dictator a "madman," which is to say that he was capable of anything. In fact, though, he was capable of very little and in recent years had attempted almost nothing.
After Bush's "Meet the Press" performance, countless commentators tried to figure out why he had done so poorly. Many of them focused on performance, political artifice -- the part of politics that looks so easy until, as Wes Clark did, you try it for yourself. Yes, Bush did not perform well. But even a brilliant actor needs material.
Others lamented Bush's verbal klutziness. If only he could talk like Tony Blair, one of them sighed. But the reason he cannot talk like Blair is because he doesn't think like Blair. The British prime minister can acknowledge an awkward fact, even a mistake, and keep on going. Bush can only insist that he is right. It doesn't matter that the facts have changed.
This had little to do with speech and a lot to do with thought. Once certainty is snatched from him, he seems in a state of vertigo where he grasps at certain words to steady himself. Dangerous. Madman. But if a madman does not have the weapons you said he did, then he is not dangerous, and if he did not have the weapons then maybe he was not as mad as we thought he was. There is much to ponder here.
Bush, though, will ponder not -- not on Iraq and not on taxes. He believes in minimal taxes, and he believes this no matter what the economic or fiscal conditions -- boom, bust, surplus, deficit. There is no play in the man, no notion that in economics, one size cannot fit all. "I believe that the best way to stimulate economic growth is to let people keep more of their own money," he told Russert. It is that simple.
There is something childlike about the "Meet the Press" transcript. The repetition. The simplistic thinking. "Saddam Hussein was a danger to America," the president said repeatedly. But how? He had no missiles that could reach our shores. He had no nuclear weapons program. He did not play ball with terrorist outfits or, for that matter, they with him. "The man was a threat," Bush said. How? How? How?
"He had a weapon," the president insisted. But he didn't, remember? That was the whole point of David Kay's report. Oh, but Hussein was a madman.
The president does not do nuance -- that we know. But the failure to come up with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not a nuance. It is a massive reversal of fact, hot turned into cold, tall into short. Bush's inability or refusal to come to grips with the new facts is not the product of a poor performance or an errant tongue, but of a troubling insistence that his beliefs cannot be wrong. That -- nuance be damned -- makes him look like a dope. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46667-2004Feb16?language=printer
US Arabic channel a turn-off From the Guardian (Matthew Craft)
Al Hurra, a new American satellite TV channel aimed at viewers in the Middle East, has been greeted frostily in Cairo, reports Matthew Craft.
The day after the United States unveiled its Arabic-language satellite channel, based in Virginia and beamed across the Arab world, few people in downtown Cairo confessed to tuning in for the inaugural broadcast. Opinions, however, were plentiful.
"You mean the American propaganda channel?" proved the most popular response.
On Saturday, the American answer to Al Jazeera hit the airwaves. Al Hurra, "the free one", began its broadcast at 5pm in Cairo when Mohammad - who asked that his full name not be used - was still busy helping customers in his busy electronics store. The station ran an exclusive interview with President Bush over two days, but Mohammad saw no reason to listen, yet again, to the American point of view. No matter how many times he hears the American line it will not make a difference.
"Why would I watch Bush on television when every day I can read what he says here," he said, pointing to his newspaper. "We know what the American policies are, and we still don't like them." http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1149373,00.html
-R
We know of the outing of Valerie Plame, CIA agent, by an Administration source. It was characteristic of this group. Witness this report from the AP about a counter-terrorism case in Detroit where the Asst. US Attorney Richard Convertino is suing Ashcroft for “gross mismanagement”.
A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism…
Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him.
The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and "interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities," the suit alleges. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/17/terror/main600677.shtml
9/11- The Jersey Widows
They go by several names; they are most persuasive advocates for accountability. They make a clear case for Administration incompetence (on 9/11) and intransigence (since 9/11). If you missed it, you can listen via the link. http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/02/20040217_b_main.asp
Jobs:
Economists agree that the economy must produce between 125,000 and 150,000 jobs each month just to keep up with the growing population. Thus, the Bush 4 years needed to create 6 to 7.2 million jobs in that period. Yet, we’re down over 2 million thus far. So, the net loss is 8- 9 million. You’re not going to see that figure in the media, as it’s too discomforting a frame.
