Friday, April 15, 2005
Judicial Wars: Everyone a liberal to be targeted…
As Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, this new conservative line against the judiciary is broader than previous right-wing attacks on judges. Conservatives are now criticizing all federal judges, not just "liberal" judges. More precisely, many are upset with the very idea that judges act as a check on the other branches of government. The Supreme Court may be stacked with Republican nominees, and it may have handed the presidency to a Republican candidate who lost the popular vote, but that doesn't matter to Dobson. He still believes that Justice Anthony Kennedy is "the most dangerous man in America," and that stopping judicial tyranny is urgent.
Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, stresses that Republicans have already succeeded in their efforts to remake the judiciary. In the past 30 years under Republican presidents, the federal courts have become strikingly more conservative. No current Supreme Court justices are as liberal as some we've had in the past -- as Earl Warren, or Thurgood Marshall, or William Brennan. Yet at the same time we have more extremely conservative judges -- like Antonin Scalia, or Clarence Thomas -- than we've ever had. These judges, who favor an interpretation of the Constitution that allows no room for changing times, envision a judiciary that is less interventionist than the kind of third branch that liberals would demand.
"The real danger is not Tom DeLay talking recklessly," Sunstein says. The Schiavo case presages something scarier -- the continuing "massive transformation of the federal judiciary." http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/11/judges/index.html
Then, there was Dana Milbank’s story in the WaPost about the Right conference on "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny":
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38308-2005Apr8.html
And:
Conservatives near lock on US courts
Senators will consider new judicial nominees Thursday. GOP-appointed judges already control 10 of 13 appeals courts
As Democrats and Republicans in Washington prepare for an expected showdown over the use of filibusters to stall judicial nominees, President Bush is already well on his way to recasting the nation's federal appeals courts in a more conservative mold.
Republican appointees now constitute a majority of judges on 10 of the nation's 13 federal appeals courts. As few as three more lifetime appointments on key courts would tip the balance in favor of GOP appointees on all but one appeals court - the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The confrontation over judges heats up Thursday with the Senate Judiciary Committee expected to send a second appeals court candidate to the full Senate for a possible vote. The process is being closely watched because if either nomination triggers a filibuster, it could provide the vehicle for Republican senators to launch the so-called nuclear option, which would squelch filibusters. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p01s02-uspo.htm
Frist and the Christian Right: The Senate leader had kept his distance from talk about ousting “activist” judges and from Tom DeLay. But now he will participate in a telecast, “Justice Sunday,” which is an evangelical event focused on the Democrats’ ungodliness.
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.
Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."
Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/politics/15judges.html?ei=5094&en=0b42a55582cd9ab5&hp=&ex=1113624000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
Estate Taxes: House again passed it; Will the Senate? The NY Times article says no, the Wall Street Journal is more “optimistic”.
The toll:
· Specifically, the CBPP noted that congressional Republicans and the Bush White House want to eliminate the Estate Tax entirely by 2011. When one adds up the lost revenue and the higher interest on the national debt (Republicans admit they have no way of paying for the repeal), the “total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion.” The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that extending repeal beyond 2010 would reduce revenues by $290 billion through 2015, including $72 billion in 2015 alone.
· But the Joint Tax Committee’s estimate essentially captures only the cost of four additional years of estate tax repeal. The revenues losses associated with 10 more years of repeal — for the period from fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2021 — are much higher, about $745 billion.
· When the associated $225 billion in higher interest payments on the debt are taken into account, the total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion. http://www.cbpp.org/4-12-05tax.htm
Democrats Waking up? Talk is of their using this week to push the line that they are the true “party of reform”, that the Republicans are making the tax system more complicated and unjust. They had best be loud w/ this.
Meanwhile, Ben Nelson tries to sell out:
The fight over judicial nominations was finally starting to go the Dems way. The Senate confirmed a non-controversial nominee unanimously, Bill Frist found himself without the votes he needs to exercise the “nuclear option,” and two major conservative groups (the National Right to Work Committee and the Gun Owners of America) came out against the Republican plan.
And then hyper-moderate Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) decided to try and screw it all up with an unhelpful “compromise.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who is working on a bipartisan compromise to end the filibuster of judicial nominees, said he believes that his party’s practice of blocking confirmation votes on controversial nominees has put him and fellow Democratic centrists in politically difficult positions.
Business as Usual: Republicans and Health Care
By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans’ health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.
Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, sought to add $1.9 billion to the $80.6 billion wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill to cover costs of treating returning combat veterans for war-related injuries and to cover shortfalls in funding for VA programs.
The Bush administration sought no VA money as part of its supplemental funding request, and none was included in the version of the bill passed by the House in March. http://www.armytimes.com/print.php?f=1-292925-782283.php
Business as Usual: Cover Up
The Bush administration is impeding an investigation into the Education Department's hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams by refusing to allow key White House officials to be interviewed, a Democratic lawmaker briefed on the review said Thursday.
In addition, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is considering invoking a privilege that he said would require information to be deleted when the final version is publicly released, which is expected within days. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Education-Investigation.html?
True Believers:
Conservative House Republicans, beset with growing distrust of the Senate, are urging the House leadership to jump ahead of the Senate on Social Security reform and pass a bill based on large personal retirement accounts and no tax increases or cuts in benefits.
They also want House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House Majority Tom DeLay to say publicly that any bill sent over from the Senate that doesn't meet all these requirements will not be taken up in the House. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050413-111450-4410r.htm
Post Peak Oil: James Howard Kunstler gets us back to Energy. He notes that the Administration’s failure to prepare us “might be considered an impeachable offense”.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1113405728853&has-player=true
Michael Klare: Some of us have focused on the 14 permanent bases being readied in Iraq. The Pentagon is also relocating troops to "forward operating sites" also known as "forward operating locations," and "cooperative security locations." Get used to the lingo. Klare elaborates:
The decommissioning of older bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea and the acquisition of new facilities in other areas has been described by the White House as "the most comprehensive restructuring of US military forces overseas since the end of the Korean War." In explaining these moves, the Bush Administration emphasizes the issue of utility: Many older installations eat up vast resources but contribute little to overall combat effectiveness, and so should be closed; at the same time, new facilities are needed in areas where few American bases currently exist. But while it is certainly arguable that the closing of obsolete bases in Europe and East Asia will free resources that might be better employed somewhere else, it is also clear that a lot more is going on than mere military utility. Indeed, a close look at Pentagon statements and policy reports suggests that three other factors are at work: a new calculus of America's geopolitical interests; a shift in US strategic orientation from defensive to offensive operations; and concerns about the future reliability of long-term allies, especially those in "Old Europe."
Most significant, overall, is the revised calculation of America's geopolitical interests. During the cold war, when "containment" was the overarching strategic principle, the United States surrounded the Soviet bloc with major bases. With the end of the cold war, however, this template no longer made sense, and many of these bases lost their strategic rationale. Meanwhile, other concerns--terrorism, the pursuit of foreign oil and the rise of China--have come to preoccupy American strategists. It is these concerns that are largely driving the realignment of US bases and forces. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050425&s=klare
Why Antagonize Russia? William Pfaff notes that the bases encircle Russia
Moscow cooperates with the West at virtually every level of international relations. It supplies the West with oil, cooperates in Bush's war on terror, and has made no trouble over U.S. bases in Central Asia.
So why do we want to make an enemy of Putin?
The Russians are being subjected to a very high level of provocation. Russia is now encircled by American power. There are U.S. forces in Central Asia and the Caucasus. With the Baltic states now members of NATO, alliance aircraft are deployed on Russia's frontier. The Poles and others are anxious for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU.
