Washington Post mixes up article with The Onion

The only rational explanation for this article is that it was written for The Onion and got misplaced in the Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082800964.html

Hat tip to The Agitator.

John Tierney

John Tierney is a blessing for the New York Times Editorial page.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/opinion/27tierney.html

My new religion

Any other takers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

New scientific discovery

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/08/25/earth.spin.ap/index.html

Anyone with half a brain knows that our Intelligent Designer gave the earth's core a little extra spin.

Always thinking ahead, He is...

Crazy idea

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9063638/

I have an idea. GO FIND A NEW DOCTOR. His manner is certainly blunt and probably considered by many to be unprofessional, but maybe, just maybe, it actually works for certain types of people. Oh, you're not one of those people? GO FIND A NEW DOCTOR.

Bush to cite proof of Iran Arms Program

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/22/AR2005082201447.html

Disturbing if true...

I'm posting the following article not because of the conservative commentary, but because it contains quotes from a Wall Street Journal article that I don't have access to (I don't have a subscription). Take the commentary for what it's worth, but check out the quotes from the article:

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/08/the_jury_system.html

If any of this stuff is true, it's very disturbing. Is it true that the guy who died didn't die of a condition that Vioxx was linked to? Is it true that the jury didn't understand the science that was presented? Are these quotes really indicitive of the reasons why some jury members decided against Merck? This is very disturbing.

NY Times sticks head further in ass

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/national/22design.html?ei=5094&en=0ca73531c0586b08&hp=&ex=1124769600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Why anyone takes these intelligent design people seriously is beyond me. Actually, I do understand it. It's an attempt by people who don't believe in science to refute science by pretending to BE science that refutes science because previous attempts to refute science by spinning around in circles with their fingers in their ears didn't work. It's actually quite smart, because you've got people who understand science who clearly recognize what's going on, and then you've got people who don't understand science given the impression that science isn't quite decided about evolution.

Whereas some people get upset over this stuff, I tend to sit back and laugh at the prospect of this stuff being taught in schools. I say let the Kansans and the Texans teach their intelligent design and let other states and schools keep teaching our new fancypants book lernin' thing. My kids will have less competition getting into college. People get worked up because they see this new intelligent design movement as culture actually shifting towards that viewpoint. I see the opposite. I see them gathering huge breaths of air and screaming at the top of their lungs as they flail in a last desperate attempt to save their beliefs from a culture that is slowly but surely proving them wrong.

No, I don't get upset at the intelligent designers for trying to save their belief. I do, however, get upset at the New York Times, which has no business taking these people seriously.

OGE on vacation

The OGE is on vacation for a week or so, so I'll probably be the only one posting here. I suspect that the little potus is feeling relaxed in the absence of one of his most vehement critics, so I'll make an effort to pick up the slack and hold the right wing accountable!

However, it's too early in the morning to rant about anything, so check out the post below:

http://volokh.com/posts/1124630771.shtml

It's about songs that traditionally get met with patriotic cheers, but upon examination of the lyrics you have to wonder whether the crowd knows what they're cheering for...

Best advice John Roberts ever gave

"In an Oct. 1, 1985, memo, he warned that it would be inaccurate for Reagan to refer to Pete Rose as a " 'slugger.' Rose is a singles hitter, whose lifetime 'slugging average' of .415 is not even close to the minimum .500 required for listing" as a slugger."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/19/AR2005081901609_2.html

High Gas Prices

Is the Senate going to try and fix our high gas prices?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/19/senate.gasprices.reut/index.html

Mooshinator suggests cutting the Capital Gains tax!

Krugman Reviews Gumbel: Gore Won Florida

"In his recent book 'Steal This Vote' - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: 'Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/opinion/19krugman.html?th&emc=th

Cesspool Of Ohio Politics Traps Gov

"Ohio Gov. Bob Taft (R), a member of one of the most distinguished families in American politics, was indicted yesterday on four criminal misdemeanor counts for failing to report a series of golf outings, dinners and other gifts in a scandal that has rocked the powerful state Republican Party."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/17/AR2005081701209.html?referrer=email

Gideon Rose On The Cycle Of American Foreign Policy

You have to expect some over-simplification if not outright error when an analyst posits a neat theory of our foreign policy, and Gideon Rose complies with the notion. The theory of a cycle of alternating moralistic and realistic determinants, however, can be useful:

"Seen in proper perspective, in other words, the Bush administration's signature efforts represent not some durable, world-historical shift in America's approach to foreign policy but merely one more failed idealistic attempt to escape the difficult trade-offs and unpleasant compromises that international politics inevitably demand - even from the strongest power since Rome. Just as they have so many times before, the realists have come in after an election to offer some adult supervision and tidy up the joint. This time it's simply happened under the nose of a victorious incumbent rather than his opponent (which may account for the failure to change the rhetoric along with the policy)."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/opinion/18rose.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

Quick History of Gaza

"...Gaza, a 25-mile-long, 6-mile-wide strip of land, was part of Mandatory Palestine, which was ruled by the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was never part of the Zionist state intended by the United Nations partition plan that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948. At that point, five Arab nations immediately attacked the new nation, but Gaza wasn't even part of the territory Israel got in signing truces in 1949. It became the home of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing Israel, and Israel's armistice with Egypt in 1949 put it under Egyptian rule."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/opinion/18thur1.html?th&emc=th

AFSCME v. State of Washington

I pointed to the wrong case, below. The case that Roberts criticized is AFSCME v. State of Washington, although I can't find the ruling anywhere.

Oh duh, it's all clear!

If there's still any confusion about John Roberts, it's all cleared up here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2124543/

GOP Spends $3/4Million Defending Indicted Vote-Tamperer

You got to love the integrity of our election process, especially in the hands of the bush-Cheney machine.

"The Republican Party says it still has a zero-tolerance policy for tampering with voters even as it pays the legal bills for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to thwart Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

"James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

"The Republican National Committee already has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/11/AR2005081100164.html

Blumenthal Profiles Prince of Darkness

Among the tidbits: Robert Novak not only converted from Judaism to Catholicism, he entered Opus Dei.

"For nearly 50 years, Robert Novak badgered and bullied his way to the top of Washington. His disgrace in the Valerie Plame affair has brought him crashing down -- and he has only himself to blame."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/11/novak/index_np.html

Good Summary

(as good as a one paragraph summary can be)

From the following article:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/17/leahy.roberts.ap/index.html

"In material released Monday, Roberts emerged as an attorney serving in the Reagan White House who held views generally in line with those of other conservatives. He was sympathetic to prayer in public schools, dismissive of "comparable worth," referred to the "tragedy of abortion" and took a swipe at the Supreme Court for being too willing to hear multiple appeals from death row inmates."

I find "sympathetic to prayer in public schools" a pretty decent description, one that (to me at least) is not quite as strong as saying "supports". CNN also described him as "dismissive of comparable worth" without going into detail about what "comparable worth" is. This approach works well in this situation because (if I understand it correctly based on the case I posted below) the concept of "comparable worth" as criticized by Roberts is a bit complicated and would be difficult to summarize without being misleading; it appears to me to involve more than just gender discrimination and equal pay for equal work. I've read some attempted summaries of "comparable worth" as criticized and most seem to simplify the issue down to a gender one. Of course, no major news source bothers to actually tell me which court case is being referred to here, so I'm left guessing...

Great Rants---Just Hope It's True

Doug Thompson credits himself with the first political news website (1994) but his rants distinguish it, although today's piece is in the guise of reportage:

"Buy beleaguered, overworked White House aides enough drinks and they tell a sordid tale of an administration under siege, beset by bitter staff infighting and led by a man whose mood swings suggest paranoia bordering on schizophrenia.

"They describe a President whose public persona masks an angry, obscenity-spouting man who berates staff, unleashes tirades against those who disagree with him and ends meetings in the Oval Office with 'get out of here!'”

"Decreasing job approval ratings and increased criticism within his own party drives the President’s paranoia even higher. Bush, in a meeting with senior advisors, called Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist a 'god-damned traitor' for opposing him on stem-cell research.

“'There’s real concern in the West Wing that the President is losing it,' a high-level aide told me recently."

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/dtbio.asp

Washington Post Pulls Its Head Out

The wonder is that the idiots went along with it in the first place. Maybe it was recommended by an embedded reporter. . .