The Administration is backing off its expectation of robust job growth for the balance of the year.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow distanced himself on Tuesday from the Bush administration's official prediction that the nation would add 2.6 million jobs by the end of this year.
That prediction, which is far more optimistic than that of many private sector forecasters, was part of the annual economic report released last week by the White House Council of Economic Advisers and was immediately echoed by Mr. Bush himself. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/politics/18JOBS.html?pagewanted=all
Media Concentration: Strange Bedfellows:
A few people may go to this issue after the Janet Jackson show at the Super Bowl. The NY Times’ William Safire remains an ally on this issue. His excellent piece:
If one huge corporation controlled both the production and the dissemination of most of our news and entertainment, couldn't it rule the world?
Can't happen here, you say; America is the land of competition that generates new technology to ensure a diversity of voices. But consider how a supine Congress and a feckless majority of the Federal Communications Commission have been failing to protect our access to a variety of news, views and entertainment.
The media giant known as Viacom-CBS-MTV just showed us how it controls both content and communication of the sexiest Super Bowl. The five other big sisters that now bestride the world are (1) Murdoch-FoxTV-HarperCollins-WeeklyStandard-NewYorkPost-LondonTimes-DirecTV; (2) G.E.-NBC-Universal-Vivendi; (3) Time-Warner-CNN-AOL; (4) Disney-ABC-ESPN; and (5) the biggest cable company, Comcast…
You say the U.S. government would never allow that? The Horatius lollygagging at the bridge is the F.C.C.'s Michael Powell, who never met a merger he didn't like. Cowering next to him is General Roundheels at the Bush Justice Department's Pro-Trust Division, which last year waved through Murdoch's takeover of DirecTV. (Joel Klein, Last of the Trustbusters, now teaches school in New York.)
But what of the Senate, guardian of free speech? There was Powell last week before Chairman John McCain's Commerce Committee, currying favor with cultural conservatives by pretending to be outraged over Janet Jackson's "costume reveal." The F.C.C. chairman, looking stern, pledged "ruthless and rigorous scrutiny" of any Comcast bid to merge Disney-ABC-ESPN into a huge DisCast. Media giants — always willing to agree to cosmetic "restrictions" on their way to amalgamation — chuckled at the notion of a "ruthless Mike."
McCain's plaintive question to Powell — "Where will it all end?" — is too little, too late. This senatorial apostle of deregulation, who last week called the world's attention to the media concentration that helps subvert democracy in Russia, has been blind to the danger of headlong concentration of media power in America. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/opinion/16SAFI.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fWilliam%20Safire
Rest-of-the-World, I: Haiti: Fine summary in The Nation (Amy Wilentz)
The Aristide administration, which has been overthrown once already, has been egalitarian in the lives destroyed during its time: Among its dead can be counted the president's former friends and his foes, democrats and supporters of dictatorship. Among the victims have been policemen and prisoners and politicians; rich men and poor, journalists and slum-dwellers, human-rights workers and doctors and businessmen. Almost no sector has been untouched.
No one can argue that Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidency has been in any way successful other than this: It exists. He was elected in 1990 with enormous hope by an overwhelming majority in a legitimate election--and quickly overthrown by the Haitian Army and its friends. In 1994 he was returned to power through the good will of the Clinton Administration, in the optimistic expectation that he would be able to turn Haiti around. He was not able to do so for a combination of reasons, some political, some personal and most having to do with his inability to conduct a happy relationship either with the Bush Administration or with his own business and intellectual elite. Washington also cut off huge portions of aid, which cannot have helped Aristide's standing. Still, a fatal combination of arrogance and naïveté on his part made Aristide's difficult position much more intractable. Meanwhile, the Haitian opposition has been coddled and pushed toward the depths of intransigence by Aristide's detractors in the US government, in both Haiti and in Washington. By now, with the country well on its way to chaos, many argue that Aristide has exhausted the electorate's patience and must be replaced.