The Russian government has been amazingly calm about all this, but it might one of these days lose that calm. Russia today is not the Soviet Union, but it could still find ways to be very unpleasant to those who chose to make an enemy of it. http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/12/news/edpfaff.html
Eric Rudolph, Christian, Anti-Abortion Terrorist... or Pot Smoker?
In any case, there may be a tighter connection to the murders than abortion or religion. Deborah Rudolph, Eric's sister-in-law, says he's a drug addict. According to the AP, she told the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report that in the early 1990s, he would "sleep all day, then stay up all night and eat pizza and smoke pot and watch movies by Cheech and Chong." He reportedly made as much as $60,000 selling hydroponic marijuana. That much pot is enough to make anyone paranoid.http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/ct/2003/122/22.0.html
Man, those ‘60’s were Evil…
Sports: Naming a Stadium…for the Military
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium could be renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK under the terms of a deal being negotiated by District officials and the Department of Defense, sources close to the discussions said yesterday…
On Monday, the National Guard had agreed to a deal to pay the commission about $6 million over three years for the sponsorship, but the agreement was halted by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum. They objected to a branch of the military paying to put its name on a sports building or playing field.
After city leaders met with Warner and Blum on Tuesday, negotiations resumed. Yesterday, the two sides had agreed that the Department of Defense would pay for recruiting and marketing opportunities at the stadium but that the city would not ask for money if the field is renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK. If that name change is agreed upon, the city would make it in honor of the military services, at no cost, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
They said the Department of Defense wants to pay less than the Guard would have paid for the naming rights. Money from the sponsorship will go to improving youth athletic programs in the city.
Asked whether it was appropriate to have the military's name on the field, D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said at his weekly news conference yesterday that "this has nothing to do with whether you agree or disagree with the war. I think it's actually a good fit." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51287-2005Apr13.html?nav=hcmodule
-R
As Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, this new conservative line against the judiciary is broader than previous right-wing attacks on judges. Conservatives are now criticizing all federal judges, not just "liberal" judges. More precisely, many are upset with the very idea that judges act as a check on the other branches of government. The Supreme Court may be stacked with Republican nominees, and it may have handed the presidency to a Republican candidate who lost the popular vote, but that doesn't matter to Dobson. He still believes that Justice Anthony Kennedy is "the most dangerous man in America," and that stopping judicial tyranny is urgent.
Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, stresses that Republicans have already succeeded in their efforts to remake the judiciary. In the past 30 years under Republican presidents, the federal courts have become strikingly more conservative. No current Supreme Court justices are as liberal as some we've had in the past -- as Earl Warren, or Thurgood Marshall, or William Brennan. Yet at the same time we have more extremely conservative judges -- like Antonin Scalia, or Clarence Thomas -- than we've ever had. These judges, who favor an interpretation of the Constitution that allows no room for changing times, envision a judiciary that is less interventionist than the kind of third branch that liberals would demand.
"The real danger is not Tom DeLay talking recklessly," Sunstein says. The Schiavo case presages something scarier -- the continuing "massive transformation of the federal judiciary." http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/11/judges/index.html
Then, there was Dana Milbank’s story in the WaPost about the Right conference on "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny":
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38308-2005Apr8.html
And:
Conservatives near lock on US courts
Senators will consider new judicial nominees Thursday. GOP-appointed judges already control 10 of 13 appeals courts
As Democrats and Republicans in Washington prepare for an expected showdown over the use of filibusters to stall judicial nominees, President Bush is already well on his way to recasting the nation's federal appeals courts in a more conservative mold.
Republican appointees now constitute a majority of judges on 10 of the nation's 13 federal appeals courts. As few as three more lifetime appointments on key courts would tip the balance in favor of GOP appointees on all but one appeals court - the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The confrontation over judges heats up Thursday with the Senate Judiciary Committee expected to send a second appeals court candidate to the full Senate for a possible vote. The process is being closely watched because if either nomination triggers a filibuster, it could provide the vehicle for Republican senators to launch the so-called nuclear option, which would squelch filibusters. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p01s02-uspo.htm
Frist and the Christian Right: The Senate leader had kept his distance from talk about ousting “activist” judges and from Tom DeLay. But now he will participate in a telecast, “Justice Sunday,” which is an evangelical event focused on the Democrats’ ungodliness.
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.
Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."
Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/politics/15judges.html?ei=5094&en=0b42a55582cd9ab5&hp=&ex=1113624000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
Estate Taxes: House again passed it; Will the Senate? The NY Times article says no, the Wall Street Journal is more “optimistic”.
The toll:
· Specifically, the CBPP noted that congressional Republicans and the Bush White House want to eliminate the Estate Tax entirely by 2011. When one adds up the lost revenue and the higher interest on the national debt (Republicans admit they have no way of paying for the repeal), the “total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion.” The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that extending repeal beyond 2010 would reduce revenues by $290 billion through 2015, including $72 billion in 2015 alone.
· But the Joint Tax Committee’s estimate essentially captures only the cost of four additional years of estate tax repeal. The revenues losses associated with 10 more years of repeal — for the period from fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2021 — are much higher, about $745 billion.
· When the associated $225 billion in higher interest payments on the debt are taken into account, the total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion. http://www.cbpp.org/4-12-05tax.htm
Democrats Waking up? Talk is of their using this week to push the line that they are the true “party of reform”, that the Republicans are making the tax system more complicated and unjust. They had best be loud w/ this.
Meanwhile, Ben Nelson tries to sell out:
The fight over judicial nominations was finally starting to go the Dems way. The Senate confirmed a non-controversial nominee unanimously, Bill Frist found himself without the votes he needs to exercise the “nuclear option,” and two major conservative groups (the National Right to Work Committee and the Gun Owners of America) came out against the Republican plan.
And then hyper-moderate Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) decided to try and screw it all up with an unhelpful “compromise.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who is working on a bipartisan compromise to end the filibuster of judicial nominees, said he believes that his party’s practice of blocking confirmation votes on controversial nominees has put him and fellow Democratic centrists in politically difficult positions.
Business as Usual: Republicans and Health Care
By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans’ health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.
Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, sought to add $1.9 billion to the $80.6 billion wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill to cover costs of treating returning combat veterans for war-related injuries and to cover shortfalls in funding for VA programs.
The Bush administration sought no VA money as part of its supplemental funding request, and none was included in the version of the bill passed by the House in March. http://www.armytimes.com/print.php?f=1-292925-782283.php
Business as Usual: Cover Up
The Bush administration is impeding an investigation into the Education Department's hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams by refusing to allow key White House officials to be interviewed, a Democratic lawmaker briefed on the review said Thursday.
In addition, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is considering invoking a privilege that he said would require information to be deleted when the final version is publicly released, which is expected within days. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Education-Investigation.html?
True Believers:
Conservative House Republicans, beset with growing distrust of the Senate, are urging the House leadership to jump ahead of the Senate on Social Security reform and pass a bill based on large personal retirement accounts and no tax increases or cuts in benefits.
