Don't criticize, condemn or complain.

Oops!

 Israel Warns: Free Soldier or Prime Minister Dies
Israel last night threatened to assassinate Palestinian prime minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed. 

Gilad Shalit and the children slaughtered in the Israeli artillery barrage on the beach share a common misfortune. They are simply pawns in Israel's never-ending quest to subjugate the Palestinian people.

Bush made a show of urging restraint. What a farce. He is a puppet and always has been. I went to dinner last night at friends. They had another couple over, the husband had worked for the Republican minority staff of the Foreign Relations committee in the mid 1980's.  The Committee was preparing a "democracy" initiative for the Middle East when the subject came up of Israeli "democracy" for Israeli and West Bank Arabs. AIPAC and the Israel Lobby landed on em like a ton of bricks.

Israel Detains Palestinian Ministers
Knocks out Electricity to Half of Gazans

Half of the Palestinians in Gaza, who were already living pretty miserable lives after decades of marginalization and brutalization by the Israelis, were left without electricity yesterday.

Palestinian officials like Saeb Erekat rejected the idea that knocking out electricity for hundreds of thousands of people is targeting a "terrorist infrastructure." In fact, destroying electricity generation capability interferes with water purification. Palestinian children will die because of this, from drinking unpurified water. And what crime did Palestinian toddlers commit, to be murdered in this way?

The Israelis escalated the crisis by detaining Hamas government ministers. The likelihood is that the captors of the Israeli soldier are freelancers. This wasn't something plotted out by the Haniyeh government, which, in fact, recently granted a huge concession on the issue of potentially recognizing Israel.

PM Ismail Haniyeh called for the United Nations Security Council to intervene.

The ministers detained are members of a freely and democratically elected government. I can't imagine under what legal authority the Israelis have arrested them. But everyone in the Middle East can see exactly what "elections" and "democracy" amount to. Bush's promises have never seemed so hollow.

Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, called for the US to get involved as an honest broker. Well, I suppose miracles do happen.

I am upset about the renewed crisis in Palestine because it is an emotional issue and will spill over into Sunni Arab Iraq. It is likely that pro-Palestinian Sunni guerrillas will kill some US troops specifically to avenge the people of Gaza. This is one reason I am complaining about the massively disproportional character of the Israeli response. It has the potential of further endangering American lives in the region.

And, it is counter-productive. The Israelis can't get back their soldier by destroying electricity plants in Gaza. They can't get more security by depriving Palestinians of security.

PS Jeff Morley at WaPo does a fine piece on the beach bombing background to the current round of violence

Will the left be able to spin this as America and Israel's fault? The fact is islam is at war with the world, and nothing Israel or America has done is the cause of islamic barbarity.

http://www.manager.co.th/IHT/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9490000084472

 NARATHIWAT – Suspected Muslim militants went on a shooting spree across the insurgency-plagued South, killing two people and wounding eight more, police said, as military intelligence warned of more coordinated attacks across the troubled region.

Two men on motorcycles burst into a karaoke bar in the Narathiwat’s Rueso district late Wednesday and shot all six customers, police said.

Eighteen-year-old Sanoh Umar died after he was shot in the head with a handgun while the remaining five customers suffered gunshot wounds.

Around the same time, a rubber plantation owner was gunned down in Sukhirin district. Soon Bunjit, 68, was critically wounded after two men on motorcycles shot him with AK-47 assault rifles.

Also Wednesday, a 25-year-old Muslim man was shot dead in his home in Rangae district. Two unidentified men walked into the house of Usman Daleh and shot him several times before fleeing, police said.

State railway employee Gariyah Yoh, 58, was injured in Sungai Padi early yesterday when a man riding pillion on a motorcycle shot him with an AK-47.

A homemade bomb exploded yesterday afternoon close to the Ratchakarin army base in Cho Airong district, but no one was harmed.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports that Lt. Commander Charles Swift, the Navy attorney who represented Hamdan in the Supreme Court case against the Bush administration, believes his career in the Navy is in jeopardy.  He was passed over for promotion once before and will learn sometime later this month if he will be passed over again.  If so, he will leave the Navy

Lt. Commander Swift, appointed by Rumsfeld's Pentagon, represented his client Ahmed Hamdan fearlessly before the Supreme Court and won his claim against the Bush administration Executive Order establishing unauthorized military tribunals in violation of international law.

Col. Dwight Sullivan, Office of Military Commissions and Swift's boss said this:

"It's a fundamental constitutional question about the powers of the president," Sullivan said. Asked about Swift's aggressive legal challenge of the commander in chief, Sullivan saluted Swift's "moral courage."

"He has been absolutely fearless is pursuing his client's interests. And also he has exhibited an extraordinary level of legal skill. His legal strategy has been brilliant.

"We all take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and he has certainly done that, literally."

It seems to me that the difference between two lawyers, David Addington who designed the military commissions and wrote the executive order signed by George Bush and Lt. Commander Charles Swift, the lawyer who challenged that executive order on behalf of his client is this:

One views the Constitution of the United States as a vehicle by which he may aggrandize the office of the President using any means at his disposal to increase and exploit powers inherent in the document. 

The other views the Constitution as a document written to enhance and ensure the liberty and justice that the American people cherish and believe is worth fighting and dying for.

Take your pick.

Who are Jehovah's Witnesses? Over 200 such conventions this summer in the United States, with dozens more in countries around the world.

The WatchTower Corporation is a media publishing, real estate development, and convention sponsoring company and their literature all promotes the corporation and those goals.

Jehovah's Witnesses will suspend the door to door proselytizing for which they are so well known, in order to meet together for a three day program of instruction prepared by the world headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York.

Few in the community at large know much about the beliefs and activities of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in spite of their well known evangelical activities to distribute the numerous books, magazines, pamphlets, and tracts they produce by the millions.

 Once informed of their beliefs, many view them as a high control group Sometimes referred to as a cult.

Their ranks have grown rapidly in the last few decades, in spite of the documentation of their failed prophecies, constantly changing Bible chronology, flip flopping doctrinal changes, bizarre medical advice, and dogmatic teachings that many consider physically and emotionally harmful.

 For further information on their beliefs and activities, please review the information provided by the following sources:

http://www.silentlambs.org  A non-profit group dedicated to publicizing the widespread problem of child molestation within the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion, and their organizational procedures that, in effect, protect some molesters at the cost of the well being and protection of the victims. They are also dedicated to the wider societal issues regarding child molestation, including awareness programs, counseling and recovery for the victims.

 http://www.freeminds.org  A wealth of information on all aspects of the beliefs and activities of Jehovah’s Witnesses. PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE SCANDAL INVOLVING THE REGISTRATION OF JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES WITH THE UNITED NATIONS, AND WHY THEIR ASSOCIATION WITH THE UN IS AN EMBARRASSING SCANDAL FOR THE RELIGION.

http://www.watchtowerinformationservice.org   Another well organized documentation of all issues related to the Jehovah’s Witnesses community.

 Conventions are a Watchtower corporate cash cow and money maker just like rock concerts. The WatchTower Corporation is a multi media production and printing company,activities like summer conventions are for the purpose of promoting and raising funds for the WatchTower Corporation.

They produce books, tapes, CD's, and videos. Their main business is soliciting donations, both door to door from strangers and from their own members at WatchTower Corporation sponsored meetings.

Their second cash producing business is sponsoring events and conventions and collecting donations at those.

 The third equity business is the real estate development and speculating business. A huge sub business is the soliciting and managing of the proceeds of wills, trusts, and cash assets of loyal members. This is their lowest road and they pursue it with impunity.

 -- Danny Haszard,expert witness on the Jehovah's Witness http://www.dannyhaszard.com  

Humanitarian crisis is looming in Gaza

Detroit Free Press - 30 Jun 2006

The 1.4 million residents of the Gaza Strip will face a humanitarian crisis within days unless fighting between Israelis and Palestinians stops

CONTENTS:

1- UN Gaza Report: June 30/06

2- ICRC: Israel must allow urgent medicines into Gaza

3- Amnesty Int'l: Attacks are war crime

[An extract of the story - text is reorganized]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

UN Gaza Report: 30 Jun 2006

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/KKEE-6R9QH2?OpenDocument

ELECTRICITY

An IAF air strike destroyed all six transformers of the only domestic power supply plant in the Gaza Strip. This plant provided 43% of Gaza’s daily electricity supply (90 of the 210 megawatts). 700,000 living in the middle governorate were initially without electricity. Gaza Electrical Distribution Company (GEDCO) is load-sharing the remaining electricity supply from Israel resulting in intermittent power. It will take more than nine months to procure replacement transformers at US$15 million.

FUEL

The Nahal Oz energy pipeline, (the only fuel to the Gaza Strip) remains closed by the Israeli authorities for the fifth consecutive day. 15,000 litres of fuel are required daily for the back-up generators to power regular water supplies. Given the current financial crisis, there are concerns over the long-term costs of maintenance and spare parts when using such a large number of generators.

WATER

Most of the 132 water wells were powered through the destroyed electrical grid. Generators are being increasingly relied upon to power water wells, threatening sufficient daily water. An air strike on a bridge destroyed the water pipeline serving approximately 155,000, which is now repaired.

They may not have materials for future repairs arising from any further Israeli military actions. A number of containers with equipment, spare parts and materials at Karni crossing for over three months waiting to enter the Gaza Strip.

HEALTH

The two month emergency stocks of essential health materials held at hospitals are running low in certain selected items, such as: heparin, surgical plaster and some disposables including sutures, needles and canula.

Increased casualties arising from clashes raise concerns over the ability to respond to large numbers of injured persons. Destruction of three bridges will hinder the transfer of patients from southern Gaza to the main referral hospital (Shifa hospital) in Gaza city.

Hospitals back-up generators are currently being used during power outages, since continuous power is required for cold chain items, food for patients, and for emergency operations and at the Central Drugs Store.

Health professionals are concerned about effect of power outages on: domestic food spoiling and the lack of the requisite power to treat waste water, which could lead to outbreaks of communicable diseases.

FOOD

Wheat flour mills are relying on fuel to power their generators to grind the wheat grain to bread, and have on average only 2-3 days of fuel stocks.

CROSSING POINTS AND HUMANITARIAN ACCESS

All crossing points remain closed, this has meant that essential humanitarian supplies cannot enter the Gaza Strip.

CIVILIAN PROTECTION

IAF super-sonic booms resumed as of 28 June occurring at around 4am, with approximately 3-4 ‘booms’ each night. The booms cause widespread anxiety and distress to families, especially young children.

Since 26 June Palestinians have fired 20 homemade rockets and the IAF have conducted 50 air strikes. The IDF has intensified artillery shelling since 28 June firing over 500 shells in the last two days primarily on the north and eastern borders with Israel.

Since 26 June, one Palestinian has been killed and seven injured from IDF tank fire and IAF air strikes. On 26 June, four Israelis in Sderot (Israel) were injured by homemade rockets.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

ICRC urges Israel to allow urgent medicines into Gaza

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L3034809.htm

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), called on Israel to allow urgent medical supplies into Gaza, as obliged under international law (including the Geneva Conventions)

"We are negotiating with Israel to allow in humanitarian aid. These are essential medicines and medical supplies for the Palestinian Red Crescent," Krimitsas told Reuters.

The ICRC is also anxious to deliver food packages and household items for Palestinian families, some of whom have had their homes destroyed. "Under international law, Israel has the obligation to allow humanitarian supplies into Gaza."

Hospitals, hard-hit by the loss of electricity, have to use generators for power, consuming precious fuel, Krimitsas said. "We are worried about the fuel stocks. Palestinian authorities have estimated that they have enough for about 7 to 10 days," she added.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amnesty: Attacks are war crime

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/HMYT-6R9NZV?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635PFR

Deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes, Amnesty International said today.

The deliberate destruction of the Gaza Strip’s only electricity power station, water networks, bridges, roads and other infrastructure is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and has major and long-term humanitarian consequences for the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.

High numbers of Palestinian bystanders, including women and children, have been killed and injured by Israeli artillery shelling and air strikes in recent weeks and months. This situation looks set to worsen in light of the end of the unilateral cease-fire which the armed wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had been observing since last year.

Fourth Geneva Convention, "collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited" (article 33) as is the destruction of private or public property, "except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessar by military operations" (Article 53). The Convention requires all states party to it to search for and ensure the prosectution of perpetrators of the war crime of "causing extensive destrucdtion ... not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly". "Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects" is also a war crime under Article 8 (b) (ii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

ReliefWeb Focus: Occupied Palestinian Territory (CE)

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc108?OpenForm&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635PFR

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1150885889961&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Excerpt:

"The new UN Human Rights Council voted Friday to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every council session. The resolution, which was sponsored by Islamic countries, was passed by a vote of 29-12, with five abstentions. It effectively revives a practice of the UN's dissolved Human Rights Commission, which also reviewed alleged Israeli abuses every time it met."

 ---------------

The rights of Eliyahu Ahseri to live, the rights of Gilad Shalit to not be used as a bargaining chip to get terrorist killers out of jail, the rights of parents in Sderot to send their kids off to school in security—all of these rights, just like always, don't mean anything to this slanted, cynical joke of a world body.

From the Council for the National Interest Foundation 

Freedom for All... Including Palestinians

As we celebrate the independence of the United States and the freedom of the American people, we pay

respect to the right of all peoples to self-determination. Yet as we celebrate, others needlessly suffer under

an illegal occupation, with no end in sight. Here at home, the Bush Administration has sung its own praises

about democratizing the Arab world while hypocritically implementing a policy intended to bring down the duly

elected government of the Palestinian people.

We are engaged in an effort to compress the lives of four million people under the weight of our sanctions and

an Israeli blockade. This is a recipe for a Third Intifada. That would be in no one’s interest.

“Terrorism has been described as waging war on innocents to break their political

leaders. Is that not a fair description of what we are doing to the Palestinians?”

- Pat Buchanan, June 5, 2006, from The American Conservative magazine

How is it that we have become so divorced from our founding principles? How is it that our alliance with Israel has led us so far astray?

More 

 

Whitewashing a criminal government: US press buries Israeli kidnapping of Palestinian parliament

Geov Parrish- WorkingForChange.com

06.30.06 - It's bad enough that the Israeli government went and seized as political prisoners, essentially as hostages, 87 Hamas members of the Palestine Authority (PA) parliament yesterday, including eight cabinet ministers. Once again, Israel has demonstrated its contempt for virtually every known code of conduct honored by civilized (and, usually, even by uncivilized) governments around the globe.

But what was even more appalling was the response of American media, which didn't think the kidnapping of a third of the government of a supposedly sovereign state authority was all that significant. Consider this headline and subheads from the Washington Post: West Bank Settler Killed / An 18-year-old Israeli settler was found executed today. Israel arrests more than 80 Hamas officials.

