Friday, July 15, 2005
Rove, aka, Traitorgate (or whatever to call this)
What is this about? The media tend to reduce such to personalities, fitting the Republican spin. Was Rove bad, or is he being unfairly slimed? They’re reluctant to view it as being an Abuse of Power, the White House’s machinery being used to quash people. And it certainly doesn’t want it connected to Iraq. After all, that’s what this is about- silencing someone who challenged the propaganda that got us into war. Joe Wilson makes this clear in all of his appearances. It's all about Iraq. The Downing Street Memo is further proof that the Brits knew we would invade regardless of the evidence and Wilson challenged the lie about Niger uranium and the aluminum tubes.
The WaPost’s Richard Cohen is on it.
Washington is electrified with the abundant energy of buzz from a scandal -- speculation about Rove, about Bush, about Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby. Who leaked? Who may have lied? How did Novak slip the noose? But the real scandal is the ongoing mess in Iraq, the murder just the other day of innocent children (is there any other kind?) and the false notion that, somehow, taking out Hussein would make us all safer. London gives the lie to that. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071301989.html
Eric Alterman addresses this as well
In the sorry spectacle of the ongoing Karl Rove/Judith Miller/Matt Cooper episode, it's easy to forget just what inspired this whole tawdry mess. Remember, it all dates back to 2002 and early 2003 when the Bush administration was trying to make its weak case for war in Iraq look stronger. This made it necessary, according to the judgment of Rove, his accomplices, and their journalistic patsy, Robert Novak, to engage in a campaign to smear Joe Wilson, who was dispatched by the CIA to Africa to investigate George W. Bush's false assertions that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger for use in nuclear weapons.
When Wilson came back and cast doubt on the claims—going public in The New York Times when the administration continued to stick to the story he had personally investigated and discovered to be false—the Bush team pushed back hard, reportedly leaking to Bob Novak and several other journalists that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA and got him the assignment. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=885973
What’s at Stake: Reminder: This leak by a government official could constitute a felony. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 states that a federal employee with access to classified information who is convicted of making an unauthorized disclosure about a covert agent faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines. It merely requires an act of disclosure.
What’s to happen? The Republicans remains confident, that their control of government will enable them to stonewall. And, they seek to change the subject, so that the coming debate about the next Supreme Court Justice will become The Story, and media interest in Rove will fade.
The Goal: Have Bush fire Rove? Again, Bush and the Iraq war lies should be the target. Besides, it’s hardly a likely scenario. I’m not the first to wonder if that would be like having Pinocchio fire Geppetto.
The Right Counter-Attack: The charges would be laughable if they didn’t have the power. Recall the absurdity of so much put forward by others who have used the big lie. But, no, I won’t bring up Josef Goebbels.
There is their technique of attacking the opponent’s strength, which usually has worked, an inversion that finds Rove the heroic whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson and which hangs Cooper and Wilson as lying scoundrels. All of their spokespeople utter the RNC Talking Points. It was hardly surprising to hear Bush use the same wording as spokesman McClellan.
Newt Gingrich stayed on the Talking Points on the Today show: Rove didn’t say her name and is being smeared; Wilson lied when he claimed that Cheney sent him and/or authorized his Africa trip. [Wilson never made the claim].
They go after Matt Cooper as well. Fitzgerald will get ‘his’, when necessary.
Rove lawyer Robert Luskin: "Cooper's truthful testimony today will not call into question the accuracy or completeness of anything Rove has previously said to the prosecutor or the grand jury." And, that Cooper was spinning (the truth) “in a pretty ugly fashion.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5139995,00.html
Sean Hannity: Cooper ‘set Rove up’, and David Brooks, on NPR, repeated that ‘the investigation’s still on-going’, it’s all a “frenzy”, Wilson is lying and repeated many Administration lies and that it’s so ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4754569
The Wall Street Journal take: "The White House political guru deserves a prize" for telling the truth and "exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson as his wife."
Rep. Peter King asserts that the Media “should be shot”, Rove is showing guts by challenging Wilson’s account, and the Republicans should “fire enough bullets” till the Supreme Court story overwhelms the Rove mess.
And, they’re going after critics in the Senate: Harry Reid introduced an amendment to the homeland security appropriations that would prevent anyone who discloses the identity of a covert CIA operative from having a security clearance. They countered with their own, which would strip security access from any senator who repeated a statement by an FBI agent which was subsequently used as "propaganda" by America's enemies. In other words, the law is targeted at the likes of Sen. Durbin, making it against the law to say what he said last month.
The text of the so-called 'Frist Amendment':
"Any federal officeholder who makes reference to a classified Federal Bureau of Investigation report on the floor of the United States Senate, or any federal officeholder that makes a statement based on a FBI agent's comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations thereby putting our servicemen and women at risk, shall not be permitted access to such information or to hold a security clearance for access to such information."
Other Republican Testimonials to Rove http://www.gop.com/news/Read.aspx?ID=5627
What’s Happening, Iraq: Fallujah: Four months after the allegedly successful cleansing of the city, the Fallujah is again embattled. The army is under-trained and hot-headed, unable to halt bomb-making and questionably gaining the support of the populace.
But the insurgency is rising from the rubble nevertheless, eight months after the American military killed as many as 1,500 Iraqis in a costly invasion that fanned anti-American passions across Iraq and the Arab world.
Somewhere in the bowels of Falluja, the former guerrilla stronghold 35 miles west of Baghdad, where four American contractors were killed in an ambush, and the bodies of two were hanged from a bridge, in March 2004, insurgents are building suicide car bombs again. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/international/middleeast/15falluja.html?
Anti-missiles on airliners: Testing, testing. Lasers to divert missiles, years away; worth it? Many doubt…
The government will begin testing anti-missile equipment on three airliners next month, a first step toward what could be the most expensive security upgrade ever ordered for the nation's aviation system.
Both Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems will rig out-of-service planes with laser defense systems designed to misdirect shoulder-fired missiles, said John Kubricky, director of the Department of Homeland Security's systems engineering and development office. Test results will be sent to Congress early next year.
It could take years before passenger planes carry protection against missiles, a weapon terrorists might use to shoot down jets and cause economic havoc in the airline industry. The tests will help the nation's leaders decide whether they should install laser systems on all 6,800 aircraft in the U.S. airline fleet at a cost of at least $6 billion. http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050714/1a_lede14_dom.art.htm
Terror Allocation: Pork, not Security NY Times editorial:
This was a sad week for the war on terror. The Senate voted, disgracefully, to shift homeland security money from high-risk areas to low-risk ones—a step that is likely to mean less money to defend New York and California against terrorism and more for states like Wyoming. Before the vote, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff made a powerful appeal to the senators to distribute the money based on risk. But the Senate, led by Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and other small-state representatives, put political pork ahead of national security. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/opinion/opinionspecial/14thu1.html
Rehnquist Retirement / Death Watch. Not yet.
"I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits."
Word has it that he was tired of the media encamped on his street.
Venezuela: Much. Michael Parenti’s account of his recent visit, noting gains in health care, the elimination of middlemen, and:
In Venezuela over 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Before Chavez, most of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist. Their children never went to school, since they could not afford the annual fees. The neoliberal market “adjustments” of the 1980s and 1990s only made things worse, cutting social spending and eliminating subsidies in consumer goods. Successive Administrations did nothing about the rampant corruption and nothing about the growing gap between rich and poor, the growing malnutrition and desperation.
