Friday, February 11, 2005
North Korea: So, it’s ‘official’, they have nukes. But, hey, Saddam was the real threat! The Bush Administration continues its very low key response, ostensibly, says one “senior diplomat”, “not to make the North Koreans enjoy our panic.” http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-koreanukes11feb11,0,7914097.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Perhaps this is just an upping the ante so as to increase concessions from the U.S.? More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15207-2005Feb10?language=printer
9/11
"No one could have imagined...using planes as a missile"
Those were Condi’s words, consistent with all Bushies, testifying (never under oath, you’ll remember) that the 9/11 attack was impossible to anticipate. But now we have an additional contradiction to her claim, that the FAA was most aware of the possibility of terrorists hijacking a plane and using it as a weapon, that there were 52 FAA “security branch intelligence reports” that mentioned bin Laden/al-Qaeda from April-September of 2001. The FAA even distributed a CD ROM as to their concern.
But, Condi, our national security advisor, didn’t have a clue. NY Times:
U.S. aviation officials failed to respond to dozens of warnings of a possible terrorist threat months before Sept. 11, 2001, according to a previously undisclosed report by the panel that probed the attacks.
The report, which was recently declassified and obtained by Reuters on Thursday, said federal aviation officials reviewed 52 intelligence reports between April 1, 2001, and Sept. 10, 2001, that warned about Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.
Jane F. Garvey, the F.A.A. administrator at the time, told the commission "that she was aware of the heightened threat during the summer of 2001," the report said. But several other senior agency officials "were basically unaware of the threat," as were senior airline operations officials and veteran pilots, the report said.
The classified version of the commission report quotes extensively from circulars prepared by the F.A.A. about the threat of terrorism, but many of those references have been blacked out in the declassified version, officials said.
Several former commissioners and staff members said they were upset and disappointed by the administration's refusal to release the full report publicly.
"Our intention was to make as much information available to the public as soon as possible," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Sept. 11 commission member. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-commission-faa.html?
Some of the language in these reports was hardly subtle: …the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable…
Condi has long insisted that she was not alerted as to the threat, in effect trashing the account of Richard Clarke, Mr. Anti-Terrorism. The Australian press look at a newly declassified document that contradicts the chronically lying Ms. Rice.
Eight months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today."We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," then White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign last year when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice, his boss at the time, had been warned of the threat. Rice is now US Secretary of State.
However, Ms Rice wrote in a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration". http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12216311^401,00.html
Class Action Lawsuits Curbed. Passed easily. The upshot? It directs many suits from state to federal courts where they’re usually tossed out. It was opposed by labor, consumer groups, state prosecutors, etc. but isn’t clear whether the feds refusal sends such suits back to the state courts. Regardless, it wasn’t exactly a united Democratic front. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/politics/11class.html?pagewanted=all&position=
One footnote: Bush pushed this at a Commerce Department event, accompanied by an ‘independent expert’ who support this measure. It turns out that he was Walter Dellinger III, a lawyer from a firm that was collecting $780,000 to push this legislation.
More of the same.
Brit Hume: Social Security and FDR. Al Franken (the subject of a flurry of rumors this week that he was declaring for Senate in Minnesota; he isn’t, but might do so in 2008) and Media Matters led the way in exposing Fox News’ Brit Hume’s distortion of FDR remarks to suggest that FDR always wanted Social Security to be eventually privatized. Then, the Republican Noise Machine featured Bill Bennett spinning the lie on Fox News.
Hume turns this completely on its head. He pulls two unrelated bits out of the FDR quote, and adds the words “government funding” between them. Because it’s so carefully done, it’s clear that it’s deliberate. And it’s a nasty form of dishonesty. Hume is manipulating Americans’ trust of FDR in order to build support for dismantling FDR’s legacy. ...Although it won’t be as explosive politically, this is worse than Dan Rather’s memo scandal. First of all, it's deliberate. Secondly, it's untrue. Dan Rather was guilty of being insufficiently skeptical of forged, true documents. But Brit Hume, Fox News Channel's #1 anchor--not commentator, not editorialist, anchor--is deliberately perverting the words of a hero to destroy the hero's legacy. http://www.airamericaradio.com/weblogs/alfrankenshow/index.php?/franken/hume_resign/
“Jeff Gannon”
For those who haven’t followed this, I’ll try a summary.
*Talon News appeared as a new web site in 2002, set up by GOPUSA.com, an organization established by a known Texas right-winger.
*5 days later, their “correspondent”, one “Jeff Gannon”, was credentialed by the White House, although he had been refused such by the House and Senate.
*“Gannon” appeared at White House press conferences and briefings, always asking soft ball questions that included fiercely partisan statements.
*His overdoing it- quoting a Rush Limbaugh joke as fact- raised suspicion. *Media Matters investigated and exposed him. “Gannon” was found to be James "JD" Guckert who had taken a $50 course on “journalism” conducted by longtime Republican activist Morton Blackwell, a co-founder of the Moral Majority.
*Bloggers found a WaPost report that mentioned that Guckert had access to an internal CIA memo that named Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
*There was a flurry of distracting reports as to Guckert being a male prostitute.
*Guckert resigned from Talon News, saying he was stalked and threatened by Lefties.
*The major media- WaPost on Thursday, NY Times on Friday have written it up, and thoroughly.
*A few Democrats have demanded answers. The White House has thus far pleaded ignorance of all.
Two Democrats in Congress are pressing for investigations into how a Washington reporter who used a pseudonym managed to gain access to the White House and had access to classified documents that named Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative.
The Democrats, Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Louise M. Slaughter from Rochester, wrote yesterday to Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent prosecutor appointed in the Plame case, seeking an investigation into how the reporter, James D. Guckert, who used the name Jeff Gannon, had access to classified documents that revealed the identity of Ms. Plame. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/politics/11gannon.html?pagewanted=all
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Plenty of death, with reports of Iraqis avoid more and more areas, with checkpoints manned by insurgents.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12816-2005Feb10.html
Harold Meyerson terms Iraq “the War of the Vanishing Raisons D'Etre," and wonders if the direction is toward “Iran-lite.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9445-2005Feb8?language=printer
Lynne Stewart Chillingly severe verdict.
Lynne F. Stewart, an outspoken lawyer known for representing a long list of unpopular defendants, was convicted yesterday by a federal jury in Manhattan of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a terrorist client.
In a startlingly sweeping verdict, Ms. Stewart was convicted on all five counts of providing material aid to terrorism and of lying to the government when she pledged to obey federal rules that barred her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, from communicating with his followers. Her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, were also convicted of all the charges against them. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/nyregion/11stewart.html?hp&ex=1108098000&en=00fac2fc8f0b5cd2&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Bush Rally The audio is even more entertaining. Mary is a known supporter, as are all at such carefully staged events. From the White House web site:
Mary is with us. Mary Mornin. How are you, Mary?
MS. MORNIN: I'm fine.
THE PRESIDENT: Good. Okay, Mary, tell us about yourself.
MS. MORNIN: Okay, I'm a divorced, single mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.
THE PRESIDENT: Fantastic. First of all, you've got the hardest job in America, being a single mom.
________
THE PRESIDENT: I remember when I turned 50, I used to think 50 was really old. Now I think it's young, and getting ready to turn 60 here in a couple of years, and I still feel young. I mean, we are living longer, and people are working longer, and the truth of the matter is, elderly baby boomers have got a lot to offer to our society, and we shouldn't think about giving up our responsibilities in society. (Applause.) Isn't that right?
MS. MORNIN: That's right.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but nevertheless, there's a certain comfort to know that the promises made will be kept by the government.
MS. MORNIN: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: And so thank you for asking that. You don't have to worry.
MS. MORNIN: That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.
THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?
MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)
MS. MORNIN: Not much. Not much.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, hopefully, this will help you get you sleep to know that when we talk about Social Security, nothing changes.
MS. MORNIN: Okay, thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: That's great. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050204-3.html
Perhaps this is just an upping the ante so as to increase concessions from the U.S.? More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15207-2005Feb10?language=printer
9/11
"No one could have imagined...using planes as a missile"
Those were Condi’s words, consistent with all Bushies, testifying (never under oath, you’ll remember) that the 9/11 attack was impossible to anticipate. But now we have an additional contradiction to her claim, that the FAA was most aware of the possibility of terrorists hijacking a plane and using it as a weapon, that there were 52 FAA “security branch intelligence reports” that mentioned bin Laden/al-Qaeda from April-September of 2001. The FAA even distributed a CD ROM as to their concern.