 

More

Destruction of Gaza - Photos - Reports

STOP ISRAEL'S WAR CRIMES IN GAZA

Respond to the Gaza invasion - take action

Justin Rood at the TPM Muckraker reported that a lobbying firm with ties to Rep. Jerry Lewis, Copeland Lowery, reported $2 million in previously undisclosed income from clients after it learned it was a target of a federal investigation last year.

According to Justin, Bill Lowery personally signed six consecutive disclosures that omitted $225k in lobbying fees from the Foundation For The Improvement in Mathematics and Science Educaton in San Diego. I can understand why - there weren't any or, at least, any recorded on the foundation's books.

I took a look at the foundation's 990s, available at Guidestar and the Foundation Center's 990 Finder, and I just don't see when the foundation ever even had $225k to pay Copeland Lowery. Besides, the foundation did not disclose any payments to lobbyists.

The foundation was only founded sometime after July 2001. Its fiscal year runs from Jul 1 to June 30.

The foundation was inactive and had no revenue between July 2001 and June 2002, according to its fiscal 2001 990.

In fiscal 2002, the foundation took in $148k in contributions and paid $42k in salary expense, $49k in travel expense and $50k in supplies expense.

In fiscal 2003, the foundation took in $223k in contributions and paid $167k in salary and salary-related expenses and $48k in operating expenses.

Between July 1, 2001 and June 30, 2004, the foundation received a total of $371k in contributions and paid a total of $356k in salary and operating expenses. No room there for lobbying fees.

The Foundation For the Improvement Of Mathematics and Science Education directors and officers between July 1, 2001 and June 30, 2004 were (Names of directors at June 30, 2002 were not disclosed.):

Alan D. Bersin, Former Superintendent of San Diego Schools - President
Dr. Lionel Meno, Dean, SDSU College of Education, San Diego - Treasurer
Al Panico, Director of Grants, Waitt Family Foundation, San Diego - Secretary
Daniel Sullivan, Executive Vice-President, Qualcomm, San Diego - Director (2003 only)
Candace Kilburn, Vice-President, AMCC, San Diego - Director

Looks like someone has some 'splaining to do.

Part I: Ringing Ears Hear No Evil: Marine SYSCOM’s Lightweight Approach to Head Injury

Warner (R-VA):

A leading Senate Republican said Friday that he was not sure that Congress should pass legislation to create new military tribunals for terror suspects, a stance that raised doubts about prospects for a White House plan to establish an alternative to the commissions struck down this week by the Supreme Court.

He'll be sure, soon enough.

Here's my proposal for a Democratic Patriotism campaign:

July 4, 2006

"Today, Democrats in the House and Senate pledged affirmative action for the Constitution, announcing that they will simultaneously place "The Pledge to the Constitution of America Act" on the legislative calendar immediately following the 4th of July weekend. In a novel strategic turning the tables on Congressional Republicans, they propose adding the words, "and to the Constitution" to the Pledge of Allegiance. If passed by Congress, it would change the Pledge to read, "I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Consitution of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which they stand, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Republicans immediately responded by blocking the legislation in committee for study and hearings to begin after the November elections. etc."

This could fire up our base and become the centerpiece of our fall campaign. I bet we'd get overwhelming support for it.

If you like it, spread the word fast!

Below is an extended excerpt from "The Hidden Power", the profile of David Addington by Jane Mayer in the current New Yorker magazine.  It is clear. direct and goes a long way toward bringing light to the "dark side" of Cheney and Addington.

With thanks. From July 3,2006 New Yorker: 

On November 13, 2001, an executive order setting up the military commissions was issued under Bush’s signature. The decision stunned Powell; the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; the highest-ranking lawyer at the C.I.A.; and many judge advocate generals, or JAGs, the top lawyers in the military services. None of them had been consulted. Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, who had argued for trying terror suspects in the U.S. courts, was also bypassed. And the order surprised John Bellinger III, the National Security Council legal adviser and deputy White House counsel, who had been formally asked to help create a legal method for trying foreign terror suspects. According to multiple sources, Addington secretly usurped the process. He and a few hand-picked associates, including Bradford Berenson and Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, wrote the executive order creating the commissions. Moreover, Addington did not show drafts of the order to Powell or Rice, who, the senior Administration lawyer said, was incensed when she learned about her exclusion.

The order proclaimed a state of “extraordinary emergency,” and announced that the rules for the military commissions would be dictated by the Secretary of Defense, without review by Congress or the courts. The commissions could try any foreign person the President or his representatives deemed to have “engaged in” or “abetted” or “conspired to commit” terrorism, without offering the right to seek an appeal from anyone but the President or the Secretary of Defense. Detainees would be treated “humanely,” and would be given “full and fair trials,” the order said. Yet the order continued that “it is not practicable” to apply “the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.” The death penalty, for example, could be imposed even if there was a split verdict. Moreover, in December, 2001, the Department of Defense circulated internal memos suggesting that, in the commission system, defendants would have only limited rights to confront their accusers, see all the evidence against them, or be present during their trials. There would be no right to remain silent, and hearsay evidence would be admissible, as would evidence obtained through physical coercion. Guilt did not need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The order firmly established that terrorism would henceforth be approached on a war footing, endowing the President with enhanced powers.

The precedent for the order was an arcane 1942 case, ex parte Quirin, in which Franklin Roosevelt created a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had infiltrated the United States via submarines. The Supreme Court upheld the case, 8–0, but even the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has called it “not this Court’s finest hour.” Roosevelt was later criticized for creating a sham process. Moreover, while he used military commissions to try a handful of suspects who had already admitted their guilt, the Bush White House was proposing expanding the process to cover thousands of “enemy combatants.” It was also ignoring the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, having codified procedures for courts-martial in 1951, had rendered Quirin out of date.

Berenson said, “The legal foundation was very strong. F.D.R.’s order establishing military commissions had been upheld by the Supreme Court. This was almost identical. What we underestimated was the extent to which the culture had shifted beneath us since World War Two.” Concerns about civil liberties and human rights, and anger over Vietnam and Watergate, he said, had turned public opinion against a strong executive branch: “But Addington thought military commissions had to be a tool at the President’s disposal.”

Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy’s chief JAG until June, 2002, said that he and the other JAGs, who were experts in the laws of war, tried unsuccessfully to amend parts of the military-commission plan when they learned of it, days before the order was formally signed by the President. “But we were marginalized,” he said. “We were warning them that we had this long tradition of military justice, and we didn’t want to tarnish it. The treatment of detainees was a huge issue. They didn’t want to hear it.” In a 2004 report in the Times, Guter said that when he and the other JAGs told Haynes that they needed more information, Haynes replied, “No, you don’t.” (Haynes’s office offered no comment.)

At the Defense Department, Shiffrin, the deputy general counsel for intelligence, and a career lawyer rather than a political appointee, was taken aback when Haynes showed him the order. Earlier in Shiffrin’s career, at the Justice Department, his office had been in the same room where the Nazi defendants were tried, and he had become interested in the case, which he said he regarded as “one of the worst Supreme Court cases ever.” He recalled informing Haynes that he was skeptical of the Administration’s invocation of Quirin. “Gee, this is problematic,” Shiffrin told him.

Marine Major Dan Mori, the uniformed lawyer who has been assigned to defend David Hicks, one of the ten terror suspects in Guantánamo who have been charged, said of the commissions, “It was a political stunt. The Administration clearly didn’t know anything about military law or the laws of war. I think they were clueless that there even was a U.C.M.J. and a Manual for Courts-Martial! The fundamental problem is that the rules were constructed by people with a vested interest in conviction.”

Mori said that the charges against the detainees reflected a profound legal confusion. “A military commission can try only violations of the laws of war,” he said. “But the Administration’s lawyers didn’t understand this.” Under federal criminal statutes, for example, conspiring to commit terrorist acts is a crime. But, as the Nuremburg trials that followed the Second World War established, under the laws of war it is not, since all soldiers could be charged with conspiring to fight for their side. Yet, Mori said, a charge of conspiracy “is the only thing there is in many cases at Guantánamo—guilt by association. So you’ve got this big problem.” He added, “I hope that nobody confuses military justice with these ‘military commissions.’ This is a political process, set up by the civilian leadership. It’s inept, incompetent, and improper.”

Under attack from defense lawyers like Mori, the military commissions have been tied up in the courts almost since the order was issued. Bellinger and others fought to make the commissions fairer, so that they could withstand court challenges, and the Pentagon gradually softened its rules. But Administration lawyers involved in the process said that Addington resisted at every turn. He insisted, for instance, on maintaining the admissibility of statements obtained through coercion, or even torture. In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. “Torture isn’t important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not,” the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. “It’s more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for ‘maximum flexibility.’ ”

Last month, Addington lost this internal battle. The Administration rescinded the provision allowing coerced testimony, after even the military officials overseeing the commissions supported the reform. According to a senior Administration legal adviser who participated in discussions about the commissions, Addington remained opposed to the change. “He wanted no changes,” the lawyer said. “He said the rules were good, right from the start.” Addington accused officials who were trying to reform the rules of “giving away the President’s prerogatives.”

Patrick Hynes's new book "In Defense of the Religious Right" only engages secular arguments shallowly but remains refreshingly free of venom and makes a number of good points, albeit in support of an unjust agenda far more divisive than he recognizes it to be.

One of his best points throughout is that liberals who rant against the religious right, frequently in stereotyped, inaccurate terms, needlessly alienate voters who have some sympathies in that direction. He doesn't understand our anger very well, but he's right about its effect as a style of argument (unless, I would say, the anger is carefully presented, doesn't overwhelm a progressive message, and does not function merely to avoid debate with religious or social conservative views). Furthering his argument that the religious right are the in mainstream of the country's thinking, Hynes draws on an Atlantic Monthly article by E.J. Dionne to observe that most Americans don't want to fight a culture war. He argues that liberals' use of the term "backlash" to describe Christian conservative political activism implies that it is liberals who are attempting to change the status quo, who have an agenda. Many Americans, in his account, who aren't members of the Christian right nonetheless share many of its moral impulses and policy views.

Hynes maintains that although liberals charge social conservatives with unfairly using religious justifications for their policy preferences, many liberals do the same either on their own initiative or in response, and cites a half-dozen persuasive examples (he points to the familiar "Jesus would be a liberal!" type of exclamation). He fully acknowledges the sincerity of many liberals' religious belief, such as that of President Carter or Sojourners editor Jim Wallis. But he notes that contrary to religious and secular liberal contentions, right-wing evangelicals do care about the poor, but advocate local government action and non-governmental charity, and believe that large-scale, federal government action in accord with the religious left's counsel harms the economy. (His brief argument is not likely to be persuasive to anyone who knows a reasonable amount about the complexity of the challenges facing the working class and doesn't already advocate a more-or-less laissez-faire philosophy.)

Hynes, a political consultant, fails to take liberal values and arguments seriously. He is dismissive, for example, of social equality, calling such terminology about gay marriage "verbal tics" rather than obviously real moral claims. Gay people are strangely unreal in his version of the debate; gay activists and their social agitating in opposition to majority views define the left in his mind, and he fails to attend to the reasons they have for fighting to change the status quo. He should know better than to idealize the majority; religious people have been in the forefront of all kinds of social reform efforts throughout the nation’s history. But his frequently well-reasoned, pugilistic book, dense with analysis of polling data and a sharp political sensibility, offers a window into social-conservative thought and an effective political approach, subtler than Karl Rove-style red meat, that will likely have many takers come election season.

http://911review.org/Alex/US_Ambassador_cultist.shtml

9-11 review

Ambassador de Sade
By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet. Posted November 8, 2005.

Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the
ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the
founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic. More
stories by John Gorenfeld

Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to
important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler,
the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian.
Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities,
Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around
his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has
reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job
last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings
between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian
intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents
-- all behind Sembler's back.

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as
an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the
transformative power of political donations. For 16
years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the
leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT,
Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking
array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just
one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel
agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams
show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a
counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a
janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained
weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood.
During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat
blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my
mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years
to overcome.

"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at
your soul." She told AlterNet that she was committed
at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught
with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a
classmate whose mother was a flight attendant.
Samantha's mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT
expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior
high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the
warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by
counselors that her daughter was a liar, was
encouraged to trick the girl for her own good.

Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run
but was hauled into the back by older girls. Inside,
as was standard operating procedure, she began the
atonement process that cost over $12,000 a year:
all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the
arms ("motivating") and chanting signaled submission
to "staying straight." She was coerced, she says, into
confessing to being a "druggie whore" who went down on
truckers for drugs. "You're forced to confess crimes
you never committed." (Some survivors call it
extortion.)

Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our
Man In Rome -- he also served under the first Bush as
Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe's story unique,
his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business.
Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends,
closed under a breathtaking array of institutional
abuse claims by 1993, ranging from sexual abuse,
beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for
hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that
a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially
mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former
STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure
settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials
yanked its licenses after media reports of teen
torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped
punishment. As one of the preeminent and
hardest-working GOP fundraisers, Sembler has received
the honor of living during the George W. Bush
presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official
residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the
largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at
"The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty call it), the
dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the
ambassador entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage --
until Betty complained that the old friends were
stinking up "my house," the Washington Post reported.

He's come home, but still wafting across national drug
policy is the influence of his STRAIGHT, which has
legally changed its identity to the Drug Free America
Foundation (director Calvina Fay denies it's the same
organization but the name change is listed in Florida
corporate filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it
lobbies for severe narcotics policies and workplace
drug testing, with an advisory board that includes the
like of Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and
Homeland Security Director of Public Safety Christy
McCampbell. A more pressing issue is that former
overseers of Sembler's company, true believers in the
STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses
that treat teens with the old methods.

Starting out STRAIGHT

The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his
fortune in Florida real estate, founded STRAIGHT from
the ashes of The Seed -- an earlier program suspended
by the U.S. Senate for tactics reminiscent, said a
senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan
years rolled into view, and a climate of fear nurtured
a Shock and Awe approach to teens, the Semblers found
a new world of acceptance for an anything-goes
treatment business, meting out punishment in privately
run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George
H.W. Bush lent their names to the program, celebrating
a role model weapon in the "war on drugs."

Nine years before the elder Bush took office, Sembler
was a faithful political supporter, and raising
millions beginning in '79 for the Bushes' clash with
Reagan for the Republican nomination. In 1988, as Bush
finally accepted the GOP's nomination for president,
Sembler sat in the front row. With his man in the
White House, STRAIGHT would become a vehicle for
purchasing eminence as a Drug War thinker. By 1988,
Sembler wasn't just running the Vice President's "Team
100" soft money campaign and enjoying steak dinners
with him -- he was sojourning in George and Barbara
Bush's living room, briefing the candidate on drug
policy. As a token of his friendship, he gave Bush a
new tennis racket, receiving this note in return:
"Maybe we can play at Camp David someday."

And Sembler's success grew and grew as the Clinton era
spooled out. The slickly dressed go-getter smashed
records as RNC Finance Chairman from 1997 to 2000,
chairing the "Regents" club that accommodated such
super donors as Enron's Ken Lay to fund George W.
Bush's campaign machine.