They also want House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House Majority Tom DeLay to say publicly that any bill sent over from the Senate that doesn't meet all these requirements will not be taken up in the House. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050413-111450-4410r.htm
Post Peak Oil: James Howard Kunstler gets us back to Energy. He notes that the Administration’s failure to prepare us “might be considered an impeachable offense”.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1113405728853&has-player=true
Michael Klare: Some of us have focused on the 14 permanent bases being readied in Iraq. The Pentagon is also relocating troops to "forward operating sites" also known as "forward operating locations," and "cooperative security locations." Get used to the lingo. Klare elaborates:
The decommissioning of older bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea and the acquisition of new facilities in other areas has been described by the White House as "the most comprehensive restructuring of US military forces overseas since the end of the Korean War." In explaining these moves, the Bush Administration emphasizes the issue of utility: Many older installations eat up vast resources but contribute little to overall combat effectiveness, and so should be closed; at the same time, new facilities are needed in areas where few American bases currently exist. But while it is certainly arguable that the closing of obsolete bases in Europe and East Asia will free resources that might be better employed somewhere else, it is also clear that a lot more is going on than mere military utility. Indeed, a close look at Pentagon statements and policy reports suggests that three other factors are at work: a new calculus of America's geopolitical interests; a shift in US strategic orientation from defensive to offensive operations; and concerns about the future reliability of long-term allies, especially those in "Old Europe."
Most significant, overall, is the revised calculation of America's geopolitical interests. During the cold war, when "containment" was the overarching strategic principle, the United States surrounded the Soviet bloc with major bases. With the end of the cold war, however, this template no longer made sense, and many of these bases lost their strategic rationale. Meanwhile, other concerns--terrorism, the pursuit of foreign oil and the rise of China--have come to preoccupy American strategists. It is these concerns that are largely driving the realignment of US bases and forces. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050425&s=klare
Why Antagonize Russia? William Pfaff notes that the bases encircle Russia
Moscow cooperates with the West at virtually every level of international relations. It supplies the West with oil, cooperates in Bush's war on terror, and has made no trouble over U.S. bases in Central Asia.
So why do we want to make an enemy of Putin?
The Russians are being subjected to a very high level of provocation. Russia is now encircled by American power. There are U.S. forces in Central Asia and the Caucasus. With the Baltic states now members of NATO, alliance aircraft are deployed on Russia's frontier. The Poles and others are anxious for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU.
The Russian government has been amazingly calm about all this, but it might one of these days lose that calm. Russia today is not the Soviet Union, but it could still find ways to be very unpleasant to those who chose to make an enemy of it. http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/12/news/edpfaff.html
Eric Rudolph, Christian, Anti-Abortion Terrorist... or Pot Smoker?
In any case, there may be a tighter connection to the murders than abortion or religion. Deborah Rudolph, Eric's sister-in-law, says he's a drug addict. According to the AP, she told the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report that in the early 1990s, he would "sleep all day, then stay up all night and eat pizza and smoke pot and watch movies by Cheech and Chong." He reportedly made as much as $60,000 selling hydroponic marijuana. That much pot is enough to make anyone paranoid.http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/ct/2003/122/22.0.html
Man, those ‘60’s were Evil…
Sports: Naming a Stadium…for the Military
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium could be renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK under the terms of a deal being negotiated by District officials and the Department of Defense, sources close to the discussions said yesterday…
On Monday, the National Guard had agreed to a deal to pay the commission about $6 million over three years for the sponsorship, but the agreement was halted by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum. They objected to a branch of the military paying to put its name on a sports building or playing field.
After city leaders met with Warner and Blum on Tuesday, negotiations resumed. Yesterday, the two sides had agreed that the Department of Defense would pay for recruiting and marketing opportunities at the stadium but that the city would not ask for money if the field is renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK. If that name change is agreed upon, the city would make it in honor of the military services, at no cost, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
They said the Department of Defense wants to pay less than the Guard would have paid for the naming rights. Money from the sponsorship will go to improving youth athletic programs in the city.
Asked whether it was appropriate to have the military's name on the field, D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said at his weekly news conference yesterday that "this has nothing to do with whether you agree or disagree with the war. I think it's actually a good fit." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51287-2005Apr13.html?nav=hcmodule
-R
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Bolton the Bully More on the “serial abuser of underlings”…but Chafee is likely to vote for him, so he’ll get committee approval.
The State Department's former intelligence chief testified Tuesday that John R. Bolton was a "serial abuser" of underlings who tried to remove an intelligence analyst who disagreed with him and was "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy."
But it appeared that the testimony of Carl W. Ford Jr., former assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had not changed any votes on Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Republicans control the panel 10 to 8 and were seen as likely to approve him. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bolton13apr13,0,2563180.story?coll=la-home-nation
DeLay Critiqued in a Red State. Louisville’s Courier-Journal
Tom DeLay is not Joe McCarthy. He does not yet have the same power or ability to inspire fear.
In any case, history does not repeat itself so neatly.
But the House majority leader is a frighteningly toxic and corrupt presence in American public life.He is also authoritarian and vengeful.
In the current one-party rule that prevails in Washington, only his fellow Republicans can take him down.
That will take guts in some cases, however, and little of that is on display. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2005504120346
Estate Taxes Disappearing.
In 1992, when heirs to the Mars Inc. fortune joined a few other wealthy families to hire the law firm Patton Boggs LLP to lobby for estate tax repeal, the joke on K Street was that few Washington sightseers had paid so much for a fruitless tour of the Capitol.
Today, the House is expected to vote to permanently repeal the estate tax, moving the Mars candy, Gallo wine and Campbell soup fortunes one step closer to a goal that once seemed quixotic at best: ending all taxation on inheritances.
"I think this train has an awful lot of momentum," said Yale University law professor Michael J. Graetz, a former senior official in the Treasury Department of President George H.W. Bush.
The propaganda has worked:
But ultimately, whether people believe the estate tax will affect them has little bearing on support for repeal. Early this year, with Soldano's money, Luntz again began polling, this time in the face of record budget deficits and lingering economic unease. More than 80 percent called the taxation of inheritances "extreme." About 64 percent said they favored "death tax" repeal. Support fell to a still-strong 56 percent when asked whether they favored repeal, even if it temporarily boosted the budget deficit.
Democrats "still don't get it," Graetz said. "The politics are still very powerful." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48025-2005Apr12?language=printer
Drug Prices: Still climbing
Wholesale prices for popular brand-name prescription drugs rose an average 7.1% in 2004, more than twice the general inflation rate, a new study commissioned by the nation's largest seniors lobby says.
The increase is the biggest in the five years that AARP, with 35 million members, has sponsored the study. It's just slightly higher than the 7% price rise in 2003. The group, which has pushed for lower drug prices, is set to release its report today. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-12-drug-prices_x.htm
Terror Threat? Tuesday newscasts trumpeted this, but as the Washington Post points out, it’s not clear if it was an idea that was abandoned over 3 years ago. The major media remain reluctant to point out that the threat has always been exaggerated/hyped.
Three British nationals who are being held on terrorism charges in the United Kingdom have been indicted in the United States on related allegations that they planned to blow up financial buildings in Washington, New York and New Jersey, according to court documents unsealed yesterday.
The four-count indictment, handed up last month in federal court in Manhattan, alleges that Dhiran Barot, Nadeem Tarmohamed and Qaisar Shaffi took part in months of methodical reconnaissance of financial targets between August 2000 and April 2001, including video surveillance in Manhattan. The alleged plot led to a controversial terrorism alert last summer for financial sectors in the three jurisdictions, amid fears that al Qaeda might be planning an attack tied to the November elections. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46550-2005Apr12.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Al-Sadr Back in play: The weekend massive demonstration is to be followed by more street protests.
Followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia preacher, said on Sunday that they would follow up a big demonstration in Baghdad with a non-violent campaign to oust US and other foreign forces from Iraq.
The Sadr loyalists, who fought intermittedly against US and Iraqi government forces through much of last year, said they would continue to organise street protests, call upon Iraq's Shia clergy to demand withdrawal, and ask their allies in parliament to introduce a motion for a pull-out.