But, Condi, our national security advisor, didn’t have a clue. NY Times:
U.S. aviation officials failed to respond to dozens of warnings of a possible terrorist threat months before Sept. 11, 2001, according to a previously undisclosed report by the panel that probed the attacks.
The report, which was recently declassified and obtained by Reuters on Thursday, said federal aviation officials reviewed 52 intelligence reports between April 1, 2001, and Sept. 10, 2001, that warned about Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.
Jane F. Garvey, the F.A.A. administrator at the time, told the commission "that she was aware of the heightened threat during the summer of 2001," the report said. But several other senior agency officials "were basically unaware of the threat," as were senior airline operations officials and veteran pilots, the report said.
The classified version of the commission report quotes extensively from circulars prepared by the F.A.A. about the threat of terrorism, but many of those references have been blacked out in the declassified version, officials said.
Several former commissioners and staff members said they were upset and disappointed by the administration's refusal to release the full report publicly.
"Our intention was to make as much information available to the public as soon as possible," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Sept. 11 commission member. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-commission-faa.html?
Some of the language in these reports was hardly subtle: …the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable…
Condi has long insisted that she was not alerted as to the threat, in effect trashing the account of Richard Clarke, Mr. Anti-Terrorism. The Australian press look at a newly declassified document that contradicts the chronically lying Ms. Rice.
Eight months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today."We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," then White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign last year when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice, his boss at the time, had been warned of the threat. Rice is now US Secretary of State.
However, Ms Rice wrote in a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration". http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12216311^401,00.html
Class Action Lawsuits Curbed. Passed easily. The upshot? It directs many suits from state to federal courts where they’re usually tossed out. It was opposed by labor, consumer groups, state prosecutors, etc. but isn’t clear whether the feds refusal sends such suits back to the state courts. Regardless, it wasn’t exactly a united Democratic front. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/politics/11class.html?pagewanted=all&position=
One footnote: Bush pushed this at a Commerce Department event, accompanied by an ‘independent expert’ who support this measure. It turns out that he was Walter Dellinger III, a lawyer from a firm that was collecting $780,000 to push this legislation.
More of the same.
Brit Hume: Social Security and FDR. Al Franken (the subject of a flurry of rumors this week that he was declaring for Senate in Minnesota; he isn’t, but might do so in 2008) and Media Matters led the way in exposing Fox News’ Brit Hume’s distortion of FDR remarks to suggest that FDR always wanted Social Security to be eventually privatized. Then, the Republican Noise Machine featured Bill Bennett spinning the lie on Fox News.
Hume turns this completely on its head. He pulls two unrelated bits out of the FDR quote, and adds the words “government funding” between them. Because it’s so carefully done, it’s clear that it’s deliberate. And it’s a nasty form of dishonesty. Hume is manipulating Americans’ trust of FDR in order to build support for dismantling FDR’s legacy. ...Although it won’t be as explosive politically, this is worse than Dan Rather’s memo scandal. First of all, it's deliberate. Secondly, it's untrue. Dan Rather was guilty of being insufficiently skeptical of forged, true documents. But Brit Hume, Fox News Channel's #1 anchor--not commentator, not editorialist, anchor--is deliberately perverting the words of a hero to destroy the hero's legacy. http://www.airamericaradio.com/weblogs/alfrankenshow/index.php?/franken/hume_resign/
“Jeff Gannon”
For those who haven’t followed this, I’ll try a summary.
*Talon News appeared as a new web site in 2002, set up by GOPUSA.com, an organization established by a known Texas right-winger.
*5 days later, their “correspondent”, one “Jeff Gannon”, was credentialed by the White House, although he had been refused such by the House and Senate.
*“Gannon” appeared at White House press conferences and briefings, always asking soft ball questions that included fiercely partisan statements.
*His overdoing it- quoting a Rush Limbaugh joke as fact- raised suspicion. *Media Matters investigated and exposed him. “Gannon” was found to be James "JD" Guckert who had taken a $50 course on “journalism” conducted by longtime Republican activist Morton Blackwell, a co-founder of the Moral Majority.
*Bloggers found a WaPost report that mentioned that Guckert had access to an internal CIA memo that named Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
*There was a flurry of distracting reports as to Guckert being a male prostitute.
*Guckert resigned from Talon News, saying he was stalked and threatened by Lefties.
*The major media- WaPost on Thursday, NY Times on Friday have written it up, and thoroughly.
*A few Democrats have demanded answers. The White House has thus far pleaded ignorance of all.
Two Democrats in Congress are pressing for investigations into how a Washington reporter who used a pseudonym managed to gain access to the White House and had access to classified documents that named Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative.
The Democrats, Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Louise M. Slaughter from Rochester, wrote yesterday to Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent prosecutor appointed in the Plame case, seeking an investigation into how the reporter, James D. Guckert, who used the name Jeff Gannon, had access to classified documents that revealed the identity of Ms. Plame. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/politics/11gannon.html?pagewanted=all
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Plenty of death, with reports of Iraqis avoid more and more areas, with checkpoints manned by insurgents.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12816-2005Feb10.html
Harold Meyerson terms Iraq “the War of the Vanishing Raisons D'Etre," and wonders if the direction is toward “Iran-lite.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9445-2005Feb8?language=printer
Lynne Stewart Chillingly severe verdict.
Lynne F. Stewart, an outspoken lawyer known for representing a long list of unpopular defendants, was convicted yesterday by a federal jury in Manhattan of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a terrorist client.
In a startlingly sweeping verdict, Ms. Stewart was convicted on all five counts of providing material aid to terrorism and of lying to the government when she pledged to obey federal rules that barred her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, from communicating with his followers. Her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, were also convicted of all the charges against them. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/nyregion/11stewart.html?hp&ex=1108098000&en=00fac2fc8f0b5cd2&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Bush Rally The audio is even more entertaining. Mary is a known supporter, as are all at such carefully staged events. From the White House web site:
Mary is with us. Mary Mornin. How are you, Mary?
MS. MORNIN: I'm fine.
THE PRESIDENT: Good. Okay, Mary, tell us about yourself.
MS. MORNIN: Okay, I'm a divorced, single mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.
THE PRESIDENT: Fantastic. First of all, you've got the hardest job in America, being a single mom.
________
THE PRESIDENT: I remember when I turned 50, I used to think 50 was really old. Now I think it's young, and getting ready to turn 60 here in a couple of years, and I still feel young. I mean, we are living longer, and people are working longer, and the truth of the matter is, elderly baby boomers have got a lot to offer to our society, and we shouldn't think about giving up our responsibilities in society. (Applause.) Isn't that right?
MS. MORNIN: That's right.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but nevertheless, there's a certain comfort to know that the promises made will be kept by the government.
MS. MORNIN: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: And so thank you for asking that. You don't have to worry.
MS. MORNIN: That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.
THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?
MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)
MS. MORNIN: Not much. Not much.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, hopefully, this will help you get you sleep to know that when we talk about Social Security, nothing changes.
MS. MORNIN: Okay, thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: That's great. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050204-3.html
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Social Security: Bad Sign for Administration. With friends like this…
It's not surprising that Michigan's eight Democrats in Congress are opposing President George W. Bush's plan to overhaul social security -- something he's certain to discuss today in his noon speech before the Detroit Economic Club.
But it is unusual that the president may have significant problems within his own party: A survey of Michigan's congressional delegation shows that at least four of nine Republicans in the U.S. House are withholding endorsement of Bush's proposed personal accounts that would allow taxpayers to invest up to 4 percent of their payroll taxes that now go toward social security.
Convincing them to climb onboard, these Republicans say, will take details, and a pledge that benefits will not be cut for current retirees or those close to retirement. Michigan Democrats, meanwhile, universally oppose Bush's plan. http://www.freep.com/news/mich/social8e_20050208.htm
And, the one ironic up-side of the last election, is that retirements and defeats of Democrats in the South has removed cover for the Republicans in their perpetual tendency to claim bi-partisan support for their initiatives.