Meanwhile, a coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage
had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993
-- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and
psychological trauma. The Web sites Fornits.com and
TheStraights.com have collected many of their stories.
Posts Kelly Caputo, an '88 alumna: "I don't think I
will ever be the same. My every thought has been
violated, confused, degraded and warped."

"My best guess is that at least half of the kids were
abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus
at American University who created the Drug Policy
Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has
singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War"
as among drug warriors' worst mistakes.

But today, Sembler's trail of purchased political
friendships has led him through the opulent doors of
the $83 million "Mel Sembler Building" in Rome,
christened this year with help from a longtime ally in
Congress, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL). Not the palace
where Sembler worked as ambassador, but another of the
Eternal City's architectural treasures, built in 1927
and now dedicated as an annex to the U.S. Embassy in a
$30 million renovation at taxpayer expense. "Narcissus
is now Greek and Roman," said the Washington Post of
the monument. No one could remember any other diplomat
receiving such honors, not even Benjamin Franklin.

"We don't do that, do we?" George W. Bush reportedly
told the congressman, according to Congressman C.W.
Bill Young 's (R-Florida) speech during the ceremony.
"We don't name buildings for ambassadors where they
have served."

"Mr. President," the politician replied, "I introduced
the bill and you signed it." Bush may have missed the
Sembler Building provision, tucked as it was into an
appropriations bill. But he owed much to the longtime
family friend, whom he thanked on "The Jim Lehrer
Report" [RealAudio] in 2000 for raising $21.3 million
at a single dinner in April, a new record. Asked what
favors the money paid for, Bush professed wonderment
at the premise: "I know there's this kind of sentiment
now -- I heard it during the primaries ... [that] if
someone contributes to a person's campaign, there's
this great sense of being beholden."

At the Sembler Building, visitors can stroll among the
Italian frescoes of cherubs and heavens, and marvel at
the spoils of Bush family loyalty, and meditate on the
human costs that made Sembler's paradise possible.

STRAIGHT's practices

Melvin Sembler's Jekyll-and-Hyde empire appealed to
parents with cheery pamphlets bearing pictures of
happy and reunited families that had put their
horrible pasts behind them.

Even Princess Diana had graced the clinics with a
visit, celebrating STRAIGHT as a humanitarian
institution. George H.W. Bush named the program among
his "thousand points of light." But many called it
Hell.

Taking in new kids without much discrimination -- many
addiction-free -- STRAIGHT staff assured parents that
a variety of troubled teens could benefit from their
brand of discipline.

Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would
enter the care of a "host home" overseen, at night, by
the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the
months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back
basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant
future, going to the bathroom alone, without an
ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop --
literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT
kids, who had been molded into drug warriors in the
heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and
join the winning side, becoming the hall monitors and
the muscle that enforced the rules.

>From the outset, STRAIGHT's method was on thin ice
with regulators. The underpinnings had long struck
critics as more Pyongyang than Pinellas County.
Sembler took his blueprint from another St. Petersburg
program, The Seed, in which his son had enrolled in
the 1970s. The Senate was less impressed than Sembler
with The Seed. Senator Sam Ervin, who'd brought down
Richard Nixon, killed the program's federal subsidies
for funding a method "similar to the highly refined
'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North
Koreans." Ervin's 1974 probe into the rise of
treatment abuse articulated an admirable American
ideal: that "if our society is to remain free, one man
must not be empowered to change another's personality
and dictate the values, thoughts and feelings of
another." Sembler had other ideals in mind, as
hundreds of STRAIGHT victims would later attest.

Finally, one by one, the 12 clinics, which had once
formed a nine-state empire, went dark. Much of the
money was lost in settlements, but jury verdicts
offered a peek into the regularity of the abuses.
Florida patient Karen Norton was awarded $721,000 by a
jury after being thrown against a wall in 1982 by the
Semblers' treatment guru of choice: Dr. Miller Newton,
whose unaccredited Ph.D was in public administration,
but was tapped by the Semblers as STRAIGHT National
Clinical Director. He's emblematic of how the creature
Sembler built just won't stop sprouting heads, having
personally launched spinoff businesses with names like
KIDS. As a result, Newton has paid out over $12
million to his victims. Having moved back to Florida,
he now calls himself "Friar Cassian," a priest in the
non-Catholic Antiochian Orthodox church.

But just last month, Betty Sembler testified in a case
against a STRAIGHT critic that Miller Newton, the dark
cleric of rehab, is "a very close and dear friend and
a valued one," and an "outstanding individual." Had he
committed outrageous acts? "Absolutely not," she said,
adding that it was incomprehensible that ex-STRAIGHT
teen Richard Bradbury was picketing Newton. Thanks to
her judgment of character, Newton has been given a
voice in national drug policy, listed as a participant
in a Drug Free America Foundation "International
Scientific and Medical Forum."

>From the beginning, critics were shocked to find that
the keepers freely acknowledged many of the tactics --
yet insisted they were necessary. Mel Sembler even
seems to have been emboldened by painful questions
about his clinics. "We've got nothing to hide -- we're
saving lives," he said in 1977 after six directors
quit over practices that included kicking a restrained
youth. He remained closely involved in personnel
management. Almost two decades later, recalling how
the ACLU was furious about STRAIGHT's practices,
Sembler told Florida Trend Magazine in 1997 -- "with a
grin," the reporter wrote -- that "it just shows that
we must have been doing things right."

And rather than clean up Florida's program, he
apparently leaned on health inspectors in 1989 to go
easy on it. Reports of a cover-up wouldn't emerge for
four more years -- long years, for the teenagers
committed to a program that wouldn't lose its license
until 1993. STRAIGHT foe Bradbury, believing he'd been
"brainwashed" into becoming an abusive counselor,
brought the clinics to the attention of the state
after years of protest. Inspector Lowell Clary of the
Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative
Services found that reports of illegally restrained
and stomped-on teens had been swept under the rug,
likely with help from Republican state senators, who
went unnamed, but made phone calls urging the clinic
stayed open. A "persistent foul odor" hung over this
use of power, said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed
applauding the death of STRAIGHT.

"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of
Health and Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector
General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of
inspectors in 1989] received a phone call informing
them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would
receive their license." "If you do anything other than
what I tell you on this issue, I will fire you on the
spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't
positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may
have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other
state senators."

By now, Clinton was in office. Four years earlier,
while young "druggies" were still being restrained to
chairs for 12 hours, denied medication and sent to the
hospital with injuries, the 1989 report would have
tarnished President George H.W. Bush's "points of
light." Bush had designated STRAIGHT an American
treasure. On that fragile premise, not one but two
STRAIGHT presidents had been named ambassadors in
1989, the year of the Florida inspection. Sembler got
the Australian assignment. The other post sent
co-founder Joseph Zappala to Spain armed for diplomacy
with a high school education. The two were mocked in
People as "too hick to hack it." They'd clowned around
during the nomination process, turning in nearly
identical answers on Senate disclosure forms. In the
"languages spoken" box Sembler had written,
humorously, "English (fluent)."

That took real cheek. These two pranksters had been
leaders of a group characterized as a destructive cult
by top authorities on cult abuse ranging from Steve
Hassan of the Freedom Of Mind Center to the late Dr.
Margaret Singer of UC Berkeley, an expert on the abuse
of American servicemen in the Korean War whose expert
testimony was used to close a facility in Cincinnati.
Bradbury, the whistleblower, concurs, saying the
program modified his personality into something
monstrous. Bradbury attended the St. Petersburg,
Florida clinic. "You don't understand what they did to
these kids," Bradbury told AlterNet. "They put stuff
up my butt."

But you wouldn't know from Sembler's State Department
biography that his claim to fame has such a shoddy
legal record. The program has the honor of being
described as a "remarkable program" in his bio, and it
credits STRAIGHT with saving 12,000 kids. The
ambassador did not return attempts to contact him
during the reporting for this story, and declined the
author's interview requests last year through a U.S.
Embassy spokesman.

In addition to receiving a second Ambassadorship from
the second Bush president, his Governor Jeb Bush named
August 8, 2000, "Betty Sembler Day" for her "work
protecting children from the dangers of drugs,"
labeling her "ambassadorable." The next year, at a
drug policy conference in Florida, a writer from the
Canadian legalization magazine Cannibis Culture asked
her about the STRAIGHT victims. "They should get a
life," he quotes her as replying. "There's nothing to
apologize for. The [drug] legalizers are the ones who
should be apologizing."

The ambassador's wife is an outspoken critic of what
she calls "medical excuse marijuana," and serves on
the boards of such mighty anti-legalization campaigns
as the International Task Force On Strategic Drug
Policy, which works with Latin American countries to
lobby for harsh drug laws. Mel himself used his Rome
ambassadorial pulpit for a global conference in 2003,
appealing to the "moral imperatives" of the drug war
and urging a "culture of disapproval of drug abuse."
DFAF, founded by the Semblers, receives hundreds of
thousands of dollars in grants from the Small Business
Association to advance workplace drug testing in
businesses -- for example, a handout in 2000 of
$314,000. Betty Sembler is president and Melvin has
served as chairman.

STRAIGHT's Spin-offs

Though Sembler's clinics were shuttered, the spirit of
STRAIGHT lives on as a flourishing model for drug
rehabilitation. That includes offshoots run by former
STRAIGHT staff, such as the Orlando STRAIGHT spin-off,
SAFE, which was described by 16-year-old Leah
Marchessault in 2000 as "something from the Twilight
Zone" in a report by Florida's WAMI TV station.

Leah had gone to visit her sister, in for heroin
abuse, only to be told she herself was a "druggie" --
sound familiar? And when Leah fled, she was pinned
against a wall and assaulted by a pack of nine women
members who forced her to undergo a full-body search.
Another girl told WAMI of being "forced to stand for
about an hour and a half, the attention being focused
on me, and about every 10 minutes I was told how I was
full of crap, how I needed to be flushed out."

Despite their cheery names -- SAFE in Orlando,
Florida; Kids Helping Kids of Cincinnati, Ohio;
Growing Together of Lake Worth, Florida -- these
barely regulated warehouses cry out for oversight.
Hungry for recruits, they appeal to the fears of
parents by warning a child will die on the streets if
uncorrected by their methods.

In the TV report, the presence of a spokeswoman named
Loretta Parrish was evidence that SAFE was the child
of STRAIGHT -- she'd been the local STRAIGHT's
marketing director until 1992, when the old company
closed under state scrutiny, and SAFE, a new company,
almost immediately sprang up to replace it. A new head
for the hydra: Parrish didn't dispute the visiting
sister's horrifying experience, but called it
necessary, as if explaining something something
obvious to her since the '80s.

"Yes we do require that," said Parrish. "And if they
don't, then they have to remove the other child. This
is a family treatment program. And unless the entire
family is in treatment, it doesn't work."

"We do not do a strip search that is different from
any other treatment program," she adds, and later
described the teens and moms attacking SAFE as "a
coalition of cockroaches." Gov. Jeb Bush even endorsed
SAFE in a letter he wrote as "a valuable tool."

And so with the former STRAIGHT bosses rich in
Republican honors, and insulated in a political Xanadu
not unlike the alternate reality field engulfing the
White House, a new generation of teenagers is going
under the hammer, as an old generation of victims
finds cold comfort for their own suffering. If this is
the compassionate kind of conservatism, how harsh the
other variety must be.

John Gorenfeld, a freelance writer in San Francisco,
will be blogging further details of this story at gorenfeld.net/john.

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How many times have we listened to the supporters of the Bush administration attempt to defend the neo-conservative policies and the PNAC inspired philosophy that continues to sink this country into debt and systematically tramples the constitution? What we hear is the repetition of the same baseless and uninformed talking points, and an attitude that has come to reflect what many abroad refer to as American arrogance. It makes you wonder if the conservative rank and file ever takes the time to research any of claims and policy decisions they so blindly support, and continue to defend.

Lets look at some of the claims that continues to be trotted out by the conservatives.

Conservatives insist that the republican party is the party that cuts taxes, and even as learned economist insist that the cuts had no direct positive effects on the economy, or the paychecks of the middle class, administration defenders hail these cuts as a great thing on their behalf. The fact is, the republican tax cuts target the very rich and are of no benefit to the middle class. The so-called “death tax” that had the republicans behaving as if they were fighting for their very survival, benefit one quarter of one percent of all Americans, the people Bush refers to as “the haves, and the have mores”. That’s correct, less than one percent of Americans. They are willing to debate the inheritance tax, while the Katrina victims are still homeless and an entire city and culture has been wiped of the map, and the “war on poverty” came to an abrupt end, as the republicans “cut and run from their domestic obligations.

The Bush administration claim to be the only party that is serious about fighting terrorism and the only ones capable of defending our country from Islamic fundamental terrorist. But lets move our chairs around and look at this from a different perspective. Since Bush took office five years ago, there has been more terrorist attacks world wide than in the ten years before that. Maybe the fact that they inspire terrorism worldwide better than anyone in the world makes has fooled them into thinking that they are the experts. It also is no secret that this administration knew of the intentions of Bin Laden and al quaeda, but were so distracted by the PNAC inspired desire to invade Iraq, that they couldn’t see past their maps of the Iraqi oil fields.

Then there is my favorite. “We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them over here” . Of course, this was before the administration finally admitted that there was no link to Saddam Hussein and al quaeda. And someone also need to tell these guys that we have to fight them over here, because while we’re creating havoc in Iraq, the terrorist are over here and have been here for some time. Most Americans support the administration’s efforts in combating terrorist at home and abroad once its legal and once there is oversight. Then there is the situation in Darfur that continued to deteriorate without much show of concern from the administration and their supporters. Apparently the lives of the Iraqis are of more value to the administration than the lives of a few million Sudanese. Or is that the oil?

Bush supporters repeat one of his lines that is inexplicable, even for the president himself. “We shouldn’t leave Iraq until we win”. Of course, no one has been able to explain what that means, or how winning is accomplished. Who are we fighting and how do we know we’ve won? Often they would reference either the second world war, or the bombing of Japan, all of which are wars won against specific countries and not against some type of ideology, like Islamic fundamentalism.

The big secret is that the politicians know that most Americans never take the time to research the statements and political positions of their elected officials.

Ignorance is bliss, but stupidity is not incurable.

Enough of Israel and their Lobby? I have. A rogue state by any other name:

Israel Threatens to Assassinate PM
	Israel Bombs PA Interior Ministry

Israel Arrests 64 PA Lawmakers, Ministers

On Friday, June 30th, The War Tapes opens in the following cities: BERKELEY, CA (Landmark Shattuck Cinemas) BOSTON, MA (Kendall Square Cinema) CONCORD, NH (Regal (Hoyts) Concord 10) SAN FRANCISCO, CA (The Castro Theatre), BUSHVILLE, DC (E Street Cinema)

The verdict in the Siegelman/Scrushy, etc. trial is in- guilty on all counts for former Healthsouth CEO Scrushy, guilty on half the counts for fomer Gov. Siegelman, and not guilty for their two co-defendants.