"The Washington Post announced yesterday that it will back out of a controversial co-sponsorship of a Pentagon-organized event next month to remember the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and support the troops in Iraq."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/15/AR2005081501523.html

All I Know Is, It Smells Of Carrion 

BERMAN TAKES ON THE DEMOCRATIC HAWKS

This issue needs a lot more attention. Berman seems right, as far as he goes, in that the Democratic leadership is trapped in a strategy of trying to out-tough the Republicans (despite evidence, like Kerry's campaign, that it hasn't worked and, as the public's disillusion with Iraq increases, won't work).

What he does not do is look beyond the defense picture and see that the same pattern within the party leadership includes economics as well. This group has no intention of scaling down government spending or reforming the incredible inequity of the government's upward redistribution of wealth. It is owned by corporate influence as surely as the Republicans.

The oge has called the voters who elected the wretched little fraud in the white house stupid; but he and the millions of voters who tried to elect Kerry were stupid as well. When the traditional Democratic leadership cut the legs off Dean they cut their own party's throat. We should have recognized that at the time. Had we swung our support to a third party, we might have saved the Democratic party by forcing it to re-examine its basic operations and obligations. Dean seems intent on trying to revive the party from the grass roots. He may be right, but the entrenched mischief at the top is like carbuncles.

We have a Republican party which has been overthrown by the neocons, and we have a Democratic party overthrown by the new dems, whom I am simply going to call neolibs, because I like the symmetry. Both are enabled by and handservants to the corporate global interests which possess no morality by definition of what they are. They could care less about gays one way or another or abortion or national security or the welfare of discrete geopolitical units. They operate according to their chartered purpose to accumulate wealth. The superrich at their tops, whether as ceo's, directors, or shareholders, already own the world. With few exceptions, the superrich are possessed by their own engines of commerce. Those who on occasion appear to value and even support charity and political reform---Gates, Soros, and Turner, for example---are nonetheless wed to their fortunes and to the price they exact. Their incredible wealth is dependent on the staus quo, and even if they desired it, the very mechanics by which their wealth survives and increases, precludes any fundamental social change. They may want to unseat the twit in the white house, or feed Africa, or refurbish the UN and public education, but these are all window-dressing in the big picture, notwithstanding the limited if meaningful good they would accomplish for some.

It is likely that only a new party dedicated to traditional American values can overcome the entrenched hordes of neocons and neolibs. If the worst (or best) scenario dealing bush and his cronies a death blow should come to pass, the neolibs would simply move in to fill the vacuum, and the state of affairs would likely remain the same or worsen. Don't even hope that the mainstream Dems would do anything meaningful to bring peace, clean up the environment, save the middle class, or advance technology at the rate we need to save the species.

So who will constitute the new party? I suppose we will at length see a coalition of radicals of disparate traditional political orientations---liberals, conservatives, socialists, greens, progressives, and libertarians---forced to make common cause based on a core of similar interests, against the transcendent threats to the republic. The ACLU, for example, will fight to protect civil liberties regardless of the immediate political/partisan features.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050815/the_strategic_class.php

Roberts hates women

I'm having trouble digging up the exact State of Washington case that Roberts criticized Olympia Snowe and others for supporting. I'm reading a lot of bylines about how Roberts supports gender inequality and such things and from what I can tell (in the CNN article below) Roberts was specifically criticizing Snowe and others for supporting a specific court decision. I'd like to know what, specifically, the court decision stated so I can know what, specifically, Roberts was against.

I *think* it's this one:

http://search.mrsc.org/nxt/gateway.dll?f=templates&fn=courts.htm$vid=courts:court, but I can't confirm that.

If that's really the one, then there's some definite nuance (oh no, not the dreaded Kerryesque word, "nuance") involved here. I have trouble finding gender discrimination in my brief reading of the case.

On edit: The link doesn't bring you directly to the case. Go to that link, search for "comparable worth" (using double quotes to surround it) and pick the first choice.

Meaningless to most people...

Only one person who reads this blog will understand the first thought that came to my mind after reading the following sentence:

"For now, the aide said, Democratic strategy is to make it clear Roberts was subject to fair scrutiny while avoiding a pointless conflagration that could backfire on the party."

It's got nothing to do with John Roberts.

Media bias?

I'm not usually one to call out media bias, but this one in particular struck me...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/15/roberts.documents/index.html

The title on the front page of CNN.com was "Documents show Roberts backed school prayer", and the first paragraph of the article also states "Supreme Court nominee John Roberts supported the idea of allowing prayer in public schools".

Further down in the article we find out the details, specifically that Roberts criticized a Supreme Court decision that declared moments of silence unconstitutional. That seems a little bit different than backing school prayer outright. I would prefer the introductory paragraph be rephrased to "Supreme Court nominee John Roberts criticized a Supreme Court decision finding moments of silent reflection in school unconstitutional." In all honestly, that's exactly what he did. It takes a bit of a stretch to get to "supported the idea of allowing prayer in public schools", and although I'm not claming intentional bias on the part of CNN, I think it reflects an unconscious decision by the author to accept the equivalence of "supporting something" with "finding something constitutional", a decision that minimizes the influence of States' Rights on conservative judicial philosophy. Supporters of States' Rights would find it quite appropriate, in fact probably a normal course of action, for a judicial decision to find constitutional something that most people would consider reprehensible. A somewhat analogous scenario would be to unfairly say that the ACLU supports hate speech when in fact they are defending the right of someone to say something that the ACLU probably considers disgusting. The statements "the ACLU supports hate speech" and "John Roberts supports school prayer" are technically true but only because the definition of "supports" can be so broadly interpreted, and I think in such a situation it's appropriate to elaborate in order to focus on what "supports" really constitutes.

Intentional bias? Probably not. Unconscious bias which resulted in a misleading statement? I think so.

On Edit: Roberts very well may personally like the idea of a whole array of potential school prayer laws, or he may not. However, the evidence in the CNN article serves only to state his opinion on the constitutionality of moments of silent reflection, and thus any other conclusions are not supported by the facts as presented.

Link to Grassfire's Petition Against Kelo (SCOTUS' Wretched Decision Expanding Eminent Domain)

OK, I know it's a conservative website, but they are on the right side with this one. Besides, there are some issues---like this one---on which liberals and conservatives should agree. Bombard Washington with outrage from the full spectrum.

http://www.grassfire.org/65/petition.asp?RID=8719331

Link To Support St. Patricks Four

"The first and only federal conspiracy trial arising out of civil resistance to the Iraq War begins September 19 in Binghamton, NY.

"Summary. Two days before the invasion of Iraq, four Catholic Workers from Ithaca (NY), in an act of non-violent civil resistance, entered a military recruiting center, read a statement, and carefully poured their own blood around the vestibule. The four, all parents, were tried in Tompkins County Court in April 2004 on charges of criminal mischief. Nine of twelve jurors voted to acquit.

"However, almost a year later, the US government decided to retry the four, now on charges of conspiracy. If convicted, they face up to six years in prison and $250,000 in fines. The St. Patrick's Four trial begins September 19 in Binghamton, NY.

"Show solidarity, and please add your name or group's name to the support committee."

Sign the Letter in Support of the St. Patrick's Four

Frank Rich: The War Is Over

Reasoning that even the Republicans will desert the little potus in order to survive midterm elections, Rich pens his best piece of the year:

"LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. 'We will stay the course,' he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html?th&emc=th

More For Them That Has

The only debate over the estate tax should be between the 2% rich and the 98% rest of us whom they stole the money from in the first place.

"And while opponents contend that the estate tax is a "double tax," many of the earnings that are subject to it were never taxed in the first place...

"(but) only 2 percent of all estates - about 52,000 - were subject to any estate tax. At that point, taxes were imposed only on estates worth $675,000 or more. The limit rose to $1.5 million in 2004, and if that limit had been in effect in 2000, only 13,771 estates - fewer than 1 percent - would have been subject to the tax. All but 740 of them would have had enough in liquid assets to cover estate tax liabilities, the office estimated...

"Once the estate tax was fully repealed, the Treasury would lose more than $70 billion a year in today's dollars. Over the first 10 years of full repeal, the cost would total more than $700 billion, plus interest. Assuming that the government is still running an annual deficit in 2011, which is more likely than not, the total 10-year cost would be close to $1 trillion."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/business/yourmoney/14view.html?th&emc=th

A Hog By Any Other Name

If you thought there was any limit to the shamelessness of the swine we elect to congress, swallow your sense of credibility:

"Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham (R-Calif.) is asking his contributors -- including the Washington defense contractor at the center of a federal grand jury probe -- for permission to use their campaign donations to pay for his legal defense.

