(06-15) 17:35 PDT -- Ruth Britton enjoys her part-time work as a college instructor. But, at 69, there are plenty of other things the Greenbrae resident would like to do - volunteer, write, take classes, travel.
The problem is, with the cost of living rising and the value of her investments falling, Britton can't do without the money she gets from teaching. She's already put off retirement several years. Now, she says she may have to stay on the job four or five years more.
It's been a curious experience, each evening recently, turning on the NBC or ABC nightly news, with historic levels of flooding in Iowa as the lead story. ("Uncharted territory," National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Pierce called these floods.) After all, there are those stunning images of Cedar Rapids, a small city now simply in the water. The National Weather Service has already termed what's happened to the city an "historic hydrologic event," with the Cedar River topping its banks at, or above, half-millennium highs. (That's an every 500 year "event"!)
But here's the special strangeness of this TV moment: Network news loves weather disasters, and yet, as with historic droughts in the Southeast or Southwest, as with the hordes of tornadoes coursing through the center of the country, as with so many other extreme weather phenomena of recent times, including flooding in Southern China and the Burmese cyclone, when it comes to the Midwestern floods, night after night no TV talking head seems ever to mention the possibility that climate change/global warming might somehow be involved. (Nor, by the way, are our major newspapers any better on the subject.) As an omission, it's kinda staggering, really, for an event already being labeled "a Midwestern Katrina."
Around the world, protests against soaring food and fuel prices are mounting. The poor — and even the middle classes — are seeing their incomes squeezed as the global economy enters a slowdown. Politicians want to respond to their constituents’ legitimate concerns, but do not know what to do.
In the United States, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain took the easy way out, and supported a suspension of the gasoline tax, at least for the summer. Only Barack Obama stood his ground and rejected the proposal, which would have merely increased demand for gasoline — and thereby offset the effect of the tax cut.
It was nineteen years ago this week that I.F. (Izzy) Stone died. The legendary blogger was 81.
Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?
Well, yeah, but when I think of today’s blunt, fact-based online hell-raisers, my mind quickly flashes on Izzy Stone. You may think of Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Arianna Huffington. I think of Izzy.
Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we associate with today’s best bloggers. Like them, he was obsessed with citing original documents and texts. But before search engines, Izzy had to consume ten newspapers per day — and physically visit government archives and press offices, and personally pore over thousands of words in the Congressional Record. That’s how he repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of his day in exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War.
For Immediate Release: June 12, 2008
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337
ARMY’S $100 MILLION HOUSING FROM HELL: ALASKA’S TAKU GARDENS — Responsibility Evaded for Uninhabitable Base Family Housing atop Weapons Dump
Washington, DC — For more then three years, the U.S. Army has hemorrhaged money into an Alaskan housing complex that will likely never be occupied, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). After a damning internal investigation, the Army ordered a new review which excused any misconduct as a failure to communicate, conceding only that “this was not an organization optimally aligned for success.”
Under intense pressure to provide housing at booming Fort Wainwright, in 2005 base officials authorized building 128 units on a 54-acre site, called Taku Gardens but with only cursory environmental assessment. Unfortunately, that site was an old weapons and equipment dump, profoundly contaminated with munitions (some holding chemical agent), dioxin, PCBs, tons of drums and equipment (including an entire locomotive and a forklift). By the time construction was halted, 79 units had been built but will likely have to be torn down.
Finally, the U.S. Mega-Bases in Iraq Make the News
By Tom Engelhardt
It's just a $5,812,353 contract -- chump change for the Pentagon -- and not even one of those notorious "no-bid" contracts either. Ninety-eight bids were solicited by the Army Corps of Engineers and 12 were received before the contract was awarded this May 28th to Wintara, Inc. of Fort Washington, Maryland, for "replacement facilities for Forward Operating Base Speicher, Iraq." According to a Department of Defense press release, the work on those "facilities" to be replaced at the base near Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, is expected to be completed by January 31, 2009, a mere 11 days after a new president enters the Oval Office. It is but one modest reminder that, when the next administration hits Washington, American bases in Iraq, large and small, will still be undergoing the sort of repair and upgrading that has been ongoing for years.
A month ago Monday, a group of guest workers from India placed a frantic 3:00 am phone call to Saket Soni, lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. The workers said that armed security guards were holding some workers prisoner in the TV room of the Signal International Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the company's 290 welders and pipe fitters live.
The men told Soni that Signal International – a sub-contractor for mammoth defense contractor Northrop Grumman – had staged a pre-dawn raid and that six Indian workers had been detained in the “TV room,” flanked by security guards, one of whom carried a gun. About 200 other Indian employees at Signal were standing outside the room.
On Thursday July 12, the Supreme Court restored habeas corpus to the accused persons detained by President Bush at Guantanamo. In doing so it set American laws again on the track of constitutional self-respect. But it also opened the grounds for a debate which is sure to be long and fierce, in which the American opponents of liberty, eager for the domestic regime that in 2002 seemed almost in their grasp, will spare no reproach against the Court and will speak openly of the "lack of realism" of the U.S. Constitution.
Two previous decisions, and two bad remedies by a servile Republican Congress and its Democratic enablers, led to Thursday's decision. The Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush, in June 2004, recognized that the Guantanamo prisoners had statutory habeas rights. The response by Congress was the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which specified the harsher rules to which they were subject. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in June 2006, the Court held that Guantanamo trials by military commissions were in violation of both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. Congress then offered up, and the president signed into law in October 2006, the Military Commissions Act, which gave legislative sanction to the Guantanamo commissions and stripped the prisoners of habeas corpus.
San Francisco
FOR months, our political punditry foresaw one, and only one, prospective gender contest looming in the general election: between the first serious female presidential candidate and the Republican male “warrior.” But those who were dreading a plebiscite on sexual politics shouldn’t celebrate just yet. Hillary Clinton may be out of the race, but a Barack Obama versus John McCain match-up still has the makings of an epic American gender showdown.
The reason is a gender ethic that has guided American politics since the age of Andrew Jackson. The sentiment was succinctly expressed in a massive marble statue that stood on the steps of the United States Capitol from 1853 to 1958. Named “The Rescue,” but more commonly known as “Daniel Boone Protects His Family,” the monument featured a gigantic white pioneer in a buckskin coat holding a nearly naked Indian in a death’s grip, while off to the side a frail white woman crouched over her infant.
TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.
In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
The answer surprises even cynical me: Barack Obama's neighborhood. Republicans are preparing to court the blue-collar vote by casting the election as a referendum on Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, which Mr. Obama represented in the Illinois Senate and where the prestigious University of Chicago is situated.
Once said, it had to be admitted. If you looked at Dodi from behind when he was sitting down, you could see a substantial spare tyre around his 13-year-old middle. It bulged out from his hips and flopped down like a muffin rising out over its baking case. He had become quite lazy, too, preferring to lounge in front of the fire rather than play in the garden as he used to. His excess weight was slowing him down. His joints seemed stiff as he climbed the stairs.
