Friday, February 18, 2005
What’s Happening, Iraq:
The war in Iraq is helping to recruit terrorists. But we already knew that.
The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday.
"Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28876-2005Feb16.html
Negroponte: The former ambassador was known as The Ostrich, as he looked the other way when terror was being spread in Central America in the ‘80’s. Yet, this has been addressed in previous confirmation hearings, so it’s old news and won’t slow his confirmation as new intelligence chief. The NY Times reported that it was “known” that Negroponte was looking to exit Iraq. The LA Times summarizes that the position of “spy chief” has “immense burdens, meager authority.” http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess18feb18,0,2956388.story?coll=la-home-headlines
“Jeff Gannon”: No one has yet focused on his connections to the White House, although Dina Powell who heads the personnel office is married to one Richard Powell who is on the board of GOPUSA whose head started Talon News... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64575-2005Jan10.html
Major media are beginning to cover it, with NBC Nightly News and much of MSNBC (yes, that’s major). Hopefully they will fasten on to Gannon’s being a White House presence before his “news organization”, Talon News, was created.
Salon is doing its part. Eric Boehlert and Joe Conason:
Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias "Jeff Gannon," once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "published regularly," in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.
But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003. Gannon, a jack of all trades who spent time in the military as well as working at an auto repair shop (not to mention escorting), has already stated publicly that Talon News was his first job in journalism. That means he wasn't working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/17/gannon/print.html
Long before "Jeff Gannon" became a household pseudonym in the nation's capital, he had earned considerable recognition among the political elites of South Dakota. During that state's closely contested Senate race last year, the Talon News writer -- whose real name is now known to be James Dale Guckert -- dug his claws deep into Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader narrowly defeated by Republican John Thune.
In 2004 Republican leaders placed no higher price on any head, besides John Kerry's, than on the Senate Democratic leader's. For years, conservative organizations had attacked Daschle with campaigns that included notorious ads that paired the Army veteran with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The smear efforts damaged Daschle's standing with the state's voters, and as the election grew nearer, Republican blogs and Web sites took up the dirty work. In what has now been exposed as a blatant Republican strategy, the seemingly independent bloggers had in fact been paid by the Thune campaign. http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/02/18/gannon/print.html
Greenspan and Social Security: He’s a hack, a shill for the Administration, pure and simple. As Krugman notes (below), the Democrats have to cease their deference: “They acted as if he were still playing his proper role, acting as a nonpartisan source of economic advice.”
Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave his blessing on Wednesday to the creation of individual investment accounts in Social Security but expressed unease that the change could lead to trillions of dollars in additional government borrowing in the next few decades. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/business/17fed.html?
Prior to his testimony, Greg Anrig, Jr., vice president of programs at The Century Foundation, warned us of Greenspan’s history with Social Security.
When Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testifies before the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday, it will be the first time he will comment publicly on President George W. Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security. Great weight will be given to his statements. But in light of Greenspan's long, tortured relationship with Social Security, his views should be treated with the same skepticism that Dr. Phil shows toward his guests.
Over the past two decades, Greenspan has repeatedly argued that Reagan's "ironclad commitment" should be broken. Year after year, he has said that the benefits promised to future retirees are unaffordable, that the retirement age should be delayed further, and that other ways of reducing benefits should be considered. And yet in 2001, Greenspan endorsed the Bush tax cuts, which mainly benefited the highest income Americans. If made permanent, those tax cuts would amount to more than three times the size of Social Security's projected shortfall over the next 75 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In Greenspan's view, the Social Security benefits that his own commission promised to future retirees are not affordable, but tax cuts for the wealthy are.
President Bush's proposal would raise the national debt by $4.5 trillion over its first 20 years—substantially more than the shortfall projected for Social Security over the next 75 years—because new money would be needed to pay for the accounts while continuing to pay current beneficiaries. On the surface of it, that added federal debt in and of itself should be anathema to a Federal Reserve chairman who has long preached the virtues of fiscal responsibility. But remember, Alan Greenspan "doesn't like the present Social Security system." We will soon find out how much he dislikes it. http://www.tcf.org/4L/4LMain.asp?SubjectID=4&ArticleID=873
In general, it’s in trouble. The NY Times reports on Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert opposing it. The LA Times summarizes as to the lack of popularity for the “idea.”