Far from ruining the country, here are some of the good things the Chavez government has accomplished:
A land reform program designed to assist small farmers and the landless poor has been instituted—this past March a large landed estate owned by a British beef company was occupied by agrarian workers for farming purposes
Education is now free (right through to university level), causing a dramatic increase in grade school enrollment
The government has set up a marine conservation program and is taking steps to protect the land and fishing rights of indigenous peoples
Special banks now assist small enterprises, worker cooperatives, and farmers
Attempts to further privatize the state-run oil industry—80 percent of which is still publicly owned—have been halted and limits have been placed on foreign capital penetration
Chavez kicked out U.S. military advisors and prohibited overflights by U.S. military aircraft engaged in counterinsurgency in Colombia http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2005/parenti0705.html
Parenti also provides some working definitions:
A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable distribution of social resources and human services and who supports the kinds of programs that the Chavez government is putting in place. (Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to advance the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.) The term “leftist” is frequently bandied about in the U.S. media, but seldom defined. The power of the label is in its remaining undefined, allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact, which precludes rational examination of its political content.
Meanwhile Chavez’s opponents, who staged an illegal and unconstitutional coup in April 2002 against the democratically elected government, are depicted in the U.S. media as champions of “pro-democratic” and “pro-West” governance. We are talking about the free-market plutocrats and corporate-military leaders of the privileged social order who killed more people in the 48 hours they held power in 2002 than were ever harmed by Chavez in his years of rule.
-R
What is this about? The media tend to reduce such to personalities, fitting the Republican spin. Was Rove bad, or is he being unfairly slimed? They’re reluctant to view it as being an Abuse of Power, the White House’s machinery being used to quash people. And it certainly doesn’t want it connected to Iraq. After all, that’s what this is about- silencing someone who challenged the propaganda that got us into war. Joe Wilson makes this clear in all of his appearances. It's all about Iraq. The Downing Street Memo is further proof that the Brits knew we would invade regardless of the evidence and Wilson challenged the lie about Niger uranium and the aluminum tubes.
The WaPost’s Richard Cohen is on it.
Washington is electrified with the abundant energy of buzz from a scandal -- speculation about Rove, about Bush, about Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby. Who leaked? Who may have lied? How did Novak slip the noose? But the real scandal is the ongoing mess in Iraq, the murder just the other day of innocent children (is there any other kind?) and the false notion that, somehow, taking out Hussein would make us all safer. London gives the lie to that. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071301989.html
Eric Alterman addresses this as well
In the sorry spectacle of the ongoing Karl Rove/Judith Miller/Matt Cooper episode, it's easy to forget just what inspired this whole tawdry mess. Remember, it all dates back to 2002 and early 2003 when the Bush administration was trying to make its weak case for war in Iraq look stronger. This made it necessary, according to the judgment of Rove, his accomplices, and their journalistic patsy, Robert Novak, to engage in a campaign to smear Joe Wilson, who was dispatched by the CIA to Africa to investigate George W. Bush's false assertions that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger for use in nuclear weapons.
When Wilson came back and cast doubt on the claims—going public in The New York Times when the administration continued to stick to the story he had personally investigated and discovered to be false—the Bush team pushed back hard, reportedly leaking to Bob Novak and several other journalists that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA and got him the assignment. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=885973
What’s at Stake: Reminder: This leak by a government official could constitute a felony. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 states that a federal employee with access to classified information who is convicted of making an unauthorized disclosure about a covert agent faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines. It merely requires an act of disclosure.
What’s to happen? The Republicans remains confident, that their control of government will enable them to stonewall. And, they seek to change the subject, so that the coming debate about the next Supreme Court Justice will become The Story, and media interest in Rove will fade.
The Goal: Have Bush fire Rove? Again, Bush and the Iraq war lies should be the target. Besides, it’s hardly a likely scenario. I’m not the first to wonder if that would be like having Pinocchio fire Geppetto.
The Right Counter-Attack: The charges would be laughable if they didn’t have the power. Recall the absurdity of so much put forward by others who have used the big lie. But, no, I won’t bring up Josef Goebbels.
There is their technique of attacking the opponent’s strength, which usually has worked, an inversion that finds Rove the heroic whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson and which hangs Cooper and Wilson as lying scoundrels. All of their spokespeople utter the RNC Talking Points. It was hardly surprising to hear Bush use the same wording as spokesman McClellan.
Newt Gingrich stayed on the Talking Points on the Today show: Rove didn’t say her name and is being smeared; Wilson lied when he claimed that Cheney sent him and/or authorized his Africa trip. [Wilson never made the claim].
They go after Matt Cooper as well. Fitzgerald will get ‘his’, when necessary.
Rove lawyer Robert Luskin: "Cooper's truthful testimony today will not call into question the accuracy or completeness of anything Rove has previously said to the prosecutor or the grand jury." And, that Cooper was spinning (the truth) “in a pretty ugly fashion.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5139995,00.html
Sean Hannity: Cooper ‘set Rove up’, and David Brooks, on NPR, repeated that ‘the investigation’s still on-going’, it’s all a “frenzy”, Wilson is lying and repeated many Administration lies and that it’s so ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4754569
The Wall Street Journal take: "The White House political guru deserves a prize" for telling the truth and "exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson as his wife."
Rep. Peter King asserts that the Media “should be shot”, Rove is showing guts by challenging Wilson’s account, and the Republicans should “fire enough bullets” till the Supreme Court story overwhelms the Rove mess.
And, they’re going after critics in the Senate: Harry Reid introduced an amendment to the homeland security appropriations that would prevent anyone who discloses the identity of a covert CIA operative from having a security clearance. They countered with their own, which would strip security access from any senator who repeated a statement by an FBI agent which was subsequently used as "propaganda" by America's enemies. In other words, the law is targeted at the likes of Sen. Durbin, making it against the law to say what he said last month.
The text of the so-called 'Frist Amendment':
"Any federal officeholder who makes reference to a classified Federal Bureau of Investigation report on the floor of the United States Senate, or any federal officeholder that makes a statement based on a FBI agent's comments which is used as propaganda by terrorist organizations thereby putting our servicemen and women at risk, shall not be permitted access to such information or to hold a security clearance for access to such information."
Other Republican Testimonials to Rove http://www.gop.com/news/Read.aspx?ID=5627
What’s Happening, Iraq: Fallujah: Four months after the allegedly successful cleansing of the city, the Fallujah is again embattled. The army is under-trained and hot-headed, unable to halt bomb-making and questionably gaining the support of the populace.
But the insurgency is rising from the rubble nevertheless, eight months after the American military killed as many as 1,500 Iraqis in a costly invasion that fanned anti-American passions across Iraq and the Arab world.
Somewhere in the bowels of Falluja, the former guerrilla stronghold 35 miles west of Baghdad, where four American contractors were killed in an ambush, and the bodies of two were hanged from a bridge, in March 2004, insurgents are building suicide car bombs again. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/international/middleeast/15falluja.html?
Anti-missiles on airliners: Testing, testing. Lasers to divert missiles, years away; worth it? Many doubt…
The government will begin testing anti-missile equipment on three airliners next month, a first step toward what could be the most expensive security upgrade ever ordered for the nation's aviation system.