"We have emerged from the jails of Saddam, only to enter the jails of the Americans," said Muayad al-Khazraji, a cleric, as protesters wearing US-style camouflage and orange jumpsuits acted out skits depicting the abuse of prisoners in US- supervised detention facilities. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/53fef120-a9df-11d9-aa38-00000e2511c8.html
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army as a player in Southern Iraq.
We believe Moqtada's militia is generally marginalized, and there is little to be gained from taking a military role," said Lt. Col. Bob Taylor, chief intelligence officer for the 3rd Infantry Division, which oversees Baghdad. "But it could still be a threat."
Beyond Baghdad, though, Iraqis see a new boldness in the militia in cities like Nasiriyah, Basra and Amarah, all south of the capital and all patrolled by foreign forces allied with the United States.
In Basra, the Mahdi Army is widely viewed as the force that can put more armed men in the street than any other. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35586-2005Apr7.html
Michael Klare on 'Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran,' Oil, rarely mentioned by the Administration, is the focus.
While our media is filled with stories on the Bush administration and Iran, they almost invariably focus on the Iranian nuclear program (or European negotiations and U.S. non-negotiations about the same). You could read our press for weeks at a time -- if you didn't stray onto the business pages -- and not be aware that Iran sits on a sea of oil and natural gas. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, for long stretches, a typical newspaper reader or prime-time TV news viewer, or, for that matter, an NPR listener, would have just about no way of knowing that our world runs on oil. Of course, our local gas stations are informative enough on the subject these days, so this reality is lost on few people. Still, the sort of piece that hit the front page of the British Financial Times the other day -- IMF warns on risk of ‘permanent oil shock' -- is not normally a front-page commonplace for us.
This has a certain importance when, in the British and Israeli press and on the Internet, rumors and reports abound that either the Bush administration or the Israeli government (in coordination with Bush officials) or both are planning air attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities as early as this June (with hopes of an oil-regime change in Tehran); or when the Washington Post reports on months of Iranian air-space infringement and air-defense testing on the part of American unmanned aircraft, and Seymour Hersh reports on American Special Forces (or Kurdish agents) moving in and out of Iran, again possibly in preparation for future attacks. (By the way, an interesting counter-argument against the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran appeared in the Asia Times recently.) http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2312 .'
More on Iran and Oil. Compatriot Chuck Palson adds the following link which further helps us focus on oil and not Iran’s alleged nuclear program.
Iran does not pose a threat to the United States because of its nuclear projects, its WMD, or its support to “terrorists organizations” as America claims, but in its attempt to reshape the global economic system by converting it from a petrodollar to a petro euro system. Such conversion is looked upon as a declaration of economic warfare against the US as that would drastically reduce the revenues of the American corporations and eventually might cause an economic collapse. http://www.greaterkashmir.com/full_story.asp?ItemID=2836&cat=11
Filibuster: Frist still short. No nuclear option yet, according to the Wall Street Journal
The Senate appears headed for a high-stakes showdown over the “nuclear option,” a gambit to end the Democrats’ ability to filibuster judicial nominations. But Republicans have a problem. Even with a 55-seat majority, they currently don’t have the votes to change the rules. […]
For now, though, the point may be moot as several Republicans — a mix of veterans and moderates — are resisting a hasty decision, leaving Mr. Frist two or three firm votes shy of his goal. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111326299410804062,00.html?mod=politics%5Ffirst%5Felement%5Fhs
Russ Feingold: End of presidential thoughts? He’s getting his second divorce. In our political world, that should finish the aspirations of a Democrat. But, for Republicans, who are either riding high (Rudy Giuliani) or are staging comebacks (Newt Gingrich), two divorces isn’t a problem.
U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, viewed as a possible candidate for president in 2008, said Monday that he is getting a divorce.
Feingold and his wife, Mary, issued a joint statement through the Democrat's Senate office saying they have decided to end their 14-year marriage.
"We are separating amicably, and intend to remain very good friends," the statement said.
The marriage was the second for both, who live in Middleton. Feingold, 52, has two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Feingold has two sons from hers.
Kenneth Mayer, a UW- Madison political science professor, said it's uncertain what effect his divorce and bachelor status will have on Feingold's presidential aspirations and political future.
"It's hard to predict when these kinds of things will have an effect and when they won't," Mayer said. "Obviously politicians who are divorced are pretty common. In fact, divorced people are pretty common."
Larry Sabato, A University of Virginia expert in presidential campaigns, was more blunt.
"This is the end of his presidential hopes, at least for 2008," he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
"The Democratic Party is much more tolerant of things, but a twice-divorced single man would have very little chance of being elected president," Sabato added. "That is not something that would appeal to any red state." http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=35750&ntpid=3
Wal-Mart as Good Guy. Sort of
"Certainly, we welcome any contributions toward conservation," said Eric Olson, a representative for the Sierra Club's Challenge to Sprawl Campaign, which works on sprawl and transportation issues. "But we need to look at the totality of Wal-Mart's environmental record, and we can see over the last several years there have been millions of dollars in violations and penalties."
Mr. Olson said the company spent $8.6 million in civil penalties and settlement costs, including $3.1 million it paid in civil penalties within the last year to settle charges that it had violated the Clean Water Act in nine states.
Mr. Berry said Wal-Mart's contribution was by far the biggest the foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Congress 21 years ago to funnel federal grants to environmental groups, had ever received.
It is distributing Wal-Mart's money to three nonprofit groups - the Conservation Fund, the Deschutes Basin Land Trust and the Arkansas chapter of the Nature Conservancy - that have agreed to match Wal-Mart's donation with money they raise. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/national/13walmart.html?pagewanted=print&position=
-R
The State Department's former intelligence chief testified Tuesday that John R. Bolton was a "serial abuser" of underlings who tried to remove an intelligence analyst who disagreed with him and was "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy."
But it appeared that the testimony of Carl W. Ford Jr., former assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had not changed any votes on Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Republicans control the panel 10 to 8 and were seen as likely to approve him. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bolton13apr13,0,2563180.story?coll=la-home-nation
DeLay Critiqued in a Red State. Louisville’s Courier-Journal
Tom DeLay is not Joe McCarthy. He does not yet have the same power or ability to inspire fear.
In any case, history does not repeat itself so neatly.
But the House majority leader is a frighteningly toxic and corrupt presence in American public life.He is also authoritarian and vengeful.
In the current one-party rule that prevails in Washington, only his fellow Republicans can take him down.
That will take guts in some cases, however, and little of that is on display. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2005504120346
Estate Taxes Disappearing.
In 1992, when heirs to the Mars Inc. fortune joined a few other wealthy families to hire the law firm Patton Boggs LLP to lobby for estate tax repeal, the joke on K Street was that few Washington sightseers had paid so much for a fruitless tour of the Capitol.
Today, the House is expected to vote to permanently repeal the estate tax, moving the Mars candy, Gallo wine and Campbell soup fortunes one step closer to a goal that once seemed quixotic at best: ending all taxation on inheritances.
"I think this train has an awful lot of momentum," said Yale University law professor Michael J. Graetz, a former senior official in the Treasury Department of President George H.W. Bush.
The propaganda has worked:
But ultimately, whether people believe the estate tax will affect them has little bearing on support for repeal. Early this year, with Soldano's money, Luntz again began polling, this time in the face of record budget deficits and lingering economic unease. More than 80 percent called the taxation of inheritances "extreme." About 64 percent said they favored "death tax" repeal. Support fell to a still-strong 56 percent when asked whether they favored repeal, even if it temporarily boosted the budget deficit.