My discomfort with the verdicts has very little to do with the substance of the trial.  My problem is with the behavior of the prosecutorial community.  Both Siegelman and Scrushy had been indicted before.  Scrushy was found innocent of a ginourmous number of corporate fraud related charges; the charges against Siegelman were eventually dismissed. 

One way to characterize the prosecutors' continued insistence on getting these men would be to characterize it as dogged determination.  If at first you don't suceed, etc., etc.

 But looking at it in the larger context, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps our prosecutorial community is getting a little too slap-happy with unproveable indictments.  The trend now is to pile on the charges in a 'the more the merrier' sort of feeding frenzy.  This applies across the board- in corporate trials, terrorism trials, and plain old criminal trials.  Sure, sometimes it works- sometimes it doesn't.  Gotta do what you gotta do to win, right?

But here's the thing about prosecutors- they're not supposed to be out for the win.  They are supposed to be out for justice.  They represent the people- one of whom is the defendant in front of them at the time.  The Siegelman trials made it clear, however, that the prosecutors were out to win.  Courtroom fights between the attorneys- nasty words on the airwaves- all made it clear that the issue of whether or not these men were actually guilty was less important then the process of finding them guilty. 

It's hard to dredge up too much sympathy for these particuliar defendants.  Justice was, more then likely, done- albeit accidentally.  The problem here is not with the trial, but with the system in general.  Prosecutors (Federal, state, SEC all included) have spent the last 4 years trying to get something on Scrushy.  The tax dollars spent on this effort have far outweighed any bribes he may have given to Siegelman.   

Staff writer, Time magazine.

Really, is there no depth to which one can sink and still be given a respectable platform by our proud news media establishment?

Perhaps I'm too harsh. After all, he was only investigated for indictment, no?

I mean, he's no Scooter Libby.

Small nations are like indecently-dressed women. They tempt the evil-minded. - Julius Nyerere, President of Tanganyika, 1964

The War Tapes opens tonight in Berkeley and at the Castro Theater San Francisco. Soldiers with cameras take you to the heart of the Iraq Disaster. One of the "stars" Sgt. Bazzi will answer questions from the audience after the Castro showing today and tommorrow.  SF Chron review (little man falling off chair) is  here.  Front page story on film here

What the media doesn't show because the media did not produce it.

Trailer plus clips and outtakes at film website

The attack on the New York Times is really out of proportion with the publication of the financial surveillance story.  That got me to wondering what particular thing the Bush administration is  trying to hide.  I think I found it in Christopher Dickey's column in Newsweek (online only):

All this talk of pulling out of Iraq - Murtha or Rumsfeld - take your pick, doesn't amount to a hill of beans.  This is how Dickey puts it. 

"When Bremer sneaked out of Iraq in June, 2004 he failed to sign a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) as part of Order 17 of  the Coalition Provisional Authority document regarding governance in Iraq.  This means that Americans in Iraq - military or civilian- are exempt from Iraqi laws;  cannot be arrested, prosecuted, tried or taxed, do not have to pay rent for buildings and land they turn into bases.  It's all about what the Americans get to do and what the Iraqis  get to do for them."

When the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1637 expires December 31 of this year so will the legal mandate of the United States and other forces in Iraq.  The Iraq constitution (that you hear so much about but know so little of ) provides that all existing laws such as CPA Order 17 "remain in force for as long as the U.N mandate are renewed".

Iraqi Parliament has to call for renewal of the resolution, but the Parliament is getting ready to recess.  The U.S. wants Maliki  to take the action himself if Parliament does not. 

Maliki's recent call for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops and amnesty for Iraq insurgents is a sign of big trouble for the Bush administration. So why aren't we hearing or reading about this every day as part of the discussion on bringing the troops home?

What do we not know about the Bush administration's relationship with Maliki.  Did Bush look him in the eye and threaten him, bribe him or what?

"To get out of Iraq, the United States must established a relationship of equal respect with the Maliki government."

"The United States is running a protectorate for incompetents in Iraq--especially the incompetence at the highest levels that got us into this mess".

So far the Bush smoke screen is working all too well.

Dickey recommends reading Order 17.

It's fairly easy to see that the Ann Coulter Republicans want everyone to view politics as a game. If we do, it allows them to discount intelligence and experience, two traits largely lacking among Bush-era conservatives. It also gives their meritless arguments better footing in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. A leg up that represents, I thought, everything Republicans were supposed to hate. So much for taking the personal responsibility to become a well-informed individual.

Though serious adults realize that politics, most certainly, isn't a game, I thought, since a radical minority of Americans view it as such, it's only fair they tell the rest of us the rules. What are the guidelines by which you're playing, Republicans? How do you decide what's right and what's wrong? Who's a patriot and who's a terrorist? Who wins and who loses? Because inquiring minds want to know.

Within the Republican rulebook, is there a rule by which the president can say the New York Times is doing "great harm" to America, pundits can refer to the paper as a national security threat and talk-show hosts can both accuse the Times of treason and support its staffers' executions and everyone looks the other way? Further, that they can do so while a walking national security threat, Karl Rove, roams free and is able to coordinate a smear campaign against the very paper that aided and abetted the administration on multiple occasions? And gave cover to the White House while it waged a war against Joseph Wilson, whose wife was working on actual national security threats, weapons of mass destruction in Iran? If there is, I'd like to know.

Speaking of heated rhetoric, I'm curious to know if there's a rule that gives Republicans carte blanche to call for their opponents' deaths while still labeling those who criticize them as the angry ones. That what's good for Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, Glenn Beck and so many others is fine, but the moment Democrats critique, civilly, the administration, we become a frothy pack of angry wolves, a group not in control of our emotions or our sanity? If there is, I'd like to know.

I'd like to know if there is a rule in the playbook by which the Republican Party can use deceased civil rights pioneers as photo props, not go on the record as opposing lynching, speculate that aborting African American children would reduce the crime rate and refer to a black congresswoman as a "ghetto slut" and get away with it? Not only get away with it, but be able to accuse the Democrats of racism for opposing on principle Bush nominees like Alberto Gonzales or Condoleeza Rice, whose minority status is somehow supposed to outweigh their massive incompetence? If there is, I'd like to know.

Also, is there a rule by which a Republican can - not once, but twice - run afoul of the law for drug-related violations, only to see another Republican repeatedly say that there was "no wrongdoing" involved in the latter violation and that the lawbreaker was a victim of "political persecution"? Because I'm wondering if another aspect of that rule involves the second Republican, Bill O'Reilly, having the ability to speak out of one side of his mouth about the first Republican, Rush Limbaugh, while referring to the residents of New Orleans as "drug-addicted" and "thugs"? Or for O'Reilly to let Limbaugh free while saying previously that he would have ordered the execution of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and, were he in charge of Iraq, would shoot curfew violators "on sight"? If there is, I'd like to know.

Finally, is there a rule that allows Republicans to claim that they support the troops while, in reality, the truth would prove otherwise? That allows them to hold sham votes recommending against a timetable that seemingly everyone is calling for? That lets them get away with supporting granting amnesty to those who would torture, mutilate and murder our troops? That allows them to send others to war while they stay home and say things like military service "isn't for our kind of people"? That considers supporting the troops slapping a Rick Santorum bumper sticker on your car? If there is, I'd like to know.

I'd like to know, because I've got the sneaking suspicion that there isn't a rulebook. At least nothing more involved than a simple, six-word phrase, a phrase that has been used over and over to excuse Republican hypocrisy. To whitewash years of wrongdoing. To allow the right to get away, literally and figuratively, with murder. A phrase so short, yet so harmful: It's OK if you're a Republican.

The Moose does not agree with the ruling. As the Moose has made clear, he is a Hamiltonian who is differential to Presidential power during wartime.

Excuse me, Mr. Wittman. Is illiteracy a common trait of Hamiltonians, or are you an exception?

Maybe I'm out on a limb here, but I just don't assign much weight to the opinions of people who clearly should have studied harder in sixth grade. Does that make me one of those "elitists" Moosie is always so resentful of?

I'm not a big "sports guy," but I do follow cycling to some extent. For those interested, a potential shocker, including some of the biggest names in the cycling world:

Former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich was suspended by his racing team Friday amid a doping scandal in Spain, forcing him out of cycling's premier race. Oscar Sevilla, Ullrich's teammate, also was suspended by the T-Mobile team. ...Ullrich and Sevilla were among 56 cyclists named in a Spanish probe as having contact with a doctor charged in connection with alleged doping, a Spanish radio station reported Thursday

....Spanish station Cadena SER said the Civil Guard decoded the names from notes taken by Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes. Other names included Italian rider Ivan Basso, American Tyler Hamilton, Spaniards Francisco Mancebo, Joseba Beloki, Roberto Heras, Santi Perez, Jose Enrique Gutierrez and Colombian Santiago Botero, the station reported. It wasn't immediately clear what Fuentes' relationship was with the cyclists.

Doesn't at all mean any of them are guilty. In fact, these allegations pop up all the time. Lance Armstrong was haunted by them his entire career.

That said, there's no denying doping in this sport is a huge problem, and those in charge have never done enough to eliminate it.

There's an interesting post over at Taegan Goddard. Seems like the SCOTUS ruling upholding most of the DeLaymander in Texas may backfire on the GOP.

Now that state legislatures have the green light to redistrict whenever the spirit moves, the Dems, who are in control in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, etc. have the opportunity to significantly boost their states' Congressional delegations.

Seems to me this also means that state legislative battles may become almost as important as actual Congressional elections in determining the makeup of the House.

DeGaulle is reputed to have said of France, "Any country with 300 cheeses is ungovernable." Personally, I regard French cheesemaking as a reasonable excuse for governmental confusion, but that is neither here nor there.

What is here, however, is that the current thread, begun by Newman about Obama, has over 300 posts. It is my contention that any thread with more than 150-200 becomes unmanageable.

I offer this blog not to change the subject, but to provide a venue for continuing the thread in a more user-friendly way.

"The Court's conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground: Congress has not issued the Executive a 'blank check,' Breyer wrote. "Indeed, Congress has denied the president the legislative authority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the president from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary."

Or, as Monty Python put it, "Supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony."

 It's about damn time.   Worth noting: Alito, J., dissenting.  Thank you Senator Lieberman.

[An Occasional Series]

U.S. losing war on terrorism, experts say
Poll finds that more than 8 in 10 respondents blame the Iraq war

ACLU sues Pentagon over anti-war group monitoring

06/15/2006

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. Defense Department on Wednesday to demand information it says the government has collected on groups opposed to the war in Iraq.

The group says the Pentagon has been monitoring anti-war groups and individuals and has compiled lists on people it sees as potential threats but who the ACLU says are exercising their free-speech rights.

The suit was the ACLU's first attempt to force the Pentagon to disclose domestic surveillance and followed similar suits by the organization against the FBI and the Justice Department.

"It's absolutely improper for the U.S. military to keep databases on lawful First Amendment (free-speech) activities," said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner.

"These are peaceful, law-abiding groups and individuals that oppose U.S. war policy but pose no threat to the military."

The ACLU said the Defense Department shared the information with other government agencies through the database, known as the Threat and Local Observation Notice, or Talon.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the Defense Department never commented on pending lawsuits. In April, the Pentagon said a review found it had collected data on U.S. peace activists and discovered that about 260 entries in the Talon database should not have been kept there or should have been removed.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for eastern Pennsylvania, charges the Pentagon is refusing to comply with requests by the ACLU to declare who had been monitored.

The ACLU filed the requests after learning through an NBC News report of Pentagon surveillance of peace groups.

The ACLU has also challenged President George W. Bush's order authorizing the National Security Agency to tap into private phone calls without court permission.

The latest suit is filed on behalf of some 30 groups, including the Americans Friends Service Committee, also known as the Quakers.

URL...

http://911review.org/news/ACLU_sues_Pentagon.html

ACLU sues Pentagon over anti-war group monitoring

Related...

CIFA NSA targets anti war groups

Counterintelligence Field Activity, CIFA for short, has been caught red-handed targetting anti-war groups.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006
 

Is MITRE Corp. The Trojan Horse of 9/11?
Category: News and Politics

IS DEFENSE CONTRACTOR MITRE CORP.
THE TROJAN HORSE OF 9/11?

By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
http://www.americanfreepress.net

Did a central controller with "super user" privileges of the command and control systems of the Department of Defense, NORAD, the Air Force, and the FAA, control the aerial attacks of 9/11? There is only one agency that has that capability â a little-known private company known as MITRE Corp.

There are basically two versions of events surrounding the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. There is the government version, propagated by the controlled media, which claims that 19 Arab terrorists, organized by Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hijacked 4 passenger aircraft and used them to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This version, used to launch the "war on terror" and two invasions in the Middle East, is challenged by a lack of evidence.

On the other hand, a host of unofficial explanations, based on available evidence, make up what can be called the "inside job" or anti-government version. This version basically claims that agents embedded within the U.S. military and intelligence organizations conspired to carry out the terror attacks.

The two foreign nations most often implicated in the unofficial explanations of 9/11 are Israel and Britain. Both countries are supporters and beneficiaries of the Bush administration's "war on terror."

For the Israelis, Iraq, a major threat, was drastically reduced in power and put under military occupation. For the British, a oil-rich territory, Iraq's southern region of Basra, which it originally occupied in 1914, was reoccupied and its immense oil assets put under control of the Crown.

Royal Dutch Shell and BP, formerly named British Petroleum, are two companies said to be controlled by the Crown, which have posted record profits since 9/11.

While both Britain and Israel have substantial assets and powerful organizations in the United States, proponents of the anti-government version have not explained how a foreign power could manipulate the computer systems of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command ( NORAD), and the U.S. Air Force, and thereby control the aerial attacks of 9/11.

When American Free Press interviewed Eckehardt Werthebach, former president of Germanyâs domestic intelligence service, in December 2001, he said âthe deathly precisionâ and âthe magnitude of planningâ behind the 9/11 attacks would have required âyears of planning.â

Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach said, would require the âfixed frameâ of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a âloose groupâ of terrorists like the one allegedly led by Mohammed Atta.

Many people would have been involved in the planning of such an operation, Werthebach said. He pointed to the absence of leaks as further indication that the attacks were âstate organized actions.â

Andreas von B�low, who served on Germany's parliamentary commission and oversaw the three branches of the German secret service, told AFP that he believed that Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, was behind the terror attacks. The attacks, he said, were carried out to turn public opinion against the Arabs and boost military and security spending.

âYou donât get the higher echelons,â von BÃ�low said, referring to the âarchitectural structureâ which masterminds such terror attacks. At this level, he said, the organization doing the planning, such as Mossad or British intelligence, is primarily interested in affecting public opinion.