"Cunningham announced last month that he is not running for reelection because of the investigation, which focuses on his relationship with Mitchell J. Wade, founder of MZM Inc. The company has worked on several Pentagon intelligence programs that Cunningham supported as a member of the House intelligence and appropriations committees."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/13/AR2005081300856.html?referrer=email

And check out this little item of systemic corruption:

"...The Federal Election Commission has approved similar requests to use campaign donations to pay legal bills."

Pacifying Fallujah

(Much) Lowered Expectations For Iraq

You tell me. Just what is going on?

"The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

"The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

"'What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,' said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. 'We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.'"

Again, what is going on? The wretched little fraud in the white house is still blabbing about staying the course. It would appear one of two things. Either this is a pathetic PR effort to condition the American public to an ignominious withdrawal---leaving a devastated country worse off, under a tyranny of theocracy and likely civil war of whatever duration---while the cretin in the oval office tries to preserve some semblance of leadership, or the rest of the government is going its own way on a path of some realism and contrition. Why is it that neither possibility convinces me? It would be one thing for the white house cabal to lie or contrive their way out of the involvement---they have no qualms about that kind of behavior---but to admit mistake and abandon a long-cherished campaign just does not sound like the idiot or his neo cronies.

Then again, maybe they have kept Saddam alive for a reason. . .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/13/AR2005081300853.html?referrer=email

Most Exquisitely Dark Quote Of The Day

"A Marine sergeant in Iraq recently pumped up his squad by telling them that 'these will be the good old days, when you brought...death and destruction to--what the fuck is this place called?'"

That one came from Naomi Klein's latest essay. I admire if not always agree with her work, including this piece. It is worth reading, however, for the context in which she presents the following reference:

"... Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological epiphany while studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar was shocked by Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more significant was Qutb's encounter with what he later described as America's 'evil and fanatic racial discrimination.' By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project. For Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an assault on his identity: Clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less than those of European Jews. According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University, this experience 'left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake.'"

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0812-21.htm

Consider the Absurdity: Military Torture Photos Blocked

OK. Our brass are more worried about the effect that releasing the photos will have on anti-American reaction than on cleaning up the filthy mess of torture and abuse they created (at the white house's doubtless insistence). You want to know why Gen. Meyers is in this bind? Because he, like every other officer in the Armed Services, has known all along it is wrong, from every perspective, but he had to play the role of good soldier and go along with the scum above. He saw what happened to his buddies when they gave conflicting advice.

"NEW YORK, Aug. 12 -- Releasing photos and videotapes of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison would aid al Qaeda recruitment, weaken governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and incite riots against U.S. troops, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned in court papers.

"The American Civil Liberties Union is seeking the release of 87 photographs and four videotapes taken at the prison as part of a lawsuit it filed in October 2003...

"In a response to the arguments by Myers, the ACLU submitted a declaration by retired Army Col. Michael E. Pheneger, who said Myers 'mistakes propaganda for motivation.'"

I think he also confuses rectal sodomy with loyalty.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201616.html?referrer=email

Vulnerable

National Electric Grid Still Vulnerable

Surprised? The worst-kept secret in the nation is that the ridiculous little fraud in the white house and his corrupt cowardly congress couldn't protect Little Miss Muffet from her spider. When their preoccupation is with an adolescent notion of power and stealing as much money from the taxpayer as they can, who worries about infrastructure? We already have seen how they react to menace: they run away.

The legacy of the stupid little fraud will be those seven minutes he sat helpless and vaccuous in a classroom when told his country was under attack (at least, I hope we won't see worse in the remaining term). I sometimes think the only reason the fundamentalists haven't made their next attack (the Islamic ones; the Christian ones are just waiting to pronounce it some deity's willful punishment for watching Sponge Bob) is that they can't figure out how to surpass their ungodly luck on 9/11.

"AFTER the blackout of 2003, addressing the vulnerabilities of America's electrical grid was a top priority. Not only was the creaky system going to be repaired and restructured, its key facilities were going to be reinforced to guard against terrorism. After all, Al Qaeda documents suggest that terrorists have considered attacking the grid, which would cause chaos, wreak economic havoc, and possibly cost lives.

"So here we are, nearly two years later, and is the grid safer? Sadly, no. Terrorists could still send a nation as powerful and modernized as the United States into the dark ages for weeks."

Well, it might save some energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/opinion/13mcneal.html?th&emc=th

Delta Moves Toward Bankruptcy

With the neos persisting in their reconstruction of some adolescent notion of a free marketplace, it is always interesting to see how government treats big business. Bankruptcy has been so good for United, that it is no wonder the other giants are looking to follow suit. Lou Dobbs was right, go ahead and nationalize them. They can't run themselves.

"Delta has lost nearly $10 billion since 2001, with its losses accelerating over the last year. Its chief executive, Gerald Grinstein, had emphasized a desire to avoid Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which it barely averted last October by obtaining $1 billion in cuts from its pilots. But last month, Mr. Grinstein said that circumstances beyond Delta's control, namely higher oil prices and industry competition, could force its hand."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/business/13delta.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

Post Card Of Lynching Of Lige Daniels, 44 Years Before Ku Klux Killen Enacted Killing Of Civil Rights Workers---Time Sure Moves Slow In Dixie 

THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN

Former (?) klansman Edgar Ray Killen has been released on bail pending appeal after conviction less than two months ago in the most infamous killings of the civil rights era. A bunch of friends/sympathizers helped scrape together his bail. Now, the oge's sense of justice is outraged, but check out his logic. Consider the following:

"Legal experts and others questioned the bail decision. James E. Prince III, publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, a weekly newspaper, said:

"'He may not be capable of enacting revenge, but he has stature within a certain community. And they are capable of enacting revenge. It's difficult to bring closure on the reign of terror with him out of prison. It's difficult, because that fear is still there with him out.'"

Mr. Prince has it three-quarters right. If he understood the primary definition of "enact," he might have got it all right, instead of speaking two nonsensical sentences. Here is the irony. Killen was eligible for bail release because he was convicted of manslaughter, not murder; he was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, because he was not at the murder site; he was not at the murder site because he planned the crime and delegated it to his cronies to commit.

By the facts of the case, he is as dangerous now in a wheelchair as he was then. He is as capable now of enacting revenge as he was then of enacting the killing of three innocents. Age and infirmity dilute not one bit the force or effect of the venom in this treacherous little reptile who may have served no more than six weeks total in local jail for his horrific crimes, before he dies.

It is this "narrow application" of law (not "interpretation") that disserves justice. Killen's release may be legal, but it is not lawful. Not only the judge, but many onlookers and analysts have missed the points made above, likely influenced by the appearance of the old, infirm monster, grumbling about the quality of his time in jail. It is an ironic example of why justice is supposed to be blind.

In this case, I suspect stupidity and myopia were determinate in the judge's decision (although you never know, this far south). In my comments posted to the Mooshinator's piece regarding Roberts' arguments for the clinic bomber, my point was that Roberts was operating from an ideological frame in a specific political context with a preferred outcome; he argued to apply the law so narrowly that it precluded an alternative. That is not conservative practice. It is incomplete consideration of the facts. Regard any issue as on a continuum, with the most satisfactory sum of necessary fact at the ideal center---everything that is needed and nothing more. To argue or rule on a matter when your selection or inclusion of fact is deficient, to the left of center (narrow, as I insist it was deliberate in the Roberts case, and narrow, as I suggest it was likely unintentional in Killen) is not to promote good law any more than is acting from a point of excess and attenuated fact to the right of center, a position that often earns the term "activist" from lay observers.

Strategic lawyering as the evidence suggests Roberts eagerly performed for his political clients---during the early emergence of neocon ideology---can rely as much on excluding pertinent facts as on including extraneous ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/national/13killen.html?th&emc=th

Eco Horror Show: Vast Siberian Peat Bogs Melt

The suddenness of this phenomenon is as shocking as its scale.

"THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

"The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

"The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.
Kirpotin describes an 'ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming.' He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this 'has all happened in the last three or four years.'"

Drive that SUV.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500

In Praise of Lard: Pork Fat Where It Belongs

Not in congressional legislation, in the kitchen. Of all the tasty foods made best with lard, Corby Kummer misses one: Utz's Potato Chips, until recently, fried in lard. Um, tasty. Maybe our Pennsylvania Dutch friends will return to their original practice.