Democrats "still don't get it," Graetz said. "The politics are still very powerful." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48025-2005Apr12?language=printer
Drug Prices: Still climbing
Wholesale prices for popular brand-name prescription drugs rose an average 7.1% in 2004, more than twice the general inflation rate, a new study commissioned by the nation's largest seniors lobby says.
The increase is the biggest in the five years that AARP, with 35 million members, has sponsored the study. It's just slightly higher than the 7% price rise in 2003. The group, which has pushed for lower drug prices, is set to release its report today. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-12-drug-prices_x.htm
Terror Threat? Tuesday newscasts trumpeted this, but as the Washington Post points out, it’s not clear if it was an idea that was abandoned over 3 years ago. The major media remain reluctant to point out that the threat has always been exaggerated/hyped.
Three British nationals who are being held on terrorism charges in the United Kingdom have been indicted in the United States on related allegations that they planned to blow up financial buildings in Washington, New York and New Jersey, according to court documents unsealed yesterday.
The four-count indictment, handed up last month in federal court in Manhattan, alleges that Dhiran Barot, Nadeem Tarmohamed and Qaisar Shaffi took part in months of methodical reconnaissance of financial targets between August 2000 and April 2001, including video surveillance in Manhattan. The alleged plot led to a controversial terrorism alert last summer for financial sectors in the three jurisdictions, amid fears that al Qaeda might be planning an attack tied to the November elections. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46550-2005Apr12.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Al-Sadr Back in play: The weekend massive demonstration is to be followed by more street protests.
Followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia preacher, said on Sunday that they would follow up a big demonstration in Baghdad with a non-violent campaign to oust US and other foreign forces from Iraq.
The Sadr loyalists, who fought intermittedly against US and Iraqi government forces through much of last year, said they would continue to organise street protests, call upon Iraq's Shia clergy to demand withdrawal, and ask their allies in parliament to introduce a motion for a pull-out.
"We have emerged from the jails of Saddam, only to enter the jails of the Americans," said Muayad al-Khazraji, a cleric, as protesters wearing US-style camouflage and orange jumpsuits acted out skits depicting the abuse of prisoners in US- supervised detention facilities. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/53fef120-a9df-11d9-aa38-00000e2511c8.html
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army as a player in Southern Iraq.
We believe Moqtada's militia is generally marginalized, and there is little to be gained from taking a military role," said Lt. Col. Bob Taylor, chief intelligence officer for the 3rd Infantry Division, which oversees Baghdad. "But it could still be a threat."
Beyond Baghdad, though, Iraqis see a new boldness in the militia in cities like Nasiriyah, Basra and Amarah, all south of the capital and all patrolled by foreign forces allied with the United States.
In Basra, the Mahdi Army is widely viewed as the force that can put more armed men in the street than any other. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35586-2005Apr7.html
Michael Klare on 'Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran,' Oil, rarely mentioned by the Administration, is the focus.
While our media is filled with stories on the Bush administration and Iran, they almost invariably focus on the Iranian nuclear program (or European negotiations and U.S. non-negotiations about the same). You could read our press for weeks at a time -- if you didn't stray onto the business pages -- and not be aware that Iran sits on a sea of oil and natural gas. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, for long stretches, a typical newspaper reader or prime-time TV news viewer, or, for that matter, an NPR listener, would have just about no way of knowing that our world runs on oil. Of course, our local gas stations are informative enough on the subject these days, so this reality is lost on few people. Still, the sort of piece that hit the front page of the British Financial Times the other day -- IMF warns on risk of ‘permanent oil shock' -- is not normally a front-page commonplace for us.
This has a certain importance when, in the British and Israeli press and on the Internet, rumors and reports abound that either the Bush administration or the Israeli government (in coordination with Bush officials) or both are planning air attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities as early as this June (with hopes of an oil-regime change in Tehran); or when the Washington Post reports on months of Iranian air-space infringement and air-defense testing on the part of American unmanned aircraft, and Seymour Hersh reports on American Special Forces (or Kurdish agents) moving in and out of Iran, again possibly in preparation for future attacks. (By the way, an interesting counter-argument against the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran appeared in the Asia Times recently.) http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2312 .'
More on Iran and Oil. Compatriot Chuck Palson adds the following link which further helps us focus on oil and not Iran’s alleged nuclear program.
Iran does not pose a threat to the United States because of its nuclear projects, its WMD, or its support to “terrorists organizations” as America claims, but in its attempt to reshape the global economic system by converting it from a petrodollar to a petro euro system. Such conversion is looked upon as a declaration of economic warfare against the US as that would drastically reduce the revenues of the American corporations and eventually might cause an economic collapse. http://www.greaterkashmir.com/full_story.asp?ItemID=2836&cat=11
Filibuster: Frist still short. No nuclear option yet, according to the Wall Street Journal
The Senate appears headed for a high-stakes showdown over the “nuclear option,” a gambit to end the Democrats’ ability to filibuster judicial nominations. But Republicans have a problem. Even with a 55-seat majority, they currently don’t have the votes to change the rules. […]
For now, though, the point may be moot as several Republicans — a mix of veterans and moderates — are resisting a hasty decision, leaving Mr. Frist two or three firm votes shy of his goal. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111326299410804062,00.html?mod=politics%5Ffirst%5Felement%5Fhs
Russ Feingold: End of presidential thoughts? He’s getting his second divorce. In our political world, that should finish the aspirations of a Democrat. But, for Republicans, who are either riding high (Rudy Giuliani) or are staging comebacks (Newt Gingrich), two divorces isn’t a problem.
U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, viewed as a possible candidate for president in 2008, said Monday that he is getting a divorce.
Feingold and his wife, Mary, issued a joint statement through the Democrat's Senate office saying they have decided to end their 14-year marriage.
"We are separating amicably, and intend to remain very good friends," the statement said.
The marriage was the second for both, who live in Middleton. Feingold, 52, has two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Feingold has two sons from hers.
Kenneth Mayer, a UW- Madison political science professor, said it's uncertain what effect his divorce and bachelor status will have on Feingold's presidential aspirations and political future.
"It's hard to predict when these kinds of things will have an effect and when they won't," Mayer said. "Obviously politicians who are divorced are pretty common. In fact, divorced people are pretty common."
Larry Sabato, A University of Virginia expert in presidential campaigns, was more blunt.
"This is the end of his presidential hopes, at least for 2008," he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
"The Democratic Party is much more tolerant of things, but a twice-divorced single man would have very little chance of being elected president," Sabato added. "That is not something that would appeal to any red state." http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=35750&ntpid=3
Wal-Mart as Good Guy. Sort of
"Certainly, we welcome any contributions toward conservation," said Eric Olson, a representative for the Sierra Club's Challenge to Sprawl Campaign, which works on sprawl and transportation issues. "But we need to look at the totality of Wal-Mart's environmental record, and we can see over the last several years there have been millions of dollars in violations and penalties."
Mr. Olson said the company spent $8.6 million in civil penalties and settlement costs, including $3.1 million it paid in civil penalties within the last year to settle charges that it had violated the Clean Water Act in nine states.
Mr. Berry said Wal-Mart's contribution was by far the biggest the foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Congress 21 years ago to funnel federal grants to environmental groups, had ever received.
It is distributing Wal-Mart's money to three nonprofit groups - the Conservation Fund, the Deschutes Basin Land Trust and the Arkansas chapter of the Nature Conservancy - that have agreed to match Wal-Mart's donation with money they raise. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/national/13walmart.html?pagewanted=print&position=
-R
Monday, April 11, 2005
Wal-Mart: Union Stuff Ongoing.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union called on Wal-Mart Stores yesterday to release all documents connected with accusations that its former vice chairman, Tom Coughlin, had obtained improper expense account reimbursements to finance secret anti-union activities.