Both Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems will rig out-of-service planes with laser defense systems designed to misdirect shoulder-fired missiles, said John Kubricky, director of the Department of Homeland Security's systems engineering and development office. Test results will be sent to Congress early next year.
It could take years before passenger planes carry protection against missiles, a weapon terrorists might use to shoot down jets and cause economic havoc in the airline industry. The tests will help the nation's leaders decide whether they should install laser systems on all 6,800 aircraft in the U.S. airline fleet at a cost of at least $6 billion. http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050714/1a_lede14_dom.art.htm
Terror Allocation: Pork, not Security NY Times editorial:
This was a sad week for the war on terror. The Senate voted, disgracefully, to shift homeland security money from high-risk areas to low-risk ones—a step that is likely to mean less money to defend New York and California against terrorism and more for states like Wyoming. Before the vote, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff made a powerful appeal to the senators to distribute the money based on risk. But the Senate, led by Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and other small-state representatives, put political pork ahead of national security. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/opinion/opinionspecial/14thu1.html
Rehnquist Retirement / Death Watch. Not yet.
"I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits."
Word has it that he was tired of the media encamped on his street.
Venezuela: Much. Michael Parenti’s account of his recent visit, noting gains in health care, the elimination of middlemen, and:
In Venezuela over 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Before Chavez, most of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist. Their children never went to school, since they could not afford the annual fees. The neoliberal market “adjustments” of the 1980s and 1990s only made things worse, cutting social spending and eliminating subsidies in consumer goods. Successive Administrations did nothing about the rampant corruption and nothing about the growing gap between rich and poor, the growing malnutrition and desperation.
Far from ruining the country, here are some of the good things the Chavez government has accomplished:
A land reform program designed to assist small farmers and the landless poor has been instituted—this past March a large landed estate owned by a British beef company was occupied by agrarian workers for farming purposes
Education is now free (right through to university level), causing a dramatic increase in grade school enrollment
The government has set up a marine conservation program and is taking steps to protect the land and fishing rights of indigenous peoples
Special banks now assist small enterprises, worker cooperatives, and farmers
Attempts to further privatize the state-run oil industry—80 percent of which is still publicly owned—have been halted and limits have been placed on foreign capital penetration
Chavez kicked out U.S. military advisors and prohibited overflights by U.S. military aircraft engaged in counterinsurgency in Colombia http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2005/parenti0705.html
Parenti also provides some working definitions:
A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable distribution of social resources and human services and who supports the kinds of programs that the Chavez government is putting in place. (Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to advance the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.) The term “leftist” is frequently bandied about in the U.S. media, but seldom defined. The power of the label is in its remaining undefined, allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact, which precludes rational examination of its political content.
Meanwhile Chavez’s opponents, who staged an illegal and unconstitutional coup in April 2002 against the democratically elected government, are depicted in the U.S. media as champions of “pro-democratic” and “pro-West” governance. We are talking about the free-market plutocrats and corporate-military leaders of the privileged social order who killed more people in the 48 hours they held power in 2002 than were ever harmed by Chavez in his years of rule.
-R
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Rove: Still unclear what’s possible. Perhaps perjury is the most to expect, as it remains unclear whether Rove knew V. Plame was undercover. But, the Administration should be the target, not ‘merely’ Bush’s Brain.
The Times termed it “often hostile” questioning, the WaPost referred to the "most aggressive questioning a White House briefing in recent memory". Scott McClellan could only repeat, "No one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States," and "I think the way to be most helpful is to not get into commenting on it while it is an ongoing investigation."
It was very different in the past. Samples:
QUESTION: Wilson now believes that the person who did this was Karl Rove . . . Did Karl Rove tell that . . .
McCLELLAN: I haven't heard that. That's just totally ridiculous. But we've already addressed this issue. If I could find out who anonymous people were, I would. I just said, it's totally ridiculous.
QUESTION: But did Karl Rove do it?
McCLELLAN: I said, it's totally ridiculous.
Scott McClellan Press Briefing September 16, 2003
QUESTION: Has the President either asked Karl Rove to assure him that he had nothing to do with this; or did Karl Rove go to the President to assure him that he . . .
McCLELLAN: I don't think he needs that. I think I've spoken clearly to this publicly . . . I've just said there's no truth to it.
QUESTION: Yes, but I'm just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President, or if he just talked to you, and you're here at this . . .
McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.
QUESTION: How does he know that?
McCLELLAN: The President knows.
Scott McClellan Press Gaggle September 29, 2003
QUESTION: Weeks ago, when you were first asked whether Mr. Rove had the conversation with Robert Novak that produced the column, you dismissed it as ridiculous. And I wanted just to make sure, at that time, had you talked to Karl?
McCLELLAN: I've made it very clear, from the beginning, that it is totally ridiculous. I've known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask Karl, because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct.
QUESTION: Can you say for the record whether Mr. Rove possessed the information about Mr. Wilson's wife, but merely did not talk to anybody about it?
McCLELLAN: I don't know whether or not -- I mean, I'm sure he probably saw the same media reports everybody else in this room has.
QUESTION: When you talked to Mr. Rove, did you discuss, did you ever have this information?
McCLELLAN: We're going down a lot of different roads here. I've made it very clear that he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was.
Scott McClellan Press Briefing September 29, 2003
Full text of this week’s McClellan’s press briefings at: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/11/briefing-711/
The Nation’s David Corn, amongst others, had this figured out 2 years ago:
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=823
Bush not talking
"President Bush, at an Oval Office photo opportunity Tuesday, was asked directly whether he would fire Rove — in keeping with a pledge in June, 2004, to dismiss any leakers in the case. The president did not respond." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050712/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_leak_investigation_14;_ylt=AoX9PxHjle3Ykxqrs4KQ.ktZJ_wA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
RNC Response: Ken Mehlman, the Chair, is the name attached to an embarrassing list of old Republican charges / positions re the Plame – Wilson- Niger episode. The basic statement:
It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, Moveon wing of the party. The bottom line is Karl Rove was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise and the Democrats are engaging in blatant partisan political attacks."
http://www.rnc.org/News/Read.aspx?ID=5619
The apparent RNC point people for defending Rove are relative lightweights- Sens. Cornyn and Coleman, Rep. Peter King.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Watergate question of ‘What did the President know, and when did he know it?
Democrats’ Response: Why go after Rove? Just ask the above question. Rove may be Bush’s Brain, but he’s not the prez. It wouldn’t be shocking to learn that Bush hardly knew him, as per his extinguished relationship w/ ‘Kenny Boy’ Lay.
"The president should immediately suspend Karl Rove's security clearances and shut him down by shutting him out of classified meetings or discussions," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (news, bio, voting record), a New Jersey Democrat.
"It is time for the President to keep his word. Karl Rove should be fired and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," said Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York. Several other Democrats have also called on Rove to explain his role or resign.
Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), a California Democrat and the ranking minority member of the House Government Reform Committee, called for a congressional hearing to hear testimony from Rove, who is widely seen as the architect of Bush's election victories. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/bush_leak_dc&printer=1;_ylt=AgJtHHLRYGf3McokhjTqlIYb.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
More lawlessness:
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) has been acting increasingly entitled, if not bizarre. The latest involved a Chicago drug case. Note: Chicago is not in Wisconsin.