Social Security: It is, after all, a regressive tax. Lucid essay by activist Mike Cohen:
But the Basic Financial ideas of Social Security have had only one change for the worse in 1983. Social security in the past was run as a pay as you go proposition i.e. prior to 1983 the Amount paid out was balanced by the regressive tax for the program which people paid in. The tax is regressive because its rate is fixed; it starts out on low incomes and cuts out at higher levels of income. Simply taxing the same rate thought the tax brackets would restore social security to solvency instantly Alan Greenspan, a believer in Laissez-Faire Capitalism and Social Darwinism i.e. Objectivism, in 1983, chaired a commission which argued that Social Security if it ran on the pay as you go basis would be in default i.e. more money would be paid by the government than it took in. It therefore raised the tax substantially on the lower brackets so that the Social Security Administration would be in surplus. Since 1983 to the present 1.5 trillion more dollars have been taken in than paid out. This money has been used to pay for government programs otherwise in deficit. In other words, social security funds are used as general revenues as part of the US tax base. At about the same time taxes were cut on the top income brackets so the social security surplus has been used to finance tax cuts to the Ultra Rich...[break]
So where does this leave us? It may be that social security is over funded and should be closer to deficit now? This is so if Federal investments are paying off in substantially increased productivity and monies are better spent elsewhere. It might make sense to roll Social Security into the tax code and increase the progressive base of the taxation. It would also make sense to let the Social Security Administration act as a single payer for National Health Insurance like the Canadian System which appears to function quite well. http://bluebeard.bu.edu/peaceworks/social-security-1.doc
Medicare Fraud: We knew the Administration cooked the books when passing the prescription drug bill. The real figures are now fully revealed, double [Times], if not triple [WaPost] the “estimated” cost. The outrage:
[Representative Rahm Democrat of Illinois] Emanuel said: "The new cost estimate destroys the credibility of the Bush administration. Officials were so far off in estimating the cost of the Medicare law. Why should we believe what they say about the financial problems of Social Security?"
Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said: "I told you so. We can't trust numbers provided by administration officials. They'll say anything to get a bill passed. And if the new drug benefit costs more, the extra money goes to their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, not to senior citizens." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/national/09medicare.html?hp&ex=1108011600&en=1a75c77fde14828c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9328-2005Feb8.html
Bush Budget: European (British) view: A jaundiced eye…
President Bush's travesty of a budget manages to simultaneously bash the poor while making the rich feel good about their wealthNone of the movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos thought the Bush administration was serious about cutting the budget deficit, and they appear to have been right.
The President's budget proposal, published yesterday, is a travesty of a budget - even before an irate Congress gets its hands on it. The proposed cuts in spending are confined to non-security discretionary outlays - that part of total spending which comprises a mere 20 per cent of the total. And the most prominent victims are the urban poor, who will suffer from cuts in health, education, housing and other welfare programmes, while the first-term tax cuts for the rich are made permanent.
True, there are proposals for cutting agricultural subsidies, which will be approved by most economists other than those employed by the agricultural lobby, but the broad thrust of the budget is to bash the poor while making the rich feel good about their wealth. And, in the immortal words of the Miami columnist Dave Barry ( who will be sorely missed on this side of the Atlantic too, if he really is about to retire ), "I am not making this up". http://www.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,12498,1408453,00.html
Other Budget Particulars:
* They seek to cut the EPA by nearly 6 percent, with the biggest chunk coming from a clean-water fund.
* The program to help people pay their heating bills would be cut by 8 percent.
* The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be trimmed by about 12 percent.
* "Financing for the apprehension of Army deserters would double."
* The WaPost's editorial page says there are two ways to view the proposed budget: "the first as farce, the second as tragedy." http://slate.msn.com/id/2113271/
Military Spending: More than they Admit to- Fred Kaplan:
Two things are striking about next year's military budget, which President Bush sent to Congress Monday. First, it's a lot larger than the published numbers show—at least $20 billion and possibly as much as $40 billion larger, not including the hidden costs of the war in Iraq—and the undercounting seems to be a deliberate ploy to make the deficit look smaller and the budget less weighed down with armaments than they really are.
Second, whatever the budget totals, tens of billions in defense spending could be slashed if the president followed the principle he laid down in his State of the Union Address last week—to "substantially reduce or eliminate" all programs that "do not fulfill essential priorities." http://slate.msn.com/id/2113274/
Whey They Aren’t Conservatives: LA Times:
The era of big government is back.Bush's $2.57-trillion budget for 2006, if approved by Congress, would be more than a third bigger than the 2001 budget he inherited four years ago. It is a monument to how much Republicans' guiding fiscal philosophy has changed over the 10 years since the GOP's Contract With America called for a balanced budget and abolition of entire Cabinet agencies. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-assess8feb08,0,7191816.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Republican Scandal with Consequence. Incredibly rare. AP report
The former head of a Republican consulting group was sentenced Tuesday to five months in jail for jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities during the 2002 election.
Allen Raymond, who was president of the Alexandria, Va.-based GOP Marketplace LLC at the time, did not comment as he left the U.S. District Court sentencing. He also was fined $15,600.
He had pleaded guilty in July.
Court papers say Raymond and co-conspirators plotted to jam Democratic lines that voters could call for rides to the polls in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont. A line run by the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters' union also was jammed. http://apnews.myway.com//article/20050208/D884EJE01.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: “Iraqi-isation”. Talk of (gradual) withdrawal.
The British and US governments are set to publish their exit strategy from Iraq based on replacing coalition troops with Iraqi security forces, Tony Blair told senior MPs today.
Appearing before the House of Commons liaison committee as another 19 people were killed in Baghdad, Mr Blair revealed that the coalition was considering publishing a paper by retired US general Gary Luck on how to build up the Iraqi security forces.
General Luck's assessment, which was sent to the Pentagon last month, is believed to be the basis of an Anglo-American plan to gradually withdraw the 150,000 coalition troops in Iraq.
Mr Blair told the committee: "I think that we will be able to give some idea of what the next steps and over what period the 'Iraqi-isation' of security will take place."
"Iraqi-isation", or the gradual replacement of coalition troops by Iraqi security forces, is understood to involve doubling local police trainees and setting up special Iraqi units to assist the police and army. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1408330,00.html
Torture Victims. They’re Innocent, but can’t be released. We’ve known of this ‘predicament’- the CIA seizing countless innocents and sending them abroad to be tortured, then continuing to hold them, despite the lack of ‘intelligence value’...and their innocence. Jane Mayer pursues:
The Bush Administration’s departure from international norms has been justified in intellectual terms by élite lawyers like Gonzales, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Gonzales, the new Attorney General, argued during his confirmation proceedings that the U.N. Convention Against Torture’s ban on “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of terrorist suspects does not apply to American interrogations of foreigners overseas. Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation, including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warn that the Bush Administration, having taken so many prisoners outside the realm of the law, may not be able to bring them back in. By holding detainees indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under circumstances that could, in legal parlance, “shock the conscience” of a court, the Administration has jeopardized its chances of convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as witnesses in almost any court in the world.
“It’s a big problem,” Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission, says. “In criminal justice, you either prosecute the suspects or let them go. But if you’ve treated them in ways that won’t allow you to prosecute them you’re in this no man’s land. What do you do with these people?” http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6
Who we are: Canadian view
The film Seven Days In May is one of my all-time favourites. The gripping 1964 drama, starring Burt Lancaster, depicts an attempted coup by far rightists in Washington using a top-secret Pentagon anti-terrorist unit called something like "Contelinpro."
Life imitates art. This week, former military intelligence analyst William Arkin revealed a hitherto unknown directive, with the Orwellian name "JCS Conplan 0300-97," authorizing the Pentagon to employ special, ultra-secret "anti-terrorist" military units on American soil for what the author claims are "extra-legal missions."
In other words, using U.S. soldiers to kill or arrest Americans, acts that have been illegal since the U.S. Civil War.
This frightening news comes as Washington is gripped by reborn, Cold-War-style paranoia, ominous threats of war against Iran from the real president, Dick Cheney, and a titanic bureaucratic battle just won by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Instead of being fired for the grotesque military-political fiasco in Iraq and the shameful torture scandals, Rumsfeld has just managed to create a new, Pentagon spy/special ops organization, blandly named "Strategic Support Branch," that will replace or duplicate many of the CIA's tasks.
Have we reached Seven Days in May?
Not yet, but the second Bush administration has been taking dangerous steps that continue to curtail personal rights, further emasculate the supine, cowardly U.S. Congress, and empower ideological or religious extremists and shadowy agencies with unrestrained powers that endanger Americans at home, and all abroad suspected of troubling the Pax Americana. http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2005/02/06/pf-922316.html
Giving it up…and heading North. Many of us have stated our fantasies, thoughts and/or know of others who’ve inquired or actually left the country. So, how many are doing it?
In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Mr. Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported an increase in inquiries from the United States to about 115,000 a day from 20,000. After three months, memories of the election have begun to recede. There has been an inauguration, even a State of the Union address.
Yet immigration lawyers say that Americans are not just making inquiries and that more are pursuing a move above the 49th parallel, fed up with a country they see drifting persistently to the right and abandoning the principles of tolerance, compassion and peaceful idealism they felt once defined the nation.