The oge suspects that the two greatest dietary hazards of the past half century will turn out to be high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil. Most living Americans were raised on them.

"Every baker knows that despite lard's heavy reputation (it is pig fat, after all), nothing makes a flakier or better-tasting pie crust. Lard also makes the lightest and tastiest fried chicken: buttermilk, secret spices and ancient cast-iron skillets are all well and good, but the key to fried chicken greatness is lard."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/opinion/12kummer.html?th&emc=th

Wolff Article To Blast Media On Plame

Not on line yet, the September Vanity Fair article may put the media's wretched performance in perspective.

"Wolff mocks Time’s Matt Cooper and Norman Pearlstine and can’t seem to make heads or tails of 'genuinely spooky' Novak. He holds off full judgment on the Times’ jailed reporter Judith Miller, while noting the 'baloney' she retailed for the White House. But he pointedly notes, concerning Miller, that reporters are born 'blabbermouths' and even when they don’t write or print a certain story they are prone to 'serve it up to everybody they know.'”

http://209.11.49.220/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001013806

GOP Leased Old RKO Movie Lot In 1999 Because It Possessed The Only Radio Transmitter Powerful EnoughTo Penetrate The Skull Of The Little potus. 

The Little bush Bulge That Wouldn't Go Away

Why does the oge stand convinced that bush was wired? Because he could be. Period. There is no way the most corrupt, treacherous administration in modern history would miss that advantage. Anyway, here's a little detail on the (non) coverage of the incident:

"Executive editor Campbell confirmed that he killed Scott’s Nelson story, but he declined to give an explanation for what he conceded was a rare interference in the paper’s daily operation. 'It’s entirely an internal matter. In doesn’t involve anyone in New York, Mother Jones or you especially,' he told Extra!.

"Said an obviously frustrated Nelson, 'The scientific community last November produced very credible evidence suggesting the president may have been cheating in the debates. Responsible reporters at the New York Times and the Star-News have attempted to report this news to their readers but their efforts were quashed by upper management. The founders of this nation understood the importance of an informed public, but given what has just happened, one is tempted to ask: Does the term "free press" apply only to those who can afford to own one?'”

Duh.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2611

Abramoff Indicted At Last; Number of Lobbyists Reduced to 33,999; Is DeLay Trembling?

It's been a long time coming, but it looks like the wheels of justice are grinding fine at last. Given the known facts, it defies belief that DeLay and some of his fellow congressional whores could escape this net much longer. In any event, it is reaffirming that one more scumbag is taken down.

"MIAMI, Aug. 11 -- Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a business partner were indicted by a federal grand jury in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday, charged with five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy in their purchase of a fleet of Florida gambling boats from a businessman who was later killed in a gangland-style hit...

"But Abramoff's dealings with SunCruz were intertwined with his relationships with powerful members of Congress and their staffs. As the negotiations warmed up, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's office -- he was the House minority whip then -- gave Boulis a flag that had flown over the Capitol. And as the SunCruz deal was closing, Abramoff brought his lead financier to a DeLay fundraiser in the lobbyist's box at FedEx Field during a Monday Night Football game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys.

"To help land the deal, an Abramoff associate, Michael Scanlon, persuaded Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) to officially criticize Boulis in the Congressional Record; later, Ney praised Kidan in the official publication of Congress."

Read on unless you are already hurling.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/11/AR2005081101108.html

Prosecutor: Pundits Wrong About Plame

She says the facts as we know them definitely suggest a case which can be prosecuted under the federal identities protection law.

Pundits right, left, and center have reached a rare unanimous verdict about one aspect of the grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame leak: They've decided that no charges can be brought under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, because it imposes an impossibly high standard for proof of intent. Typically, writing for Slate on July 19th, Christopher Hitchens described the 1982 Act as a "silly law" that requires that "you knowingly wish to expose the cover of a CIA officer who you understand may be harmed as a result." Similarly, columnist Richard Cohen, in the July 14 Washington Post, said he thought Rove was a "political opportunist, not a traitor" and that he didn't think Rove "specifically intended to blow the cover of a CIA agent..."

"Shocking as it may seem, however, the pundits are wrong; and their casual summaries of the requirements of the 1982 statute betray a fundamental misunderstanding regarding proof of criminal intent."

http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=11747

Everyone is misleading...

The latest John Roberts fiasco revolves around a NARAL ad that is being pulled. The ad itself infuriated conservatives, who called it at worst untrue and at best misleading. My personal favorite factchecking organization has chimed in on the issue, but they're being criticized by NARAL and liberal bloggers as having done a poor job of factchecking.

So what's the deal?

Well, they're all right and they're all wrong. I haven't seen the ad yet, though I've read a transcript, and it IS horribly misleading. I'm glad they're pulling it. By the same token, the factcheck article is amongst the worst I've seen from them and attempts to take some of NARAL's truthful but misleading statements and paint them as untruthful. In addition, there are a few questionable insertions of opinions. I think factcheck screwed up, getting caught in the middle between NARAL's use of technical truths to imply something totally different and the talking points of conservatives who are claiming the ad is false.

From what I can tell, the ad is "true". However, I've read some very good factcheck pieces before which have picked apart not only outright falsifications but misleading implications, the difference being that most of the articles state outright that that's what they're doing. This one doesn't always do that.

By the same token, I think that it IS a legitimate function of a factchecker to not only check outright facts but to clear up misleading implications. The catch here is that it has to be done in a nonbiased way, and that nonbias needs to be established over time by building up your reputation. In addition, you've got to be absolutely clear when saying that something is untrue versus misleading. Factcheck could have done an excellent piece on the NARAL ad, because the ad IS so misleading, but they slipped up and made some mistakes. I'm hoping they learn from their mistakes and get back on track, because they generally do a good job.

How about the NARAL ad? It's probably true (I say probably because I'm not about to go re-factcheck after all the hubbub, but rather I'll trust that it's true since it gives them the benefit of the doubt in the context of my argument, anyway). The ad states something to the effect that John Roberts supported violent abortion clinic bombers, the implication being that John Roberts supported the VIOLENT ACTIONS of abortion clinic bombers, when in reality his support consisted of agreeing with thier legal argument. Beyond that, the legal argument in question did not come about because of an abortion clinic bombing. Yes, the group involved had previously been associated with abortion clinic bombings and so his support of them is technically support of "abortion clinic bombers" (actually, I'm not sure if this is true because I don't know if any current members of the organization had ever been involved in bombings or if it was only past members, nor do I know if the organization made statements in support of bombings or if it's only that members have done so, but this is a side point - let's assume that the organization is properly labeled "abortion clinic bombers"), but this particular legal question was about protest tactics such as verbal harassment and blocking entrances and such. Nowhere in this case is there any debate whatsoever about the legality of bombing an abortion clinic - clearly, bombing an abortion clinic violates all sorts of laws and John Roberts hasn't stated otherwise.

In addition, Roberts didn't even claim that blockading clinics is legal. Such blockades are illegal under state trespassing laws, which Roberts flat out stated. Roberts opinion said that blockading clinics is not illegal under a specific Federal law which was passed to deal with Ku Klux Klan race discrimination. Roberts stated that abortion clinic blockades are not an act of gender discrimination because both men and women were blockaded. Whether the Ku Klux Klan law covers gender discrimination was not even addressed by Roberts since his position was that no gender discrimination had occurred.

(Note that after this case the Federal Government DID pass Federal laws that much more clearly apply to abortion clinic blockades. These laws didn't exist at the time of Roberts' opinion.)

To summarize Roberts position in a nutshell, he stated that abortion clinic blockades are not gender discrimination and thus can't even begin to be addressed by a specific Federal discrimination law. Roberts also said that such blockades are illegal under State trespassing laws. By stating what he stated, Roberts made a legal argument that agreed with a legal argument made by an organization who's members have been associated with abortion clinic bombings (I'm not comfortable saying that the organization itself supports abortion clinic bombings, because I don't know if that's true without checking on their public statements). In this particular case, I can't spot Roberts making any comment whatsoever on abortion clinic bombings (though in the past he drafted a memo stating that abortion clinic bombers should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law).

To summarize more - Roberts stated that abortion clinic blockades are not gender discrimination.