In an extraordinary move, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee privately demanded last month that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago change its decision in a narcotics case because he didn't believe a drug courier got a harsh enough prison term.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), in a five-page letter dated June 23 to Chief Judge Joel Flaum, asserted that a June 16 decision by a three-judge appeals court panel was wrong.
He demanded "a prompt response" as to what steps Flaum would take "to rectify the panel's actions" in a case where a drug courier in a Chicago police corruption case received a 97-month prison sentence instead of the at least 120 months required by a drug-conspiracy statute. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0507100352jul10,1,5787813.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Texas: Felony charges for local Republicans? From the New Statesman:
"State District Judge Bob Perkins today said he believes two officials with Texans for a Republican Majority should stand trial on felony charges of money laundering." http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/07/13trmpac_me.html
Zell Miller as thief The Macon Telegraph reports that Miller stole $80K upon leaving office as governor, that he pocketed funds earmarked for entertainment et al at the Governor’s mansion and took the remainder as “unused leave.’ Miller’s defense: ‘No one said I couldn’t.’: http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/opinion/12088562.htm
London: Terrorists recruited: The Times of London reports on a British government dossier that was leaked to them that notes that many young Brits are turning to terrorism, that they "perceive a 'double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US."
AL-QAEDA is secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in this country, leaked Whitehall documents reveal.
A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.
Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other. The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.
A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier — Young Muslims and Extremism — prepared for the prime minister last year, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, revealed separately last night that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-20749-1688872-20749,00.html
The long-developing and now burgeoning Moslem presence in western Europe Excellent Wall Street Journal series
Europe is undergoing a massive population shift -- some say the largest in more than a millennium -- as Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa cross the Mediterranean in search of work and a better life. The Muslim population of Europe is increasing dramatically; in countries like France, it is already about six million, or 10% of the total, and could easily double in percentage terms in the coming 20 years.
Declining birthrates mean that Europe needs these immigrants to stay vibrant. And indeed, many of them have integrated successfully, gaining education, wealth and prestige. Yet across the continent, some of Europe's Muslims are drifting off into separate troubled societies. In some European cities, nearly half of Muslim youths drop out of high school and unemployment rates are high. Racism is on the rise, helping to drive Muslims back into their communities. The situation was crystallized in a report last year by the French domestic intelligence agency, which surveyed 630 communities with a heavy concentration of Muslim migrants. Half of them, the report said, are "ghettoized" along religious lines. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112103551842081687,00.html
Oh, Rail Transit? Sure!
The Senate is having second thoughts about cutting mass-transit security funding after last week's London bombings.
As lawmakers began debate yesterday on $31 billion in 2006 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the terrorist attacks Thursday on three crowded subway trains and a double-decker bus provided a stark backdrop to complaints from urban lawmakers that mass transit gets short shrift in funding compared with air travel.
Last month, the Senate Appropriations Committee cut mass-transit security funding for the coming year by $50 million from this year's $150 million level. The spending bill's Republican authors said they won't object to adding more to secure rail and bus systems, but they cautioned that even with the extra money it could be a while before the effects are seen. That's because the government has been slow in releasing grants authorized for the current fiscal year -- while billions in other security funds remain untapped. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/AR2005071101364_pf.html
Bush Bump: Slight, predictable, temporary:
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. July 7-10, 2005
"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?" If "Depends": "Overall, do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?"
Approve: 47% (42% last month)
Disapprove: 46% (49%)
Unsure: 7% (10%) http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm
Tax Receipts Up: Happy talk re Deficit Shrinking:
We’ll hear about this for the balance of the year. Some reality to it, short-term, as corporate tax numbers are up, as corporate income is up. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/business/13deficit.html
Anticipating what’s to come, Paul Krugman issued a warning in his last column. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html?
Single Payer Universal Health Care: Interest? Massachusetts bill hearing, July 20
A push for universal health coverage is being rekindled in some states by the soaring cost of health care and the lack of political support in Washington for federal changes.
Advocates of a single-payer system — where the government would collect taxes and cover everyone, similar to programs in Canada and across Europe — have introduced bills in at least 18 state legislatures. Some are symbolic gestures, but heated debate is taking place in California and Vermont.
In Ohio, doctors, union officials and religious leaders are gathering signatures to get a single-payer health system placed on a ballot next year.
"The level of misery with private insurers is rising, and that's why we're seeing this increased activity," said Larry Levitt, vice president of the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation, which analyzes health care issues. "But whether one state can succeed, I don't know."
"There's no other solution out there," said David Pavlick, a member of the United Auto Workers in Cleveland, which has endorsed the Ohio campaign. "The system we have now is immoral, it's foundering and it's on its last legs."…
In any event, voters are still leery. A Kaiser Foundation poll released earlier this year found that 55 percent of Americans opposed a single-payer health system. Thirty-seven percent favored it.
Knowing that, some states are taking incremental approaches.
Maine started enrolling people this year in a state-private program that offers affordable health coverage to small businesses and families. The goal is to bring coverage to the 130,000 Mainers who lack it by 2009.
"It's really going to the states to push health care reform along," said Janne Hellgren, coordinator for a universal health care movement in Massachusetts. "Washington just isn't willing to change the status quo." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050710/ap_on_he_me/health_care_push&printer=1;_ylt=AuWTEfga4UgXLZMyNxxKXU5a24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
Living with ‘oil shocks’ ‘Peak Oil’? Who cares?!
The Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian revolution in 1978-79 exposed America's vulnerability to powerful forces outside its control, forces that sent fuel prices to record levels, prompted anger over gas lines and led to bookend recessions that defined a decade of economic turmoil.
By 1980, the energy crisis and the inflation it spawned had left Americans in a vindictive mood, contributing to the re-election defeat of President Jimmy Carter, who had promised to wage the "moral equivalent of war" against dependence on foreign oil.
But the latest escalation in oil prices - to as much as $60 today from less than $30 a barrel a little more than two years ago - has produced a much more limited response. Energy legislation that President Bush is pressing Congress to pass this summer would bring little relief. And while Americans say in polls that they are deeply disturbed by high gasoline prices and looking for someone to blame, most people continue to drive just as avidly as before; purchases of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles have slowed but there has been no significant shift to more fuel-efficient cars.
Furthermore, gasoline consumption has continued to rise, up 1 percent in May compared with the same month last year.
James R. Schlesinger, whom President Carter selected as the first energy secretary, in 1977, said in a recent interview that the country's basic energy approach can best be summed up this way: "We have only two modes - complacency and panic." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/business/worldbusiness/12oil.ready.html?
Part-time Job Openings
The Army National Guard, a cornerstone of the U.S. force in Iraq, missed its recruiting goal for at least the ninth straight month in June and is nearly 19,000 soldiers below its authorized strength, military officials said Monday.
The Army Guard was seeking 5,032 new soldiers in June but signed up only 4,337, a 14 percent shortfall, according to statistics released Monday by the Pentagon. It is more than 10,000 soldiers behind its year-to-date goal of almost 45,000 recruits, and has missed its recruiting target during at least 17 of the last 18 months. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050712/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_recruits&printer=1;_ylt=Ap.3CO33HPzWyNZvQqUjtGiWwvIE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
H. Clinton. Write-ups in the NY Times both Tuesday and Wednesday. The former:
Previewing the themes for her re-election drive next year, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is opening an effort emphasizing her role on defense and other areas that Republicans have long used to their advantage.