In a recent article in AFP, " The Perfect Terrorist Plan To Level the Twin Towers Created In 1976" by Greg Szymanski, it was reported that the U.S. Army devised a plan in 1976 to bring down the towers using commercial airliners and box cutters as weapons.

At the time, George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA and Martin R. Hoffmann was Secretary of the Army. Hoffmann told AFP that he did not recall being involved in this planning reportedly done by the U.S. Army.

An architect, even of destruction, needs a contractor. Proponents of the anti-government version of 9/11 provide evidence to support their claims, but do not explain how the U.S. military and civil aviation control systems could have been hijacked to allow the aerial attacks to occur.

Because the attacks involved systems used by the FAA, NORAD, and the U.S. Air Force, the conspirators would have needed "super user" access to the command and control centers of these three separate organizations.

Super user means the most privileged user on a computerized data system. The super user has complete access to all files on the system. For the previously mentioned agencies, and virtually all other U.S. defense and intelligence organizations, there is one such possible super user: a little-known private not-for-profit organization, based in Bedford, Mass., known as MITRE Corp. MITRE also has a headquarters in McLean, Va., on a campus it shares with Northrop Grumman.

The MITRE Corp. is a major defense contracting organization headed by the former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), Dr. James Rodney Schlesinger. Schlesinger, who was reportedly made DCI at the request of Henry Kissinger in 1973, later served as Secretary of Defense.

Schlesinger, a former director of strategic studies at the RAND Corp., was described in a 1973 biography as a "devout Lutheran," although he was born in New York in 1929 to immigrant Jewish parents from Austria and Russia. Schlesinger earned three degrees from Harvard University.

Schlesinger's father, an accountant, founded the accounting firm Schlesinger & Haas, and was a trustee and chairman of the budget of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His father was also a member of the New York State Grand Lodge of Masons.

The MITRE Corp., of which Schlesinger is chairman of the board of trustees, is connected to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, and Mitretek Systems of Falls Church, Va.

Schlesinger is a senior advisor for the Lehman Brothers investment firm and a member of the Defense Policy Board and advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The MITRE Corp. has provided computer and information technology to the FAA and the U.S. Air Force since the late 1950's. MITRE is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) for the Dept. of Defense, the FAA, and the Internal Revenue Service.

The chairman of the board of trustees of Mitretek Systems, a spin-off of MITRE Corp., is Martin R. Hoffmann, who served as Secretary of the Army when the "perfect terrorist plan" was reportedly prepared in 1976.

MITRE's Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) FFRDC for the Dept. of Defense was established in 1958. The C3I "supports a broad and diverse set of sponsors within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. These include the military departments, defense and intelligence agencies, the combatant commands, and elements of both the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," according to MITRE's website. "Information systems technology," it says, "coupled with domain knowledge, underpin the work of the C3I FFRDC."

The U.S. Air Force maintains its Electronic Systems Center (ESC) at the Hanscom AFB in Bedford, Mass. The ESC manages the development and acquisition of electronic command and control (C2) systems used by the Air Force.

The ESC is the Air Force's "brain for information, command and control systems," according to Charles Paone, a civilian employee of the ESC. It is the "product center" for the Air Force's Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (J-STARS), Paone said.

Asked about MITRE's role at the ESC, Paone said, "MITRE does the front-end engineering. It's basically our in-house engineer." MITRE employees operate the computer systems at Hanscom AFB, Paone said.

MIT's Lincoln Laboratories, the parent of MITRE, is located on the Hanscom AFB.

A second FFRDC, the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) provides computer engineering and technology to the FAA. MITRE's support of the FAA began in 1958, when the company was created.

The FAA's Airspace Management Handbook of May 2004, for example, was written and published by the MITRE Corp.

Jennifer Shearman, MITRE's public relations manager for "corporate identity" in Bedford, told AFP that MITRE is a "trusted mentor" for the FAA and is a "unique" provider of "objective and independent" information for the U.S. civil aviation authority.

MITRE's Bedford headquarters are located near Boston's Logan airport where the two planes that struck the World Trade Center supposedly originated. Bedford lies directly under the flight path of westbound flights leaving Logan.

MITRE developed the technology "to aid controllers in solving problems while keeping aircraft close to their route, altitude, and speed preferences." Shearman was unable to say why the MITRE technology apparently failed on 9/11.

Indira Singh, an "IT consultant" who previously worked on a Defense Advanced Research Project, and who was employed by J.P. Morgan on 9/11, in risk management, pointed to MITRE's role at the FAA during the 9/11 Citizens' Commission hearings in New York last September.

"Ptech was with MITRE Corporation in the basement of the FAA for two years prior to 9/11," Singh said. "Their specific job is to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force in the case of an emergency. If anyone was in a position to know that the FAA â that there was a window of opportunity or to insert software or to change anything â it would have been Ptech along with MITRE."

A representative of Ptech could not be reached. [Ptech appears to have been a Mossad front company created to provide insecure Trojan Horse software to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Ptech has the typical Arab owners and financiers - and Mossad operators.]

For example, see Michael Goff, former marketing manager at Ptech, Inc. http://www.goffpr.com/about.asp

Photo: Dr. James Rodney Schlesinger

Schlesinger bio info: http://www.mitre.org/about/bot/schlesinger.html 

Also see...
ACLU sues Pentagon over anti-war group monitoring
911review in the News
Alex Constantine directory

IS DEFENSE CONTRACTOR MITRE CORP THE TROJAN HORSE OF 9/11?

URL of this article...

http://911review.org/companies/MITRE/MITRE_Bollyn.html

The amnesty plan that wasn't from a "government" that isn't is a proposition quite readily defended as this report on the apparent quick collapse of Mailiki's "national reconciliation plan"  from AP makes plain.

It would have been arguably better had Mailiki made no proposal at all than this for it will surely expose and widen the already gaping cleavages in Iraq.

Martin Seiff of UPI referring to the Unity Government - worth remembering throughout the continuing farce that is Bush's Iraq

"Trouble is, none of it is real"

Thoughts on Sen. Obama's speech and Nathan Newman's post:

Sen. Obama: Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word "Christian" describes one's political opponents, not people of faith.

Three simple questions, Sen. Obama:

1) Which Democrats? Which liberals?

2) What specifically did they do or say?

3) What specifically would you have had them do or say instead? Otherwise, it's just more "Some Democrats..." nonsense -- not just untrue but totally gratuitous.

How about next time, "I propose..." instead of "Flying in the face of the America-hating progressive wing of my party, I propose..."

In an otherwise entirely reasonable post, AmericanDreamer wrote: "Obama's argument that it is possible both to rescind calls to check one's religious rhetoric at the door as a condition of speaking in the public square..."

Which calls? Who among elected Democrats or party spokespeople has called for this?

Although a great many religious people are actively and sometimes vociferously hostile to secular people, who are these Democrats and liberals who are saying that Jesse Jackson, for example, should check his religious rhetoric at the door?

The longer this thread goes on, the more I'm convinced that "Some Democrats..." (or liberals or leftists) is the most pernicious construction the Republicans have ever created.

Where are they hiding, these mysterioius "some?"

I've been involved in progressive and Dem politics for 40 years. I've seen religious contingents march side by side with the most radical of radical leftists and never be treated with anything less than respect. I've seen roomfuls of secular people refuting right-wing claims to moral superiority by citing Christian tradition and Jesus' words, rather than saying who cares what Jesus/the Bible says. I've been to rallies, memorial services, and bar mitzvahs where secular people thrilled to religious rhetoric. I've seen Dean Corps people turning their energies to serving meals and sorting cans at faith-based charities.

It's odd that no one ever says, "Some Republicans..." even though the "some" are so easily identifiable, and given so prominent a platform: Coulter, Malkin, Limbaugh, Dobson, Robertson...no shortage. And yet no one can ever name a single one of the "some" Democrats, liberals, or leftists.

Besides playing into the Republican narrative, it's just not constructive to suggest that we change in some unspecified manner from a way we're not.

The verdict in Hamdan will not close Gitmo, but it is a big step in bringing the executive branch back inside the corral of accountability, and the U.S. back into the rule of law.

The Justices in the majority found that the military tribunals created to try Guantanamo Bay detainees do not pass muster under federal or international law. The ruling is, in a sense, a result of an ambiguity in the 2004 Rasul v. Bush ruling, where Justice O’Connor found that detainees have a right to defend themselves in a legal proceeding, but left open what those proceedings might look like.

The government has instituted tribunals in a few cases, based on the November 01 executive order establishing military tribunals for accused terrorists. These tribunals provide substantially fewer protections than ordinary courts martial. This was part of the basis for the decision, as I understand it. But it's far from the most interesting part.

But in addition to these tribunals, which have been ordered in only a handful of cases, the government’s response to Rasul was to create “detainee review boards” that functioned more or less like parole hearings, listening to evidence in each detainees case, but providing no legal representation to help detainees defend themselves effectively.

Meanwhile, the response on the other side, after Rasul, was to begin organizing lawyers willing to represent Gitmo detainees in federal habeas corpus petitions, arguing under one of the oldest Anglo-American legal protections that the government must provide a clear legal basis for their actions if detention was to continue. A surprising number of law firms and other prominent attorneys agreed to help in this effort.

In the meantime, however, the Detainee Treatment Act passed by Congress sought to strip federal courts of the jurisdiction to hear these cases. Today, this court-stripping measure has been set aside. In the grand scheme of things, this is arguably more important than the ruling on military tribunals, in that it allows potentially hundreds of cases to go forward, and hundreds of detained men (and children) to have their day in court.

In a practical sense, I think that this is the important angle of the story that isn't, yet, getting that much play. With barriers imposed by Congress removed, there are more than 200 detainee cases that are seeking to make their way into federal courts, and it's likely that some of them will get there in the near future. Rasul and Hamdan, in a sense, addressed the process, but not the substance of indefinite detention, and the authority of the government to hold people under these conditions. As the habeas suits move forward, we'll start to move to the heart of the issue. Probably, it will be a rocky road, but I wonder if, two years hence, the Supreme Court won't be called on to make an even more daring and important decision than those it made in 2006 and 2004.

Finally, the big news concerns the conditions under which Gitmo was set up in the first place. Guantanamo Bay was chosen because it is a legal oddity: technically the sovereign territory of Cuba, the area is under permanent lease to the U.S.; the government has argued in cases back to the early 1990s that federal courts do not have jurisdiction there. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration said that was not obliged to apply the Geneva Conventions, since Al Qaeda members are not part of any military, and the Taliban was an illegal regime, meaning that its soldiers aren’t soldiers at all, and hence are not eligible for Prisoner of War status. No federal jurisdiction, and no international law to apply – it all seemed an idyllic island spot for a vacation from all that law.

The ruling states that the Geneva Conventions must be applied to Al Qaeda detainees. Specifically, according to SCOTUSBlog:

[T]he Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda… This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever"—including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

The ruling thus addresses (in theory, at least) not only the question of detentions, but the regime of coercive detention that has been so contentious in the past two years. It probably opens the way to a host of other challenges to the government’s actions,

I doubt that Gitmo is going away – even though members of the Administration including the President have expressed some weariness with the controversy, the principle of unbridled executive authority in matters of war is too important to them to give up without a fight, or more properly, a dodge. That’s what happened after Rasul, and the result was two more years of waiting. Another two, hey, that would take us to 2008….

From today's  Progress Report another "Mission Accomplished". If opposition to the War in Iraq was the focus of the Democratic Campaign '06, the effect would be devastating. With the I word on their lips, Democratic candidates could deliver the unambigous message, a tale of Republican reign of failure not only around the globe but here at home too.  NASCAR dads do not like losers,and that is exactly what George Bush is, and exactly the message that the War Wing of the Party would tongue tie if they tried to deliver it.

"As a result of the United States military, [the] Taliban is no longer in existence."

Loser of the United States
September 2004

2006 The Taliban Can
Like a Phoenix,Taliban Waging Full Blown Insurgency
Karzai Government Rocked

Time for an “Agonizing Reappraisal”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

From Nathan Neuman's (http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2006/jun/28/obama_religion_and_the_blog_reaction  reaction to Barrack Obama's speech....

 This was a speech to other progressive religious people and I really find it hard to believe people are trashing it so hard, given that he upholds almost all progressive principles and mostly accuses secular folks of "avoiding the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands." Hardly a Republican talking point, just a statement that most liberals don't feel comfortable engaging in this religious debate, which is not inaccurate I think.

What utter nonsense... Obama's statement, quoted about, is completely consistent with GOP talking points about the Democratic left (there is a reason why Coulter named her book "Godless")-- and is completely untrue as well.

But not only did Obama spew false GOP talking points, he did so in the context of supporting one of the far-right's favorite wedge issues "prayer in school." The end of prayer in schools was one of the great victories for religious diversity and tolerance in this nation -- no longer were children of "minority" faiths being indoctrinated into Christianity, and schools placed all religions on an equal footing. Obama wants to eliminate that, forcing parents who do not want their kids indoctrinated into Christianity to either withdraw their children from public schools, or have their children face ostracism because they have been instructed by their parents not to participate in the officially sanctioned prayers.

There is no impediment to schools implementing a period of silent reflection, during which those children who wish to pray can do so. We shouldn't be forcing children to recite (or listen to) prayers to a deity that is foreign to their parents belief.

What Obama has done is endorse a giant step toward a very slippery slope that could lead to what the right-wing wants --- for the US to become an "official" Christian nation. It would be one thing if he'd advocated allowing the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public buildings, or allow nativity scenes on public property during the Christmas season -- advocating that the state recognize the role that religion plays in citizens lives while unnecessary is not a radical position to take. Advocating that Democrats endorse prayer in school is a radical notion that is in direct opposition to the ideas behind the "no establishment of religion" clause of the Bill of Rights.

No, no, no! The Supreme court told "Georgie" and the monsters in his administration today that their claims of unlimited executive branch power is a no-no! SUPREME COURT RULING

In a 5-3 ruling the court ruled that the administration had overstepped its bounds at Guantanamo Bay's infamous "prison"..

Chief Justice John Roberts didn't participate in the ruling because he had already voted the "wrong" way in a previous ruling on this matter so, in effect, it would have been 5-4.

The good news is: this is a slap in the face to "Georgie", Dick "The Monster" Cheney and "Rummy" for their power mongering attempts to make their own rules. The bad news is: the world's view of these monsters has been confirmed which is bad for all Americans.

The consequences will probably be that "Gitmo" will close. The administration will spin this decision as a political "way out" for them to finally end this horrible chapter in our history. But where will they send the "detainees?"

Suggestion: Let them, one by one, go hunting with "Dickie."

The US urges restraint - but what does that matter? 

 Residents Flee in Terror from Israeli Army

Why I didn't give 2 "Cheers for Sharon" with Dr. Jentleson is explained in Informed Comment's roundup of life in Israel's Gaza Ghetto. Time to call a rogue state, a rogue state.