WASHINGTON — A dejected Sen. Lindsey Graham blasted the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday on Guantanamo Bay detainees, calling it "dangerous and irresponsible."
The South Carolina Republican, who's also a military lawyer and a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, helped craft the Military Commissions Act and had confidently predicted that it would pass high court muster.
In Britain, the Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is attempting to enact legislation empowering the Government to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days without bothering to charge them with any crime (as a result of post-9/11 legislation, the British Government may do so now for 28 days). Much of the opposition to this expansion of the Government’s detention power comes from the British Right, which sees it as an intolerable expansion of unchecked government power and a severe erosion of core Western liberties. Factions within the British Left are opposed to the legislation for the same reason.
The official position of the British Conservative Party is to oppose the legislation, and former Tory Prime Minister John Major — who himself was the target of a 1991 bombing-assassination plot by the IRA — wrote an Op-Ed in the Times Online emphatically opposing these increased detention powers and also opposing new DNA and other domestic surveillance programs.
Rogers Cadenhead, founder and publisher of The Drudge Retort, has been Cease and Desisted by AP News for publishing fragments of their syndicated news articles and reports.
Yes, fragments, not the whole articles.NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- FEMA gave away about $85 million in household goods meant for Hurricane Katrina victims, a CNN investigation has found.
The material, from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities, sat in warehouses for two years before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's giveaway to federal and state agencies this year.
Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."
It has become a cliché to say that we live in a new Gilded Age. True enough, up to a point. Money, mostly new money, rules politics and culture. Corporations merge into ever larger corporations. You have to go back to before World War I to match today's levels of income and wealth inequality.
In some ways, the second Gilded Age is worse than the first. Sure, we live longer now, more of us can read and you don't have to be a white man to be able to vote. But to prove my point, consider two big parties, thrown 110 years apart.If the special-rate Countrywide loan that led to Jim Johnson's resignation from Barack Obama's VP screening team was shady, then there's a few other Washington insiders who may have some explaining to do.
A new article from Portfolio rattles off a list of top Washington officials, current and former, who also received discounted loans because they were personally approved by Countywide Financial's top exec Angelo Mozilo.
By David Cho and Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 13, 2008; D01
Banks and mortgage firms are providing questionable information about the number of subprime mortgage borrowers they are helping and the rate at which homeowners are falling into foreclosure, according to the top regulator for the nation's largest banks.
Those details are crucial for regulators to gauge the severity of the housing crisis and evaluate the effectiveness of the steps lenders are taking to address the problems.
“Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.”
That little ditty famously summarized the message of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.
The percentage of underweight babies born in the United States has increased to its highest rate in 40 years, with Georgia ranking seventh from the bottom in delivering healthy infants, according to a new report that also documents a recent rise in the number of children living in poverty.
The data on low birth weights is troubling because such babies — those born at less than 5.5 pounds — are at greater risk of dying in infancy or experiencing long-term disabilities.
Monday in Raleigh, North Carolina, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama opened the general election fight, taking the gloves off against the "tired and misguided [economic] philosophy that has dominated Washington for too long," and offering a clear challenge to the Bush-McCain economic misrule. In Washington before the National Federation of Independent Business, McCain counterpunched, suggesting the choice was between low taxes and "the largest tax increase since World War II."
This argument will be the big kahuna in this election. Despite ritual boosterism, soothing rhetoric and quiet prayers by Wall Street pundits, the economy is foul and likely to get much worse. We've lost jobs for five months in a row. Gas, food, health care costs are soaring. For workers, the mess is worse than the stagflation of the 1970s. Then, growth was stagnant while prices and wages were spiraling up. Now we've got stagflation squared; growth and wages are stagnant and prices on basics are soaring, while the value of homes, the largest investment Americans have, is plummeting.
Glenn Greenwald
Jun. 10, 2008 | (updated below)
The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau has a long, prominent article today on the pending debate over FISA and telecom amnesty -- headlined: "Return to Old Spy Rules Is Seen as Deadline Nears" -- that features (and endorses) virtually every blatant falsehood that has distorted these spying issues from the beginning, and which is built on every shoddy journalistic practice that has made clear debate over these issues almost impossible. The article strongly suggests that a so-called "compromise" is imminent, a "compromise" which will deliver to the President virtually everything he seeks in the way of new warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom amnesty.
One paragraph after the next in Lichtblau's article features shrill warnings, mostly from unnamed "officials," about all the scary things that will happen if Congressional Democrats do not quickly pass a new FISA bill that is similar to the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill and that is agreeable to the President. If a "compromise" isn't reached, reports the article, then we'll all have to live under the so-called "old" FISA law -- meaning the law used by the U.S. to defend itself from 1978 until August, 2007 and then again from February, 2008 until the present. Moreover, the one-year surveillance orders obtained last August under the now-expired Protect America Act are set to expire in August, 2008.
As we enter the twilight of the Bush era, with the distinct possibility of a Democrat moving into the White House next January, it’s reasonable to suppose that top administration officials are spending a lot of their energy trying to make it as difficult as possible for their successors to roll back their policies.
What are the Bushies doing to lock in their current course – even if it’s Barack Obama in the Oval Office on inauguration day? What agreements and contracts are they committing the country to? What rules, line-items, and executive orders will live on beyond their creators? What Trojan horses, landmines and Manchurian Candidates have they put in place throughout government?
June 9, 2008 —
A senior Justice Department official says a $500,000 federal grant to the World Golf Foundation is an appropriate use of money designed to deal with juvenile crime in America.
"We need something really attractive to engage the gangs and the street kids, golf is the hook," said J. Robert Flores, the administrator of the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The Justice Department, in a decision by Flores, gave the money to the World Golf Foundation's First Tee program, even though Justice Department staffers had rated the program 47th on a list of 104 applicants. The allegations were first reported earlier this year by the trade journal Youth Today.
Now that the presidential race is finally under way, a lot of Democrats are giddy with excitement, certain that Barack Obama will demolish John McCain; and those Democrats apparently have every reason to believe that it will happen. On the other hand, there also are some others who aren't quite so sure: others who recall the outcomes of the last two presidential races, both of which resulted in surprising "wins" for yet another dubious far-rightist candidate. Those uneasy types are wondering -- and the Democrats too should be wondering -- if history might yet again repeat itself, despite the rosy way things seem to look right now.
The question is, of course, unpleasant; but it's also necessary. And we might best begin to answer it by taking a close look at Recount, which just ended its first run on HBO (although subscribers can still see it On Demand). For all its strengths, the film is deeply flawed by the same weird denial that has kept the Democrats both in the dark and out of power--and that could keep them there beyond Election Day, regardless of the will of the electorate.
Oil futures that were falling a week ago on concerns about declining gasoline consumption have dramatically reversed course and appear poised to set new records above $140 a barrel. While the market remains concerned about the effect of high prices on demand, several weeks of falling oil inventories and the dollar's inability to make headway against the euro have combined to turn market sentiment decidedly bullish.
BAGHDAD -Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed "status of forces" agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.
Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.