On a Web site that is to go into operation on Wednesday, Hillary for Senate (www.hillaryclinton.com), Mrs. Clinton's re-election campaign, also highlights her goal of reducing abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies, even as it casts her as a champion of abortion rights.
All in all, Mrs. Clinton, the junior senator from New York, appeared to be continuing her drive to reach beyond the traditional liberal Democrats who make up her base. Mrs. Clinton also offered a much broader political and policy portfolio than the one she presented during her first campaign for public office in 2000.
With 16 months to go before the 2006 election, the establishment of the site shows how aggressively Mrs. Clinton and her advisers plan to pursue her re-election effort…
On its Web site, the Clinton campaign places emphasis on the record Mrs. Clinton has amassed on national defense, pointing out, among other things, that she has visited troops abroad, as the first New York senator to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/politics/12hillary.html?pagewanted=print
What’s Happening, Iraq: Outspoken Army Blogger/emailer. There is a trail of emails from Leonard Clark prior to his being arrested by the military for blogging his criticisms and for describing the Iraq war as both unnecessary and illegal. He was a member of the 860th MP Company in the Arizona National Guard, which is currently stationed in the Baghdad area. Although his web site http://leonardclark.com/blog/ has been scrubbed since his arrest what remains of his correspondence can be found on others’ web sites.
Clark described himself thusly:
Leonard Clark (the damned liberal patrolling the mean streets of Iraq every day) :)
Inner City Public School Kinder Garten teacher
Resident of Glendale, Arizona
and Candidate for the United States Senate in Arizona against John Kyl
One such email began:
Thank you all for your kind words and encouragement. I remember sitting and watching the news show every Sunday morning in the States and becoming very emotional every time I saw the faces and names of soldiers who were killed over here in this disastrous fiasco called the Occupation of Iraq. I grew very angry at the terrorist who killed them but angrier at the maniac who put them there and caused their unnecessary deaths. I could not understand nor do I understand even now how an American leader can be so callous as to sacrifice American soldiers lives just so he won't have to be embarrassed or look bad politically. We are not over here propping up a corrupt government just for democracy the leadership has us here for 2 to 3 reasons :
1. For the U.S. to have an excuse just occupy a piece of territory in the Middle East as a future beach head against Iran
2. For the blood money of oil.
3. To prevent the embarrassment of the maniac (you know who) who would have to admit he made a mistake. http://spidel.net/PHP-Nuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9
-R
The Times termed it “often hostile” questioning, the WaPost referred to the "most aggressive questioning a White House briefing in recent memory". Scott McClellan could only repeat, "No one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States," and "I think the way to be most helpful is to not get into commenting on it while it is an ongoing investigation."
It was very different in the past. Samples:
QUESTION: Wilson now believes that the person who did this was Karl Rove . . . Did Karl Rove tell that . . .
McCLELLAN: I haven't heard that. That's just totally ridiculous. But we've already addressed this issue. If I could find out who anonymous people were, I would. I just said, it's totally ridiculous.
QUESTION: But did Karl Rove do it?
McCLELLAN: I said, it's totally ridiculous.
Scott McClellan Press Briefing September 16, 2003
QUESTION: Has the President either asked Karl Rove to assure him that he had nothing to do with this; or did Karl Rove go to the President to assure him that he . . .
McCLELLAN: I don't think he needs that. I think I've spoken clearly to this publicly . . . I've just said there's no truth to it.
QUESTION: Yes, but I'm just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President, or if he just talked to you, and you're here at this . . .
McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.
QUESTION: How does he know that?
McCLELLAN: The President knows.
Scott McClellan Press Gaggle September 29, 2003
QUESTION: Weeks ago, when you were first asked whether Mr. Rove had the conversation with Robert Novak that produced the column, you dismissed it as ridiculous. And I wanted just to make sure, at that time, had you talked to Karl?
McCLELLAN: I've made it very clear, from the beginning, that it is totally ridiculous. I've known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask Karl, because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct.
QUESTION: Can you say for the record whether Mr. Rove possessed the information about Mr. Wilson's wife, but merely did not talk to anybody about it?
McCLELLAN: I don't know whether or not -- I mean, I'm sure he probably saw the same media reports everybody else in this room has.
QUESTION: When you talked to Mr. Rove, did you discuss, did you ever have this information?
McCLELLAN: We're going down a lot of different roads here. I've made it very clear that he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was.
Scott McClellan Press Briefing September 29, 2003
Full text of this week’s McClellan’s press briefings at: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/11/briefing-711/
The Nation’s David Corn, amongst others, had this figured out 2 years ago:
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=823
Bush not talking
"President Bush, at an Oval Office photo opportunity Tuesday, was asked directly whether he would fire Rove — in keeping with a pledge in June, 2004, to dismiss any leakers in the case. The president did not respond." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050712/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_leak_investigation_14;_ylt=AoX9PxHjle3Ykxqrs4KQ.ktZJ_wA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
RNC Response: Ken Mehlman, the Chair, is the name attached to an embarrassing list of old Republican charges / positions re the Plame – Wilson- Niger episode. The basic statement:
It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, Moveon wing of the party. The bottom line is Karl Rove was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise and the Democrats are engaging in blatant partisan political attacks."
http://www.rnc.org/News/Read.aspx?ID=5619
The apparent RNC point people for defending Rove are relative lightweights- Sens. Cornyn and Coleman, Rep. Peter King.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Watergate question of ‘What did the President know, and when did he know it?
Democrats’ Response: Why go after Rove? Just ask the above question. Rove may be Bush’s Brain, but he’s not the prez. It wouldn’t be shocking to learn that Bush hardly knew him, as per his extinguished relationship w/ ‘Kenny Boy’ Lay.
"The president should immediately suspend Karl Rove's security clearances and shut him down by shutting him out of classified meetings or discussions," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (news, bio, voting record), a New Jersey Democrat.
"It is time for the President to keep his word. Karl Rove should be fired and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," said Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York. Several other Democrats have also called on Rove to explain his role or resign.
Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), a California Democrat and the ranking minority member of the House Government Reform Committee, called for a congressional hearing to hear testimony from Rove, who is widely seen as the architect of Bush's election victories. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/bush_leak_dc&printer=1;_ylt=AgJtHHLRYGf3McokhjTqlIYb.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
More lawlessness:
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) has been acting increasingly entitled, if not bizarre. The latest involved a Chicago drug case. Note: Chicago is not in Wisconsin.
In an extraordinary move, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee privately demanded last month that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago change its decision in a narcotics case because he didn't believe a drug courier got a harsh enough prison term.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), in a five-page letter dated June 23 to Chief Judge Joel Flaum, asserted that a June 16 decision by a three-judge appeals court panel was wrong.