The union's call for release of the materials comes two weeks after Mr. Coughlin resigned, accused by Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, of taking $100,000 to $500,000 through expense account abuses.
The company, based in Bentonville, Ark., said it had turned the matter over to the United States attorney for the Western District of Arkansas for criminal investigation. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/business/09walmart.html
Workers Losing Out: I guess one has to keep saving by shopping at Wal-Mart, since inflation is outpacing wage increases. Just kidding. The LA Times’ coverage continues to be exemplary.
This is the first time that salaries have increased more slowly than prices since the 1990-91 recession. Though salary growth has been relatively sluggish since the 2001 downturn, inflation also had stayed relatively subdued until last year, when the consumer price index rose 2.7%. But wages rose only 2.5%.
The effective 0.2-percentage-point erosion in workers' living standards occurred while the economy expanded at a healthy 4%, better than the 3% historical average.
Meanwhile, corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay increases down. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wages11apr11,0,5092199.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Social Security: Republican Tactics: Idea: Shelving Private Accounts, temporarily, trying to trap the Democrats.
Senate Republicans are considering temporarily sidetracking President Bush's plan for personal investment accounts under Social Security, hoping Democrats will then join compromise talks on legislation to restore the program's solvency.
Several GOP officials said Thursday that Republican leaders discussed the possibility privately this week, recognizing that unified Democratic opposition to the accounts has so far stalled efforts to advance the president's top domestic priority.
At the same time, these officials said GOP leaders were wary of leaving the impression they intend to abandon the president's proposal to allow younger workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes independently.
In the end, leaders remain determined to deliver what Bush wants, they added. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SOCIAL_SECURITY?SITE=IADES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
DeLay Fights Back The Republicans don’t roll over; they’ve developed a counterstrategy to seize the initiative. May 12 is the scheduled $200 a plate dinner for DeLay. Make your reservations!
Allies and friends of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) have concluded that public attention to his ethics is unlikely to abate for months to come, and they plan to try to preserve his power by launching an aggressive media strategy and calling in favors from prominent conservative leaders, according to Republicans participating in the strategy sessions.
The Republicans said the strategy combines leaks from DeLay allies about questionable Democratic trips and financial matters; denunciations of unfavorable news stories as biased, orchestrated rehashes; and swift, organized responses to journalists' inquiries.
The resistance was launched two weeks ago when DeLay flew back to Washington from Texas during Easter recess to speak to a group of about 30 conservative leaders who had gathered in the conference room of the Family Research Council for a call to arms on his behalf. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40496-2005Apr9?language=printer
…though, Shays Breaks Ranks.
"He is an absolute embarrassment to me and to the Republican Party," U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Bridgeport, told more than 50 Greenwich residents yesterday morning at Town Hall. He was in Greenwich to host a public forum, open to all political parties, on whatever pressing issues attendees were interested in discussing…
He knows that . . . if he ever runs for speaker, I get to vote on the House floor, and my 'No' vote combined with the Democrats means he will never be speaker," Shays said, drawing applause from the room. "One of the things I want to say here is that Tom DeLay will never be speaker in Congress."
"With all due respect, I can be accused of a lot of things, but supporting Tom DeLay is not one of them," Shays added. http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/local/scn-gt-shays3apr10,0,7959855.story?coll=green-news-local-headlines
Nutty Rick Santorum tells DeLay that he must explain himself.
"I think he has to come forward and lay out what he did and why he did it and let the people then judge for themselves," Santorum said. "From everything I've heard … everything he's done was according to the law." http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-delay11apr11,1,4168125.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true
Islamic Expertise still negligible Fred Kaplan laments
In the three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government funded dozens—if not hundreds—of Russian-language and Russian-studies departments not just within the military but in high schools and colleges all across America.
Now, three and a half years after Islamic fundamentalists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense is three months away from publishing an official "instruction" providing "guidance for language program management."
It's pathetic. http://slate.msn.com/id/2116330/
What’s Happening, Iraq: Demonstration An increasingly rare down note, as the demand goes, basically, ‘U.S. out, Islam good.’ Juan Cole reports
Edmund Sanders reports that the crowds in downtown Baghdad protesting the US troop presence in the country may have been as large as 300,000. If it were even half that, these would be the largest popular demonstrations in Iraq since 1958! To any extent that they show popular sentiment shifting in Shiite areas to Muqtada al-Sadr's position on the American presence, they would indicate that he is winning politically even though the US defeated his militia militarily.
Big demonstrations were also held in Ramadi and in Najaf.
In Baghad, Shaikh Mu'ayyad al-Khazraji, a Sadr aide, said that the demonstrations would continue, to pressure the parliament to demand a US withdrawal.
Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada urged his followers not to bear arms and were not to reply with gunfire if they were shot at by the Americans, saying that God would be responsible for defeating the Occupiers." http://www.juancole.com/
Hardly unrelated are subsequent re-statements of how well the counter-‘insurgency’ is going, that some troops can be projected to be withdrawn by early next year. [The NY Times generously makes it their lead Monday story.] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/politics/11military.html?
And, the new Iraqi president re-stated his faith in the American military presence. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/politics/11talabani.html
Reconstruction Trouble: Another sour note. Reconstruction is not only slow, it’s also terribly inefficient. The U.S. blames the lack of training and discipline of the Iraqis to explain infrastructure and security problems, the Iraqis cite the lack of security and slashed budgets. One result: Iraqis drinking sewage-tainted water.
Iraqi officials have crippled scores of water, sewage and electrical plants refurbished with U.S. funds by failing to maintain and operate them properly, wasting millions of American taxpayer dollars in the process, according to interviews and documents.
Hardest hit has been the effort to rebuild the country's water and sewage systems, a multibillion-dollar task considered among the most crucial components of the effort to improve daily life for Iraqis. Of more than 40 such plants run by the Iraqis, not one is being operated properly, according to Bechtel Group Inc., the contractor at work on the project. The power grid faces similar problems. U.S. officials said the Iraqis' inability to properly operate overhauled electrical plants contributed to widespread power shortages this winter. None of the 19 electrical facilities that has undergone U.S.-funded repair work is being run correctly, a senior American advisor said.
An internal memo by coalition officials in Iraq obtained by The Times says that throughout the country, renovated plants "deteriorate quickly to an alarming state of disrepair and inoperability." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/la-fg-waste10apr10,0,3572459.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Casualties Mark Benjamin, UPI/Salon, on ‘On the Media’ (NPR) describes how U.S. wounded are hidden from the U.S. public.
What the Pentagon is doing is only reporting casualties who are hurt directly by the bullets and the bombs of the enemy. So, in other words, if two soldiers are driving in Humvees, one is shot and wounded while he's driving his Humvee, he will show up as a wounded soldier. However, if the other one drives off the road and slams into a pole and breaks his neck and is paralyzed for the rest of his life, he does not show up as a casualty. The reason why that's such a strange practice, because the Pentagon's own definition of "casualty" includes anyone who is lost to the organization for medical reasons, whether that's an accident or a horrible illness that comes on in Iraq, or whether it's by the bullets and bombs of the enemy. So, what we're seeing is a low number.
The flights of wounded fly out of Iraq or Afghanistan to a hospital in Germany and then to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The Pentagon has arranged the schedule of flights so that they only land at night, usually quite late at night - you know, around 10 o'clock; sometimes much later. And then, many of the most seriously wounded go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, or if you're a Marine, possibly to Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Photography and reporters in general are barred from Walter Reed or from Bethesda, from seeing those soldiers arrive at all. And just the simple fact that the flights only arrive at night has had the effect of essentially blinding the American people from a drumbeat of wounded. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_040105_wounded.html
Civilian “casualties”- Children without Food. The BBC reports:
Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says.
Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led invasion - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.
The report was prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4395525.stm
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: Tom Englehardt looks at the “success” story that is Afghanistan, noting the rule of warlords, the flourishing drug trade and the ongoing improvements to the U.S.’s 14 airfields.
It may be the case that Afghanistan will prove the perfect Bush "democracy". It had an election and sooner or later will undoubtedly have more of them. Its resulting government remains weak, malleable, and completely dependent on American forces. The US military and our intelligence services have had a free hand in setting up various detention centers, prisons, and holding camps (where anything goes and no law rules) that add up to a foreign mini-gulag stuffed with prisoners, many not Afghan, beyond the reach of any court. Our 14 airfields and growing network of bases and outposts are now to be "upgraded" as part of a "strategic partnership" with an Afghan government that we put into power and largely control. These bases, in turn, should serve as a launching pad for controlling the larger region, and the detention and torture centers as suitable places for the unruly of the area. Afghanistan, in short, is in the process of becoming an electoral-narco-gulag-permanent-base dependency, and so qualifies as a model democracy, suitable to be spread far and wide. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GD09Ag02.html
Movement Building: Time to Leave the ‘60’s Behind American Prospect lengthy article (Kevin Mattson) that encourages the Left to drop its ‘60’s protest politics.
Expressive anti-politics is the last refuge of the powerless. Impulsive, it bursts like a flame and then burns out, to be felt only in the heart of the participant while the ruling class, unperturbed, goes on its merry way.
The Right(’s) Lessons from the ’60s
Burnout is a constant theme of 1968. We’ve heard the refrain about “tired radicals,” and the one about Yippies turning into yuppies. Even while appreciating the social movements from this time, Paul Berman (who was a part of it all) admits, “The uprisings proved amazingly unproductive in regard to conventional political or economic change.” The historian Alan Brinkley comments, “The new radicals” of 1968 “never developed the organizational or institutional skills necessary for building an enduring movement.”
Meanwhile, of course, an enduring movement was being built during the ’60s -- but it was on the right. http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=9366
Movement History: Revisiting Liberation Theology The Pope was not friendly to the mix of Marxism and the gospel which featured politically active priests championing the rights of the poor.
Although the late pope promoted freedoms and denounced war and globalization, he clamped down on a movement called "liberation theology" — and in so doing alienated Catholics who wanted the church to take a more active role in "liberating" the poor from misery and oppression. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-libtheology10apr10,0,7248531,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Frank Rich- Now, an op. ed’er, on The Culture of Death
If there's one lesson to take away from the saturation coverage of the pope, it is how relatively enlightened he was compared with the men in business suits ruling Washington. Our leaders are not only to the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine). They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of "Revelations," to the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere. This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution, John Paul in 1996 officially declared that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."
We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
Daily Show (Jon Stewart) wins [another] Peabody award (excellence in electronic media). The article notes that Dan Rather and his (fired) producer also were honored.
"The Daily Show," which combines elements of entertainment and news, was honored for its presidential election coverage, as it had been four years earlier.
"All of us at 'The Daily Show' very much appreciate the Peabody Committee's recognition of our work," Mr. Stewart said in a statement released by the show. "Because this is the first time we've ever released a statement, we'd also like to, just for the hell of it, categorically deny all charges and say that we find them both scurrilous and without merit."
Mr. Stewart may have made time for a joke, but he did not crow that in two consecutive presidential election years the Peabody judges decided that his show's presentations - which are part running gag and part droll annotation of the campaigns - were worthy of citation. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/arts/television/08peabody.html?pagewanted=all
-R
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union called on Wal-Mart Stores yesterday to release all documents connected with accusations that its former vice chairman, Tom Coughlin, had obtained improper expense account reimbursements to finance secret anti-union activities.
The union's call for release of the materials comes two weeks after Mr. Coughlin resigned, accused by Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, of taking $100,000 to $500,000 through expense account abuses.
The company, based in Bentonville, Ark., said it had turned the matter over to the United States attorney for the Western District of Arkansas for criminal investigation. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/business/09walmart.html
Workers Losing Out: I guess one has to keep saving by shopping at Wal-Mart, since inflation is outpacing wage increases. Just kidding. The LA Times’ coverage continues to be exemplary.
This is the first time that salaries have increased more slowly than prices since the 1990-91 recession. Though salary growth has been relatively sluggish since the 2001 downturn, inflation also had stayed relatively subdued until last year, when the consumer price index rose 2.7%. But wages rose only 2.5%.
The effective 0.2-percentage-point erosion in workers' living standards occurred while the economy expanded at a healthy 4%, better than the 3% historical average.
Meanwhile, corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay increases down. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wages11apr11,0,5092199.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Social Security: Republican Tactics: Idea: Shelving Private Accounts, temporarily, trying to trap the Democrats.
Senate Republicans are considering temporarily sidetracking President Bush's plan for personal investment accounts under Social Security, hoping Democrats will then join compromise talks on legislation to restore the program's solvency.
Several GOP officials said Thursday that Republican leaders discussed the possibility privately this week, recognizing that unified Democratic opposition to the accounts has so far stalled efforts to advance the president's top domestic priority.
At the same time, these officials said GOP leaders were wary of leaving the impression they intend to abandon the president's proposal to allow younger workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes independently.
In the end, leaders remain determined to deliver what Bush wants, they added. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SOCIAL_SECURITY?SITE=IADES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
DeLay Fights Back The Republicans don’t roll over; they’ve developed a counterstrategy to seize the initiative. May 12 is the scheduled $200 a plate dinner for DeLay. Make your reservations!
Allies and friends of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) have concluded that public attention to his ethics is unlikely to abate for months to come, and they plan to try to preserve his power by launching an aggressive media strategy and calling in favors from prominent conservative leaders, according to Republicans participating in the strategy sessions.
The Republicans said the strategy combines leaks from DeLay allies about questionable Democratic trips and financial matters; denunciations of unfavorable news stories as biased, orchestrated rehashes; and swift, organized responses to journalists' inquiries.
The resistance was launched two weeks ago when DeLay flew back to Washington from Texas during Easter recess to speak to a group of about 30 conservative leaders who had gathered in the conference room of the Family Research Council for a call to arms on his behalf. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40496-2005Apr9?language=printer
…though, Shays Breaks Ranks.
"He is an absolute embarrassment to me and to the Republican Party," U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Bridgeport, told more than 50 Greenwich residents yesterday morning at Town Hall. He was in Greenwich to host a public forum, open to all political parties, on whatever pressing issues attendees were interested in discussing…
He knows that . . . if he ever runs for speaker, I get to vote on the House floor, and my 'No' vote combined with the Democrats means he will never be speaker," Shays said, drawing applause from the room. "One of the things I want to say here is that Tom DeLay will never be speaker in Congress."
"With all due respect, I can be accused of a lot of things, but supporting Tom DeLay is not one of them," Shays added. http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/local/scn-gt-shays3apr10,0,7959855.story?coll=green-news-local-headlines
Nutty Rick Santorum tells DeLay that he must explain himself.
"I think he has to come forward and lay out what he did and why he did it and let the people then judge for themselves," Santorum said. "From everything I've heard … everything he's done was according to the law." http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-delay11apr11,1,4168125.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true
Islamic Expertise still negligible Fred Kaplan laments
In the three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government funded dozens—if not hundreds—of Russian-language and Russian-studies departments not just within the military but in high schools and colleges all across America.