Do you disagree with this interpretation? A lot of people probably do, and I'd love to see a NARAL ad with the headline, "John Roberts argued that blockading abortion clinics does not discriminate against women. Do you want this type of thinking on the Supreme Court?" I'd love to see conservative groups fight back with... well hell, it could be the same thing - "John Roberts argued that blockading abortion clinics does not discriminate against women. Do you want this type of thinking on the Supreme Court?"

But that doesn't make good TV.

Congressman In Rare Moment Of Leisure Relaxing With Family 

Pork, Pork, And More Pork

If you were outraged by the excesses and giveaways in the energy bill, do not even go here:

"Yesterday, Bush effectively signed a cease-fire -- critics called it more like a surrender -- in his war on pork. He signed into law a $286 billion transportation measure that contains a record 6,371 pet projects inserted by members of Congress from both parties.

"'I'm proud to be here to sign this transportation bill, because our economy depends on us having the most efficient, reliable transportation system in the world,' Bush said at a Caterpillar Inc. manufacturing plant.
Bush brushed aside pleas from taxpayer groups to veto the bill, which exceeded the $284 billion limit that he had vowed not to cross...

"But hundreds of millions of dollars will be channeled to programs that critics say have nothing to do with improving congestion or efficiency: $2.3 million for the beautification of the Ronald Reagan Freeway in California; $6 million for graffiti elimination in New York; nearly $4 million on the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; $2.4 million on a Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Louisiana; and $1.2 million to install lighting and steps and to equip an interpretative facility at the Blue Ridge Music Center, to name a few."

Thank goodness the GOP is in charge of the pursestrings. But then again, what would else would you expect from a virtually uncontrolled lobby industry of 34,000, the high cost of elections, and the most corrupt Congress and Presidency in modern history?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081000223_pf.html

Housing Bubble Continues Modest in Midwest Farmlands 

The Fed And The Housing Bubble

The article does not deal with the emerging scandal about the industry's collusion in selling properties to illegal aliens based on falsified applications and secured by federal housing loans (another ouch for the taxpayer), a story Lou Dobbs publicized last night.

"As the Federal Reserve raises interest rates in the US for the 10th time, its inability to control accelerating house price inflation is worrying analysts.

"Put simply, in many parts of the US buying a home is now unaffordable for all but the most wealthy, and the Fed hopes a rates rise will help to start cool things down."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4135442.stm

New Evidence: Gov Knew Bay of Pigs Would Fail

Nothing too surprising about this, but the question remains, What was the reason they did it anyway? The oge has never believed that underlings withheld their doubts from Kennedy, but that remains a possibility. Governments have done dumber things. Are doing dumber things.

"Five months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA task force plotting to overthrow Fidel Castro concluded that the invasion was 'unachievable' as a covert paramilitary operation, according to a newly discovered unclassified document."

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/12354497.htm

Peter Galbraith On Iraq's Factions

Galbraith dileneates the peoples, history, and current conflicts dividing the country and confounding the bush policy.

"The Shiites are completely immune to any appeal by insurgents. Sunni fundamentalists consider Shiites as apostates, and possibly a more dangerous enemy than even the Americans. (The Americans, they know, will leave. The apostates want to rule.) For the last two years, Sunni Arab insurgents have targeted Shiite mosques, clerics, religious celebrations, and pilgrims—with a toll in the thousands. The insurgent goal is to provoke sectarian war, and they seem to be succeeding. In spite of calls for restraint by Shiite leaders, there are growing numbers of retaliatory killings of Sunni Arabs by Shiites.

"But while the insurgents cannot win, neither can they be defeated."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18150

BIG Brother Rides Again: Horrific NLRB Ruling

Hold on to your hats, fellow anarchosyndicalists, this one is unbelievable. There is just no end to how far the GOP will go to mess with your private life.

"On June 7 the three Republican appointees on the five-member board that regulates employer-employee relations in the United States handed down a remarkable ruling that expands the rights of employers to muck around in their workers' lives when they're off the job. They upheld the legality of a regulation for uniformed employees at Guardsmark, a security guard company, that reads, '[Y]ou must NOT . . . fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the client's employees or with co-employees.'

"We Americans largely believe we live in a country that cherishes, or at minimum strives to cherish, the rights of the individual. This is one of our foremost mass delusions. As employees and consumers, our rights are routinely subordinated to those of business. The reason that personal information on 50 million consumers has been compromised, stolen or lost is that we have no effective laws -- indeed, no federal laws at all -- protecting the privacy of our data; the opposition from big business has doomed all serious attempts to ensure consumers' privacy.

"So as we fight to bring liberal democracy to quasi-feudal backwaters in distant lands, we might remember that the fight for individual rights in the American workplace -- and now, beyond it -- is itself a long way from a victorious conclusion. And thanks to the NLRB, it just got longer."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/09/AR2005080901162.html

Hillary Says "I Told You So" 

Game Addict Dies Of Exhaustion

"A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday."

http://salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8BSUTG00.html

Was The Game Going That Bad?

"A fan plunged from the upper deck at Yankee Stadium onto the screen behind home plate during Tuesday night's game between New York and the Chicago White Sox and was taken to a hospital."

http://salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8BSTO580.html

What The Hell Does This Mean?

I defy any syntactic wizard to explain this one:

"A German intelligence chief is saying that terrorism from Iran is 'radiating from Iraq:'"

http://salon.com/?x

Really Dumb Quote Of The Day: Dogs Of War

"How can they use these lovely pets for criminal and murderous acts? ...A poor dog can't refuse what they are doing with him because he can't think and decide."

---Rasha Khairir, Iraqi stockbroker, regarding the insurgents' practice of rigging dogs with bombs

Incidentally, man's best friend was decimated in previous wars. For example,

"Of 4,300 dogs sent to Vietnam, 2,000 were handed over to the South Vietnamese army and 2,000 were put to sleep. Only 200 managed to make it home, said Ron Aiello, Vietnam War-era dog handler who runs U.S. War Dog, a 1,100-member Burlington, N.J., organization."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-dogs10aug10,0,7842758.story?track=tottext

Falling Stars

In a highly unusual move, the Army has relieved a four star general of his command, apparently for adultery. Or is it that adultery among generals is highly unusual? Thank god somebody is watching out for the morals of our military leadership.

"The allegation against him does not involve a relationship with anyone within the military or even the federal government," Robertson said, emphasizing that the allegations do not involve more than one relationship. "It does not involve anyone on active duty or a civilian in the Department of Defense."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/09/AR2005080900515.html?referrer=email

Engineered Successful Coup In Baghdad

What Mayor Of Baghdad?

Every so often you run into an item which is so odd that it forces interpretation. Given a big sandstorm in Iraq, given a mob of armed thugs a hundred strong, presto, you have a new mayor. Is it a coup? Is it democracy in action? What the hell is it?

What it is not is any semblance of normal governmental process, and that betrays the reality of Iraq/Baghdad, no matter what anybody is saying about it. The facts are absurd. And that is the nature of things under our intervention.

"BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 - Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.

"The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life."

You have to weep. Or something.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/international/middleeast/10iraq.html?th&emc=th

Appointed To New Commission To Investigate Intelligence 

Four Of The Terrorists Were ID'd A Year Before 9/11

The outrage here isn't so much that we didn't appreciate the danger (the UK made the same error of judgement, after 9/11, with known jihadists in their country) as it is that this kind of information is still surfacing after four years and millions of dollars spent on investigating and reporting the state of intelligence. How can you possibly predicate effective action based on incomplete data? Why create yet another monstrous government bureaucracy like Homeland Security when you don't even know what intelligence the existing agencies in fact gathered? And is the cause of these gaps in reporting incompetence or intent?

"WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

"In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon...

"A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.

"The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode."

Well I guess that explains it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html?th&emc=th

 

Congress' War On Time And the oge's Chickens

The oge is much concerned with daylight hours just now, as his wife's pullets are approaching maturity. The lives of birds are highly regulated by light; chickens require about 16 hours of light, for example, to lay eggs reliably. Shorten the light and they stop laying and go into molt, not only refeathering their clucking bodies but refurbishing their oviducts for the next cycle. With too much light, on the other hand, pullets gain sexual maturity too soon and are stunted physically. And on and on.