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Israel Detains Palestinian Ministers
Knocks out Electricity to Half of Gazans
Half of the Palestinians in Gaza, who were already living pretty miserable lives after decades of marginalization and brutalization by the Israelis, were left without electricity yesterday.
Palestinian officials like Saeb Erekat rejected the idea that knocking out electricity for hundreds of thousands of people is targeting a "terrorist infrastructure." In fact, destroying electricity generation capability interferes with water purification. Palestinian children will die because of this, from drinking unpurified water. And what crime did Palestinian toddlers commit, to be murdered in this way?
The Israelis escalated the crisis by detaining Hamas government ministers. The likelihood is that the captors of the Israeli soldier are freelancers. This wasn't something plotted out by the Haniyeh government, which, in fact, recently granted a huge concession on the issue of potentially recognizing Israel.
PM Ismail Haniyeh called for the United Nations Security Council to intervene.
The ministers detained are members of a freely and democratically elected government. I can't imagine under what legal authority the Israelis have arrested them. But everyone in the Middle East can see exactly what "elections" and "democracy" amount to. Bush's promises have never seemed so hollow.
Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, called for the US to get involved as an honest broker. Well, I suppose miracles do happen.
I am upset about the renewed crisis in Palestine because it is an emotional issue and will spill over into Sunni Arab Iraq. It is likely that pro-Palestinian Sunni guerrillas will kill some US troops specifically to avenge the people of Gaza. This is one reason I am complaining about the massively disproportional character of the Israeli response. It has the potential of further endangering American lives in the region.
And, it is counter-productive. The Israelis can't get back their soldier by destroying electricity plants in Gaza. They can't get more security by depriving Palestinians of security.

posted by Juan @ 6/29/2006 06:33:00 AM 0 comments   

I just submitted the following letter to the CS Monitor, in regard to their article Debate on Hill Over Power of the President. It's the first time I've ever written a letter to the editor - I'll let you know if they print it. The Cooper paper I mention is here [PDF].

Your June 28 article, "Debate on Hill Over Power of the President," overlooks two vital concerns in this debate. One is that President Bush's use of signing statements exceeds those of previous Presidents not only in number, but also in scope. In the September 2005 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly, scholar Phillip Cooper described in detail Bush's "audacious claims to constitutional authority" in his use of signing statements. Bush has used signing statements to treat a number of mandatory legislative provisions as merely "advisory," to recast areas of foreign affairs where Presidents previously shared power with Congress into areas of exclusive Presidential authority, to grant himself a de facto line-item veto, to reprogram Congressional appropriations for his own purposes, to assert such tight control over information as to render Congressional oversight meaningless in many areas, and to assert several other claims to power. No previous President has made such wide-ranging claims of Presidential authority, by use of signing statements or any other means.

The other vital concern is understanding the larger context of this debate. President Bush has made broad claims to Presidential power beyond the use of signing statements. For example, via executive order he has suspended habeas corpus for those he suspects of connection to terrorism. Habeas corpus has been suspended only once before in our history, by President Lincoln in the Civil War. While Lincoln sought and obtained retroactive authorization from Congress, Bush has not acknowledged any Congressional authority in this area. In regard to the warrantless wiretapping program, what has not been widely noted is its connection to the Patriot Act. President Bush asked Congress to loosen some of the FISA rules, and was granted these requests in the Patriot Act. He publicly thanked Congress, and then secretly directed the NSA to disregard those very same laws.

What is urgently needed in this country, and is so far lacking, is a broad, informed, and vigorous public debate on just how much power we are willing to invest in the Presidency, given the terrorist threat, and how to guard against abuses of that power. President Bush's aggressive stance on executive authority will not go away with his administration. Once power is acquired, it is rarely relinquished - future Presidents will build on the precedents he is establishing. As such, this is hardly an arcane debate - it goes to the very principals of government on which this country was founded.

There are many ways to think about religion and its relationship with politics. In the end, Sen. Obama's approach probably carries a different emphasis from what mine would be. But the speech, which has gotten lots of quick progressive criticism, is, as Nathan Newman has suggested, extremely thoughtful and nuanced. Before you judge it, you should read the entire thing, available here, for yourself. (You can also listen to it there too.)

 Pat Buchanan surveys the wreckage of Bush foreign policy. Trenchant and incontestable.

Time for an “Agonizing Reappraisal”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Gazing across what Zbigniew Brzezinski once called the “arc of crisis,” U.S. foreign policy appears to be disintegrating.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1150885858552&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

In another development, an elderly Israeli kidnapped.

http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=2754

Some positive news however: More than 30 Hamas terrorists arrested.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/732528.html

All of this has occured, along with the rocket attacks nearly a year after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

In an upcoming issue of the Nation.   Here's the review in advance via Tom Englehardt.

The American Political Tradition
    By Andrew J. Bacevich
    TomDispatch.com 

    When it comes to foreign policy, the fundamental divide in American politics today is not between left and right but between those who subscribe to the myth of the "American Century" and those who do not. Peter Beinart is a true believer. In his eyes America's purpose today remains precisely what it has always been: to confront and destroy the enemies of freedom at home and abroad. In The Good Fight, he summons liberals to recover their crusading spirit and to "put anti-totalitarianism at the center of their hopes for a better country and a better world." Liberalism must become once again what it was in its heyday: "a fighting faith."... 

The Good Fight began life as an essay that appeared in The New Republic when Beinart edited that magazine. According to press reports, he received a handsome $600,000 advance to expand his essay into a book. The result can only be called a major disappointment: The Good Fight is insipid, pretentious and poorly written. At points it verges on incoherence. As history, it is meretricious. As policy prescription, it is wrongheaded. Beinart has perpetrated his fraud twice over.

Bacevich proceeds with a history lesson who may not know a great deal about history but who amply compensates in other ways.

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing, convened by Arlen Specter (R-Pa), to discuss the use of the Presidential Signing Statement, a practice undertaken more frequently by the Bush administration than all previous presidents combined. An impressive panel of constitutional law experts provided testimony, including conservative scholar Bruce Fein, former Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan administration.

(Cross posted at MyLeftWing and hairytruth.blogspot.com)

Fein's assessment is that the President's unprecedented use of Signing Statements represents a concerted effort to assume unlimited executive power, circumventing any meaningful system of checks and balance across the three branches of government, and that his actions clearly rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Whether or not Fein's judgment is valid from the perspective of constitutional law, the evaluation is worth considering in a broader context. Over seventy years ago, the celebrated journalist Dorothy Thompson spoke these chilling words:

No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"

Is it already too late? Under a fog of carefully crafted fear - fear of others, fear of seeming unpatriotic, fear of sacrifice - has the King already assumed the throne?

As Thompson also said, "Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live."

EDITOR'S UPDATE: as reported by Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

"Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had 'staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He's said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President's reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world's a battlefield -- according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It's got the sense of Louis XIV: 'I am the State.' "

One of the few arguments that Republicans have left to defend President Bush and the Republican Congress's abysmal poll numbers is the line that: polls don't mean anything, winning elections is what counts.  They will then cite the 2004 exit polls as proof that all polls are unreliable and therefore President Bush must be wildly popular across the country, if only the "blue-state elitists" and the "liberal media" would take notice. 

Leaving this silliness aside, there appears to be a legitimate argument as to whether or not the Republicans have a highly superior get-out-the-vote (GOTV) machine that allows them to win elections and that polls cannot fully measure.  Such an argument is going to be made by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger in their upcoming book One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century.  According to Taegan Goddard, the book examines "the Republican party's dominance in redistricting, using computer technology to turn out their core supporters at the polls and why modern polling no longer accurately tracks their progress."

Some argue that if the Democrats want to win elections, they will have to stop relying on labor and GOTV groups to turn out blue voters, but will have to build a system within the party that is similar to that of the Republicans.

However, in a recent post at the Daily Strategist, Alan Abramowitz laid out the case that the Democratic ground game isn't in as bad shape as many would have us believe.

An op-ed by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger in Sunday's L.A. Times gives the impression that the GOP now enjoys a clear advantage when it comes to voter mobilization. However, the evidence from the 2004 election simply doesn't support this view. According to the 2004 National Election

Study, both parties dramatically increased their voter mobilization efforts in 2004 but Democrats did a better job of contacting voters than Republicans. According to the NES survey, the percentage of voters contacted by the GOP increased from 26 percent in 2000 to 29 percent in 2004 while the percentage contacted by Democrats increased from 23 percent in 2000 to 32 percent in 2004.

Ohio in 2004 is often cited as an example of the GOP's superiority inthe ground game but, again, the evidence doesn't support this view.

Between 2000 and 2004, the Republican vote in Ohio increased by an impressive 21.7% but the Democratic vote increased by an even more

impressive 25.4%.

Recently it has been argued that Rep. Chris Cannon's (R-UT) primary victory (which came with the assistance of White House "robocalls") and Rep. Brian Bilbray's (R-CA) triumph over netroots favorite Francine Busby were due to advanced GOTV tactics that turned out voters by identifying their hot-button issues.  Whether or not there is such a GOP GOTV machine may well be discovered after the 2006 elections -- which could be the its biggest test yet.

Just today I wrote, hopefully to a Middle Eastern readership, that: “If we were to take up arms against our own government as many have suggested, we would desecrate the spirit of America and all that our ancestors died to procure and defend for us, their descendents, even more than the NeoCons have done, who took over the government here mostly using the law, even though they did it by self-serving, out-of-context and other warped, lying, "interpretations" of the Law. Whatever we do, IT MUST BE DONE WITHIN THE LAW, else we are no longer who we believe, who we choose to be. By that way we would finish our own destruction even more thoroughly than the fanatic NeoCons ever could. I wanted them to know that we are not a country of unthinking, murderous, Christianesque, fanatic, thieving conquerors, and that is the only impression they could possibly get from their experience with our troops, who are under- and wrongly- trained, under-equipped, poorly supervised, over-utilized and wrongly used.

(For any errors in the following, I ask your forgiveness in advance; I am exhausted, in more pain than usual, and absolutely livid).

I have read about rendition, and about torture, sometimes to death. These are unbelievable, intolerable evils, and they are being committed by my own country. Not only are they horrors that we should not be doing for any reason whatsoever, they are having exactly the opposite effect to the one those who have authorized them intend for them to have. They do NOT gain us information we need in a timely fashion; they gain us almost no useful information at all. At most, they gain us a name to go after, supplied by some poor, desperate, innocent soul who has given us the name of someone he doesn’t care for, probably figuring that if he’s to be forced to name someone, he may as well cause trouble from someone he doesn’t like. And that circle grows and grows.

Just now, I read again about innocent people – or suspects, which damned well should be the same thing! – who are women as old as seventy, as young as twelve, being stripped naked, raped, beaten, tortured in other ways, held without charge or hope of any help for the flimsiest of reasons. I read about their being kept in conditions that would gain the owners of dogs in this country substantial jail time and fines should they treat dogs in such an inhumane fashion. I read about a young woman left in a jail cell with the rotting corpse of her brother. Surely a certain way to “win hearts and minds” there.

Here in our own country, more and more, it seems we do the same thing: take someone poor and blackmail them into naming someone, anyone. If they can, great, they cut a deal. If there’s just no one to give up to the police, maybe because they were framed by police anyway, then they can go to jail for essentially a lifetime, for a crime without a victim.

But back to the Middle East. We now torture and hold as long as we like, it seems, people of all ages – who are subject to rape along with the usual tortures – males ranging from ten to their late sixties, and small boys, as young as eight or ten. I have read about adult males raped with broom handles and such. And then there’s the other humiliation, a regular practice too.

For anyone who has read anything about Middle Eastern customs and history, it is immediately apparent that the insurgency now needs no explanation other than this kind of behavior. Never mind that we won’t let them own their own businesses, that they have little or no vital infrastructure almost four years after being “liberated”, that the only ways we allow them to fulfill the necessary role of provider makes them targets, creating more widows and orphans. They are all treated like The Enemy: shot at random if a soldier’s had a bad day, their children or spouse killed before their eyes for no good reason… The men are humiliated before their wives and other women, before their own children, if they haven’t been killed, their neighbors. The women are used as whores before their husbands.

And no one does anything, no one says anything. The military hides it all unless they’re caught out. Business as usual.

We are creating a whole area of the Earth that will remember this evil for as long as people continue to live in those places. Our leaders will listen to no expert advice, do not bother to learn anything about the language, customs, cultures, religions – nothing at all. Our soldiers end up killing – and now even suspicion isn’t necessary, just the desire to kill – simply because they too have no notion of how to communicate with the people who live in Iraq. And to top it off, we are there under false pretenses and illegally.

No – let’s start in the right place. It has become clear the President and his party stole the election by gerrymandering, Jim Crow laws, cheating at registration by tossing legitimate registrations, calling people and telling them to go to the wrong voting places, machines that err on the side of their own candidates, judges that stop what recounts are possible and declare for their candidate, and on and on and on and on. The President of the United States of America is a liar, a fanatic and a thief, and he and his Vice President occupy those offices against the clearly expressed Will of The People. We didn’t want him, we voted him out of office, so he stole the office anyway. He is a religious demagogue who also believes in a Christian fringe cult (Dominionism – look it up). They have spent over thirty years infiltrating the government for a specific purpose: they intend to take over the government and legislate Old Testament laws, discard the Constitution, destroy the Social Contract by which we care for the poor, the aged, those caught in disasters – for each other. He is an alcoholic/drug addict who found better drugs: power and God. He intends to destroy what remains of our school system and turn it over to corporations and churches.

Their intent is to destroy America no matter what the People want and make it into a corporate theocracy. They also believe in the old Adam Smith trickle-down economic theory (with a Hobbsian/religious twist), which has been shown to be good for nothing at all save bankrupting countries, creating massive numbers of poor people out of what was a solid working class, and enriching the wealthy.

That religious twist is this: if you are poor, it is because you are out of favor with God. Obviously, you are lazy, sinful and so on, and God is punishing you. If you are rich, born so or not (though they stack the deck against the working poor, another creation of theirs, ever climbing into the next stratum, figuring that if God favors you, nothing will stand in the way), then God obviously loves you.

All of their appointees are either incompetents who don’t belong where they are but are being rewarded for their financial support, or they are plants representing the industries that the agencies they now control are supposed to regulate, with the intent of destroying those agencies, freeing business to steal, lie, poison our air, food, water, land and anything else that happens to get in the way, to take any of the commons they can at no cost to them, nothing returned to the country or the People until there is nothing left but poisoned land, air, and water. And some super-rich people. These NeoCons are creating an American Empire that is more abusive than any since ancient times, but is far more powerful and careless of people and resources. They believe nothing they do not want to believe, as though their deliberate blindness creates the reality they choose, as if science were nothing but superstition, easily ignored.