June 9, 2008 —
The White House had stronger ties to disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff than it has publicly admitted, according to a draft congressional report released Monday.
President Bush met Abramoff on at least four occasions the White House has yet to acknowledge, according to the draft report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
And White House officials appeared as comfortable going to Abramoff and his lobbyists seeking tickets to sporting and entertainment events, as they did seeking input on personnel picks for plum jobs, the report found.
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.
Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.
WASHINGTON — The credit crisis triggered by bad home loans is spreading to other areas, forcing banks to tighten credit and probably extending the credit crisis that's dragging down the economy well into next year, and perhaps beyond.
That means consumers are going to have an increasingly difficult time getting bank loans for car purchases, credit cards, home equity credit lines, student loans and even commercial real estate, experts say.
Google "neglect," "Washington," and "Latin America," and you will be led to thousands of hand-wringing calls from politicians and pundits for Washington to "pay more attention" to the region. True, Richard Nixon once said that "people don't give one shit" about the place. And his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger quipped that Latin America is a "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica." But Kissinger also made that same joke about Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand -- and, of the three countries, only the latter didn't suffer widespread political murder as a result of his policies, a high price to pay for such a reportedly inconsequential place.
Latin America, in fact, has been indispensable in the evolution of U.S. diplomacy. The region is often referred to as America's "backyard," but a better metaphor might be Washington's "strategic reserve," the place where ascendant foreign-policy coalitions regroup and redraw the outlines of U.S. power, following moments of global crisis.
The forgettable first half of 2008 is stumbling to a close. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that American employers axed 49,000 jobs in May, the fifth straight month of job losses—an event that signals a recession sure as the glittery ball dropping on Times Square augurs a New Year. The report, which inspired a 394-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Friday, was the latest in a run of bad news. Auto sales, the largest retailing sector in the U.S., were off 10.7 percent in May from the year before. And housing? Ugh. Nationwide, according to the Case-Shiller Index, home prices in the first quarter fell 14 percent.
Yet hope springs eternal that the second half will be better than the first. Economists polled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in May believe the economy will grow at an annual rate of 1.7 percent and 1.8 percent in the third and fourth quarters, respectively. Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, tells NEWSWEEK that "home sales and prices in most of the country will improve during the second half of 2008." (Yun is the Little Orphan Annie of forecasters. He's always sure the sun will come out tomorrow.) Last month, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, "We expect to see a faster pace of economic growth before the end of the year."
By Walter Pincus
Monday, June 9, 2008; A15
There is an important line in last week's Senate intelligence committee report on the Bush administration's prewar exaggerations of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It says that the panel did not review "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch."
More important, there was no effort to obtain White House records or interview President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other administration officials whose speeches were analyzed because, the report says, such steps were considered beyond the scope of the report.
You may be surprised to learn that the pleasant person from FedEx Ground delivering your package owns the truck which he or she has parked in front of your house. FedEx Ground drivers, you will find out in Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, are not FedEx employees.
They are what are called independent contractors, although it demands no little effort to discern what about their position is independent. If they do not do what they are told, their contracts are abrogated forthwith. They are required to buy their own truck with 60 monthly installments of $781.12, which comes to $46,867.20. Plus there is a final kicker payment of $8,000, all of which adds up to a grand total of almost $55,000. On top of this, as an independent business person, the driver must bear the costs of insurance, maintenance, fuel, repairs and the fee for the FedEx uniform rental.
This past September, the secretive mercenary company Blackwater USA found its name splashed across front pages throughout the world after the company's shooters gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. But by early 2008, Blackwater had largely receded from the headlines save for the occasional blip on the media radar sparked by Congressman Henry Waxman's ongoing investigations into its activities. Its forces remained deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and business continued to pour in. In the two weeks directly following Nisour Square, Blackwater signed more than $144 million in contracts with the State Department for "protective services" in Iraq and Afghanistan alone and, over the following weeks and months, won millions more in contracts with other federal entities like the Coast Guard, the Navy and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
CIC Doesn't Mean What He Thinks It MeansDouglas Holtz-Eakin said the only similarity between McCain's economic plan and Bush's is a commitment to keep taxes low.
``Sadly, it seems that is all President Bush understood in the economy,'' Holtz-Eakin said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on Bloomberg Television's ``Conversations with Judy Woodruff.'' It is Barack Obama's budget plan, not Senator McCain's, that resembles Bush's policies, he said.
By Matthew Bigg and Tim Gaynor
MONROE, Ga./DOUGLAS, Arizona (Reuters) - In the richest nation on earth, a rising number of people line up for free food because they are struggling to put meals on the table at home.
Demand at food banks in the United States is up 15 percent to 20 percent over last year and many food banks are having difficulty coping, according to America's Second Harvest, the largest U.S. food bank provider with 200 in its network.
Food bank networks procure nonperishable and fresh produce from suppliers, then stock it in warehouses before distributing it via a chain of community food banks across the country.
by Andrew Cockburn
Reviewed by Pepe EscobarWho are they referring to? An enemy is a country with whom a nation is at war. "Enemy countries"? We have enemies (hi, Osama). We have critics. We even have competitors. But the United States doesn't have enemy countries.
WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W. Bush administration official.
J. Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defence Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.
By Robert Gavin, Globe Staff | June 7, 2008
An unexpected surge in the national unemployment rate set off shock waves that washed over financial, currency, and oil markets yesterday and delivered another blow to hopes that the sliding US economy would soon begin to rebound.
The Labor Department reported yesterday that the jobless rate leaped half a percentage point to 5.5 percent in May, the biggest one-month jump since 1986. Employers, meanwhile, cut payrolls for the fifth consecutive month, shedding nearly 50,000 jobs in May.
Sunday, June 8, 2008; B06
WITH SAN Francisco gas stations already charging $4.50 per gallon of regular and other places not far behind, it's little wonder that the demand for mass transit is surging nationwide. Last year, the 10.3 billion trips taken on U.S. public transportation -- trains, subways, buses -- were the most in 50 years, according to the American Public Transportation Association. And ridership continued to jump in the first three months of 2008, particularly on light rail (streetcars and trolleys) and commuter rail lines.
The rush to mass transit is accentuating what has been plain for years -- that America's investment in its public transportation infrastructure is glaringly, perilously inadequate. The gasoline tax, which provides the main source of transportation and transit revenue, has not been increased since 1993. As a funding source it is being dangerously eroded by inflation and Americans' decreased driving mileage.
WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.
On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.
One of the more noteworthy of these is a Seattle-area-based rocket scientist named Walter P. Kistler, whose activities in this regard have just been thoroughly exposed in a pull-back-the-covers report from the Southern Poverty Law Center:
An accomplished rocket scientist has become the sole donor to the Pioneer Fund, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So they are it again, the great and the good of American democracy, grovelling and fawning to the Israeli lobbyists of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), repeatedly allying themselves to the cause of another country and one that is continuing to steal Arab land.