So armed with a table (courtesy the Naval Observatory) of the times of sunrise and sunset every day for the next year, I am working out the appropriate amount of supplementary light for the new flock. Ideally, I would gradually bring them up to 16 hours of light timed to approximate a regular fixed period throughout the year, adding light morning and evening and adjusting this week by week as the solar cycle proceeds. This is complicated, however, by the circumstance that the flock ranges outside and naturally likes to return to the coop to roost at sunset, so the popular practice is to add the light at morning only, creating an artificial sunrise. The tradeoff is that the beginning and end of their day tend to recede in relative terms from week to week by some minutes. I suppose it is gradual enough that they don't mind.

Now multiply this single example of what daylight means to the world of man and nature, and you get some notion of why the government should stay the hell out of it. The oge will simply keep the chickens on standard time, but millions of Americans will have to adjust many details of daily life to the extended hour that Congress is enacting. Of course, what the idiots you elect to public office seem to forget is that the hour of daylight added to the afternoon is taken from the morning. I don't know how you save anything when you need electricity and headlights to get up and go to work in the morning. Under our new legislation, at New York's latitude, for example, the sun will not rise until 7:38 am at the end of October.

It's not as if your elected idiots are plowing new ground here. As Michael Downing reminds us in his Times' piece, the Germans experimented with light savings in an attempt to conserve fuel in WWI. But then again, when does the current political leadership care about history lessons?

Do you want to know more, including who really benefits from extended evening daylight?

"That most Americans still believe we save daylight to help farmers tells you something about the quality of debate on this perennial controversy. In fact, farmers hated daylight saving. They needed morning light to get their dairy and crops to markets, and they were powerful enough to rally popular opinion against the law. For that reason, except during the Second World War, Congress did not dare to pass a national daylight saving policy for almost 50 years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/opinion/09downing.html?th&emc=th

Appointed To Head bush's War On Drugs 

John Tierney Takes On The Drug War

Like most things it touches, drugs are more of a problem when government gets involved. I suppose we'll hear more from Hillary about this too, in her new (?) centrist position.

"Drug warriors point to the dangers of home-cooked meth labs, which start fires and create toxic waste. But those labs and the burn victims are a result of the drug war itself.

"Amphetamine pills were easily available, sold over the counter until the 1950's, then routinely prescribed by doctors to patients who wanted to lose weight or stay awake. It was only after the authorities cracked down in the 1970's that many people turned to home labs, criminal gangs and more dangerous ways of ingesting the drug.

"It's the same pattern observed during Prohibition, when illicit stills would blow up, and there was a rise in deaths from alcohol poisoning. Far from instilling virtue in Americans, Prohibition caused them to switch from beer and wine to hard liquor. Overall consumption of alcohol might even have increased.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/opinion/09tierney.html?th&emc=th

How Do You Read This One?

Just timing? Or is someone jumping? Or pushed?

"The departure this week of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who has accepted the post of general counsel at Lockheed Martin, leaves a question mark in the probe into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Comey was the only official overseeing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation.

"With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recused, department officials say they are still trying to resolve whom Fitzgerald will now report to. Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is 'likely' to be named as acting deputy A.G., a DOJ official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter tells NEWSWEEK. But McCallum may be seen as having his own conflicts: he is an old friend of President Bush's and a member of his Skull and Bones class at Yale."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853002/site/newsweek/

Most Thoughtful Blog of the Day

"It’s not as if there is any dispute over the facts of what happened on August 6, 1945. But the keepers of the national mythology appeared to have decided that America was not ready to confront the reality of what had transpired when its leaders decided to unleash a weapon of mass destruction on a civilian population. Or to even have a sober discussion over how such a monumental decision was made.

"But then, while the brutal war crimes of Nazi Germany and Tojo’s Japan are well documented and exhaustively discussed, there has really been very little discussion, not only in the U.S. but also more widely in the West, of the legitimacy of the massive aerial bombardment of those countries' civilian populations by U.S. and British bomber fleets. The morality and legality of consciously setting out to destroy a whole civilian population center in Hiroshima was not even seriously debated at the time, it was simply enacted as the inevitable next step once the bomb was ready. And the climate that made that possible had been created in Dresden, and Hamburg, and Tokyo — and before that in the aerial bombing by British war planes of rebellious villages in Iraq in the 1920s and the Italians of the restive natives of their Libyan possession as early as 1911.

"We correctly decry terrorism precisely because it targets civilians rather than combatants, making it an illegitimate and immoral form of warfare. But there appears to be a blind spot in Western discourse when it comes to discussing the context of targeting civilians in the course of formal warfare."

http://www.tonykaron.com/

Placenta May Offer New Source for Stem Cells

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=healthNews&storyID=2005-08-05T133123Z_01_N05496409_RTRIDST_0_HEALTH-SCIENCE-CELLS-DC.XML

Krugman on the Housing Bubble: It's Real and Maybe Ending

Krugman two days in a row? He is making at least partial sense.

"In the nation as a whole, housing prices rose about 50 percent between the first quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2005. But that average blends results from Flatland metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta, where prices rose 26 and 29 percent respectively, with results from Zoned Zone areas like New York, Miami and San Diego, where prices rose 77, 96 and 118 percent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html?

Military Defying Neos on Torture

We know there are sound reasons for maintaining minimal standards in the treatment of military prisoners aside from any consideration of whether we care about the prisoners themselves or not. The oge has written about this before, and in terms of the extreme disregard the neos have for any allegiance to law or tradition. We are at the point that a mere handful of senators are trying to reestablish some sane perspective to the abuses, unaided by an oblivious MSM and public; fortunately, career military have added their voice.

"In an effort to restore the honor of the armed forces and prevent future abuses, Senators John McCain of Arizona, John Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have proposed amendments to the Defense Authorization Act that would institute standards for the treatment of military detainees. Having loyally muted their criticism during last year’s election season, the three Republican Senators are again voicing demands for candor and reform.

"Meanwhile, however, the dispute between the Republican rebels and the White House has revealed similar dissension within the military. Those fissures were exposed when Senator Graham released declassified memoranda written by top Judge Advocate General officers. Pried loose from the Pentagon by the Senator, those memos show that in early 2003, ranking J.A.G. officers from every service branch tried to warn against interrogation methods that violate the human and legal rights of prisoners in U.S. military detention facilities."

http://www.observer.com/opinions_conason.asp

New Math for Airlines

HNN just announced on air that the airline industry is confronting fuel costs that have now outstripped personnel costs. What? At first that sounds impossible. I am still sceptical.

In any event, United, always out front with splendid cost-savings ideas even as they operate under bankruptcy protection, has proposed cancelling pension benefits for fuel tanks.

And one of their VP's, assiduously studying the correlations between cheaper labor and costlier fuel, is calculating the btu value of human blood.

On the serious side: some type of economic tipping point is at work here.

CIA Official: Administration Let Bin Laden Escape

It looks like we could have had him at Tora Bora after all. As with all the other filthy dissemblances of this treacherous administration of cowards, the truth about the incompetent command in December 2001 is emerging.

"...Gary Berntsen...says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. 'He was there,' Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK.

"(Berntsen) backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a 'strategic disaster' because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members."

Congratulations on yet another successful creation of reality, you pathetic ideologues.

"'They're just holding the book,' which is scheduled for October release, (Berntsen) says. 'CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. The CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book.'"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/

WiFi in the Boonies

You probably know that one of the oge's great gripes is how internet access is commodified by our whore politicians, resulting in a rating at the bottom of developed nations. But this is a bit spotty:

"New York and other leading cities should be embarrassed that Morrow and Umatilla Counties in eastern Oregon are far ahead of them in providing high-speed Internet coverage to residents, schools and law enforcement officers - even though all of Morrow County doesn't even have a single traffic light.

"...broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification.

"Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/opinion/07kristof.html?th&emc=th

You Got to Love Florida: Nuclear Plant Dumps Hot Waste in City Sewage, Cow Pasture

Yeah, let's hear it for more nuclear power industry deregulation:

" The operator of a Florida nuclear plant appears to have shipped radioactive waste to ordinary landfills, municipal sewage treatment plants and some unknown locations in the 1970's and early 80's...

"Florida Power and Light said that in 1982 it had mistakenly made a shipment to a landfill, but the documents appear to show numerous shipments to multiple locations...

"Plant workers used a sink to wash mops, rags and other heavily contaminated materials, believing that the drain was connected to the plant's radioactive waste system, but instead it drained into a sanitary sewage system, according to the documents. The contaminants were then hauled away with sludge. According to documents cited by the plaintiffs, at one point the plant in St. Lucie County was shipping to regular landfills materials that were 10 times as radioactive as what it was shipping to a low-level waste dump."