President Bush's push to transform Social Security is in trouble, despite intense salesmanship designed to build support in Congress and with the public.
Democrats are united against the president on the issue. A new national poll shows the idea is losing ground with taxpayers. Many Republicans in Congress remain hesitant to promote letting workers under 55 privately invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes.
And Thursday, Bush's political challenge became more daunting as one of his key constituencies — economic conservatives — fumed at his new willingness to consider a tax increase to pay for the changes. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-social18feb18,0,6502267,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Krugman: Social Security and Iraq: The Similarity. Good explication.
Let me make a detour here. The way privatizers link the long-run financing of Social Security with the case for private accounts parallels the three-card-monte technique the Bush administration used to link terrorism to the Iraq war. Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 - yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again.
Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security's financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population.
And so it was with Mr. Greenspan. He painted a dark (and seriously exaggerated) picture of the demographic problem, and said that what we need is a "fully funded" system. He then conceded that Bush-style privatization would do nothing to improve the system's funding.
But privatization "as a general model," he said, "has in it the seeds of developing full funding by its very nature." Nice metaphor, but what does it mean? Clearly, he was trying to create the impression of links where none exist. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/opinion/18krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
Missile Defense. They keep spinning the test failures, and the billions pour into the (latest incarnation of the) nutty 20 year old idea.
A test of the national missile defense system failed Monday when an interceptor missile did not launch from its island base in the Pacific Ocean, the military said. It was the second failure in months for the experimental program.
A statement from the Missile Defense Agency said the cause of the failure was under investigation.
A spokesman for the agency, Rick Lehner, said the early indications was that there was a malfunction with the ground support equipment at the test range on Kwajalein Island, not with the interceptor missile itself. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/12/national/main666433.shtml
-R
The war in Iraq is helping to recruit terrorists. But we already knew that.
The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday.
"Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28876-2005Feb16.html
Negroponte: The former ambassador was known as The Ostrich, as he looked the other way when terror was being spread in Central America in the ‘80’s. Yet, this has been addressed in previous confirmation hearings, so it’s old news and won’t slow his confirmation as new intelligence chief. The NY Times reported that it was “known” that Negroponte was looking to exit Iraq. The LA Times summarizes that the position of “spy chief” has “immense burdens, meager authority.” http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess18feb18,0,2956388.story?coll=la-home-headlines
“Jeff Gannon”: No one has yet focused on his connections to the White House, although Dina Powell who heads the personnel office is married to one Richard Powell who is on the board of GOPUSA whose head started Talon News... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64575-2005Jan10.html
Major media are beginning to cover it, with NBC Nightly News and much of MSNBC (yes, that’s major). Hopefully they will fasten on to Gannon’s being a White House presence before his “news organization”, Talon News, was created.
Salon is doing its part. Eric Boehlert and Joe Conason:
Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias "Jeff Gannon," once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "published regularly," in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.
But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003. Gannon, a jack of all trades who spent time in the military as well as working at an auto repair shop (not to mention escorting), has already stated publicly that Talon News was his first job in journalism. That means he wasn't working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/17/gannon/print.html
Long before "Jeff Gannon" became a household pseudonym in the nation's capital, he had earned considerable recognition among the political elites of South Dakota. During that state's closely contested Senate race last year, the Talon News writer -- whose real name is now known to be James Dale Guckert -- dug his claws deep into Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader narrowly defeated by Republican John Thune.