Will this ever end? Even Barack Obama — or “Mr Baracka” as an Irish friend of mine innocently and wonderfully described him — found time to tell his Jewish audience that Jerusalem is the one undivided capital of Israel, which is not the view of the rest of the world which continues to regard the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem as illegal. The security of Israel. Say it again a thousand times: the security of Israel — and threaten Iran, for good measure.
One afternoon in April, six dozen wealthy Americans were entertained at a luncheon party in Midtown Manhattan, along with a special guest from Paris: Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre.
The host of the exclusive gathering was the Swiss bank UBS, whose elite private bankers built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires. As the wine flowed and Mr. Loyrette spoke of the glories of France, UBS bankers courted their affluent guests.
But now, as the federal authorities intensify an investigation into offshore bank accounts, the secrets of this rarefied world are being dragged into the open — and UBS’s privileged clients are running scared.
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 7, 2008; D01
The federal investigation of contracting arrangements between the Pentagon and tax-exempt defense firms in Pennsylvania includes multiple deals that go as far back as 2002 and involve more money than was previously known, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The FBI and the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service issued subpoenas two months ago seeking information about a small intelligence firm called Commonwealth Research Institute, or CRI, and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies. Both firms are registered nonprofit charities based in Johnstown, Pa.
Like lawn ornaments in summer, protesters outside the local abortion clinic are fixtures in many places.
Their presence and message have long been so predictable that, without looking or listening, people believe they understand the point. So you might not notice that the protest taking place outside your local clinic has fundamentally changed.
It is no longer about abortion. Saturday, June 7, is the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that granted married people the right to use contraception. To mark the day, anti-abortion groups will take to their normal posts outside clinic entrances not to convince Americans to oppose abortion but rather to stop using contraception.
The Air Force's top civilian and uniformed leaders are being booted out of the Pentagon. Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley has resigned. Secretary Michael W. Wynne is next.
The move, initially reported by Inside Defense and Air Force Times, isn't exactly a shocker. The Air Force has come under fire for everything from mishandling nukes to misleading ad campaigns to missing out on the importance of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Most importantly, the Air Force's leadership has been on the brink of open conflict for months with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. That's because in the halls of the Air Force's chiefs, the talk has been largely about the threats posed by China and a resurgent Russia. Gates wanted the service to actually focus on the wars at hand, in Iraq and Afghanistan. "For much of the past year I’ve been trying to concentrate the minds and energies of the defense establishment on the current needs and current conflicts," he told the Heritage Foundation. "In short, to ensure that all parts of the Defense Department are, in fact, at war."
An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd been infected with adware.
The January 2007 report (.pdf) -- published Thursday by the whistle blowing site Wikileaks -- demonstrates the hazards broadband customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology similar to what's described in the BT document.
As of this election year, the vast and rising tide of Millennials is arriving in numbers big enough to swamp the Boomers and set the whole American conversation on a whole new heading. And it is this, it can be argued, is what the Barack-versus-Hillary showdown was really all about.
It's over, at long last. The Democrats have a nominee.
And now the other hard part begins—the part where Democrats try to patch up the party and try to keep a lot of disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters on board.
"Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements?" I wrote in "Nixonland." "It would be hard to argue they do not." In a review of my book, Elizabeth Drew responded, "Well, I, for one, don't find it so hard." Between the time she wrote those words and the time they were published, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's brain tumor was announced.
This past Sunday I received a review in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Drew [1] which, while kind and thoughtful, contained at least one empirical falsehood (actually, at least two empirical falsehoods: Richard Nixon did buy a townhouse on Fifth Avenue, not 65th Street, after his forced retirement).
For at least six months now I've been planning, and putting off, this post. The imminent occasion of the first African American major-party nominee forces my hand. It's time for me to help give a sense of just how far we have come.
When I started researching NIXONLAND [1] I knew the congressional elections of 1966 would form a crucial part of the narrative. They'd never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now.
It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.
It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.
Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.
Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money — although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud. After that came the oil shock and the food shock, grim reminders that we’re still living in a material world.
So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.
WASHINGTON — A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.
In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.
Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a global warming bill that would have required major reductions in greenhouse gases, pushing debate over the world's biggest environmental concern to next year for a new Congress and president.
Democratic leaders fell a dozen votes short of getting the 60 needed to end a Republican filibuster on the measure and bring the bill up for a vote, prompting Majority Leader Harry Reid to pull the legislation from consideration.
Pink slips piled up and jobs disappeared into thin air in May as the nation's unemployment rate zoomed to 5.5 percent in the biggest one-month jump in decades. Wall Street swooned, and the White House said President Bush was considering new proposals to revive the economy.
Help-wanted signs are vanishing along with jobs, so the unemployment rate is likely to keep climbing, a government report indicated, underscoring the toll the housing and credit crises are taking on jobseekers, employers and the economy as a whole.
Adding to the pain, oil prices soared to a new record high, while the value of the dollar fell.
By Catherine Clifford and Ben Rooney, CNNMoney.com staff writers
Last Updated: June 6, 2008: 4:41 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices shot up nearly $11 a barrel and settled Friday at a record $138.54 on geopolitical jitters, a dollar decline and a forecast that oil would hit $150 by July 4.
Friday's spike in the July contract for light crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange marks the largest singe-day increase in oil prices on record. The contract hit an intraday record of $139.12, breaking the previous trading record of $135.09.
WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that a small group of Pentagon officials who'd collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the group's activities after only a month, and Pentagon officials never followed up on investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
By Peter Popham in Rome
Thursday, 5 June 2008
It's no beauty queen – the stems are long, scrawny and leafless and the pods dangle from the twigs like scorched testicles. Untreated, the seeds are so poisonous that as few as three can kill, while even a small amount induces nausea – hence the jatropha plant's nickname, "black vomit nut".
Despite its unprepossessing appearance, jatropha, whose pods contain inflammable oil, is one of a range of plants being intensively cultivated as biofuels. As it can grow in impoverished soil, requires little water and is inedible, its supporters claim that it cannot be said to be taking the place of food crops.
But now all biofuels, even the humble jatropha, are in the firing line. At the UN's world food summit in Rome yesterday it became clear that the responsibility of biofuels for soaring food costs that have sparked riots in 40 countries is the biggest point of contention. The US, which subsidises farmers to grow corn for ethanol production, claims biofuels account for less than 3 per cent of the 43 per cent rise in food costs over the past year. But the International Food Policy Research Institute said that they contributed 30 per cent to the rise between 2000 and 2007, while the International Monetary Fund says the figure is between 15 and 30 per cent.
Thursday, 5 June 2008
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the Air Force's top military and civilian leaders Thursday, holding them to account in a historic Pentagon shake-up after embarrassing nuclear mix-ups.
Gates announced at a news conference that he had accepted the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne — a highly unusual double firing.
Gates said his decision was based mainly on the damning conclusions of an internal report on the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads. And he linked the underlying causes of that slip-up to another startling incident: the flight last August of a B-52 bomber that was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past; that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.
I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.
How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.