Now, three and a half years after Islamic fundamentalists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense is three months away from publishing an official "instruction" providing "guidance for language program management."
It's pathetic. http://slate.msn.com/id/2116330/
What’s Happening, Iraq: Demonstration An increasingly rare down note, as the demand goes, basically, ‘U.S. out, Islam good.’ Juan Cole reports
Edmund Sanders reports that the crowds in downtown Baghdad protesting the US troop presence in the country may have been as large as 300,000. If it were even half that, these would be the largest popular demonstrations in Iraq since 1958! To any extent that they show popular sentiment shifting in Shiite areas to Muqtada al-Sadr's position on the American presence, they would indicate that he is winning politically even though the US defeated his militia militarily.
Big demonstrations were also held in Ramadi and in Najaf.
In Baghad, Shaikh Mu'ayyad al-Khazraji, a Sadr aide, said that the demonstrations would continue, to pressure the parliament to demand a US withdrawal.
Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada urged his followers not to bear arms and were not to reply with gunfire if they were shot at by the Americans, saying that God would be responsible for defeating the Occupiers." http://www.juancole.com/
Hardly unrelated are subsequent re-statements of how well the counter-‘insurgency’ is going, that some troops can be projected to be withdrawn by early next year. [The NY Times generously makes it their lead Monday story.] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/politics/11military.html?
And, the new Iraqi president re-stated his faith in the American military presence. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/politics/11talabani.html
Reconstruction Trouble: Another sour note. Reconstruction is not only slow, it’s also terribly inefficient. The U.S. blames the lack of training and discipline of the Iraqis to explain infrastructure and security problems, the Iraqis cite the lack of security and slashed budgets. One result: Iraqis drinking sewage-tainted water.
Iraqi officials have crippled scores of water, sewage and electrical plants refurbished with U.S. funds by failing to maintain and operate them properly, wasting millions of American taxpayer dollars in the process, according to interviews and documents.
Hardest hit has been the effort to rebuild the country's water and sewage systems, a multibillion-dollar task considered among the most crucial components of the effort to improve daily life for Iraqis. Of more than 40 such plants run by the Iraqis, not one is being operated properly, according to Bechtel Group Inc., the contractor at work on the project. The power grid faces similar problems. U.S. officials said the Iraqis' inability to properly operate overhauled electrical plants contributed to widespread power shortages this winter. None of the 19 electrical facilities that has undergone U.S.-funded repair work is being run correctly, a senior American advisor said.
An internal memo by coalition officials in Iraq obtained by The Times says that throughout the country, renovated plants "deteriorate quickly to an alarming state of disrepair and inoperability." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/la-fg-waste10apr10,0,3572459.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Casualties Mark Benjamin, UPI/Salon, on ‘On the Media’ (NPR) describes how U.S. wounded are hidden from the U.S. public.
What the Pentagon is doing is only reporting casualties who are hurt directly by the bullets and the bombs of the enemy. So, in other words, if two soldiers are driving in Humvees, one is shot and wounded while he's driving his Humvee, he will show up as a wounded soldier. However, if the other one drives off the road and slams into a pole and breaks his neck and is paralyzed for the rest of his life, he does not show up as a casualty. The reason why that's such a strange practice, because the Pentagon's own definition of "casualty" includes anyone who is lost to the organization for medical reasons, whether that's an accident or a horrible illness that comes on in Iraq, or whether it's by the bullets and bombs of the enemy. So, what we're seeing is a low number.
The flights of wounded fly out of Iraq or Afghanistan to a hospital in Germany and then to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The Pentagon has arranged the schedule of flights so that they only land at night, usually quite late at night - you know, around 10 o'clock; sometimes much later. And then, many of the most seriously wounded go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, or if you're a Marine, possibly to Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Photography and reporters in general are barred from Walter Reed or from Bethesda, from seeing those soldiers arrive at all. And just the simple fact that the flights only arrive at night has had the effect of essentially blinding the American people from a drumbeat of wounded. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_040105_wounded.html
Civilian “casualties”- Children without Food. The BBC reports:
Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says.
Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led invasion - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.
The report was prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4395525.stm
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: Tom Englehardt looks at the “success” story that is Afghanistan, noting the rule of warlords, the flourishing drug trade and the ongoing improvements to the U.S.’s 14 airfields.
It may be the case that Afghanistan will prove the perfect Bush "democracy". It had an election and sooner or later will undoubtedly have more of them. Its resulting government remains weak, malleable, and completely dependent on American forces. The US military and our intelligence services have had a free hand in setting up various detention centers, prisons, and holding camps (where anything goes and no law rules) that add up to a foreign mini-gulag stuffed with prisoners, many not Afghan, beyond the reach of any court. Our 14 airfields and growing network of bases and outposts are now to be "upgraded" as part of a "strategic partnership" with an Afghan government that we put into power and largely control. These bases, in turn, should serve as a launching pad for controlling the larger region, and the detention and torture centers as suitable places for the unruly of the area. Afghanistan, in short, is in the process of becoming an electoral-narco-gulag-permanent-base dependency, and so qualifies as a model democracy, suitable to be spread far and wide. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GD09Ag02.html
Movement Building: Time to Leave the ‘60’s Behind American Prospect lengthy article (Kevin Mattson) that encourages the Left to drop its ‘60’s protest politics.
Expressive anti-politics is the last refuge of the powerless. Impulsive, it bursts like a flame and then burns out, to be felt only in the heart of the participant while the ruling class, unperturbed, goes on its merry way.
The Right(’s) Lessons from the ’60s
Burnout is a constant theme of 1968. We’ve heard the refrain about “tired radicals,” and the one about Yippies turning into yuppies. Even while appreciating the social movements from this time, Paul Berman (who was a part of it all) admits, “The uprisings proved amazingly unproductive in regard to conventional political or economic change.” The historian Alan Brinkley comments, “The new radicals” of 1968 “never developed the organizational or institutional skills necessary for building an enduring movement.”
Meanwhile, of course, an enduring movement was being built during the ’60s -- but it was on the right. http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=9366
Movement History: Revisiting Liberation Theology The Pope was not friendly to the mix of Marxism and the gospel which featured politically active priests championing the rights of the poor.
Although the late pope promoted freedoms and denounced war and globalization, he clamped down on a movement called "liberation theology" — and in so doing alienated Catholics who wanted the church to take a more active role in "liberating" the poor from misery and oppression. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-libtheology10apr10,0,7248531,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Frank Rich- Now, an op. ed’er, on The Culture of Death
If there's one lesson to take away from the saturation coverage of the pope, it is how relatively enlightened he was compared with the men in business suits ruling Washington. Our leaders are not only to the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine). They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of "Revelations," to the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere. This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution, John Paul in 1996 officially declared that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."
We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
Daily Show (Jon Stewart) wins [another] Peabody award (excellence in electronic media). The article notes that Dan Rather and his (fired) producer also were honored.
"The Daily Show," which combines elements of entertainment and news, was honored for its presidential election coverage, as it had been four years earlier.
"All of us at 'The Daily Show' very much appreciate the Peabody Committee's recognition of our work," Mr. Stewart said in a statement released by the show. "Because this is the first time we've ever released a statement, we'd also like to, just for the hell of it, categorically deny all charges and say that we find them both scurrilous and without merit."
Mr. Stewart may have made time for a joke, but he did not crow that in two consecutive presidential election years the Peabody judges decided that his show's presentations - which are part running gag and part droll annotation of the campaigns - were worthy of citation. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/arts/television/08peabody.html?pagewanted=all
-R