America is in no danger of emptying out. But even a small loss of residents, many of whom cite a deep sense of political despair, is a significant event in the life of a nation that thinks of itself as a place to escape to.
Firm numbers on potential émigrés are elusive. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/national/08depart.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
-R
It's not surprising that Michigan's eight Democrats in Congress are opposing President George W. Bush's plan to overhaul social security -- something he's certain to discuss today in his noon speech before the Detroit Economic Club.
But it is unusual that the president may have significant problems within his own party: A survey of Michigan's congressional delegation shows that at least four of nine Republicans in the U.S. House are withholding endorsement of Bush's proposed personal accounts that would allow taxpayers to invest up to 4 percent of their payroll taxes that now go toward social security.
Convincing them to climb onboard, these Republicans say, will take details, and a pledge that benefits will not be cut for current retirees or those close to retirement. Michigan Democrats, meanwhile, universally oppose Bush's plan. http://www.freep.com/news/mich/social8e_20050208.htm
And, the one ironic up-side of the last election, is that retirements and defeats of Democrats in the South has removed cover for the Republicans in their perpetual tendency to claim bi-partisan support for their initiatives.
Social Security: It is, after all, a regressive tax. Lucid essay by activist Mike Cohen:
But the Basic Financial ideas of Social Security have had only one change for the worse in 1983. Social security in the past was run as a pay as you go proposition i.e. prior to 1983 the Amount paid out was balanced by the regressive tax for the program which people paid in. The tax is regressive because its rate is fixed; it starts out on low incomes and cuts out at higher levels of income. Simply taxing the same rate thought the tax brackets would restore social security to solvency instantly Alan Greenspan, a believer in Laissez-Faire Capitalism and Social Darwinism i.e. Objectivism, in 1983, chaired a commission which argued that Social Security if it ran on the pay as you go basis would be in default i.e. more money would be paid by the government than it took in. It therefore raised the tax substantially on the lower brackets so that the Social Security Administration would be in surplus. Since 1983 to the present 1.5 trillion more dollars have been taken in than paid out. This money has been used to pay for government programs otherwise in deficit. In other words, social security funds are used as general revenues as part of the US tax base. At about the same time taxes were cut on the top income brackets so the social security surplus has been used to finance tax cuts to the Ultra Rich...[break]
So where does this leave us? It may be that social security is over funded and should be closer to deficit now? This is so if Federal investments are paying off in substantially increased productivity and monies are better spent elsewhere. It might make sense to roll Social Security into the tax code and increase the progressive base of the taxation. It would also make sense to let the Social Security Administration act as a single payer for National Health Insurance like the Canadian System which appears to function quite well. http://bluebeard.bu.edu/peaceworks/social-security-1.doc
Medicare Fraud: We knew the Administration cooked the books when passing the prescription drug bill. The real figures are now fully revealed, double [Times], if not triple [WaPost] the “estimated” cost. The outrage:
[Representative Rahm Democrat of Illinois] Emanuel said: "The new cost estimate destroys the credibility of the Bush administration. Officials were so far off in estimating the cost of the Medicare law. Why should we believe what they say about the financial problems of Social Security?"
Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said: "I told you so. We can't trust numbers provided by administration officials. They'll say anything to get a bill passed. And if the new drug benefit costs more, the extra money goes to their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, not to senior citizens." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/national/09medicare.html?hp&ex=1108011600&en=1a75c77fde14828c&ei=5094&partner=homepage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9328-2005Feb8.html
Bush Budget: European (British) view: A jaundiced eye…
President Bush's travesty of a budget manages to simultaneously bash the poor while making the rich feel good about their wealthNone of the movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos thought the Bush administration was serious about cutting the budget deficit, and they appear to have been right.
The President's budget proposal, published yesterday, is a travesty of a budget - even before an irate Congress gets its hands on it. The proposed cuts in spending are confined to non-security discretionary outlays - that part of total spending which comprises a mere 20 per cent of the total. And the most prominent victims are the urban poor, who will suffer from cuts in health, education, housing and other welfare programmes, while the first-term tax cuts for the rich are made permanent.
True, there are proposals for cutting agricultural subsidies, which will be approved by most economists other than those employed by the agricultural lobby, but the broad thrust of the budget is to bash the poor while making the rich feel good about their wealth. And, in the immortal words of the Miami columnist Dave Barry ( who will be sorely missed on this side of the Atlantic too, if he really is about to retire ), "I am not making this up". http://www.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,12498,1408453,00.html
Other Budget Particulars:
* They seek to cut the EPA by nearly 6 percent, with the biggest chunk coming from a clean-water fund.
* The program to help people pay their heating bills would be cut by 8 percent.
* The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be trimmed by about 12 percent.
* "Financing for the apprehension of Army deserters would double."
* The WaPost's editorial page says there are two ways to view the proposed budget: "the first as farce, the second as tragedy." http://slate.msn.com/id/2113271/
Military Spending: More than they Admit to- Fred Kaplan:
Two things are striking about next year's military budget, which President Bush sent to Congress Monday. First, it's a lot larger than the published numbers show—at least $20 billion and possibly as much as $40 billion larger, not including the hidden costs of the war in Iraq—and the undercounting seems to be a deliberate ploy to make the deficit look smaller and the budget less weighed down with armaments than they really are.
Second, whatever the budget totals, tens of billions in defense spending could be slashed if the president followed the principle he laid down in his State of the Union Address last week—to "substantially reduce or eliminate" all programs that "do not fulfill essential priorities." http://slate.msn.com/id/2113274/
Whey They Aren’t Conservatives: LA Times:
The era of big government is back.Bush's $2.57-trillion budget for 2006, if approved by Congress, would be more than a third bigger than the 2001 budget he inherited four years ago. It is a monument to how much Republicans' guiding fiscal philosophy has changed over the 10 years since the GOP's Contract With America called for a balanced budget and abolition of entire Cabinet agencies. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-assess8feb08,0,7191816.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Republican Scandal with Consequence. Incredibly rare. AP report
The former head of a Republican consulting group was sentenced Tuesday to five months in jail for jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities during the 2002 election.
Allen Raymond, who was president of the Alexandria, Va.-based GOP Marketplace LLC at the time, did not comment as he left the U.S. District Court sentencing. He also was fined $15,600.
He had pleaded guilty in July.
Court papers say Raymond and co-conspirators plotted to jam Democratic lines that voters could call for rides to the polls in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont. A line run by the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters' union also was jammed. http://apnews.myway.com//article/20050208/D884EJE01.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: “Iraqi-isation”. Talk of (gradual) withdrawal.
The British and US governments are set to publish their exit strategy from Iraq based on replacing coalition troops with Iraqi security forces, Tony Blair told senior MPs today.
Appearing before the House of Commons liaison committee as another 19 people were killed in Baghdad, Mr Blair revealed that the coalition was considering publishing a paper by retired US general Gary Luck on how to build up the Iraqi security forces.
General Luck's assessment, which was sent to the Pentagon last month, is believed to be the basis of an Anglo-American plan to gradually withdraw the 150,000 coalition troops in Iraq.
Mr Blair told the committee: "I think that we will be able to give some idea of what the next steps and over what period the 'Iraqi-isation' of security will take place."
"Iraqi-isation", or the gradual replacement of coalition troops by Iraqi security forces, is understood to involve doubling local police trainees and setting up special Iraqi units to assist the police and army. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1408330,00.html
Torture Victims. They’re Innocent, but can’t be released. We’ve known of this ‘predicament’- the CIA seizing countless innocents and sending them abroad to be tortured, then continuing to hold them, despite the lack of ‘intelligence value’...and their innocence. Jane Mayer pursues:
The Bush Administration’s departure from international norms has been justified in intellectual terms by élite lawyers like Gonzales, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Gonzales, the new Attorney General, argued during his confirmation proceedings that the U.N. Convention Against Torture’s ban on “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of terrorist suspects does not apply to American interrogations of foreigners overseas. Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation, including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warn that the Bush Administration, having taken so many prisoners outside the realm of the law, may not be able to bring them back in. By holding detainees indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under circumstances that could, in legal parlance, “shock the conscience” of a court, the Administration has jeopardized its chances of convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as witnesses in almost any court in the world.
“It’s a big problem,” Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission, says. “In criminal justice, you either prosecute the suspects or let them go. But if you’ve treated them in ways that won’t allow you to prosecute them you’re in this no man’s land. What do you do with these people?” http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6
Who we are: Canadian view
The film Seven Days In May is one of my all-time favourites. The gripping 1964 drama, starring Burt Lancaster, depicts an attempted coup by far rightists in Washington using a top-secret Pentagon anti-terrorist unit called something like "Contelinpro."