Whether by accident or as a signal to voters of a certain intellectual attainment, Sen. Barack Obama allowed himself to be photographed a few weeks ago carrying a copy of "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria. By the looks of it, Mr. Obama is taking this celebrated young author seriously – in the photo he appears to be marking his place about a third of the way through. Mr. Obama was in Montana that day, and you got the idea he was going to kiss a few babies, deliver the usual bromides about "change," and then get back to plumbing Deep Thoughts about our troubling Global Situation.
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations.” Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.
Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.
Bill Kristol today proudly announces that one of his Weekly Standard staff members, Michael Goldfarb, was just named the Deputy Communications Director of the McCain campaign. Last April, this newest McCain official participated in a conference call with former Senator George Mitchell, during which Mitchell advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Afterwards, this is what Goldfarb wrote about what he thinks are the powers the President possesses in our country:
Mitchell's less than persuasive answer [to whether withdrawal timetables "somehow infringe on the president's powers as commander in chief?"]: "Congress is a coequal branch of government...the framers did not want to have one branch in charge of the government."True enough, but they sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.
Which decade is it, anyway?
Not long ago it seemed as if everyone watching the carnage in financial markets was drawing scary parallels with the 1930s.
This time, however, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve did what their predecessors failed to do during the banking crisis of 1930-31: they acted forcefully to avert a collapse of the financial system. And their efforts seem, provisionally, to have worked. While things are far from normal in the financial markets, over the last few months the sense of panic has been gradually subsiding.
CongressDaily is reporting ($) that a few members of the House of Representatives are forming the "Smart Contracting Caucus" to pursue what Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) called "thoughtful federal procurement reform." But Dan Friedman at CongressDaily isn't buying the spin:
Davis was a contracting lawyer and is the House's top backer of government contractors concentrated in his suburban Virginia district.
By David Ignatius
Sunday, June 1, 2008; B07
What happens when a superpower becomes preoccupied by a costly war and loses some of its ability to coerce friends and enemies toward the outcomes it favors? We're seeing a demonstration of that change now in the Middle East, as Arabs and even Israel reckon with the limits of American power -- and begin to cut their own deals.
The new power dynamic is clear in two developments over the past several weeks -- the Lebanon peace deal brokered by Qatar on May 21 and the Israel-Syria peace talks, with Turkish mediation, that were announced the same day. Both negotiations could help stabilize the region, albeit not on the terms the United States might prefer.
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
Here's a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father in a movie house off New York's Times Square -- one of the slightly seedy theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple feature B-westerns or war movies. We were catching some old oater which, as I recall, began with a stagecoach careening dramatically down the main street of a cow town. A wounded man is slumped in the driver's seat, the horses running wild. Suddenly -- perhaps from the town's newspaper office -- a cowboy dressed in white and in a white Stetson rushes out, leaps on the team of horses, stops the stagecoach, and says to the driver: "Sam, Sam, who dun it to ya?" (or the equivalent). At just that moment, the camera catches a man, dressed all in black in a black hat -- and undoubtedly mustachioed -- skulking into the saloon.
My dad promptly turns to me and whispers: "He's the one. He did it."
By MADLEN READ, AP Business Writer
2 hours, 56 minutes ago
Wall Street retreated Monday on more signs of economic weakness and executive shake-ups at two major banks — reminders of the ongoing fallout from the credit crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 130 points.
Two key economic reports indicated that the economy is still struggling. As expected, the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index for May showed its fourth straight monthly decline, while the Commerce Department said construction spending dipped in April for the sixth time in seven months due to a drop in home building.
Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com
Mon Jun 2, 9:50 AM ET
Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.
And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.
Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.
By Shobhana Chandra
June 1 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. lost jobs for a fifth month in May and manufacturing contracted, signaling the economy is stagnating, economists said before reports this week.
Payrolls probably dropped by 60,000 workers, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News before the Labor Department's June 6 report. Figures tomorrow may show the Institute for Supply Management's factory index fell to 48.5 in May.
The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.
What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago?
You wouldn’t know it from the most-exhausting-ever presidential primary campaigns, but the 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars) to defeat a ragtag band of terrorists than it spent at the height of the Cold War fighting the Soviet superpower and what we alleged were its surrogates in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
THEY thought they were being so slick. When the McCain campaign abruptly moved last Tuesday’s fund-raiser with President Bush from the Phoenix Convention Center to a private home, it was the next best thing to sending the loathed lame duck into the witness protection program. John McCain and Mr. Bush were caught on camera together for a mere 26 seconds, and at 9 p.m. Eastern time, safely after the networks’ evening newscasts. The two men’s furtive encounter on the Phoenix airport tarmac, as captured by a shaky, inaudible long shot on FoxNews.com, could have been culled from a surveillance video.
But for the McCain campaign, any “Mission Accomplished” high-fives had to be put on hold. That same evening Politico.com broke the news of Scott McClellan’s memoir, and it was soon All Bush All the Time in the mediasphere. Or more to the point: All Iraq All the Time, for the deceitful origins of the war in Iraq are the major focus of the former press secretary’s tell-all.
Last week the head of the CIA claimed it was winning the battle. Nonsense, argues Robert Fisk. The extremists in the Middle East are growing stronger
Sunday, 1 June 2008
So al-Qa'ida is "almost defeated", is it? Major gains against al-Qa'ida. Essentially defeated. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," the CIA's boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. "Near strategic defeat of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa'ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa'ida globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam." Well, you could have fooled me.
Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden's boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we've won?
Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, my good friends and the few reporters who actually did their job during the Iraq war build-up, are pissed and I am fully backing their anger. Here is what the McClatchy boys (as I call them) have to say to the "Liberal Press" and the White House with regard to Scotty's revelations:
Until now, we've resisted the temptation to post on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, which accuses the Bush White House of launching a propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq.
Why? It's not news. At least not to some of us who've covered the story from the start.
In the propaganda wars that surround elections, political labels often become detached from reality. The leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, has been called a “leftist” by Republican flacks and a “progressive” by some of his supporters. Others see Obama as a moderate Democrat only slightly less friendly to corporate capital and to the military-industrial complex than the Republican John McCain. It would be no surprise, then, if many people were wondering, Just who is a progressive?
No one, of course, has the authority to decide who is a progressive and who isn’t. Yet if the label “progressive” has meaning at all, it is only because of some shared criteria we have in mind when we use it. So it might be worthwhile to put these criteria on the table, not to draw boundaries and hand out membership badges, but to spark a conversation about the common ground of ideas and values on which progressives stand, and to underscore the point that the center is not the left.
Politico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time, appeared yesterday on the show of right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher. The two of them guffawed together at how absurd are Scott McCellan’s claims that the media was “deferential” to the Bush administration and then Allen said this:
Think Progress has the audio, which makes even clearer how eager Mike Allen was “to adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric” of the right-wing operatives which Politico exists to serve.ALLEN: And indeed, Scott does adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric of the left wing haters. Can you believe it in here he says the White House press corps was too deferential to the administration?
Public fountains are dry in Barcelona, Spain, a city so parched there’s a €9,000 ($13,000) fine if you’re caught watering your flowers. A tanker ship docked there this month carrying 5 million gallons of precious fresh water - and officials are scrambling to line up more such shipments to slake public thirst.