He demanded "a prompt response" as to what steps Flaum would take "to rectify the panel's actions" in a case where a drug courier in a Chicago police corruption case received a 97-month prison sentence instead of the at least 120 months required by a drug-conspiracy statute. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0507100352jul10,1,5787813.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Texas: Felony charges for local Republicans? From the New Statesman:
"State District Judge Bob Perkins today said he believes two officials with Texans for a Republican Majority should stand trial on felony charges of money laundering." http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/07/13trmpac_me.html
Zell Miller as thief The Macon Telegraph reports that Miller stole $80K upon leaving office as governor, that he pocketed funds earmarked for entertainment et al at the Governor’s mansion and took the remainder as “unused leave.’ Miller’s defense: ‘No one said I couldn’t.’: http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/opinion/12088562.htm
London: Terrorists recruited: The Times of London reports on a British government dossier that was leaked to them that notes that many young Brits are turning to terrorism, that they "perceive a 'double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US."
AL-QAEDA is secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in this country, leaked Whitehall documents reveal.
A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.
Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other. The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.
A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier — Young Muslims and Extremism — prepared for the prime minister last year, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, revealed separately last night that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-20749-1688872-20749,00.html
The long-developing and now burgeoning Moslem presence in western Europe Excellent Wall Street Journal series
Europe is undergoing a massive population shift -- some say the largest in more than a millennium -- as Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa cross the Mediterranean in search of work and a better life. The Muslim population of Europe is increasing dramatically; in countries like France, it is already about six million, or 10% of the total, and could easily double in percentage terms in the coming 20 years.
Declining birthrates mean that Europe needs these immigrants to stay vibrant. And indeed, many of them have integrated successfully, gaining education, wealth and prestige. Yet across the continent, some of Europe's Muslims are drifting off into separate troubled societies. In some European cities, nearly half of Muslim youths drop out of high school and unemployment rates are high. Racism is on the rise, helping to drive Muslims back into their communities. The situation was crystallized in a report last year by the French domestic intelligence agency, which surveyed 630 communities with a heavy concentration of Muslim migrants. Half of them, the report said, are "ghettoized" along religious lines. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112103551842081687,00.html
Oh, Rail Transit? Sure!
The Senate is having second thoughts about cutting mass-transit security funding after last week's London bombings.
As lawmakers began debate yesterday on $31 billion in 2006 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the terrorist attacks Thursday on three crowded subway trains and a double-decker bus provided a stark backdrop to complaints from urban lawmakers that mass transit gets short shrift in funding compared with air travel.
Last month, the Senate Appropriations Committee cut mass-transit security funding for the coming year by $50 million from this year's $150 million level. The spending bill's Republican authors said they won't object to adding more to secure rail and bus systems, but they cautioned that even with the extra money it could be a while before the effects are seen. That's because the government has been slow in releasing grants authorized for the current fiscal year -- while billions in other security funds remain untapped. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/AR2005071101364_pf.html
Bush Bump: Slight, predictable, temporary:
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. July 7-10, 2005
"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?" If "Depends": "Overall, do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?"
Approve: 47% (42% last month)
Disapprove: 46% (49%)
Unsure: 7% (10%) http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm
Tax Receipts Up: Happy talk re Deficit Shrinking:
We’ll hear about this for the balance of the year. Some reality to it, short-term, as corporate tax numbers are up, as corporate income is up. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/business/13deficit.html
Anticipating what’s to come, Paul Krugman issued a warning in his last column. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html?
Single Payer Universal Health Care: Interest? Massachusetts bill hearing, July 20
A push for universal health coverage is being rekindled in some states by the soaring cost of health care and the lack of political support in Washington for federal changes.
Advocates of a single-payer system — where the government would collect taxes and cover everyone, similar to programs in Canada and across Europe — have introduced bills in at least 18 state legislatures. Some are symbolic gestures, but heated debate is taking place in California and Vermont.
In Ohio, doctors, union officials and religious leaders are gathering signatures to get a single-payer health system placed on a ballot next year.
"The level of misery with private insurers is rising, and that's why we're seeing this increased activity," said Larry Levitt, vice president of the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation, which analyzes health care issues. "But whether one state can succeed, I don't know."
"There's no other solution out there," said David Pavlick, a member of the United Auto Workers in Cleveland, which has endorsed the Ohio campaign. "The system we have now is immoral, it's foundering and it's on its last legs."…
In any event, voters are still leery. A Kaiser Foundation poll released earlier this year found that 55 percent of Americans opposed a single-payer health system. Thirty-seven percent favored it.
Knowing that, some states are taking incremental approaches.
Maine started enrolling people this year in a state-private program that offers affordable health coverage to small businesses and families. The goal is to bring coverage to the 130,000 Mainers who lack it by 2009.
"It's really going to the states to push health care reform along," said Janne Hellgren, coordinator for a universal health care movement in Massachusetts. "Washington just isn't willing to change the status quo." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050710/ap_on_he_me/health_care_push&printer=1;_ylt=AuWTEfga4UgXLZMyNxxKXU5a24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
Living with ‘oil shocks’ ‘Peak Oil’? Who cares?!
The Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian revolution in 1978-79 exposed America's vulnerability to powerful forces outside its control, forces that sent fuel prices to record levels, prompted anger over gas lines and led to bookend recessions that defined a decade of economic turmoil.
By 1980, the energy crisis and the inflation it spawned had left Americans in a vindictive mood, contributing to the re-election defeat of President Jimmy Carter, who had promised to wage the "moral equivalent of war" against dependence on foreign oil.
But the latest escalation in oil prices - to as much as $60 today from less than $30 a barrel a little more than two years ago - has produced a much more limited response. Energy legislation that President Bush is pressing Congress to pass this summer would bring little relief. And while Americans say in polls that they are deeply disturbed by high gasoline prices and looking for someone to blame, most people continue to drive just as avidly as before; purchases of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles have slowed but there has been no significant shift to more fuel-efficient cars.
Furthermore, gasoline consumption has continued to rise, up 1 percent in May compared with the same month last year.
James R. Schlesinger, whom President Carter selected as the first energy secretary, in 1977, said in a recent interview that the country's basic energy approach can best be summed up this way: "We have only two modes - complacency and panic." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/business/worldbusiness/12oil.ready.html?
Part-time Job Openings
The Army National Guard, a cornerstone of the U.S. force in Iraq, missed its recruiting goal for at least the ninth straight month in June and is nearly 19,000 soldiers below its authorized strength, military officials said Monday.
The Army Guard was seeking 5,032 new soldiers in June but signed up only 4,337, a 14 percent shortfall, according to statistics released Monday by the Pentagon. It is more than 10,000 soldiers behind its year-to-date goal of almost 45,000 recruits, and has missed its recruiting target during at least 17 of the last 18 months. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050712/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_recruits&printer=1;_ylt=Ap.3CO33HPzWyNZvQqUjtGiWwvIE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
H. Clinton. Write-ups in the NY Times both Tuesday and Wednesday. The former:
Previewing the themes for her re-election drive next year, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is opening an effort emphasizing her role on defense and other areas that Republicans have long used to their advantage.
On a Web site that is to go into operation on Wednesday, Hillary for Senate (www.hillaryclinton.com), Mrs. Clinton's re-election campaign, also highlights her goal of reducing abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies, even as it casts her as a champion of abortion rights.
All in all, Mrs. Clinton, the junior senator from New York, appeared to be continuing her drive to reach beyond the traditional liberal Democrats who make up her base. Mrs. Clinton also offered a much broader political and policy portfolio than the one she presented during her first campaign for public office in 2000.