Life imitates art. This week, former military intelligence analyst William Arkin revealed a hitherto unknown directive, with the Orwellian name "JCS Conplan 0300-97," authorizing the Pentagon to employ special, ultra-secret "anti-terrorist" military units on American soil for what the author claims are "extra-legal missions."
In other words, using U.S. soldiers to kill or arrest Americans, acts that have been illegal since the U.S. Civil War.
This frightening news comes as Washington is gripped by reborn, Cold-War-style paranoia, ominous threats of war against Iran from the real president, Dick Cheney, and a titanic bureaucratic battle just won by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Instead of being fired for the grotesque military-political fiasco in Iraq and the shameful torture scandals, Rumsfeld has just managed to create a new, Pentagon spy/special ops organization, blandly named "Strategic Support Branch," that will replace or duplicate many of the CIA's tasks.
Have we reached Seven Days in May?
Not yet, but the second Bush administration has been taking dangerous steps that continue to curtail personal rights, further emasculate the supine, cowardly U.S. Congress, and empower ideological or religious extremists and shadowy agencies with unrestrained powers that endanger Americans at home, and all abroad suspected of troubling the Pax Americana. http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2005/02/06/pf-922316.html
Giving it up…and heading North. Many of us have stated our fantasies, thoughts and/or know of others who’ve inquired or actually left the country. So, how many are doing it?
In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Mr. Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported an increase in inquiries from the United States to about 115,000 a day from 20,000. After three months, memories of the election have begun to recede. There has been an inauguration, even a State of the Union address.
Yet immigration lawyers say that Americans are not just making inquiries and that more are pursuing a move above the 49th parallel, fed up with a country they see drifting persistently to the right and abandoning the principles of tolerance, compassion and peaceful idealism they felt once defined the nation.
America is in no danger of emptying out. But even a small loss of residents, many of whom cite a deep sense of political despair, is a significant event in the life of a nation that thinks of itself as a place to escape to.
Firm numbers on potential émigrés are elusive. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/national/08depart.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
-R
Monday, February 07, 2005
Middle East: Progress. A good sign. Hopefully the news won’t be at all sullied by the Bushies claiming it was their invasion of Iraq that was the key to movement. Or, is it because they knew Condi was visiting?
Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed a truce to end more than four years of fighting, both sides confirmed today.
Negotiators from both sides finalised the agreement during last-minute preparations for tomorrow's summit meeting between the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"The most important thing at the summit will be a mutual declaration of cessation of violence against each other," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator. An Israeli government official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, confirmed the agreement, adding that the deal would also include an end to Palestinian incitement.http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1407656,00.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Plenty of death. The “election”, of course, didn’t end the occupation / resistance.
Hendrik Hertzberg reminds us that the trumpeted elections were Sistani’s idea, not Cheney-Wolfowitz’s.
Critics of the Bush Administration can take comfort in the fact that the apparent success of the Iraqi election can be celebrated without having to celebrate the supposed wisdom of the Administration. Like the Homeland Security Department and the 9/11 Commission, the Iraqi election was something Bush & Co. resisted and were finally maneuvered into accepting. It wasn’t their idea; it was an Iraqi idea—specifically, the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Shiism’s most prominent cleric. In a way, it was a by-product of the same American ignorance and bungling that produced the unchallenged post-Saddam looting and the myriad mistakes of the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this time—for the first time—the bungling seems to have yielded something positive.
Iraq is still a very, very long way from democracy. And even if it gets there, the costs of the journey—the more than ten thousand (so far) American wounded and dead, the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children killed, the hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other purposes, the lies, the distraction from and gratuitous extension of the “war on terror,” the moral and political catastrophe of systematic torture, the draining of good will toward and sympathy for America—will not necessarily justify themselves. But, for the moment at least, one can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. It survived American slavery; it survived Stalinist coöptation (the “German Democratic Republic,” and so on); it survived Cold War horrors like America’s support of Spanish Falangism and Central American death squads. Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush. http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/050214ta_talk_hertzberg
More payola?
The U.S. Department of Defense plans to add more sites on the Internet to provide information to a global audience -- but critics question whether the Pentagon is violating President Bush's pledge not to pay journalists to promote his policies.
The Defense Department runs two Web sites overseas, one aimed at people in the Balkan region in Europe, the other for the Maghreb area of North Africa.
It is preparing another site, even as the Pentagon inspector general investigates whether the sites are appropriate. http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/02/04/web.us/index.html
U.S. Environment Sustainability: How We Rate
The Bush administration apparently doesn't care enough to feel humiliated, so ordinary Americans will have to cringe on the country's behalf over the United States' low ranking in the 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index. In this annual evaluation of 146 nations and their relative success in keeping up air and water quality, supporting biodiversity, and working with other countries to solve environmental problems, the U.S. ranked a pathetic 45th.
There is scant hope the U.S. will do better next year, either, with Washington tied in knots by Republican maneuvers to gut the Clean Air Act and a Democratic struggle just to maintain the inadequate air-quality status quo.
Prepared by Columbia and Yale researchers for the World Economic Forum, the ESI is based on 75 measures, including greenhouse-gas emissions, over-fishing, water quality, and rate at which children die of respiratory diseases. Its designers admit that the ESI measuring devices are sometimes unfair. Russia comes in at a respectable number 33, but only because the hideous hash it has made of its environment is concentrated in the industrial West, and Russia's vast, pristine Asian wilderness is included in its ESI average. Still, the U.S. lags far behind such genuine environmental-quality pioneers as the Scandinavia countries, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Guyana, Uruguay, Japan, Botswana and Bhutan, among others. http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101%7E6267%7E2694724,00.html#
Perpetual Deficits. Reasonable assessment by Edmund Andrews, but one that assumes the Bushies truly want to reduce the deficit. Of course they don’t; it was developed and must be maintained so as to justify ongoing cuts to non-military spending. Yet, all such would only save $15 billion, small change next to the military’s expansion and the ongoing Iraq/Afghanistan costs…which are “off budget”.
The economy is growing. Tax revenues are climbing. But can these factors rescue President Bush from a federal deficit that seems stuck above $400 billion?
The answer, unfortunately, is almost certainly no, analysts say.
Can’t believe the duplicity, eh?
The cornerstone of Mr. Bush's budget strategy is a belief that vigorous economic growth, spurred by supply-side tax cuts that were designed to provide incentives for upper-income Americans to produce more wealth, will generate big jumps in tax revenue that gradually reduce the deficit. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/business/07fiscal.html?ex=1265432400&en=f9e0a5a13fbea954&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
Bush and Veterans: Robert Pear continues his coverage of the budget
President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/politics/07budget.html?oref=login
Bush Budget: Any Good News? Finally found some, though I should read further, I suspect.
Mr. Bush says he wants a community health center in every poor county. The budget would increase spending for such clinics by 17.5 percent, to $2 billion. Budget officials said these clinics would care for 16.4 million people next year, up from 14 million this year.
The president is also seeking $718 million for a new effort to enroll more children in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Millions of uninsured children are eligible but not enrolled.
But, then, there’s this:
Mr. Bush seeks a $38 million increase in programs promoting sexual abstinence, which would bring the total to $192.5 million in 2006, an increase of more than 50 percent since 2004.
Budget Math It’s b.s., of course.
The budget President Bush will present to Congress today will show the federal deficit cut in half by the time he leaves office in four years.At least technically it will.Achieving that goal relies on where the budget math starts and stops, how things get counted and what gets left out
It is the 2004 deficit that Bush is promising to cut in half, but he's not starting with the actual 2004 deficit of $412 billion.Instead, his benchmark is the projected $521-billion deficit that his Office of Management and Budget estimated a year ago, when the fiscal year was four months old. Using half of that figure, Bush's goal is to reach a deficit of $260.5 billion.If Bush were to start with the actual 2004 figure, his goal would be a deficit of $206 billion — $54.5 billion more.http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-budget7feb07,1,3484190,print.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage
Bush Doesn’t understand what he is proposing. We know he’s generally ignorant, despite the new p.r. about his reading a mix of fiction/non-fiction.
From the White House site:
Q -- really understand how is it the new plan is going to fix that problem?
THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
Okay, better? I'll keep working on it. (Laughter.) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/print/20050204-13.html
But he claims to understand “frivolous asbestos lawsuits”
W.R. Grace and Co. and seven high-ranking employees knew a Montana mine was releasing cancer-causing asbestos into the air and tried to hide the danger to workers and townspeople, according to a federal indictment unsealed Monday. More than 1,200 people became ill, and some of them died, prosecutors said. The asbestos was naturally present in a vermiculite mine operated by Grace in the small town of Libby for nearly 30 years. http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/feeds/ap/2005/02/07/ap1810687.html
Vilification: That radical, Harry Reid, is up next
The Republican National Committee is set to begin a prolonged attack against newly installed Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) aimed at weakening his support in his home state as well as on the national level.
Drawing on a blueprint used successfully against former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the RNC will send a 13-page research document today to roughly 1 million people — a group that includes journalists, donors and grass-roots activists — detailing Reid’s alleged obstructionism among other topics. “
This is the initial salvo in the upcoming discussion that we are going to be having with Sen. Reid,” said RNC Communications Director Brian Jones. RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman has already done a series of radio interviews in Nevada criticizing Reid. Other events, like a gathering of medical professionals in the Silver State to protest Reid’s stance on medical malpractice reform, are in the works.
“This is a national and local communications strategy that will look to strip the bark off the Senate Minority Leader,” Jones added.
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/02/index.html#005432
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Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed a truce to end more than four years of fighting, both sides confirmed today.
Negotiators from both sides finalised the agreement during last-minute preparations for tomorrow's summit meeting between the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"The most important thing at the summit will be a mutual declaration of cessation of violence against each other," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator. An Israeli government official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, confirmed the agreement, adding that the deal would also include an end to Palestinian incitement.http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1407656,00.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Plenty of death. The “election”, of course, didn’t end the occupation / resistance.
Hendrik Hertzberg reminds us that the trumpeted elections were Sistani’s idea, not Cheney-Wolfowitz’s.
Critics of the Bush Administration can take comfort in the fact that the apparent success of the Iraqi election can be celebrated without having to celebrate the supposed wisdom of the Administration. Like the Homeland Security Department and the 9/11 Commission, the Iraqi election was something Bush & Co. resisted and were finally maneuvered into accepting. It wasn’t their idea; it was an Iraqi idea—specifically, the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Shiism’s most prominent cleric. In a way, it was a by-product of the same American ignorance and bungling that produced the unchallenged post-Saddam looting and the myriad mistakes of the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this time—for the first time—the bungling seems to have yielded something positive.
Iraq is still a very, very long way from democracy. And even if it gets there, the costs of the journey—the more than ten thousand (so far) American wounded and dead, the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children killed, the hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other purposes, the lies, the distraction from and gratuitous extension of the “war on terror,” the moral and political catastrophe of systematic torture, the draining of good will toward and sympathy for America—will not necessarily justify themselves. But, for the moment at least, one can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. It survived American slavery; it survived Stalinist coöptation (the “German Democratic Republic,” and so on); it survived Cold War horrors like America’s support of Spanish Falangism and Central American death squads. Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush. http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/050214ta_talk_hertzberg
More payola?
The U.S. Department of Defense plans to add more sites on the Internet to provide information to a global audience -- but critics question whether the Pentagon is violating President Bush's pledge not to pay journalists to promote his policies.
The Defense Department runs two Web sites overseas, one aimed at people in the Balkan region in Europe, the other for the Maghreb area of North Africa.
It is preparing another site, even as the Pentagon inspector general investigates whether the sites are appropriate. http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/02/04/web.us/index.html
U.S. Environment Sustainability: How We Rate
The Bush administration apparently doesn't care enough to feel humiliated, so ordinary Americans will have to cringe on the country's behalf over the United States' low ranking in the 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index. In this annual evaluation of 146 nations and their relative success in keeping up air and water quality, supporting biodiversity, and working with other countries to solve environmental problems, the U.S. ranked a pathetic 45th.
There is scant hope the U.S. will do better next year, either, with Washington tied in knots by Republican maneuvers to gut the Clean Air Act and a Democratic struggle just to maintain the inadequate air-quality status quo.
Prepared by Columbia and Yale researchers for the World Economic Forum, the ESI is based on 75 measures, including greenhouse-gas emissions, over-fishing, water quality, and rate at which children die of respiratory diseases. Its designers admit that the ESI measuring devices are sometimes unfair. Russia comes in at a respectable number 33, but only because the hideous hash it has made of its environment is concentrated in the industrial West, and Russia's vast, pristine Asian wilderness is included in its ESI average. Still, the U.S. lags far behind such genuine environmental-quality pioneers as the Scandinavia countries, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Guyana, Uruguay, Japan, Botswana and Bhutan, among others. http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101%7E6267%7E2694724,00.html#
Perpetual Deficits. Reasonable assessment by Edmund Andrews, but one that assumes the Bushies truly want to reduce the deficit. Of course they don’t; it was developed and must be maintained so as to justify ongoing cuts to non-military spending. Yet, all such would only save $15 billion, small change next to the military’s expansion and the ongoing Iraq/Afghanistan costs…which are “off budget”.
The economy is growing. Tax revenues are climbing. But can these factors rescue President Bush from a federal deficit that seems stuck above $400 billion?
The answer, unfortunately, is almost certainly no, analysts say.
Can’t believe the duplicity, eh?
The cornerstone of Mr. Bush's budget strategy is a belief that vigorous economic growth, spurred by supply-side tax cuts that were designed to provide incentives for upper-income Americans to produce more wealth, will generate big jumps in tax revenue that gradually reduce the deficit. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/business/07fiscal.html?ex=1265432400&en=f9e0a5a13fbea954&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
Bush and Veterans: Robert Pear continues his coverage of the budget
President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/politics/07budget.html?oref=login
Bush Budget: Any Good News? Finally found some, though I should read further, I suspect.
Mr. Bush says he wants a community health center in every poor county. The budget would increase spending for such clinics by 17.5 percent, to $2 billion. Budget officials said these clinics would care for 16.4 million people next year, up from 14 million this year.
The president is also seeking $718 million for a new effort to enroll more children in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Millions of uninsured children are eligible but not enrolled.
But, then, there’s this:
Mr. Bush seeks a $38 million increase in programs promoting sexual abstinence, which would bring the total to $192.5 million in 2006, an increase of more than 50 percent since 2004.
Budget Math It’s b.s., of course.
The budget President Bush will present to Congress today will show the federal deficit cut in half by the time he leaves office in four years.At least technically it will.Achieving that goal relies on where the budget math starts and stops, how things get counted and what gets left out
It is the 2004 deficit that Bush is promising to cut in half, but he's not starting with the actual 2004 deficit of $412 billion.Instead, his benchmark is the projected $521-billion deficit that his Office of Management and Budget estimated a year ago, when the fiscal year was four months old. Using half of that figure, Bush's goal is to reach a deficit of $260.5 billion.If Bush were to start with the actual 2004 figure, his goal would be a deficit of $206 billion — $54.5 billion more.http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-budget7feb07,1,3484190,print.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage
Bush Doesn’t understand what he is proposing. We know he’s generally ignorant, despite the new p.r. about his reading a mix of fiction/non-fiction.
From the White House site:
Q -- really understand how is it the new plan is going to fix that problem?
THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
Okay, better? I'll keep working on it. (Laughter.) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/print/20050204-13.html
But he claims to understand “frivolous asbestos lawsuits”
W.R. Grace and Co. and seven high-ranking employees knew a Montana mine was releasing cancer-causing asbestos into the air and tried to hide the danger to workers and townspeople, according to a federal indictment unsealed Monday. More than 1,200 people became ill, and some of them died, prosecutors said. The asbestos was naturally present in a vermiculite mine operated by Grace in the small town of Libby for nearly 30 years. http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/feeds/ap/2005/02/07/ap1810687.html
Vilification: That radical, Harry Reid, is up next
The Republican National Committee is set to begin a prolonged attack against newly installed Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) aimed at weakening his support in his home state as well as on the national level.
Drawing on a blueprint used successfully against former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the RNC will send a 13-page research document today to roughly 1 million people — a group that includes journalists, donors and grass-roots activists — detailing Reid’s alleged obstructionism among other topics. “
This is the initial salvo in the upcoming discussion that we are going to be having with Sen. Reid,” said RNC Communications Director Brian Jones. RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman has already done a series of radio interviews in Nevada criticizing Reid. Other events, like a gathering of medical professionals in the Silver State to protest Reid’s stance on medical malpractice reform, are in the works.
“This is a national and local communications strategy that will look to strip the bark off the Senate Minority Leader,” Jones added.
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/02/index.html#005432
-R
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Patriots’ win. 3 championships here in 53 weeks. Congrats to rooters here …and in Carolina.
Ossie Davis: Decent Times obituary
The two [wife Ruby Dee] also fought in broader arenas. They helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and were master and mistress of ceremonies.