Do you really want to know more?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/national/07nuke.html?th&emc=th

Idiot Quote of the Day, or, Your Government at Work

"But (Dr. Fauci) cautioned: 'We don't have all the (avian flu) vaccine we need to meet the possible demand. The critical issue now is, can we make enough vaccine, given the well-known inability of the vaccine industry to make enough vaccine?'"

Excuse me. We have been through this before. The avian flu vaccine is our hedge against a global pandemic that is not just a possibility, but a prediction among some experts. Just what dynamic in the private sector is supposed to emerge and fix the chronic problem of vaccine short-supply?

We know the problem. Vaccines don't make a lot of profit compared to the industry's favorite, maintenance drugs. Companies also bear the burden of stockpiles that may not be bought. Fauci heads what is supposed to be a form of public health agency. That implies a mission. I suggest the mission is definitely not wait and see if enough vaccine happens to get made. Argh.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/health/07vaccine.html?th&emc=th

Incidentally, little moron in the white house, the vaccine was developed through genetic engineering. That is a technology dependent on the reality of genetics, which comprises the science of inheritance, which is half of the mechanism of evolution. Do you have an alternative vaccine produced by intelligent design? You take that one when the birds come, you idiot.

Krugman on How to Implement I.D.

Paul Krugman is somebody the oge can take in small doses. But here he presents the example of how special interests (like the neos) build (buy) support for a favored position and systematically leverage it for political advantage. And this is the outrageous process that suffices for reality for far too many people.

"Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a 'cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit.'"

Krugman's next example is the corporate-financed sabotage of the evidence for global warning. Then he warns us:

"But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?"

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/923vgvjf.asp?pg=1

Rift Between bush and Rummy?

Not often I refer to William Kristol, who seems to think Rummy needs some tightening up:

"The president seems determined to complete the job (in Iraq). Is his defense secretary? In addition to trying to abandon the term 'war on terror,' Rumsfeld and some of his subordinates have spent an awful lot of time in recent weeks talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq--and before the job is complete. . . "

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/923vgvjf.asp?pg=1

Church News: The Power of Faith

"IN THE INTERVIEW MONDAY in which President Bush made news by defending the teaching of the 'intelligent design' theory, he also defended former Texas Ranger (now Baltimore Oriole) Rafael Palmeiro, recently suspended from Major League Baseball for a positive steroid test. 'Palmeiro is a friend,' said Bush, once the Rangers' managing partner. 'He testified in public [that he never took steroids], and I believe him.'

I think that just about says it all. Dope.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-supplements6aug06,0,1153643.story?track=tottext

Your FCC at Work: New Ruling Strengthens Monopoly

Independent internet service providers have been dealt a wicked blow...along with consumers.

"The FCC, said Gene Kimmelman, the group's director of public policy, 'continues down the wrong path on deregulation, allowing giant phone companies to tighten their stranglehold on competition, stifle innovation and reach even deeper into the pockets of consumers.'"

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-phones6aug06,0,7433163.story?track=tottext

Only a Lucky Few Go Out in Style 

More Church News: Tawdry Tale of Geriatric Retard Rape and Priest Suicide Among Jesuits

This one sort of defies belief. You have to put on your darkest sense of the absurd just to get through it. I mean, old priests molesting another old mentally ill priest in a wheel chair? If there is a moral in this lurid melodrama, it's that covering up this stuff just does not work.

"When Chevedden jumped to his death last year, he became another tragic statistic — one of at least 55 alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse who have killed themselves in the U.S. since 1990, according to research by the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chevedden6aug06,0,2916994.story?page=1&coll=la-home-headlines

And More Church News:Presbyterians Join Other Protestants Threatening Divestment in Corporate Support of Israeli Occupation

"The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. announced Friday that it would press four American corporations to stop providing military equipment and technology to Israel for use in the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that if the companies did not comply, the church would take a vote to divest its stock in them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/06/national/06church.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

Roberts as Activist: The Toad Case

This is a somewhat technical piece, but reportedly illustrates his activism:

"One of the few controversial opinions Roberts has written while serving on that court is his dissent from the denial of rehearing in the 2003 case of Rancho Viejo v. Norton.

"Though he cites U.S. Supreme Court precedents in favor of his view, Roberts ventures into the very kind of judicial activism conservatives most condemn. Ultimately, his dissent is so extreme as to, in effect, reject the protections of the Federal Endangered species Act."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/08/04/hilden.roberts/index.html

Illusions

Hat tip to Volokh Conspiracy - these illusions are incredible!

http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/colourPerception/colourPerception.html

This Doesn't Change A Thing: Roberts and Romer

He was a good soldier doing a piece of pro bono work undertaken by his firm. We already know he'd sell his first-adopted to advance his career. The only question is, given how scrupulously he compiled his credentials, did it occur to him that this episode could prove politically embarassing down the road, or did he dismiss the possibility in the belief that he was sufficiently removed from documented involvement?

In either case, his role in Romer says more about his technical skills and the fallibility of his personal calculations than it does his ideological leanings---none of which considerations detracts from the schadenfreude of watching the right-wing evangelicals twist and squirm.

"The lead plaintiffs' lawyer in the Romer case, Jean Dubofsky, said Thursday that she sought out Judge Roberts at the recommendation of Walter Dellinger, then a senior official in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. Ms. Dubofsky, a former justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, said she was specifically seeking a conservative who could provide her an insider's road map, of sorts, helping her to anticipate objections from some of the court's more conservative members, like Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

"Judge Roberts, who once clerked for Justice Rehnquist and now serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, spent about six hours on the case, Ms. Dubofsky said. 'He told me, "You have to know how to count and to get five votes, you're going to have to pick up the middle."'

"And then, she said, Judge Roberts provided explicit instructions on how to do just that, telling her that she would have to prove to the court it did not have to overturn a previous case, Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a ban on homosexual sodomy. He peppered her with questions in a moot court session."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/politics/politicsspecial1/05roberts.html?th&emc=th

Former AIPAC Officials Indicted

No surprises here. Anyone following the Franklin story was expecting this, which is why AIPAC "fired" them.

"A five-count indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., named Steven Rosen, formerly the director of foreign-policy issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Keith Weissman, the group's former senior Iran analyst.

"The charges follow the indictment in June of Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin, accused of leaking classified military information to an Israeli official and the AIPAC employees.

"The FBI investigation that led to yesterday's charges has been closely followed in Washington, where AIPAC is an influential interest group. The case also has served as a reminder of a tense time in U.S.-Israeli relations: the 1985 scandal in which civilian Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was caught spying for Israel."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002421726_spyprobe05.html

Excellent

http://ushousingbubble.blogspot.com/

Mooshinator is smiling.

BURST, BUBBLE, BURST!

You Got to Love Florida

"Miami-Dade school bus drivers, custodians, a cook and a cashier were among 29 people arrested Thursday for allegedly participating in an operation to illegally obtain the powerful painkiller OxyContin and resell it on the street, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami announced...

"The 22 school district employees arrested had only limited contact with Miami-Dade schoolchildren and none were customers, authorities said."

Thank goodness for that.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/12306946.htm

CNN Suspends Novak

I guess you could conclude that the irrascible old goat isn't holding up well in general; the well-publicized story that at least one government official urged him not to publish Plame/Wilson's name does make him look more like an actor than a reporter in this game. On the other hand, having to sit beside James Carville for more than two minutes would get to the oge for sure, and I'm not even a Republican. In any event, very few of these media whores are worth their salaries, and that includes Novak, who may in his performance of publishing the name, emerge as a political conspirator and effectual enemy of the state as well.

"NEW YORK - Robert Novak, whose revelation of a CIA officer’s name in a 2003 column has sparked a federal probe, was suspended by CNN after he swore and walked off the set during a live telecast of 'Inside Politics.'
CNN correspondent Ed Henry said afterward that he had been about to ask Novak about his role in the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity, which Novak has repeatedly refused to comment on aside from some references in his column."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8830305

Lieberman and Meeks Among 6 Worst Dems

These are the political whores who trampled democratic values and supported the rich with votes for CAFTA, Energy giveaway, Tort favoritism, and Sabotaging personal bankruptcy law. Can they really need money so bad they bend over smiling for the corps? Do they really think their constituents are so stupid as to forget what they do? And special shame on flabby-lips righteous Lieberman who actually ran as VP and then pulls this nonsense. And don't forget that Meeks is one of the two NY dems whose votes could have stopped CAFTA.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Rep. Henry Cuellar, Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, Rep. Gregory Meeks, Rep. John Tanner

Link to send their staffs sarcastic reminders of where they are supposed to stand:

http://action.ourfuture.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=27418

A 2004 Political Fund Raiser in Idaho, Well Attended by Ubiquitous Lobbyists. Note Evangelical Contingent at Right Pressing for Legislation Permitting Stone Tablets of the Ten Commandments.The Calf is Also the Official State Animal of Kansas, Texas, and 23 Other States, Outranked in Popularity Only by the Hog.