Yet now--as he finally begins to recognize how powerful the opposition has become despite all his political jockeying and playacting--should be the time for all friends of Haiti, especially in the US government, to support Aristide's continuation at the helm: not because he is good but because he is president. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040301&s=wilentz
Rest-of-the-World, II- Cyprus
Kudos to Koffi Annan and the Turks/Greeks who have finally addressed this 40 year conflict…proof that the UN can make a difference.
Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders on Friday accepted Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for ending the decades-long division of Cyprus and pledged to negotiate reunification in time for the island's May 1 entry into the European Union.
The deal between the Greek Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Rauf Denktash, was reached after three days of talks at the United Nations, and brought forth expressions of hope that a solution to one of the world's most intractable conflicts was at hand. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/international/europe/14NATI.html
Bush on the Edge?
Have we reached a tipping point? This Administration is built on lies; its Figurehead is a faux cowboy-business failure towel-snapper who relies on memorized talking points; Senior got off easy despite his involvement in the Iran-Contra, October Surprise and other scandals. (Kerry knows plenty about these chapters.) Kevin Phillips’ book vividly captures what an entitled, non-contributing oily family they’ve been. But they won’t leave on their own accord.
The media are showing increasing teeth, witness this unusually biting piece by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.
But a rereading of the "Meet the Press" transcript suggests that Bush's most critical quality -- certainty -- has oozed from him like helium from a balloon. Here was a man who was continually trying to pump himself up. He used the word "dangerous" over and over again, applying it to Saddam Hussein without ever quite saying why. He repeatedly called the former dictator a "madman," which is to say that he was capable of anything. In fact, though, he was capable of very little and in recent years had attempted almost nothing.
After Bush's "Meet the Press" performance, countless commentators tried to figure out why he had done so poorly. Many of them focused on performance, political artifice -- the part of politics that looks so easy until, as Wes Clark did, you try it for yourself. Yes, Bush did not perform well. But even a brilliant actor needs material.
Others lamented Bush's verbal klutziness. If only he could talk like Tony Blair, one of them sighed. But the reason he cannot talk like Blair is because he doesn't think like Blair. The British prime minister can acknowledge an awkward fact, even a mistake, and keep on going. Bush can only insist that he is right. It doesn't matter that the facts have changed.
This had little to do with speech and a lot to do with thought. Once certainty is snatched from him, he seems in a state of vertigo where he grasps at certain words to steady himself. Dangerous. Madman. But if a madman does not have the weapons you said he did, then he is not dangerous, and if he did not have the weapons then maybe he was not as mad as we thought he was. There is much to ponder here.
Bush, though, will ponder not -- not on Iraq and not on taxes. He believes in minimal taxes, and he believes this no matter what the economic or fiscal conditions -- boom, bust, surplus, deficit. There is no play in the man, no notion that in economics, one size cannot fit all. "I believe that the best way to stimulate economic growth is to let people keep more of their own money," he told Russert. It is that simple.
There is something childlike about the "Meet the Press" transcript. The repetition. The simplistic thinking. "Saddam Hussein was a danger to America," the president said repeatedly. But how? He had no missiles that could reach our shores. He had no nuclear weapons program. He did not play ball with terrorist outfits or, for that matter, they with him. "The man was a threat," Bush said. How? How? How?
"He had a weapon," the president insisted. But he didn't, remember? That was the whole point of David Kay's report. Oh, but Hussein was a madman.
The president does not do nuance -- that we know. But the failure to come up with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not a nuance. It is a massive reversal of fact, hot turned into cold, tall into short. Bush's inability or refusal to come to grips with the new facts is not the product of a poor performance or an errant tongue, but of a troubling insistence that his beliefs cannot be wrong. That -- nuance be damned -- makes him look like a dope. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46667-2004Feb16?language=printer
US Arabic channel a turn-off From the Guardian (Matthew Craft)
Al Hurra, a new American satellite TV channel aimed at viewers in the Middle East, has been greeted frostily in Cairo, reports Matthew Craft.
The day after the United States unveiled its Arabic-language satellite channel, based in Virginia and beamed across the Arab world, few people in downtown Cairo confessed to tuning in for the inaugural broadcast. Opinions, however, were plentiful.
"You mean the American propaganda channel?" proved the most popular response.