At a news conference in Manhattan yesterday, Harry Belafonte, with tears in his eyes, compared Mr. Davis to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W. E .B. DuBois and Fanny Lou Hamer, all of whom were Mr. Davis's friends. In particular, Mr. Davis remained fiercely loyal to Robeson even as he was denounced by other show-business figures for his openly Communist sympathies.
In 1965, Mr. Davis delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X, calling him "our shining black prince," and he spoke it again in a voiceover for the 1992 Spike Lee film, "Malcolm X." In 1968, he eulogized Dr. King. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/theater/05davis.html?oref=login
Back to the gore:
Love that Mercury
The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols in order to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration's free-market approaches to power plant pollution, according to a report released yesterday by the agency's inspector general.
Staff at the EPA were instructed by administrators to set modest limits on mercury pollution, and then had to work backward from the predetermined goal to justify the proposal, according to a report by Inspector General Nikki Tinsley.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61762-2005Feb3.html
NPR and Bush Jobs Record. Oh, that Liberal Media. While other sources termed the jobs report “modest” or “puny” or “disappointing”, NPR’s report terms January’s job growth to be “heartening”, for Bush, since the added 146,000 jobs gives the Administration a net job growth for his term... of .03%.
Gads.
For the nth time, we need to produce 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So, we needed to produce 7.2 million jobs in the 4 years. So, Cheney-Bush was 7.15 million short.
NPR is NOT a liberal network; they’re just not Right wing.
Middle East: Response to State of Union: “Nothing new”, or condemnation:
The Syrian and Iranian governments reacted angrily Thursday to George W. Bush's vow to confront them over their alleged harboring of terrorists and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The American president's State of the Union speech on Wednesday night identified Syria and Iran as the primary obstacles to his administration's declared mission to spread peace and democracy in the Middle East. It sent tremors through the region, raising fears that the administration may have more military action on its second-term agenda.
Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denounced the United States as "like one of the big heads of a seven-headed dragon," menacing his country under the direction of "Zionist and non-Zionist capitalists." "Bush is the fifth U.S. president seeking to uproot the Iranian nation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. [Jimmy] Carter, [Ronald] Reagan, father Bush and [Bill] Clinton failed. This president will also fail," the Associated Press quoted him as saying.
The response from Damascus, Syria, also reflected growing nervousness at Bush's intentions. "Freedoms cannot be exported by tanks and planes, death and destruction," said Syria's information minister, Mehdi Dakhlallah. "Everyone knows that Syria is cooperating in fighting terrorism, but the definition of terrorism cannot be selective and based on ideology and politics," he said. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/04/iran_syria/print.html
Guantanamo Abuses. Ongoing reports, not pleasant, but need to be acknowledged In this one, the Brits helped screw their own.
British intelligence officials played a crucial part in the secret abduction of UK citizen Martin Mubanga to Guantanamo Bay. There, he reveals today in an exclusive interview, he endured 33 months of ill-treatment and often abusive interrogation.
Documents seen by The Observer disclose that even the Pentagon's own lawyers now accept that the intelligence that consigned him to Guantanamo may have been deeply flawed. Mubanga, who was released without charge after his return to Britain on 25 January, now plans to sue the British government.
In his interview today, the first by any of the four Britons who returned from Guantanamo last month, Mubanga, 32, describes a horrifying catalogue of abuse:
· In one interrogation session, he was forced to urinate in the corner of the interview room while chained hand and foot.
· He was treated to a regime known as 'BI [basic item] loss'. This meant his thin mattress, trousers, shirts, towel, blankets, and flipflops were all taken away, leaving him naked except for boxer shorts in an empty metal box.
· Last autumn, while Pentagon lawyers were writing memos suggesting that Mubanga may not have had any involvement in terrorism at all and may not have been given a fair hearing, the Guantanamo authorities subjected him to the harshest treatment in his 33 months in Guantanamo, with three brutal assaults by the 'Instant Reaction Force' riot squad for trivial violations of the camp rules. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1407040,00.html
Social Security:
Bush in Florida. More humor. Really.
About 1,000 ticket-holders can expect to see Bush in the Tampa Convention Center for about an hour starting at 4 p.m., a White House spokesman said Wednesday. A handful of individuals ``who have a vested interest in strengthening Social Security and have an important story to tell'' will join him onstage.
Among those invited to apply for the appearance were stockbrokers at Raymond James & Associates, a company spokeswoman said. Tampa's Blake High School jazz band was invited to perform, the school district said. http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBEID4KQ4E.html
Get it? Stockbrokers have a vested interested in Social Security. Precious.
Another critical voice
Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund, is criticizing President Bush's plan to privatize part of Social Security.
Gross, managing director at Pimco, called the argument about the solvency of Social Security "silly" and said it was an example of the president not focusing on more important issues, such as the budget deficit.
The president's argument for individual Social Security accounts is meant "to promote an agenda that has little to do with seniors and more to do with Bush, his ownership society, and ultimately his domestic legacy alongside the likes of Ronald Reagan and FDR," Gross wrote in comments posted on Pimco's Web site. http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/04/markets/gross_social_security/index.htm?cnn=yes
Cheney Admits: Lots of Borrowing ahead. So, they admit that it doesn’t help “save” Social Security, and it results in trillions of new debt. Clearly a wonderful idea.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday acknowledged trillions of dollars in future borrowing may be needed to cover the cost of private retirement accounts under President Bush's plan to retool the Social Security system. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&e=5&u=/nm/20050206/pl_nm/retirement_borrowing_dc
Nick Kristof: Shame
…these days both parties are behaving irresponsibly. Mr. Bush is disingenuous - and perhaps fiscally reckless - by refusing to explain who will pay the bill, and the Democrats are trying to shout him down without offering solutions of their own. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/opinion/5kristof.html?oref=login&hp
Sorry column: Forget the even-handedness, Nick. The Democrats- and I’m not usually a defender- are offering an alternative: they seek to maintain Social Security!
Bush Budget: Not news, in that it was previewed in the Fall. Not surprising as it’s part of the design, developed by the first Reagan Group in the early 80’s: create deficits then slash the budget claiming you’re getting the deficit under control. Robert Pear of the Times had a stream of reports:
President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show.
Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs.
The documents show, for example, that Mr. Bush would cut spending for several programs that deal with epidemics, chronic diseases and obesity. His plan would also cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 9 percent, to $6.9 billion, the documents show. http://nytimes.com/2005/02/05/politics/05cuts.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Facing the prospect of record deficits, Bush administration officials laid out proposals on Thursday for deep cuts in spending on housing and community development.
At the same time, the nation's top health official fleshed out proposals to cut $60 billion from the projected growth of Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income people, in the next decade…
Don Plusquellic, the mayor of Akron, Ohio, who is president of the United States Conference of Mayors, said: "The new proposal in unconscionable. It will cut programs that help the poorest and the neediest."
Mr. Plusquellic, a Democrat who has led his city for 18 years, said the reshuffling of federal programs obscured the likely effects. "It would be more honest if the federal government simply said, 'We don't care about these poor people,' " he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/politics/04cuts.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1107612003-/57ZjxIBf58B75xx4on0lw&pagewanted=print&position=
President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday…
Mr. Bush's farm proposal found support from some people who frequently criticize his policies.
Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy group, said the proposal would reduce payments to big agribusiness operations. The savings, he said, would ease pressure on Congress to cut conservation programs financed in the same legislation.
"This proposal is a very big deal," Mr. Cook said. "I am stunned and impressed. The Bush administration is opening the door to reform on the most contested issue in agriculture policy today. Taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize every bushel of grain or bale of cotton. They will no longer have to subsidize the demise of the family farm." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/politics/06budget.html
President Bush's budget will propose slashing grants to local law enforcement agencies and cutting spending for environmental protection, American Indian schools and home-heating aid for the poor, The Associated Press learned Saturday. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20050205/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_budget
And, let’s not forget Orwell:
The White House will brandish independent studies on program effectiveness, appeals for lawmakers to set priorities, and, on occasion, some rhetorical creativity. The deep cuts to community development, for example, have been titled the "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1462-2005Feb5.html
Dean as Chair of DNC: The Response. They’ve stockpiled…
Robert Novak says Democrats "are concerned about the massive negative research" about Howard Dean "stockpiled by President Bush's political operatives.""The Dean file was compiled by Bush's re-election campaign when it appeared that the former Vermont governor was going to be nominated for president. It is a carefully researched compendium of Dean's often bizarre utterances." http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20050205.shtml
-R
Ossie Davis: Decent Times obituary
The two [wife Ruby Dee] also fought in broader arenas. They helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and were master and mistress of ceremonies.