At the same time, the media is giving a free pass to the Bush administration and its conservative allies. Yes, there has been a totally predictable increase in demand for oil from China and India. But while news stories blame higher gasoline costs on this increased demand, as well as commodities traders and "global unrest," they completely ignore the conservative energy policies that led America to this point. The run-up to Memorial Day is the perfect time to link pain at the pump to right-wing energy policies.
May 29th, 2008 - 3:05pm ET
Two vignettes from my brief tenure as a limousine liberal.
Tooling around the West and East Coasts lo these last few weeks on my book tour, I took a lot of rides in chauffeured sedans. The publishing industry is woefully archaic; if it worked for Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, no reason to stop doing it exactly the same way in 2008, even if the promotional budget could be much better spent on, say, blog ads. David Sirota definitely has the right idea; he's renting an RV.
Posted May 29, 2008| 04:47 PM (EST)
Over the last 30 years or so, it has gradually become an article of faith that pensions are bound to go the way of the dinosaur. Waves upon waves of mergers and layoffs across corporate America have convinced us that employers no longer have an obligation to the long-term welfare of their employees. And we have been told time and again that 401(k)s are the best answer to individual retirement.
Americans will soon be rethinking these notions.
Morning Edition, May 27, 2008 · Now that millions of people are facing foreclosure because they got into loans that never should have been approved, everybody's looking for someone to blame. Borrowers, or their brokers, lied on loan applications. Others got high interest rates they couldn't afford.
A big unanswered question is whether the Wall Street investment banks that were packaging these mortgages knew they were selling garbage loans to investors. A wave of litigation is starting against these firms. One former worker whose job was to catch bad loans says her supervisors covered them up.
Since the U.S. economy showed positive growth for the last quarter, some commentators in the business press are saying that we are not necessarily going to have a recession, or that if there is one it will be mild. This is a bit like the proverbial story of the man who jumped out of a window 60 floors up, and then said "so far, so good," as he passed the 30th floor.
The United States accumulated a massive, $8 trillion housing bubble during the decade from 1996-2006. Only about 40 percent of that bubble has now deflated. House prices are still falling at a 20 percent annual rate (over the last quarter). This means that the worst is yet to come, including another wave of mortgage defaults and write-downs. Even homeowners who are not in trouble will borrow increasingly less against their homes, reducing their spending.
Coming soon, from the folks who brought you the microwave -- Raytheon! After more than ten years in the making and at a cost of over 40 million dollars, 'Silent Guardian', or Active Denial System, (ADS, in it's formal mood), is almost ready for public release!
Yes, Raytheon -- manufacturer of the 100 bunker buster bombs kindly flown by America to Israel at the height of their bombardment of Lebanon, and supplier of electronic equipment for the apartheid wall built on Palestinian land; -- Raytheon -- with its 73,000 employees worldwide and annual revenues of 20 billion dollars has gone and done it again!
WASHINGTON, DC - May 29 - More than 1,700 of the nation's most prominent scientists and economists today released a joint statement calling on policymakers to require immediate, deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming. Issued just days before the Senate begins debate on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, the statement marks the first time leading U.S. scientists and economists have joined together to make such an appeal. (For the statement and the list of signatories, go to: www.ucsusa.org/climateletter.)
The statement stresses that implementing policies to achieve swift and substantial cuts is both economically sound and necessary to limit the worst consequences of climate change.
By Robert Scheer
Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.
David Corn
May 28 , 2008
Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.
Brig. Gen. David L. Grange doesn't wear a star on his shoulder much since his retirement in 1999. But he's on the list of retired officers the Pentagon has cultivated in an effort to influence domestic news coverage of military matters.
In fact, Grange, a CNN analyst, was tagged as the most visible shill for the Pentagon since 2002.
Where's the apology?
Politico reports that in his new book, former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan says that Bush was not "open and forthright on Iraq," adopted a "permanent campaign approach" when it came to governing, and used "propaganda" to sell the war. He also writes that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove "had at best misled" him about their role in the leak that disclosed the CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and that he (McClellan) had presented information to the White House press corps that was "badly misguided." McClellan notes that Bush "and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."
A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets, and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and George W. Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics -- a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.
NPR had a very good piece this morning detailing how investment banks accepted and passed on mortgage loans that they knew to be bad. According to its report, one investment bank had a contract with New Century, a leading issuer of subprime mortgages, that it would reject no more than 2.5 percent of its loans. Of course, such a contract would be an invitation to submit bad loans.
At the end, the report presents the assessment of the investment banks' actions by Adam Davidson, NPR's economic correspondent. Mr Davidson said that the investment banks bear responsibility for the mortgage crisis, but so do many other parties up and down the chain, including the home buyers and the mortgage issuers.
John McCain wants to create a new alliance to circumvent the UN. We mustn't let this idea gain consensus in Washington
Amid the continuing brouhaha about issues of race and gender in the US presidential campaign, we may be in danger of losing sight of the most important question that has arisen in the candidates' skirmishing over international affairs. That relates to John McCain's advocacy of the establishment of a "league of democracies", and the mounting clamour for Barack Obama to espouse the same idea as his own.
McCain says he'd establish the league in his first year in office: a close-knit grouping of like-minded nations that could respond to humanitarian crises and compensate for the UN security council's tendency to be hamstrung by the likes of Russia and China when it needs to take decisive action against the world's evil-doers. Neocon guru Robert Kagan, an avid proponent, says: "The world's democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN security council cannot reach unanimity." The league's strength would be that it "would not be limited to Europeans and Americans but would include the world's other great democracies, such as India, Brazil, Japan and Australia, and would [therefore] have even greater legitimacy".
Last Wednesday, Media Matters Action Network issued a report, which found that cable news commentators Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck regularly “serve up a steady diet of fear, anger, and resentment on the topic of illegal immigration.”
Last night on his CNN show, an edgy Lou Dobbs hosted Media Matters fellow Paul Waldman to discuss the report’s finding. Waldman asked Dobbs to provide evidence of the “myth” he often promotes — that there is a “secret plan” to build a “NAFTA Superhighway” from Mexico to Canada. Having trouble providing evidence, an exasperated Dobbs said finally, “You’re charging nonsense.” “I reject it, I reject you, and I reject your position,” he angrily added.Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.
It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven't been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth's various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.
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It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several fortuities. In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia, which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder McCain's naval assignments. He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the editors of US News & World Report as the one returning POW who would be given a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (having a famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry.
By 1977 he held the post of naval liaison to Congress, his father's old position, and shortly thereafter attained the rank of captain. It was on Capitol Hill that he met and befriended important senators—Gary Hart of Colorado, William Cohen of Maine, and most of all John Tower of Texas, the buddy to whom he was closest during a period of his life that included its share of carousing and irreparably strained his marriage to his first wife, Carol. When asked to explain the dissolution of their marriage in the late 1970s, she said, "I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else."