On Saturday, the American answer to Al Jazeera hit the airwaves. Al Hurra, "the free one", began its broadcast at 5pm in Cairo when Mohammad - who asked that his full name not be used - was still busy helping customers in his busy electronics store. The station ran an exclusive interview with President Bush over two days, but Mohammad saw no reason to listen, yet again, to the American point of view. No matter how many times he hears the American line it will not make a difference.
"Why would I watch Bush on television when every day I can read what he says here," he said, pointing to his newspaper. "We know what the American policies are, and we still don't like them." http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1149373,00.html
-R
Monday, February 16, 2004
Scandal Follow-up- Keeping up the momentum!
With Plame indictments alleged to be on the way, the Senate has decided to expand its probe to look at whether intelligence analysts were pressured to strengthen the case for war.
In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.
The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation, and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-intel13feb13.story
Budget cuts and betrayal of students- Fine Globe piece (excerpts)
(Jim Munn (2/15/2004) The damage from budget/tax cuts keeps getting passed down; the connections- that federal cuts timed with cuts in revenue, i.e. tax cuts, have steadily gutted a variety of services on the local level- are too rarely made.
On can hardly blame the students at Winthrop High School for walking out of school last Tuesday. The spontaneous protest, involving about half of the 600-member student body, came less than 24 hours after residents rejected a Proposition 2 1/2 override that would have provided $6 million to the cash-strapped schools and town.
The decision by voters will result in numerous teacher layoffs and reductions in town services and staff, as well as cause the elimination of all after-school sports, beginning in the fall. It has already caused School Superintendent Thomas Giancristiano and Director of Finance Lester Towlson to resign at a school committee meeting Thursday.
Students feel betrayed, and the sense of community that once was an integral part of high school athletics in Winthrop no longer exists. Like many of his classmates, Eruzione doesn't plan on returning to Winthrop High in the fall. No surprise there. How can any student who loves playing sports get excited over attending a school that offers nothing in the way of after-school athletics?
Today, mandatory user fees have become the policy of nearly every city and town in the Commonwealth. In Gloucester, the charge is $45 per season for any student wishing to participate in sports. In Winthrop, the user-fee scenario is more depressing -- $315 per season. And people wonder why Winthrop's once proud varsity track team was able to suit up only six boys for the winter indoor season? It's a trend sure to follow in many other communities. Having all but picked clean the pockets of the parents of Winthrop student-athletes, residents and town officials have apparently now decided to simply wash their hands of the city's youth altogether.
Students will have to learn to do without after-school sports, just as they have learned to do without painting, ceramics, photography, band, orchestra, chorus, theater, library, and industrial arts programs in school systems elsewhere. Such programs, it seems, have been deemed no longer relevant to the education of the nation's youth. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/15/budget_cuts_and_betrayal_of_students/
What’s Happening, Iraq…and Afghanistan: Security Problems in both countries, well documented. Last week had the worst casualties in Iraq since September, with over 120 Iraqis killed in three bombings. And, 2 more Americans- 540 now.
Thankfully, WBUR’s The Connection addressed the thousands of wounded vets today, how they are slipped into Andrews air force base at night http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/02/20040216_b_main.asp
In Afghanistan, even Administration officials are admitting that at least 1/3 of the country is “insecure.”
Confidential report prepared by the US-led administration in Iraq says that the attacks by insurgents in the country have escalated sharply, prompting fears of what it terms Iraq's "Balkanisation". The findings emerged after a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the top US general in Iraq, John Abizaid, on Thursday. "January has the highest rate of violence since September 2003," the report said. "The violence continues despite the expansion of the Iraqi security services and increased arrests by coalition forces in December and Januaryhttp://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1075982503425&p=1012571727088
Iraqi security forces will be unable to guarantee safety after the planned transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30, a range of Iraqi and Western specialists concluded on Sunday, one day after an audacious raid in Falluja that killed at least 25 people.
A series of bold attacks on military and police forces in Iraq last week culminated in the overrunning on Saturday of a police station in Falluja, about 35 miles west of Baghdad. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/international/middleeast/16CND-IRAQ.html
The Bush administration has begun suggesting that Afghanistan's elections scheduled for June may have to be postponed because of security problems and the failure to register enough voters.http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/international/asia/16AFGH.html?hp
More on Iraq: Iraqi health care
The hospitals…mind-boggling, though not surprising after a decade plus of sanctions and a war. The NY Times front page story (Jeffrey Gettleman)
At Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Children, gallons of raw sewage wash across the floors. The drinking water is contaminated. According to doctors, 80 percent of patients leave with infections they did not have when they arrived.