By the time they are done, there will be a United States that is totally bankrupt (that way they can say there’s no money for social programs), has no medical system to speak of except for the very wealthy, has no natural resources, no wild areas or the animals or plants that used to live there remaining. The government will control all aspects of all lives save the very wealthy. There will be no free press or free speech – which will be sedition - no right to privacy, no right to an education, a roof over our heads, to worship as we see fit, to dissent or protest – we will have only the right to do as we’re told, work hard for so little it may as well be nothing, and to die when we get sick for lack of medical care, and to obey the church or end up slave labor and die there, in prison or a concentration camp.

And that, my fellow credulous Americans, is what all our forefathers fought and died for – so that we could be slaves to the wealthy, live in poverty and shame in an industrial wasteland, go to war to conquer other countries that have what our leaders want, and to die young one way or another, fighting for no benefit to ourselves at all.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps there comes a time when you either pick up a weapon – a rifle, a handgun, a rock, your bare hands – and fight for your life and the lives of those you love, and those who, God willing, will come after you, or you become a founder of the lower class - trash. Sometimes you can only take the path left open to you. They own the lawmaking machinery of the country, then ignore the very laws they made if they suddenly become inconvenient, they own the judges, the military and the weapons, the banks and the industries, the machines that count the votes – they own everything worth owning. Now they want our souls, and our children’s souls. So what path remains to retention of our Selves, our dignity? I hope and pray that in my exhaustion and limited perception, I am wrong.

If that doesn’t say it’s time to fight, what ever will? With three million of us in jail, mostly for crimes that harmed no one and that most people don’t consider to be crimes anyway, what will it take? Will we have to fight our own children, the military, in the streets of our own country? Will it take the entire military, the citizenry, everyone who can get there, to surround the White House and drag the miscreants out by force for a trial, and probably an execution after? They have made us into war criminals! And if they will do all this to our own military and to the innocents of other countries, I doubt – no, I KNOW – they will not hesitate to use deadly force on us, the citizens, the rightful rulers of this country, in order to retain the power they stole; they already have. And it will take a country-wide rebellion exactly like that: the military, the police, the courts, the citizens, everyone, everywhere, refusing to serve this illegal, immoral, greedy, lying, thieving, hypocritical government, to make us a free people again.

They have made certain of that. There comes a time, very soon now, when we either circle the wagons with those who must stay and fight, send out riders to attack what must be attacked, and take the bastards down or go down fighting ourselves if we want our children to inherit anything but slavery in a wasteland. Damn them all; we were well on the way to a really decent, honoring and honorable civilization before they and their vengeful, lying, hypocritical God (for Whom only they speak, of course), showed up . Now, one way or another, they will make us savages again, just like them.

NOTE: Cross-posted at Ian MacLeod’s Blog, One Man’s Opinion, at: http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=30296181

You will need to register, but they ask little info, unlike WaPo or the NYT, which I refuse to register at because they want everything but my underwear size. I suggested that they ask the NSA, but have yet to hear back.

Ian MacLeod

June 27th, 2006

Oregon

Lynn Sweet, Washington collumnist for your Chicago Sun-Times, has posted the full text of Sen. Barack Obama's remarks to Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This may be difficult for those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

“I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.” – Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)

Finally someone has said it: it is essential to the future of democracy to recognize that the vast majority of Americans can't be trusted to think straight, because they are so whacko they believe the world is run by magic fairies in the sky. That IS what Barack means here, isn't it?

Oh.

Another one in the dustbin, then. Who's left?

Sometimes it's not so easy to return a cell phone.

A few weeks ago, I found a cell phone in dog poo across the street from my residence. I thought of all the times I have lost my cell phone and decided to return it to its owner.

How hard could it be?

The battery was dead. So, I couldn't receive a call from the owner to arrange the return of the phone. The day after my find, I went to three cell phone stores and asked if they had a compatible charger. I told them I just wanted to charge the phone so I could return it to its owner. None of them had a compatible charger.

One employee said it was an old cheap phone that had been discontinued. I experienced Good Samaritan fatigue for the next two weeks.

This week I obtained the name and address of the phone's owner. There was no listing in the phone book. I weighed writing him or going to the address. I decided on the road trip. It turned out his address was in the middle of no where on a god forsaken street.

He wasn't home, but a growling dog welcomed me. I laid the phone on the welcome mat and left.

Note to self: Next time write a letter and have the owner come to you.

Not exactly but longtime treasurer and director of the Waterfall Committee is John H. Moseman, CIA Chief of Staff. The Waterfall Committee is a Virginia charity which raises money primarily for breast cancer screening for women in rural Alaska.

The address of the Waterfall Comittee is 20809 Confidence Court, Ashburn VA 20147-3924 which apparently is Mr. Moseman's home. I found that out when I called the number for the Waterfall Committee, thinking I'd get the CIA. (Sorry, Mrs. M, for the little white lie!) Moseman, LLC, registered in April 2005, is at the same address.

First Lady Nancy Murkowski, wife of Governor Frank Murkowski of Alaska is chairman of the Waterfall Committee. I read about the Waterfall Committee's famous annual fishing trip at a luxury resort in Alaska today on the American Radio website via TPM Muckraker. The photos of Representative Dennis Hastert, Senator Trent Lott, Senator Kit Bond and former Senator Phil Gramm are a must-see!

The following people are or have been directors or officers of the Waterfall Committee:

Gregg D. Renkes c/o John Moseman
John H. Moseman, Ashburn VA
Janet Klinger, Vienna VA
Nancy Murkowski, Juneau AK
Malcom Roberts, Anchorage AK
Mary Jane Fate, Juneau AK
Sam Kito, Juneau AK

I only have access to the 2002-2004 990s filed by the Waterfall Committee so I don't know how much was raised for charity before 2002. Grants in 2002 were $450K compared to grants of $245k in 2003 and $221K in 2004. A press release on Governor Murkowski's website reported that the Waterfall Committee raised $300k in 2005.

I have a couple of questions for the Waterfall Committee's accountants, Cocke, Szpanka & Taylor of 1800 Robert Fulton Drive, Reston VA. (I wonder if Cocke et al are the CIA's accountants of choice?)

In 2002, the financial results were:

Contributions received - $530k
Grants - $450k
Conference, meetings etc - $212K
Travel - $4k
Consulting - $42K
Events - $11K

2003 financial results were:

Contributions received - $537K
Grants - $245k
Conference, meetings etc - $213K
Consulting fees - $42k
Events - $12K

2004 financial results were accounted for differently. It appears that all of the expenses such as consulting fees were rolled up into "events":

Contributions received - $221K
Grants - $225k
Events gross receipts - $389k
Event expense - $318K
Event income - $51K

It also appears that in 2002 and 2003 that the donors' costs for the big fishing soiree were accounted for as "contributions". Did the donors account for the trip costs as charitable contributions and take tax deductions for the full amounts?

Any chance that the consulting fees are paid to John H. Moseman or someone connected politically?

Just asking.

Waterfall Committee's 990s are available online at Guidestar and the Foundation Center's 990 Finder and a salute and word of thanks from me to those two organizations for providing an invaluable public service!

It has been awhile. Our TV station continues under renovations. Notably the control room. Ever couple of weeks an engineer or two show up and spend a few days working on things.

We have a much needed change in station management. Last week a visiting director was denied things she needed for a show for stupid reasons.

So what exactly did the New York Times do to upset the Repulicans class of never wrong.

All they did was tell the truth as best they knew it.

Does anyone think real terrorist were captured in Florida?

When news broke last week that the administration had, since September 11, tracked the financial transactions of thousands of Americans to, in its words, fight terrorism, the Republican response was both predictably swift and predictably hypocritical. Setting the tone Monday was President Bush, who said, "The disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America."

White House spokesliar Tony Snow followed his boss's lead in criticizing the New York Times, adding, "But the New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know in some cases might override somebody's right to live, and whether in fact the publications of these could place in jeopardy the safety of fellow Americans." It didn't take long, accordingly, for right-wing pundits to parrot the White House's talking points, attacking the Times and, while doing so, chipping away at our fragile democracy.

Media Matters has compiled a distressing list of right-wingers attacking the Times over the story. Radio personality Melanie Morgan said, "I see it as treason, plain and simple ..." Our old friend Ann Coulter said of the story, "If that is not treason, then we're not prosecuting anymore." Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said the Justice Department has "an obligation to consider prosecution". Congressman Peter King urged the administration to prosecute the Times and other papers reporting the story, while the editors of the National Review demanded the White House revoke the Times's press credentials.

When they're not accusing the Times of treason or demanding that their reporters lose the right to cover Congress or the White House, pundits are otherwise disparaging the paper. The flaccid Rush Limbaugh said, "I think 80 percent of their subscribers have to be jihadists." Michael Barone said, "Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack?" Said Heather McDonald, "By now it's undeniable: The New York Times is a national security threat." Brent Bozell, Newt Gingrich and Morton Kondracke each made similar statements about the Times's physical proximity to the World Trade Center, a fact that shoul, in their words, remind staffers of what happened there five years ago this September.

While the hypocrisy inherent in any Republican accusing anyone of threatening our national security - Karl Rove, anyone? - is breathtaking, it's important to focus on the complaints aimed at the media in general and the Times in particular. Where were these complaints when the Times ran a front-page article on the Clintons' marriage? Was the right wing pleased with the Old Gray Lady then, when Patrick Healy penned an expose better left to the gossip rags? It sure seemed so, because between May 23 - when the article was first published - and June 1, Chris Matthews alone asked at least 90 questions to his guests about the piece. Questions to guests on both sides of the aisle pertaining to a completely irrelevant story, a story that distracted Americans from discussing, say, the administration's willingness to spy on them and do so in absolute secrecy.

Or, more importantly, where were these complaints when the Times harbored Judith Miller, whose shoddy reporting helped push this country to war with Iraq? Were Republicans pleased when Miller would take information fed her by Ahmed Chalabi, information he had also given the administration, and get confirmation from a "senior administration official", only to then see White House representatives point to her work as evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing? Or when Miller helped Scooter Libby conduct a coordinated retribution campaign against Joseph Wilson, a campaign that represented a far greater national security threat than any Times story has ever posed?

There were no complaints, you see, because the notion that "It's OK if you're a Republican" can be safely extended to "It's OK if you're helping a Republican". Or, in many cases, the entire administration. And the moment a news outlet, especially the Times, steps out of line and stops, in Republicans' minds, helping the administration, the attacks begin. Or, more accurately, the attacks continue. Because this White House and, by extension, the Republican Party has been at war with the media longer than it has with Iraq. A war that has been fought on myriad fronts.

Think about what this White House has done since 2001. As I wrote before, "They've released bad news when no one's paying attention. They've packaged official government releases as news stories. They've paid for stories at home and abroad that push their agenda. They've planted reporters in the White House press corps to ask softball questions. There have been whispers that they've been spying on journalists, too." None of it done, as I said then, to prevent illegal activity. All of it done to strong-arm the media into either silence or the recitation of administration talking points.

When a panicking administration that owns such a dismal record wishes its questionable activities to remain in secret, a shoot-the-messenger philosophy is a no-brainer. Why? Because, as you know, it both lets them shift the focus away from their dubious behavior to the demonized Fourth Estate and riles up an already frothy base. In this climate of gay marriage bans and flag-burning legislation, such a strategy is business as usual for the Republican Party. A strategy that leads many to perceive reporting questionable behavior as worse than the questionable behavior itself. But is that really the case? I think you know the answer to that question.

Is this outrage really about the leaking and reporting of sensitive material? No, because, if it were, the administration and its supporters would be leading the charge against those who printed the Valerie Plame information. This isn't about that. It's about an administration's contempt for a press corps that sometimes pokes holes in its veil of secrecy. It's about the White House's efforts to turn the typically servile media into the official house organ of the Republican Party and the Bush White House. It's about the slow, but steady, transformation from democracy to something we Americans will scarcely recognize if the administration is allowed to proceed unabated. And if that happens and history shows that we did nothing about it, the fault is as much ours as it is theirs.

Boston, 28th of June, 1765.

In a Statement released to the Press to-day, Mr. Samuel Adams of Boston declared that he was "not terribly concerned" about reports that Parliament had recently passed an Act requiring that all Publick Documents, Newspapers, and Playing Cards sold in the Thirteen American Colonies bear an Official Stamp.

"We see no Reason for Concern," Mr. Adams added. "His Majesty's Ministers of State have explained on Numerous Occasions that it lies well within the Powers exercised by Parliament to impose any tax within These Colonies that they so chuse, and as Loyal Subjects of His Majesty we are not disposed to Dispute their Claims."

Mr. John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, concurred. "Our consultants have assured us," said Mr. Dickinson, "that the issue of Taxation without Representation is not a popular one amongst People in General." Mr. Dickinson cited a recent poll conducted by the London Gazette shewing that sixty-seven per centum of the People of the Thirteen American Colonies hold a Favorable View of the Stamp Act.

"Our most gracious Sovereign hath assured us that the Stamp Tax is a necessary measure in his continuing efforts to Safeguard the People of these Colonies from the Menace represented by the Red Savages," said Mr. Patrick Henry, a Member of the House of Burgesses in Virginia. "It would be the Height of Folly for any Publick Official in the American Colonies to be seen opposing His Majesty's efforts to protect us from the Savage Indians."

Mr. Henry added, "I know not what other men might say, but as for me, give me Security, and Plenty of It!"

as reported on page 2 of today's New York Post:

HILL BLOGS BACK AT ONLINE LEFTIES

By IAN BISHOP

June 27, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - After months of fierce attacks against her on the Internet, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is ready to meet her Web enemies head-on - by hiring a political-blog guru who worked on John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Clinton tapped Peter Daou, Kerry's director of blog outreach and online rapid response, to rehab her battered image among left-wing Internet surfers....

(No, this time I didn't pay the 25 cents for the rag, I picked it up off the subway bench. :-) I'm not ashamed to say I think it's a good thing to check it out once in a while, though--especially "Page Six." The headline and "framing" of this story, for instance, is very interesting, especially if you consider the main readership, still probably more reliant on 'talk radio' over the blogosphere as far as politics are concerned.)

Starring Michael Ledeen, Harold Rhode, AIPAC syy Larry Franklin, Special Guest Star Manucher Ghorbanifar (Raygun Award Winner for Iran Contra). Opening soon n Federal District Court

Three Days in Rome: In which a neoconservative jack-of-all-trades, a pair of Pentagon hawks, and an Iranian exile with a knack for tall tales try to outflank the CIA and conjure a coup in Tehran

By Laura Rozen

While reporters listened to Tom Delay make his case to drop off the ballot, they missed an example of SWIFT.

Right there in the same U.S. Courthouse in Austin,TX was the 11-page indictment for USA v. Majeed et al., (aka Operation Casino Flush)

Unlike the arrests of the

Miami 7, these arrests were not hyped. The suspects were not publicly labeled 'terrorists' and the FBI did not do the press conference.

It was minimized. The local police did the press conference. The unwashed masses were not spoonfed. No, you had to add one plus one on your own.