If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers' money.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century. Since then, the poverty rate has hovered at about the 13 percent level and sits at 13.3 percent today, still a disgraceful level in the context of the greatest economic boom in our history. But if the Great Society had not achieved that dramatic reduction in poverty, and the nation had not maintained it, 24 million more Americans would today be living below the poverty level.
The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.
The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.
An audit of some $8bn (£4bn) paid to US and Iraqi contractors has found that almost every payment failed to comply with US laws aimed at preventing fraud.
In one instance, $11m was paid to a US company without any record of what goods or services were provided, the US defence department audit said.
The great minds in Bush's Homeland Security department came up with a doozie this year: let's move the facility where we study the most infectious and dangerous disease among livestock from the isolated island it's now on (accessible only by ferry or helicopter) and put it where there are lots of livestock operations. Brilliant!
Seriously, the Bush administration proposed this, despite the fact that the existing lab has experienced accidents where the virus was released.
NEW YORK is a ghost town on Memorial Day weekend. But two distinct groups are hanging tight: sailors delighting in the timeless shore-leave rituals of Fleet Week, and theatergoers clutching nearly impossible-to-get tickets for “South Pacific.”
Some of those sailors served in a war that has now lasted longer than American involvement in World War II but is largely out of sight and mind as civilians panic about gas prices at home. “South Pacific” has its sailors too: this 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical tells of those who served in what we now call “the good war.”
Once upon a time, a team of federal attorneys went before the Supreme Court only to discover that their entire case was based on a revoked executive order and therefore moot.
True story. Look it up. Panama Refining Company v. Ryan. The revoked presidential order was understandably missed by the attorneys. The revocation had never been made public — an example of what legal scholars refer to as “secret law.”
In the ’30s and ’40s, Congress penned legislation aimed at bringing order to the dissemination of vital government information, amid the chaotic complexity of state administrative laws and downright shoddy record-keeping. Congress also established statutes to keep a growing body of secret law in check.
UNITED NATIONS, May 23 (IPS) - The ongoing food crisis, characterized by growing shortages and rising prices of staple commodities, has far reaching implications for the world’s scarce water resources, says a new study released here.
“More food is likely to come at a cost of more water use in agriculture,” according to the report titled “Saving Water: From Field to Fork“.
The almost incomprehensible attack on Barack Obama found below is excerpted from a "Sermon of the Month" by Dr. Cecil Todd, founder of Revival Fires International, a 501(c)3 ministry which, "at the request of the Chief Chaplains of the Pentagon," has been shipping Bibles to Iraq, via military airlift, since 2003. According to a Revival Fires press release this "full Bible is designed and authorized by the Chief Chaplains of the Pentagon." This Pentagon involvement and Bible distribution led Navy chaplain LCDR Brian K. Waite to Revival Fires.
In 2001, LCDR Waite, then a mega-church pastor and reserve chaplain, published a virulently anti-Muslim book titled Islam Uncovered -- a book which was pulled from the shelves in 2002 due to plagiarism and faked endorsements. A few months later, Waite was accepted into the Naval Chaplain Corps. As an active duty chaplain, Waite has not only endorsed Revival Fires in uniform on the ministry's website, but appeared on advertisements for, and as a featured speaker at, their 2006 and 2007 campmeetings. He is also scheduled to appear at their 2008 campmeeting, to be held in June. Past speakers at Cecil Todd's campmeetings have included both John Hagee and Rod Parsley.
Germany has banned a family of pesticides that are blamed for the deaths of millions of honeybees. The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) has suspended the registration for eight pesticide seed treatment products used in rapeseed oil and sweetcorn.
The move follows reports from German beekeepers in the Baden-Württemberg region that two thirds of their bees died earlier this month following the application of a pesticide called clothianidin.
One of the benefits from the protracted battle over telecom amnesty is that it is a perfect microcosm for how our government institutions work. And a casual review of the available evidence regarding how telecom amnesty is being pursued demonstrates what absurd, irrelevant distractions are the pro-amnesty justifications offered by the pundit class and the Bush administration.
Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T spent $5.2 million in lobbyist fees (putting it well ahead of its 2007 pace, when it spent just over $17 million). In the first quarter of 2008, Verizon spent $4.8 million on lobbyist fees, while Comcast spent $2.6 million. So in the first three months of this year, those three telecoms -- which would be among the biggest beneficiaries of telecom amnesty (right after the White House) -- spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They're on pace to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year -- just those three companies.
BERLIN (Reuters) - The United States is already in a recession and it will be longer as well as deeper than many people expect, U.S. investor Warren Buffett said in an interview published in German magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday.
He said the United States was "already in recession" and added: "Perhaps not in the sense that economists would define it" with two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
The Brookings Institutions' Ben Wittes has an article in The New Republic decrying the decision of the California Supreme Court striking down that state's discriminatory marriage law. Wittes' criticism of the decision reflects the standard attack on the California Supreme Court, an attack that relies upon what can only be described as profound ignorance about how our system of government works.
Wittes' principal objection is that the California court's ruling was wrong because it is contrary to evolving democratic efforts to forge a "compromise" on the issue of gay marriage and because a large majority supports the law (h/t Andrew Sullivan):
Another cost is that slow drip-by-drip accretion of power to courts, that steady undermining of the right of people to govern themselves. In California, the deprivation of that right is exquisitely on display, for the compromise the court upset involved decades of negotiation and movement. The nucleus of California's domestic partnership law dates from the late 1970s. Over time, it has grown more generous, by 2006 including all of the rights and obligations of marriage. In 2000, however, the people of California voted overwhelmingly to limit marriage itself to opposite-sex unions. The legislature has twice voted to extend marriage to gay couples -- and Governor Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed the bill. The current arrangement, in short, reflects a series of evolving compromises set against the backdrop of a quickly developing social consensus concerning the value and honor of same-sex relationships -- a process that the court treated as just so much bother on the way to a self-evident truth. Once upon a time, this bother had a name. We called it democracy.
By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 23, 2008; D01
The inspector general for the Defense Department said yesterday that the Pentagon cannot account for almost $15 billion worth of goods and services ranging from trucks, bottled water and mattresses to rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns that were bought from contractors in the Iraq reconstruction effort.
The Pentagon did not have the proper documentation, including receipts, vouchers, signatures, invoices or other paperwork, for $7.8 billion that American and Iraqi contractors were paid for phones, folders, paint, blankets, Nissan trucks, laundry services and other items, according to a 69-page audit released to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had some 45,000 nuclear warheads. At the moment, Iran has none. But when Barack Obama said the obvious — that Iran does not pose the sort of threat the Soviet Union did — John McCain reacted as though his rival had offered to trade Ft. Knox for a sack of magic beans.
“Such a statement betrays the depth of Sen. Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment,” exclaimed McCain. “These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess.”
But if Iran is the Soviet Union, I’m Shaquille O’Neal. There is nothing reckless in soberly distinguishing large threats from small ones, and there is something foolhardy in grossly exaggerating the strength of your enemies.