Doctors say they have been beaten up in the emergency room. Blood is in such short supply that physicians often donate their own to patients lying in front of them.
"The word `big' is not enough to express the disaster we are facing," said Ahmed A. Muhammad, the hospital's assistant manager.
…But Iraqi doctors say the war has pushed them closer to disaster. Fighting and sabotage have destroyed crucial infrastructure and the fall of Saddam Hussein precipitated a breakdown in social order.
"It's definitely worse now than before the war," said Eman Asim, the Ministry of Health official who oversees the country's 185 public hospitals. "Even at the height of sanctions, when things were miserable, it wasn't as bad as this. At least then someone was in control." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/international/middleeast/14HOSP.html?ex=1392094800&en=d32a74170d4d
China link to nuclear network
Melbourne, Australia’s The Age (Joby Warrick, Peter Slevin) reports on China’s link to the nuclear network.
Investigators have identified China as the origin of nuclear weapons designs found in Libya last year, exposing yet another link in the chain that passed nuclear secrets through Pakistan to other countries in Asia and the Middle East.
According to US Government officials and arms experts, bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded evidence of China's long-suspected role in leaking nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s. The designs were later resold to Libya by Pakistani scientists through a nuclear network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe.
The documents, some written in Chinese characters, have detailed instructions for assembling a nuclear bomb that could fit on a large ballistic missile. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/15/1076779834038.html
Voter Fraud:
Sunday’s NY Times had an editorial that noted
”In 2000, the American public saw in Katherine Harris’s massive purge eligible voters in Florida, how easy it is for registered voters to lose their rights by bureaucratic fiat.” The editorial goes on to quote the US Civil Rights commission’s findings documenting how people falsely designated as felons were struck from the polls.”
It is extraordinarily common and infuriating that the Times, which refused to carry the story back in 2000-2001 and didn’t even report on the Civil Rights Commission which it referenced in the editorial, now goes on record. And, they continue to not make crystal clear that these purged voters were predominantly black, and thus likely to be Gore supporters.
-R
With Plame indictments alleged to be on the way, the Senate has decided to expand its probe to look at whether intelligence analysts were pressured to strengthen the case for war.
In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.
The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation, and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-intel13feb13.story
Budget cuts and betrayal of students- Fine Globe piece (excerpts)
(Jim Munn (2/15/2004) The damage from budget/tax cuts keeps getting passed down; the connections- that federal cuts timed with cuts in revenue, i.e. tax cuts, have steadily gutted a variety of services on the local level- are too rarely made.
On can hardly blame the students at Winthrop High School for walking out of school last Tuesday. The spontaneous protest, involving about half of the 600-member student body, came less than 24 hours after residents rejected a Proposition 2 1/2 override that would have provided $6 million to the cash-strapped schools and town.
The decision by voters will result in numerous teacher layoffs and reductions in town services and staff, as well as cause the elimination of all after-school sports, beginning in the fall. It has already caused School Superintendent Thomas Giancristiano and Director of Finance Lester Towlson to resign at a school committee meeting Thursday.
Students feel betrayed, and the sense of community that once was an integral part of high school athletics in Winthrop no longer exists. Like many of his classmates, Eruzione doesn't plan on returning to Winthrop High in the fall. No surprise there. How can any student who loves playing sports get excited over attending a school that offers nothing in the way of after-school athletics?
Today, mandatory user fees have become the policy of nearly every city and town in the Commonwealth. In Gloucester, the charge is $45 per season for any student wishing to participate in sports. In Winthrop, the user-fee scenario is more depressing -- $315 per season. And people wonder why Winthrop's once proud varsity track team was able to suit up only six boys for the winter indoor season? It's a trend sure to follow in many other communities. Having all but picked clean the pockets of the parents of Winthrop student-athletes, residents and town officials have apparently now decided to simply wash their hands of the city's youth altogether.