You had to look out for sentences such as this from the News 8 Austin:

The charges were the result of work between the Austin Police Department, the U.S. Attorney, the Travis County Attorney’s Office, FBI and IRS: 15 suspects face federal charges and 19 face state charges.

Hmmmm. Let me see. The FBI, IRS, U.S. Attorney, and local law enforcement. That sounds like the 'work' of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

I'd like to leave you with statements APD made to the press:

"This investigation potentially is the largest this department could ever be involved in," Austin police Cmdr. Harold Piatt said.

"There is more money, more players and more opportunity for nefarious activity. Who knows what they have done with $15 million?"

Yeah, who knows? Who knows why the Austin FBI and San Antonio FBI have remained cloaked in the shadows leaving the local police out in front. Still, 1+1=2

FLAG DESECRATION

The right-wing nutcakes tried again to push through the "Flag Desecration" amendment. Bad news is: the ridiculous thing only needed one more vote to pass! That means there are some Democrats who voted for it.

It's great news that there is nothing important going on in our country or the world so there is plenty of time for our legislators to spend on such crap.

I'll tell you what desecrates our flag... Starting a war on lies and cooked intelligence, Stealing our civil liberties, spying on American citizen's phone calls, library transactions and bank accounts, Stealing a national presidential election or TWO! Those things desecrate our flag and dishonor our forefathers more than someone expressing free speech by setting a piece of cloth on fire.

I'm a veteran. I'm a life member of VFW. I served in Vietnam. I have spent my life defending the American flag and being a patriotic citizen. I remember how I felt after 3 weeks of SERE training at Camp Pendleton seeing the enemy flag lowered and the American flag raised. I still think it is a wonderful symbol of our country's freedom and glory.

I am all those things and have done all those things to defend ANY other American's right to free speech too. If a person feels the need to burn a flag or blog against these monsters or protest nonviolently, I did all those things to protect their right to do THOSE things.

Give me a break! Let's talk about important issues in Congress. Let's discuss this administration's illegal and immoral war. Let's discuss the civil liberties this administration has stolen. Let's discuss how they spy on our phone conversations, our activities at the library, our bank accounts, our very lives. Let's look at the way "Georgie", "Dickie" and "Rummy" have trampled on our rights, liberties and freedom. Let's talk about the respect we've lost in the rest of the world because of the actions of these monsters.

Let's talk about REAL desecration of the symbol of our country!

Everyone VOTE in November! Vote EVERY member out who spent days on this silliness while our heroic young men and women are dying in Iraq! Stop this insanity!

Excuse me now. I have to go find a flag to burn to protest these monsters.

On Sunday, Larry Johnson posted a very thought and reply provoking comment on the causes and the effects of the failed US Counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. The US Military after Vietnam essentially abandoned counterinsurgency training and as a consequence, lost what institutional learning it had from that disaster in South East Asia. Well, the damned thing about history is that sometimes it actually does seem to repeat itself

The US military in Iraq today reported soberly that Operation Forward Together was bogged down.  Many predicted this. If you'd like to know why see Larry's  Preparing For Retreat --   and the comments thereto.

Bush has lost the War in Iraq. Make no mistake about that.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military issued a sober assessment Tuesday of the Baghdad security crackdown, saying violence had decreased slightly but not to "the degree we would like to see" in the two weeks since 75,000 Iraqi and American troops flooded the capital.

US Admits Baghdad Offensive Progressing Slowly

While the claim of declined violence is debatable, it would not be surprising because the Bush regime publicized this very offensive months ago and even its timing.

Thankfully Gen Casey has the wisdom to plan a timetable for exit and the foresight to leak it to the media.  57% of the Amerian people want to cut and run from this catastrophe.

Sometimes fixed timetables DO aid the enemy like 5 months notice that you are coming to get them.

Justin Rood at the TPM Muckraker wrote about "Vets For Freedom" today. Vets For Freedom, a supposedly "non-partisan" organization made up of Iraq War vets, is on the offensive against Rep. John Murtha. The Center for Democracy is asking if Vets For Freedom is Republican front group and the Buffalo News has a terrific story about members of the group wanting to "embed" with a news organization.

I did a little digging around and found out that widely-quoted Vets For Freedom executive director, William Wade Denham Zirkle, was not your average GI. My guess is that Mr. Zirkle has his own political ambitions and he has some money behind him.

Amanda Doss, Murtha swiftboater, sure does play the violin well at her pity party. Sigh, she complains, all her websites for Democrats never attracted this sort of mud slinging. My Democrats are a mean bunch, huh? Republicans would never do such a thing!

Says Amanda:

Let me introduce myself. I am Amanda Doss, web designer by profession. I have created websites for many different businesses and people. I have created websites for child care centers, autobody shops, Catholic churches, Methodist churches, screen-printing businesses, and more. I have also created websites for both Democrats and Republicans.

At the bottom of each the websites I design, I put copyright information as well as designer information, including my email address for professional responses. From the websites that I created for Democrats, I have NEVER received a negative, hateful, or inappropriate email from their Republican opponents.

I went looking for some of Amanda’s sites to help her defend herself. Is what she says true? Quick answer: Yes. She designed sites for all of those places and she designed a site for a Democrat (running for the 6th circut court of appeals in Texas):

Children’s World Development Center

Computer Link

Zark Aluminum

Auto Body Works

Ben Franks, attorney

But every school kid knows this trick. Amanda is relating apples to oranges to get off the hook.

Before I start, let me state explicitly that no one deserves to be called a whore. That’s as mean as calling Kerry a traitor.

Let's go back to Amanda's words:

From the websites that I created for Democrats, I have NEVER received a negative, hateful, or inappropriate email from their Republican opponents.

Now, that's plural "websites," but I could only find one Dem website she designed by following her copyright rule. I found Ben Franks (same Ben Franks as above) who ran for Texas’s 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (Texarkana):

Elect Ben Franks

He ran against Bailey C. Moseley (R), who won. In all sincerity, congratulations Mr. Moseley. I don’t know anything about the 6th Circuit, but you started a soccer program which makes you OK in my book: Bailey Moseley for Justice

Take a minute to check out those two sites. Note how much mud is thrown. Anyone call anyone a traitor? Any Republicans reading this feel fired up about anything on the electbenfranks.com site? No, I'm not talking to the paid angry among your party. Any reasonable ones?

Amanda, I understand that you design things for the virtual world, but here's how the real world works: if you design sites that talk about Ben Frank’s qualifications, no one complains. Everyone understands that you should be talking about your own guy’s qualifications to serve. Fine. It was all above the belt.

But if you design sites that call veterans traitors, you get called a whore. I don’t like the word “whore” any more than you. It couldn't have felt good to be called a whore. I don't think you're a whore. But you called someone a name and someone called you a name. Not much changes from when you're a school kid. Humans are humans.

I might have missed the muddy site you’ve designed for a Dem. If I’ve missed one, please put it in comments and I’ll get back to you.

The immigration debate is driven by several different arguments. Capsule summary, with my own comments on each:

1. Immigrants are draining our country of resources.

Well, actually, WE are draining our country of resources; immigrant labor helps preserve what's left. The economics of it show that over their lifetimes immigrants produce more than they consume. Sure, when they first arrive, they may present a burden for awhile, just like when YOU first arrive (out of your mom's womb, for instance) YOU are a burden to society. But it more than evens out.

2. Immigrants are evil.

Some of them are, just like some of us are. Would you arrest every American based on the potential that he or she might commit a crime? Would you proscribe the rights of every American for the same reason? [Actually, the Bush administration and GOP Congress do seem intent upon it, but that's another discussion.]

3. Immigrants are scary, because they change the culture; they speak different languages (mostly Spanish) and they have odd customs.

Hey, that's the American melting pot. To borrow another successful yet scorned culture's norm: plus la change. Cultural diversity made this country great. You eat pizza, right? Burritos? Greek? Sushi? Do you wear clothing that's inspired by dress from other countries? Do you drive a car made in Japan? Do you think Russians are upset that their kids wear blue jeans? Jeebus freakin' cripes! Get over it.

4. We have to protect our borders.

Indeed we do. So why don't we get to work on that, instead of playing brick-and-mortar games. Economic security is the strongest kind of security. Help our Central American neighbors be more secure in their own lands, and our border automatically becomes more secure. Otherwise, don't be surprised that millions of economic refugees see the USA as their last, best hope for survival.

The corollary to this argument, that secure borders will save us from terrorism, is a real concern but usually blown (if you'll pardon the allusion) way out of proportion. There are easier ways to enter the country if you are a closet terrorist than sneaking across the US-Mexican border. As history as demonstrated to us!

5. AND PERHAPS THE BIGGEST ARGUMENT: It's unfair, them arriving without proper papers. Simply illegal, and that's that. Send 'em home, because they don't belong here.

That's arguably the strongest statement you can make, but also the most easily dismissed. Yes, Americans have a strong sense of justice and following the law, yet many of us violate those laws regularly, if only by jay walking or not paying our traffic tickets. The "land of opportunity" has always had an unfortunte component of "I've got mine, screw you."

And that's especially the case with immigrants. When your ancestors were immigrants, their mere struggle to arrive was virtue enough. Now that our laws on immigration are so contorted, contradictory and extremely limited, the natural movement across borders becomes a crisis. So fix that. The law should be folowed, but the law should also be rational and just, and lead us to a more democratic, equal society.

You don't send your kid to prison for leaving the bathtub faucet running. An appropriate response to the presence of undocumented immigrants is to fine them and put them back on a legal track. Sure, let's beef up the border patrols, but let's be realistic in understanding that border security is only part of the answer and not the main answer. Remember: We helped cause this influx. This situation is as if you put honey rolls on your lawn and then screamed at the birds and chipmunks for trying to peck at them.

You say they don't belong here? But we invited most of them. Of course, we only invited them temporarily, conveniently losing track so they could stay and keep on working for cheap wages. Shame on them, but even more shame to the companies that benefit from their contributions, and the government that sanctions the whole mess.

Not Ben. Bill.

Not f*#k. Filibuster.

I'm just glad to see a Senate Democrat other than Feingold or Boxer getting worked up about something. It's always the same old troublemakers...

The first two parts of "George Bush, Alcoholic" are now live on Yahoo! as part of my blog, "The Principles." Andrew Sullivan said of the blog today: "...the president's alcoholism is integral to his personality; and it's certainly as worth debating as his predecessor's sexual addiction."

Check out Parts One and Two at:

http://health.yahoo.com/experts/theprinciples/90/george-bush-alcoholicpart-1

http://health.yahoo.com/experts/theprinciples/107/george-bush-alcoholicpart-2

The five-part series runs through Friday.

There is a site that is ripping off Josh and his TPM site.

They are using the URL:

http://www.talkingpointmemo.com/

In case you miss it they removed the "s" from "points".

They have their own "Josh Marshall" too.

Now tell these guys are not trying to screw Josh and his TPM (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/)!

Anybody want to help Josh put a stop to this rip off?

EasyRider.

Someone at The New Republic named Lee Siegel, writing a column called "Lee Siegel on Culture" for the magazine's online manifestation, seems to know nothing about the blogosphere (his subject in his most recent post), American culture (according to his title, his general topic), or American history.  Strangely enough, TNR touts him as a "senior editor."

Where do they get these guys?

Perhaps Siegel was asleep during his American history classes in college--at least on the days when Alexander Hamilton and debates in the press in the early years of the republic were discussed.  When he writes of the blogosphere that it "radiates democracy's dream of full participation but practices democracy's nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction," he seems to be completely unaware that it was just this sort of dichotomy that led to The Federalist Papers.  Hamilton was a master of attack in the press.  A fast writer with no brakes, he went after anyone he disagreed with--and in nasty fashion.  He even did so in the years after The Federalist Papers, when he had become the most important person in the United States government, except for George Washington.  Yet he, with James Madison (later, the two would become bitter enemies, demolishing each other in the press), created the bulk of the most important unofficial work of American political history.

Don't dismiss the blogs, Lee.  There are Hamiltons out there honing their skills but also thinking and learning.  Sure, bloggers may often produce a thread that "meanders into trivial subjects that have nothing to do with the subject that briefly provoked it."  But so what?  Are all of your conversations over dinner with your sparkling companions always on point?  It's often the meandering that allows new ideas to gestate.  

"The blogosphere's fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus."  Oh, really?  I guess you were never a college student involved in bull sessions until three in the morning, focusless conversations that, for many of our best thinkers, were the genesis of more innovation than any particular classes.

People learn by talking, by discussion.  Perhaps, Lee, you only see media as product, not process.  That's probably because you no longer understand what has been happening in the media and in American culture.  No longer are the news media the purview of an elite, trained cadre of professionals.  No longer are the news media places where finished products are presented only.  Today, because of the Internet and, in particular, because of the blogs, the media are becoming what they once were, tools for the people in their process of political discovery (which, by the way, is the reason that "freedom of the press" was included in the First Amendment to the Constitution).

What is happening is that we, the people are reclaiming what Jürgen Habermas calls "the public sphere" from the commercial and professional elements you represent.

Scares you, doesn't it?

China May Fine News Media to Limit Coverage

By JOSEPH KAHN, June 27

BEIJING, June 26 — Chinese media outlets will be fined if they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization from government officials, under a draft law being considered by the Communist Party-controlled legislature.

The law would give government officials a powerful new tool to restrict coverage of mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, accidents and other events....

is, of course horrifying to any free speech absolutist, which I consider myself to be (and that very much includes hate speech.) BUT....

to be totally honest about my thoughts upon reading it, I must admit, embarassed, that I can dredge up some sympathy with their desire to have this power.

In several years of internet news junkiedom, I've seen so many examples of things like damaging rumors, not to mention unfounded panic, coming from "the masses" having access to "breaking," and then carrying the "breaking" off into a totally different direction of total disinformation, not following up with the details/corrections/revisions to the "breaking." Used to be that only a select group of editors and the like had access to "the wires," there was a filter making judgements about whether a story was ready to "publish" or whether it needed to be offered with a cavaet.

Yes, my concerns are elitist. But isn't the basic idea of things like a public health service with power elitist/totalitarian?

The whole "democratic" approach to news has worked out well so far, no major Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" type scenarios (though some Bird Flu forums might come close to fitting the bill, not to mention the way many Americans first ended up supporting the idea of the Iraq war) but it certainly is a less efficient way of getting accuracy on a story. The same thing happened with many of the mysteries of the stock market being opened to "all," first much much more volatility subject to rumor, but after time, a tempering of that effect.

Big pre-emptive: Of course I do not think most governments are any good at doing anything like this. Not the least of which because they have been proven by history to make very stupid decisions about when it would good to squelch herd or mob reactions, often even counter-productive to their own cause. There's an example cited in the article; they haven't learned any lessons:

...The declassification came after authorities initially covered up the SARS epidemic in 2003. Health authorities later acknowledged that the cover-up made the SARS outbreak more severe.

The proposed new law would appear to undercut the spirit of that revision, forcing reporters and editors to seek prior approval before writing about disease outbreaks....