Content conquers craft in Marie-Monique Robin’s devastating exposé Le Monde selon Monsanto (The World According to Monsanto).
The French journalist’s documentary format is pedestrian — lots of phone calls, talking heads, cheesy mock-dramatic background music. But her seriously researched critique of the international chemical “life sciences” giant Monsanto will freeze the blood in your veins.
You may know Monsanto for its role in those old chestnuts PCB, dioxin and Agent Orange, poisons so pervasive and so stubborn they have spread their toxic stain from pole to pole.
-- by Brad Friedman
The CEO and President of one of America's largest voting machine companies, Sequoia Voting Systems, gave both deceptive, and carefully selective, answers in his reply to a letter sent earlier this year from two high-ranking officials in Chicago, according to documents recently obtained during an ongoing investigation by The BRAD BLOG.
This Friday, I will have the privilege to interview Mary Tillman, the mother of the late Pat Tillman: former NFL player turned Army Ranger, turned casualty of a criminal war.
Mary Tillman has written a book along with Narda Zacchino called Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman. It’s a heart-ripping account of one family’s lonely search for justice, and how, even aided by public outcry and heavy hitters in Congress, the truth about what actually happened to Mary’s son remains at arm’s length.
There are, after four years, six investigations and two congressional hearings, still a host of unanswered questions about how Pat was killed. Boots on the Ground is yet another attempt by Mary Tillman and her very private family to force the spotlight upon his case–and to their discomfort, put the spotlight on themselves.
John Cusack's new filmWar, Inc., takes on issues few in Hollywood today would dare to: war profiteering, mercenaries, political corruption and embedded journalism. A political satire, the film stars Cusack as Hauser, a hit-man for hire who is deployed to the fictional country of Turaqistan to kill a Middle Eastern oil baron. Hauser's employer is Tamerlane, a secretive for-profit military corporation headed by a former U.S. vice president played by Dan Aykroyd. We also speak to Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
The Washington Post digs deeper into that Justice Department Inspector General's report on the FBI role in detainee interrogations, specifically the contentious high-level Administration disputes over torture:
Two major policy splits are highlighted in the report's account of the long to-and-fro over the tactics. One reflected a clash of cultures between the experienced interrogators at the FBI who were looking to prosecute terrorism crimes, and military and CIA officials who were seeking rapid information about al-Qaeda and were willing to push legal boundaries to do it. The report shows that FBI agents appeared more concerned about the long view, while others wanted detainees to break immediately in the panicked days after Sept. 11, 2001."Number one, the illegal aliens shouldn't be here. And number two, the culture from which they come is a lot more violent than the USA."
-- The O'Reilly Factor, January 15, 2007
There are many problems facing the United States today: a faltering economy, a health-care crisis, and the continuing war in Iraq, to name a few. But viewers of some of the most prominent cable news programs are presented a different reality in which one issue stands above all others: illegal immigration.
Media Matters Action Network undertook this study in order to document how immigration is discussed and debated on cable news. When it comes to immigration, cable news overflows not just with vitriolic rhetoric, but also with a series of myths that feed viewers' resentment and fears, fostering hostility toward immigrants.
Oil prices, meanwhile, fluctuated Thursday after setting a record of $135.09 in overnight trading. A stronger dollar gave some investors reason to sell oil futures to lock in profits from crude's record run. But concerns about falling supplies and rising demand are expected to keep propelling prices higher in the days and weeks to come.
"Far from normal."
Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has used to describe the financial markets (and by extension, the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There's a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual -- raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper and engineering mergers and buyouts that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America's productive capacity -- but apparently events are still out of hand.
By Nicholas von Hoffman
May 15, 2008
These days, even people who pay attention only to gallery openings and baseball scores are suddenly paying attention to what's happening on Wall Street. Investment bankers and hedge fund managers are crafting financial instruments the likes of which have never been seen by the industry, the consumer or the Federal Reserve. As mortgages melt down, the market gyrates, and the regulators make their pronouncements, here is a short list of some of the business terms and their meanings that are driving our wild financial ride.
Raising money under these circumstances is very expensive and sometimes involves a guarantee that the buyers of the new stock will receive some kind of dividend before anybody else gets paid--an additional sock in the nose to the current stockholders. The need to raise additional capital is not always due to the stupidity and incompetence of the people running the company. Sometimes it's for such profitable purposes as buying new machinery or expanding the factory (back in the days when we had factories).
By Scott Horton
A week ago Friday, Navy Captain Keith Allred, the military judge presiding in the Hamdan case, handed down a ruling in which he concluded that Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann—the legal adviser to the convening authority—had behaved impermissibly in bringing the case, and required Hartmann’s disqualification from the proceedings. In reaching these determinations, Capt. Allred twice cites “The Great Guantánamo Puppet Theater,” my article discussing the controversy about Hartmann’s conduct. And this has the editors at the Wall Street Journal seeing red.
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
Recent ACLU-compelled disclosures of previously concealed DOJ documents reveal many of the details of what has been long known: that the highest levels of the Bush administration secretly implemented an illegal torture regime. But while those torture programs began in secret, we have gradually learned more and more about them. The more time that goes by and the more we learn — particularly if we do nothing meaningful to stop it — the more the responsibility for these policies shifts from the administration to all of us collectively.
WASHINGTON — In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.
The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.
First the good news: The worst of the painful housing slump and the credit crunch might come to an end this year. Now the bad: The economy will weaken further and unemployment will rise.
That's the latest outlook from forecasters in a survey to be released Monday by the National Association for Business Economics, also known by its acronym NABE. It will take time for any rays of light to poke through the economic clouds, though.
"I was ordered multiple times by commissioned officers and noncommissioned officers to shoot unarmed civilians if their presence made me feel uncomfortable," Sgt. Jason Lemieux told a panel of lawmakers last Thursday in a packed public hearing on Capitol Hill. "These orders were given with the understanding that my immediate chain of command would protect our subordinates from legal repercussions." Lemieux, a former Marine who was part of the invading force that entered Baghdad in March 2003, came to Washington, D.C., with Iraq Veterans Against the War, weeks after the fifth anniversary of President George Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" to tell Congress enough is enough. Invited by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., the veterans spoke firmly and eloquently before members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, telling stories that were just "the tip of the iceberg," as Lemieux put it, but which nevertheless offered a frightening range of accounts: violent house raids, the killings of innocent people, "drop weapons" used to make dead civilians look like insurgents, racism in the ranks, and their own process of dehumanization as they became inured to the humanity of those who they were supposedly sent to "liberate."
Just in time for the start of the summer driving season: Oil near $130 a barrel and gas getting closer to an average of $4 a gallon.
Crude prices spiked to yet another trading high Tuesday as supply concerns mounted. At filling stations across the country, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline touched $3.80 for the first time, having followed oil's spectacular rise.
The June contract for light, sweet crude traded as high as $129.60 on the New York Mercantile Exchange before settling at $129.07, up $2.02 from Monday's record high. The expiration of that contract, which ended with the close of Tuesday's trading, created additional volatility as traders scrambled to lock in positions.