Students will have to learn to do without after-school sports, just as they have learned to do without painting, ceramics, photography, band, orchestra, chorus, theater, library, and industrial arts programs in school systems elsewhere. Such programs, it seems, have been deemed no longer relevant to the education of the nation's youth. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/15/budget_cuts_and_betrayal_of_students/
What’s Happening, Iraq…and Afghanistan: Security Problems in both countries, well documented. Last week had the worst casualties in Iraq since September, with over 120 Iraqis killed in three bombings. And, 2 more Americans- 540 now.
Thankfully, WBUR’s The Connection addressed the thousands of wounded vets today, how they are slipped into Andrews air force base at night http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/02/20040216_b_main.asp
In Afghanistan, even Administration officials are admitting that at least 1/3 of the country is “insecure.”
Confidential report prepared by the US-led administration in Iraq says that the attacks by insurgents in the country have escalated sharply, prompting fears of what it terms Iraq's "Balkanisation". The findings emerged after a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the top US general in Iraq, John Abizaid, on Thursday. "January has the highest rate of violence since September 2003," the report said. "The violence continues despite the expansion of the Iraqi security services and increased arrests by coalition forces in December and Januaryhttp://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1075982503425&p=1012571727088
Iraqi security forces will be unable to guarantee safety after the planned transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30, a range of Iraqi and Western specialists concluded on Sunday, one day after an audacious raid in Falluja that killed at least 25 people.
A series of bold attacks on military and police forces in Iraq last week culminated in the overrunning on Saturday of a police station in Falluja, about 35 miles west of Baghdad. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/international/middleeast/16CND-IRAQ.html
The Bush administration has begun suggesting that Afghanistan's elections scheduled for June may have to be postponed because of security problems and the failure to register enough voters.http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/international/asia/16AFGH.html?hp
More on Iraq: Iraqi health care
The hospitals…mind-boggling, though not surprising after a decade plus of sanctions and a war. The NY Times front page story (Jeffrey Gettleman)
At Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Children, gallons of raw sewage wash across the floors. The drinking water is contaminated. According to doctors, 80 percent of patients leave with infections they did not have when they arrived.
Doctors say they have been beaten up in the emergency room. Blood is in such short supply that physicians often donate their own to patients lying in front of them.
"The word `big' is not enough to express the disaster we are facing," said Ahmed A. Muhammad, the hospital's assistant manager.
…But Iraqi doctors say the war has pushed them closer to disaster. Fighting and sabotage have destroyed crucial infrastructure and the fall of Saddam Hussein precipitated a breakdown in social order.
"It's definitely worse now than before the war," said Eman Asim, the Ministry of Health official who oversees the country's 185 public hospitals. "Even at the height of sanctions, when things were miserable, it wasn't as bad as this. At least then someone was in control." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/international/middleeast/14HOSP.html?ex=1392094800&en=d32a74170d4d
China link to nuclear network
Melbourne, Australia’s The Age (Joby Warrick, Peter Slevin) reports on China’s link to the nuclear network.
Investigators have identified China as the origin of nuclear weapons designs found in Libya last year, exposing yet another link in the chain that passed nuclear secrets through Pakistan to other countries in Asia and the Middle East.
According to US Government officials and arms experts, bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded evidence of China's long-suspected role in leaking nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s. The designs were later resold to Libya by Pakistani scientists through a nuclear network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe.
The documents, some written in Chinese characters, have detailed instructions for assembling a nuclear bomb that could fit on a large ballistic missile. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/15/1076779834038.html
Voter Fraud:
Sunday’s NY Times had an editorial that noted
”In 2000, the American public saw in Katherine Harris’s massive purge eligible voters in Florida, how easy it is for registered voters to lose their rights by bureaucratic fiat.” The editorial goes on to quote the US Civil Rights commission’s findings documenting how people falsely designated as felons were struck from the polls.”
It is extraordinarily common and infuriating that the Times, which refused to carry the story back in 2000-2001 and didn’t even report on the Civil Rights Commission which it referenced in the editorial, now goes on record. And, they continue to not make crystal clear that these purged voters were predominantly black, and thus likely to be Gore supporters.
-R