Death of Congressional Ethics

If you have any illusions about the slippery slope down which the lubed-up, whored-out backsides of your elected officials have already and long-since slid into absolute shamelessness, kiss them (your illusions) good-bye:

"A lushly produced video on DVD arrived in lobbyists' mailboxes all over Washington this summer. In it, Sen. Michael D. Crapo narrates what amounts to a sales pitch for them to pay $2,500 each to party with him later this month in beautiful Sun Valley, Idaho.

"'We shoot all day. We fish all day. We ride horses all day. And then we finish the day with the best barbecue in the West,' the Idaho Republican boasts. 'Frankly, I think this is the best event in the country.'"

Guess who ultimately pays for all this fun and games? A: the braindamaged idiots who vote them into office. And the rest of us who haven't figured out how to evade taxation. Tea party, anyone?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/03/AR2005080301987.html

What Does $330B Worth of Pork Smell Like?

"'If you look at fiscal conservatism these days, it's in a sorry state,' said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of only eight House members to vote against the $286.5 billion transportation bill that was passed the day before the recess. 'Republicans don't even pretend anymore.'"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/03/AR2005080302218.html

Answer: Smells like hog whore elected officials.

Price of Empire 

E. L. Doctorow's Essay on the Moral Incapacity of bush

It is one of the most poignant indictments of the soulless little monster in the white house that I have read, literate and rich in psychological suggestion, courtesy of Rob, for finding it:

"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

"But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

"He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. . ."

http://www.easthamptonstar.com/20040909/col5.htm

FreeNet Getting Darker

Protection of PTP filesharing is described by advocates:

"At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.

"Others have described similar efforts to build a so-called darknet that aims to shield the identities of those sharing information. The issue is complicated by the fact that the small group of technologists designing the new systems say their goal is to create tools to circumvent censorship and political repression - not to abet copyright violation."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/technology/01file.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

US to Deploy New Land Mines?

Is the demented little born-again in the white house about to authorize land mines?

"UNITED NATIONS - The George W. Bush administration may soon resume production of antipersonnel land mines in a move that is at odds with both the international community and previous U.S. policy on the weapons, says a leading human rights organization.

"In December of this year, the Pentagon will decide whether or not to begin producing a new type of antipersonnel land mine called a 'Spider'. The first of these mines would then be scheduled to roll out in early 2007."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0803-06.htm

Tom Standage Assails Bottled Water as Dumb

"Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that 'use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided.'
Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/01/opinion/edstandage.php

Ocean Fish Species Drop to Half in 50 Years

"A combination of overfishing, habitat destruction and climate change has narrowed the range of fish across the globe, wrote biologists Boris Worm and Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and three other scientists. In some areas, such as off northwest Australia where a wide variety of tuna and billfish used to thrive, diversity has declined precipitously."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801752.html

Man on the L/Edge 

Profile of Tre Arrow

If only we could get a mix of the DNA of Robert Byrd, Eliott Spitzer, Tre Arrow, Howard Dean, and Anjolina Jolie to come out right. . .

"While authorities were hunting him in the U.S., Arrow traveled from Ontario to British Columbia, continuing an activist lifestyle and volunteering for a non-profit that collected discarded food for the needy. He was arrested, he said, for using bolt cutters to unlock dumpsters that contained reusable resources.
In prison, Arrow says there's no grass, 'no wild things,' and he's confined to a double-bunked cell 18 hours a day. His supporters help lift his spirits. His sister and a group of friends stay in contact and raise money. His website, TreArrow.org, helps cultivate support from all over the world, from a German housewife to film and television executives in Los Angeles to fellow activists such as Julia Butterfly Hill. (Though he won't mention names, he says a movie project about his life is in the works)."

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/23842/

California to Tackle "Universal" Healthcare?

As far as the oge is concerned, the US non-system of health care, which benefits only the insurance companies, is dead and rotten as social institutions go. Given that the demonic little fraud who inherited the white house has neither the brains nor inclination to revive it, and given that there are so many stake holders in the game that we will never be allowed to go back to pay-out-of-pocket for routine care, it may well devolve on some individual state(s) to show the way---assuming, of course, that our courts allow it.

"California's insurance commissioner plans to issue a report today criticizing health savings accounts and other 'consumer-driven' insurance plans as part of the problem of spiraling costs — not the solution.Saying the state's healthcare system is headed for a 'complete breakdown,' John Garamendi sharply attacked new insurance plans — including some backed by the White House — that offer reduced benefits to save money. These plans shift risk to consumers without solving the underlying problems, he said."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-insure3aug03,0,4020693.story?track=tottext

The Enduring Soul of ENRON 

More Sleaze-Bag Bankers Ante-Up on ENRON Collusion

Here's the latest whore money-changer to belly up:

"Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce agreed Tuesday to pay $2.4 billion to investors who lost money in the collapse of Enron Corp., the biggest settlement yet in a series of deals negotiated by lawyers for the University of California."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-enron3aug03,0,5268118.story?track=tottext

Who's Minding your Pension Funds?

The NYTimes editorializes on the fee-rampant conduct of United's (defaulted) pension fund: too many hands in, too few eyes watching. And ultimately, of course, as is always the case with these dubiously insured and managed enterprises, the worker and the taxpayer end up holding the bag:

"A recent report by The Times's Mary Williams Walsh documents the likelihood that the United employees who collectively lost $3.4 billion in benefits in the default weren't simply the victims of a bad stock market and low interest rates. From 1999 through 2003, Labor Department records show, some 30 money managers, consultants and other professionals that handled United's pensions earned at least $125 million, paid out of plan assets. During that same period, a huge gap opened between the value of the pensions' assets and the amount owed to present and future retirees - from a surplus of about $2 billion to a deficit of nearly $7 billion. The record is silent on how individual money managers performed, making it impossible to determine who may have acted in a way that contributed to the pensions' failures.

"Even though the federal government is the ultimate insurer for failed pensions, the world of pension investing is largely unregulated. In United's case, that system allowed money managers to make risky bets that included junk bonds, dot-com stocks and, apparently, an Albanian energy venture. A pension auditor told Ms. Walsh that many pension money managers favor actively traded equities, in part because they generate fees and commissions that can be shared with pension consultants who steer business their way. The auditor's observation is supported by a report released last May by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It found that more than half of the consultants who helped pension funds invest their money had outside business relationships that could taint their advice.

"Congress and the Labor Department, which oversees the federal pension agency, should swiftly investigate the allegations of conflicts of interest and, if warranted, seek redress for bilked workers and retirees. So far, Congress hasn't broached the topic, and" the Labor Department has been unresponsive to a written request from one of United's unions, sent in June, for an audit of United's pensions. There's no excuse for foot-dragging. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal pension insurer, is straining under the weight of $63 billion in liabilities. If it should ever collapse, American taxpayers would be the payers of last resort."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/opinion/03wed1.html?th&emc=th

US Falls to 16th in Broadband Access, Wretched Cell Phone Service

The oge has a lot of problems with the Times' Thomas Friedman, but he's right about the ridiculous state of popular access to tech in the country:

"... the last straw was when I couldn't get cellphone service while visiting I.B.M.'s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/opinion/03friedman.html?th&emc=th

Intelligent Design

I enjoyed reading this piece from a strongly right-wing blog...

http://instapundit.com/archives/024635.php

Another CIA Agent Outs Admin on Iraqi WMD

"WASHINGTON, July 31 - The Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, but the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers, a former C.I.A. officer has charged.

"In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former C.I.A. officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq's uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/politics/01weapons.html

Working Assets Petition Against Corporate Axis of Evil

Sign their petition condemning the practices of WalMart, ExxonMobil, and Fox, courtesy WorldCitizen.

http://www.neversurrender.org/neversurrender/petition.cfm?itemid=19084