At a news conference in Manhattan yesterday, Harry Belafonte, with tears in his eyes, compared Mr. Davis to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W. E .B. DuBois and Fanny Lou Hamer, all of whom were Mr. Davis's friends. In particular, Mr. Davis remained fiercely loyal to Robeson even as he was denounced by other show-business figures for his openly Communist sympathies.
In 1965, Mr. Davis delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X, calling him "our shining black prince," and he spoke it again in a voiceover for the 1992 Spike Lee film, "Malcolm X." In 1968, he eulogized Dr. King. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/theater/05davis.html?oref=login
Back to the gore:
Love that Mercury
The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols in order to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration's free-market approaches to power plant pollution, according to a report released yesterday by the agency's inspector general.
Staff at the EPA were instructed by administrators to set modest limits on mercury pollution, and then had to work backward from the predetermined goal to justify the proposal, according to a report by Inspector General Nikki Tinsley.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61762-2005Feb3.html
NPR and Bush Jobs Record. Oh, that Liberal Media. While other sources termed the jobs report “modest” or “puny” or “disappointing”, NPR’s report terms January’s job growth to be “heartening”, for Bush, since the added 146,000 jobs gives the Administration a net job growth for his term... of .03%.
Gads.
For the nth time, we need to produce 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So, we needed to produce 7.2 million jobs in the 4 years. So, Cheney-Bush was 7.15 million short.
NPR is NOT a liberal network; they’re just not Right wing.
Middle East: Response to State of Union: “Nothing new”, or condemnation:
The Syrian and Iranian governments reacted angrily Thursday to George W. Bush's vow to confront them over their alleged harboring of terrorists and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The American president's State of the Union speech on Wednesday night identified Syria and Iran as the primary obstacles to his administration's declared mission to spread peace and democracy in the Middle East. It sent tremors through the region, raising fears that the administration may have more military action on its second-term agenda.
Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denounced the United States as "like one of the big heads of a seven-headed dragon," menacing his country under the direction of "Zionist and non-Zionist capitalists." "Bush is the fifth U.S. president seeking to uproot the Iranian nation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. [Jimmy] Carter, [Ronald] Reagan, father Bush and [Bill] Clinton failed. This president will also fail," the Associated Press quoted him as saying.
The response from Damascus, Syria, also reflected growing nervousness at Bush's intentions. "Freedoms cannot be exported by tanks and planes, death and destruction," said Syria's information minister, Mehdi Dakhlallah. "Everyone knows that Syria is cooperating in fighting terrorism, but the definition of terrorism cannot be selective and based on ideology and politics," he said. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/04/iran_syria/print.html
Guantanamo Abuses. Ongoing reports, not pleasant, but need to be acknowledged In this one, the Brits helped screw their own.
British intelligence officials played a crucial part in the secret abduction of UK citizen Martin Mubanga to Guantanamo Bay. There, he reveals today in an exclusive interview, he endured 33 months of ill-treatment and often abusive interrogation.
Documents seen by The Observer disclose that even the Pentagon's own lawyers now accept that the intelligence that consigned him to Guantanamo may have been deeply flawed. Mubanga, who was released without charge after his return to Britain on 25 January, now plans to sue the British government.
In his interview today, the first by any of the four Britons who returned from Guantanamo last month, Mubanga, 32, describes a horrifying catalogue of abuse:
· In one interrogation session, he was forced to urinate in the corner of the interview room while chained hand and foot.
· He was treated to a regime known as 'BI [basic item] loss'. This meant his thin mattress, trousers, shirts, towel, blankets, and flipflops were all taken away, leaving him naked except for boxer shorts in an empty metal box.
· Last autumn, while Pentagon lawyers were writing memos suggesting that Mubanga may not have had any involvement in terrorism at all and may not have been given a fair hearing, the Guantanamo authorities subjected him to the harshest treatment in his 33 months in Guantanamo, with three brutal assaults by the 'Instant Reaction Force' riot squad for trivial violations of the camp rules. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1407040,00.html
Social Security:
Bush in Florida. More humor. Really.
About 1,000 ticket-holders can expect to see Bush in the Tampa Convention Center for about an hour starting at 4 p.m., a White House spokesman said Wednesday. A handful of individuals ``who have a vested interest in strengthening Social Security and have an important story to tell'' will join him onstage.
Among those invited to apply for the appearance were stockbrokers at Raymond James & Associates, a company spokeswoman said. Tampa's Blake High School jazz band was invited to perform, the school district said. http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBEID4KQ4E.html
Get it? Stockbrokers have a vested interested in Social Security. Precious.
Another critical voice
Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund, is criticizing President Bush's plan to privatize part of Social Security.
Gross, managing director at Pimco, called the argument about the solvency of Social Security "silly" and said it was an example of the president not focusing on more important issues, such as the budget deficit.
The president's argument for individual Social Security accounts is meant "to promote an agenda that has little to do with seniors and more to do with Bush, his ownership society, and ultimately his domestic legacy alongside the likes of Ronald Reagan and FDR," Gross wrote in comments posted on Pimco's Web site. http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/04/markets/gross_social_security/index.htm?cnn=yes
Cheney Admits: Lots of Borrowing ahead. So, they admit that it doesn’t help “save” Social Security, and it results in trillions of new debt. Clearly a wonderful idea.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday acknowledged trillions of dollars in future borrowing may be needed to cover the cost of private retirement accounts under President Bush's plan to retool the Social Security system. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&e=5&u=/nm/20050206/pl_nm/retirement_borrowing_dc
Nick Kristof: Shame
…these days both parties are behaving irresponsibly. Mr. Bush is disingenuous - and perhaps fiscally reckless - by refusing to explain who will pay the bill, and the Democrats are trying to shout him down without offering solutions of their own. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/opinion/5kristof.html?oref=login&hp
Sorry column: Forget the even-handedness, Nick. The Democrats- and I’m not usually a defender- are offering an alternative: they seek to maintain Social Security!
Bush Budget: Not news, in that it was previewed in the Fall. Not surprising as it’s part of the design, developed by the first Reagan Group in the early 80’s: create deficits then slash the budget claiming you’re getting the deficit under control. Robert Pear of the Times had a stream of reports:
President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show.
Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs.
The documents show, for example, that Mr. Bush would cut spending for several programs that deal with epidemics, chronic diseases and obesity. His plan would also cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 9 percent, to $6.9 billion, the documents show. http://nytimes.com/2005/02/05/politics/05cuts.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Facing the prospect of record deficits, Bush administration officials laid out proposals on Thursday for deep cuts in spending on housing and community development.
At the same time, the nation's top health official fleshed out proposals to cut $60 billion from the projected growth of Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income people, in the next decade…
Don Plusquellic, the mayor of Akron, Ohio, who is president of the United States Conference of Mayors, said: "The new proposal in unconscionable. It will cut programs that help the poorest and the neediest."
Mr. Plusquellic, a Democrat who has led his city for 18 years, said the reshuffling of federal programs obscured the likely effects. "It would be more honest if the federal government simply said, 'We don't care about these poor people,' " he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/politics/04cuts.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1107612003-/57ZjxIBf58B75xx4on0lw&pagewanted=print&position=
President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday…
Mr. Bush's farm proposal found support from some people who frequently criticize his policies.
Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy group, said the proposal would reduce payments to big agribusiness operations. The savings, he said, would ease pressure on Congress to cut conservation programs financed in the same legislation.
"This proposal is a very big deal," Mr. Cook said. "I am stunned and impressed. The Bush administration is opening the door to reform on the most contested issue in agriculture policy today. Taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize every bushel of grain or bale of cotton. They will no longer have to subsidize the demise of the family farm." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/politics/06budget.html
President Bush's budget will propose slashing grants to local law enforcement agencies and cutting spending for environmental protection, American Indian schools and home-heating aid for the poor, The Associated Press learned Saturday. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20050205/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_budget
And, let’s not forget Orwell:
The White House will brandish independent studies on program effectiveness, appeals for lawmakers to set priorities, and, on occasion, some rhetorical creativity. The deep cuts to community development, for example, have been titled the "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1462-2005Feb5.html
Dean as Chair of DNC: The Response. They’ve stockpiled…
Robert Novak says Democrats "are concerned about the massive negative research" about Howard Dean "stockpiled by President Bush's political operatives.""The Dean file was compiled by Bush's re-election campaign when it appeared that the former Vermont governor was going to be nominated for president. It is a carefully researched compendium of Dean's often bizarre utterances." http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20050205.shtml
-R