In 2004 Republican leaders placed no higher price on any head, besides John Kerry's, than on the Senate Democratic leader's. For years, conservative organizations had attacked Daschle with campaigns that included notorious ads that paired the Army veteran with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The smear efforts damaged Daschle's standing with the state's voters, and as the election grew nearer, Republican blogs and Web sites took up the dirty work. In what has now been exposed as a blatant Republican strategy, the seemingly independent bloggers had in fact been paid by the Thune campaign. http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/02/18/gannon/print.html
Greenspan and Social Security: He’s a hack, a shill for the Administration, pure and simple. As Krugman notes (below), the Democrats have to cease their deference: “They acted as if he were still playing his proper role, acting as a nonpartisan source of economic advice.”
Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave his blessing on Wednesday to the creation of individual investment accounts in Social Security but expressed unease that the change could lead to trillions of dollars in additional government borrowing in the next few decades. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/business/17fed.html?
Prior to his testimony, Greg Anrig, Jr., vice president of programs at The Century Foundation, warned us of Greenspan’s history with Social Security.
When Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testifies before the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday, it will be the first time he will comment publicly on President George W. Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security. Great weight will be given to his statements. But in light of Greenspan's long, tortured relationship with Social Security, his views should be treated with the same skepticism that Dr. Phil shows toward his guests.
Over the past two decades, Greenspan has repeatedly argued that Reagan's "ironclad commitment" should be broken. Year after year, he has said that the benefits promised to future retirees are unaffordable, that the retirement age should be delayed further, and that other ways of reducing benefits should be considered. And yet in 2001, Greenspan endorsed the Bush tax cuts, which mainly benefited the highest income Americans. If made permanent, those tax cuts would amount to more than three times the size of Social Security's projected shortfall over the next 75 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In Greenspan's view, the Social Security benefits that his own commission promised to future retirees are not affordable, but tax cuts for the wealthy are.
President Bush's proposal would raise the national debt by $4.5 trillion over its first 20 years—substantially more than the shortfall projected for Social Security over the next 75 years—because new money would be needed to pay for the accounts while continuing to pay current beneficiaries. On the surface of it, that added federal debt in and of itself should be anathema to a Federal Reserve chairman who has long preached the virtues of fiscal responsibility. But remember, Alan Greenspan "doesn't like the present Social Security system." We will soon find out how much he dislikes it. http://www.tcf.org/4L/4LMain.asp?SubjectID=4&ArticleID=873
In general, it’s in trouble. The NY Times reports on Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert opposing it. The LA Times summarizes as to the lack of popularity for the “idea.”
President Bush's push to transform Social Security is in trouble, despite intense salesmanship designed to build support in Congress and with the public.
Democrats are united against the president on the issue. A new national poll shows the idea is losing ground with taxpayers. Many Republicans in Congress remain hesitant to promote letting workers under 55 privately invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes.
And Thursday, Bush's political challenge became more daunting as one of his key constituencies — economic conservatives — fumed at his new willingness to consider a tax increase to pay for the changes. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-social18feb18,0,6502267,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Krugman: Social Security and Iraq: The Similarity. Good explication.
Let me make a detour here. The way privatizers link the long-run financing of Social Security with the case for private accounts parallels the three-card-monte technique the Bush administration used to link terrorism to the Iraq war. Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 - yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again.
Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security's financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population.
And so it was with Mr. Greenspan. He painted a dark (and seriously exaggerated) picture of the demographic problem, and said that what we need is a "fully funded" system. He then conceded that Bush-style privatization would do nothing to improve the system's funding.
But privatization "as a general model," he said, "has in it the seeds of developing full funding by its very nature." Nice metaphor, but what does it mean? Clearly, he was trying to create the impression of links where none exist. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/opinion/18krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
Missile Defense. They keep spinning the test failures, and the billions pour into the (latest incarnation of the) nutty 20 year old idea.
A test of the national missile defense system failed Monday when an interceptor missile did not launch from its island base in the Pacific Ocean, the military said. It was the second failure in months for the experimental program.
A statement from the Missile Defense Agency said the cause of the failure was under investigation.
A spokesman for the agency, Rick Lehner, said the early indications was that there was a malfunction with the ground support equipment at the test range on Kwajalein Island, not with the interceptor missile itself. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/12/national/main666433.shtml
-R