With 16 months to go before the 2006 election, the establishment of the site shows how aggressively Mrs. Clinton and her advisers plan to pursue her re-election effort…
On its Web site, the Clinton campaign places emphasis on the record Mrs. Clinton has amassed on national defense, pointing out, among other things, that she has visited troops abroad, as the first New York senator to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/politics/12hillary.html?pagewanted=print
What’s Happening, Iraq: Outspoken Army Blogger/emailer. There is a trail of emails from Leonard Clark prior to his being arrested by the military for blogging his criticisms and for describing the Iraq war as both unnecessary and illegal. He was a member of the 860th MP Company in the Arizona National Guard, which is currently stationed in the Baghdad area. Although his web site http://leonardclark.com/blog/ has been scrubbed since his arrest what remains of his correspondence can be found on others’ web sites.
Clark described himself thusly:
Leonard Clark (the damned liberal patrolling the mean streets of Iraq every day) :)
Inner City Public School Kinder Garten teacher
Resident of Glendale, Arizona
and Candidate for the United States Senate in Arizona against John Kyl
One such email began:
Thank you all for your kind words and encouragement. I remember sitting and watching the news show every Sunday morning in the States and becoming very emotional every time I saw the faces and names of soldiers who were killed over here in this disastrous fiasco called the Occupation of Iraq. I grew very angry at the terrorist who killed them but angrier at the maniac who put them there and caused their unnecessary deaths. I could not understand nor do I understand even now how an American leader can be so callous as to sacrifice American soldiers lives just so he won't have to be embarrassed or look bad politically. We are not over here propping up a corrupt government just for democracy the leadership has us here for 2 to 3 reasons :
1. For the U.S. to have an excuse just occupy a piece of territory in the Middle East as a future beach head against Iran
2. For the blood money of oil.
3. To prevent the embarrassment of the maniac (you know who) who would have to admit he made a mistake. http://spidel.net/PHP-Nuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9
-R
Monday, July 11, 2005
Rove / Plame / Miller, etc: The latest is that we now know that Karl Rove was involved in leaking Valerie Plame's identity and her role at CIA before the information appeared in Robert Novak's column. The key detail now is whether Rove knew Plame was operating covertly. If so, then he’s in violation of statute. Novak apparently only used the term “operative” in his columns when he was referring to covert operations. The other rather bizarre distinction that Rove’s lawyer made is that Rove named “Joe Wilson’s wife”, but did not use her name. That’s a defense?
The Monday WaPost article:
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.
Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.
The leak of Plame's name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to find the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.
To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001000.html
And, we should remember, unless he’s as out of the loop as I’ve portrayed, Bush has known all…i.e. Impeachment!
The Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff was the key (Sunday) release:
NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... " http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/
London Follow-up:
LA Times article on how the British authorities had an unspoken truce with potential ‘terrorists’ in their midst, that perhaps this was the work of a “new generation of homegrown jihadists who do not respect the deals struck by their elders.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-crossroads10jul10,1,4697130.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
[Not] Taking Care of Veterans. WaPost article on VA hospitals, in particular a notable one in New England.
According to documents released at recent meetings of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees, the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vt., was forced to shut its operating rooms temporarily because of a lack of maintenance funds to repair a broken heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Hospitals in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas stopped scheduling appointments for many veterans. The VA medical center in San Diego, with a waiting list of 750 veterans, diverted $3.5 million in maintenance funds to partially cover operating expenses and delayed filling 131 vacancies for three months to cover operating expenses. The Portland, Ore., hospital delayed non-emergency surgery for at least six months, and 7,000 veterans who use the VA facility in Bay Pines, Fla., are waiting longer than 30 days for a primary care appointment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001058_pf.html
Bush Record on Transit Security: We knew little was being done.
Just three months ago, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled on a rail security case involving CSX Transportation. In his decision, Sullivan criticized the Bush administration for having no “consistent and comprehensive federal policy addressing the risks of terrorism on our interstate rail system,” despite the fact that “the federal government has the lead role in regulating the rails and that a community can intervene only when a subject cannot be addressed by national standards or rules.”
2005: JUST $115 MILLION IN RAIL SECURITY FUNDING: Bush’s 2005 budget allocation for train security was just $115 million, equal to what the U.S. spends on eight typical hours in Iraq. (The White House spent $15 billion on airline security, “though as many as 16 times more people ride rail lines than airplanes.”) http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/07/the-bush-record-on-rail-security/
Rail: Tom Oliphant comments:
Against industry (shipping as well as manufacturing) opposition and Bush's indifference, Biden and Markey have pushed separate legislation ideas that would give the government authority to reroute shipments of these extremely dangerous substances around major metropolitan areas and to force other security improvements on the profit-crazed industry.
But the best metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in the transit and rail sectors is an obscure court case here, involving an ordinance passed by the District of Columbia City Council. The local government had the temerity to ban shipments of the most dangerous chemicals from certain zones around the nation's capital, something the Bush people should have been doing on their own.
So what is the response? The shipping people (led by rail giant CSX Transportation) backed by the administration, files a lawsuit here to block the law's enforcement. They lost in US district court, but rather than accept the result they are appealing. Meanwhile nothing is happening.
The events in London provide all the evidence we need that terrorism is alive and functioning internationally nearly four years after 9/11.
It might be helpful if the government showed the same resolve as the terrorists, but it hasn't. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/10/americas_vulnerable_railways?mode=PF
Frank Rich: Reminds us that 1750 Americans didn’t die at ‘Watergate’
WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
North Korea: Talks- “6-Party”- aimed at dismantling their nuclear weapons program. Some optimism. Most commentators cite South Korea’s promises of aid and new-found softer rhetoric from the Bush Administration. [Condi has ceased her references to their “tyrant” ruler.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/09/AR2005070901136.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Allawi speaks: The ex-prime minister is under-confident as to the near-future.
IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.
“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.
In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1687910,00.html
World Tribunal: John Pilger’s pointed essay on what’s not being covered while we focus on the English attack, what he terms "Blair's bombs", and, “he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about ‘our way of life’, which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.”
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member, "demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq." The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq. He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children, the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing. Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about this at one of the staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071005X.shtml
And, more bombings- at police headquarters, a car dealership, etc. and the main water supply was blown up for the third time in 3 weeks
Post G-8: As expected, the London attack curtailed the attention paid to poverty in Africa, global warming, the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As expected, the Administration blocked any efforts to establish specific targets for reducing greenhouse gases. 2 NY Times reports:
The bombings in London on Thursday knocked the meeting of major industrial nations off its carefully scripted focus on global warming and African poverty and turned it into a forum for President Bush and other world leaders to pledge unity in confronting terrorism…
Reflecting Mr. Bush's concern that too stringent a response to global warming could harm the American economy, the draft contained no specific agreement on concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a schedule. It contained a commitment to act with "resolve and urgency" on the issue, but also it contained broad caveats that some environmental groups said rendered it almost meaningless. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/international/europe/08summit.html?
Despite the public show of unity on the Group of 8's agenda, Mr. Bush remained at odds with other leaders over many of the details of how best to address the issues being debated and gave little ground on them.
Mr. Blair hailed a series of agreements to alleviate poverty in Africa, his signature issue, including commitments by the eight nations to double their aid to $50 billion a year by 2010, reduce trade barriers, cancel the debts of many countries and do more to fight diseases, including AIDS and malaria. The American aid pledge represents no new money beyond that which had already been promised. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/international/europe/09summit.html?pagewanted=print
Estate Tax: Upcoming (this week?) Repeal vote in Senate
The number of farms subject to the estate tax, always a minority, has fallen because Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to raise the threshold for estate taxes to $1.5 million, double that for married couples, for last year and this year. With simple planning, couples with children can shield several million more dollars from the tax.
In 2000, when the threshold was $675,000, taxes were owed by 1,659 farm estates, the study found. Had the current threshold been in effect, only 300 farms would have owed any tax.
Next year, when the threshold rises to $2 million per person, just 123 farms will be subject to the estate tax, the study found. And in 2009, when it rises to $3.5 million, only 65 of the nation's 2.2 million farms will be affected, the study said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/politics/10tax.html
Weather: Lots of intense rain, of late. Caused by ? Unclear, but as to hurricanes, we should remember this June 2005 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Warmer oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere, and other factors suggest that human-induced climate change will increase hurricane intensity and rainfall, according to climate expert Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His paper, "Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming," appears in the Perspectives section of the June 17 issue of Science. http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/trenberth.shtml
-R
The Monday WaPost article:
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.
Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.
The leak of Plame's name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to find the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.
To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001000.html
And, we should remember, unless he’s as out of the loop as I’ve portrayed, Bush has known all…i.e. Impeachment!
The Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff was the key (Sunday) release:
NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... " http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/
London Follow-up:
LA Times article on how the British authorities had an unspoken truce with potential ‘terrorists’ in their midst, that perhaps this was the work of a “new generation of homegrown jihadists who do not respect the deals struck by their elders.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-crossroads10jul10,1,4697130.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
[Not] Taking Care of Veterans. WaPost article on VA hospitals, in particular a notable one in New England.
According to documents released at recent meetings of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees, the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vt., was forced to shut its operating rooms temporarily because of a lack of maintenance funds to repair a broken heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Hospitals in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas stopped scheduling appointments for many veterans. The VA medical center in San Diego, with a waiting list of 750 veterans, diverted $3.5 million in maintenance funds to partially cover operating expenses and delayed filling 131 vacancies for three months to cover operating expenses. The Portland, Ore., hospital delayed non-emergency surgery for at least six months, and 7,000 veterans who use the VA facility in Bay Pines, Fla., are waiting longer than 30 days for a primary care appointment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001058_pf.html
Bush Record on Transit Security: We knew little was being done.
Just three months ago, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled on a rail security case involving CSX Transportation. In his decision, Sullivan criticized the Bush administration for having no “consistent and comprehensive federal policy addressing the risks of terrorism on our interstate rail system,” despite the fact that “the federal government has the lead role in regulating the rails and that a community can intervene only when a subject cannot be addressed by national standards or rules.”
2005: JUST $115 MILLION IN RAIL SECURITY FUNDING: Bush’s 2005 budget allocation for train security was just $115 million, equal to what the U.S. spends on eight typical hours in Iraq. (The White House spent $15 billion on airline security, “though as many as 16 times more people ride rail lines than airplanes.”) http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/07/the-bush-record-on-rail-security/
Rail: Tom Oliphant comments:
Against industry (shipping as well as manufacturing) opposition and Bush's indifference, Biden and Markey have pushed separate legislation ideas that would give the government authority to reroute shipments of these extremely dangerous substances around major metropolitan areas and to force other security improvements on the profit-crazed industry.
But the best metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in the transit and rail sectors is an obscure court case here, involving an ordinance passed by the District of Columbia City Council. The local government had the temerity to ban shipments of the most dangerous chemicals from certain zones around the nation's capital, something the Bush people should have been doing on their own.
So what is the response? The shipping people (led by rail giant CSX Transportation) backed by the administration, files a lawsuit here to block the law's enforcement. They lost in US district court, but rather than accept the result they are appealing. Meanwhile nothing is happening.
The events in London provide all the evidence we need that terrorism is alive and functioning internationally nearly four years after 9/11.
It might be helpful if the government showed the same resolve as the terrorists, but it hasn't. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/10/americas_vulnerable_railways?mode=PF
Frank Rich: Reminds us that 1750 Americans didn’t die at ‘Watergate’
WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
North Korea: Talks- “6-Party”- aimed at dismantling their nuclear weapons program. Some optimism. Most commentators cite South Korea’s promises of aid and new-found softer rhetoric from the Bush Administration. [Condi has ceased her references to their “tyrant” ruler.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/09/AR2005070901136.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Allawi speaks: The ex-prime minister is under-confident as to the near-future.
IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.
“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.
In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1687910,00.html
World Tribunal: John Pilger’s pointed essay on what’s not being covered while we focus on the English attack, what he terms "Blair's bombs", and, “he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about ‘our way of life’, which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.”
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member, "demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq." The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq. He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children, the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing. Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about this at one of the staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071005X.shtml
And, more bombings- at police headquarters, a car dealership, etc. and the main water supply was blown up for the third time in 3 weeks
Post G-8: As expected, the London attack curtailed the attention paid to poverty in Africa, global warming, the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As expected, the Administration blocked any efforts to establish specific targets for reducing greenhouse gases. 2 NY Times reports:
The bombings in London on Thursday knocked the meeting of major industrial nations off its carefully scripted focus on global warming and African poverty and turned it into a forum for President Bush and other world leaders to pledge unity in confronting terrorism…
Reflecting Mr. Bush's concern that too stringent a response to global warming could harm the American economy, the draft contained no specific agreement on concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a schedule. It contained a commitment to act with "resolve and urgency" on the issue, but also it contained broad caveats that some environmental groups said rendered it almost meaningless. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/international/europe/08summit.html?
Despite the public show of unity on the Group of 8's agenda, Mr. Bush remained at odds with other leaders over many of the details of how best to address the issues being debated and gave little ground on them.
Mr. Blair hailed a series of agreements to alleviate poverty in Africa, his signature issue, including commitments by the eight nations to double their aid to $50 billion a year by 2010, reduce trade barriers, cancel the debts of many countries and do more to fight diseases, including AIDS and malaria. The American aid pledge represents no new money beyond that which had already been promised. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/international/europe/09summit.html?pagewanted=print
Estate Tax: Upcoming (this week?) Repeal vote in Senate
The number of farms subject to the estate tax, always a minority, has fallen because Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to raise the threshold for estate taxes to $1.5 million, double that for married couples, for last year and this year. With simple planning, couples with children can shield several million more dollars from the tax.
In 2000, when the threshold was $675,000, taxes were owed by 1,659 farm estates, the study found. Had the current threshold been in effect, only 300 farms would have owed any tax.
Next year, when the threshold rises to $2 million per person, just 123 farms will be subject to the estate tax, the study found. And in 2009, when it rises to $3.5 million, only 65 of the nation's 2.2 million farms will be affected, the study said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/politics/10tax.html
Weather: Lots of intense rain, of late. Caused by ? Unclear, but as to hurricanes, we should remember this June 2005 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Warmer oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere, and other factors suggest that human-induced climate change will increase hurricane intensity and rainfall, according to climate expert Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His paper, "Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming," appears in the Perspectives section of the June 17 issue of Science. http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/trenberth.shtml
-R
