SAN FRANCISCO — Faced with the discovery of a serious flaw in the Internet’s workings, computer network administrators around the world have been rushing to fix their systems with a cobbled-together patch. Now it appears that the patch has some gaping holes.
On Friday, a Russian physicist demonstrated that the emergency fix to the basic Internet address system, known as the Domain Name System, is vulnerable and will almost certainly be exploited by criminals.
A toxic combination of $4 gasoline, voter anxiety and presidential ambition is making it impossible for this country to have the grown-up conversation it needs about energy.
The latest evidence comes from Senator Barack Obama, who in less than a week has reversed his stance on tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, softened his opposition to offshore drilling and unveiled an out-of-nowhere proposal to impose a windfall profits tax on the oil companies and funnel the money to consumers in the form of a $1,000 tax rebate.
Anthony J. Russo, a researcher who helped leak the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers to the media and prompted wider public questioning of the war, has died, police said.
Russo, 71, died in his native Suffolk on Wednesday, police records technician Susan Hart said Sunday. The cause of death was not immediately made public.
The case that became known as the Pentagon Papers helped put the Vietnam War on trial.
It began when Daniel Ellsberg, a top military analyst disillusioned with American policy, decided to release a top-secret, 47-volume Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina over three decades. Russo helped him reproduce and distribute copies of the study.
I once stood in John McCain's kitchen and watched Cindy cook eggs for their kids. It was still dark outside when I arrived at the McCains' north-central Phoenix house on a winter day in early 1994. I remember terra cotta tile and overstuffed plaid couches and wondering whether Mrs. McCain regularly got up before dawn to make breakfast.
I was following her husband around for the day, for a story I was working on about his role in Arizona Republican politics. I'd been gathering examples of McCain's strong-arming, and I needed some face-time with the senator, to ask about that and also to describe his personality. That day, we drove to Tucson so McCain could sit in as guest host on a local talk-radio show.
Remember the total, hideous, inexcusable absence of oversight that has been the great hallmark of George Bush's America for almost eight years now? Well, now we're getting to see that same regulatory malfeasance applied to yet another cornerstone of our political system. The Federal Election Commission -- the body that supposedly enforces campaign-finance laws in this country -- has been out of business for more than six months. That's because Congress was dragging its feet over confirmation hearings for new FEC commissioners, leaving the agency without a quorum. The commission just started work again for the first time on July 10th under its new chairman, Donald McGahn, a classic Republican Party yahoo whose chief qualifications include representing Tom DeLay, the corrupt ex-speaker of the House, in matters of campaign finance.
Apart from the obvious absurdity of not having a functioning election-policing mechanism in an election year in the world's richest democracy, the late start by the FEC makes it almost impossible for the agency to do its job. The commission has a long-standing reluctance to take action in the last months before a vote, a policy designed to help prevent federal regulators from influencing election outcomes. Normally, the FEC tries to root out infractions and loopholes -- fining campaigns for incomplete reporting, or for taking shortcuts around spending limits -- in the early months of a campaign season. But that ship sailed way too long ago to take the stink off the 2008 race.
The Justice Department investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress, according to numerous sources involved in the inquiry.
The widened scope raises the possibility that investigators will pursue criminal charges against some administration officials, and recommend appointment of a special prosecutor if there is evidence of criminal misconduct.
Trying to appear moderate is not always the best strategy for capturing votes during an election, reveals a new study. Extreme positions can build trust among an electorate, who value ideological commitment in times of uncertainty.
"The current political advantage of the Republican Party stems from the ability of its candidates to develop 'signature ideas.' This strategy is rewarded even when the electorate has ideological reservations," says University of Southern California economist Juan Carrillo, adding that this poses a challenge for the Democrats.
In the current issue of The Economic Journal, Carrillo and Micael Castanheira of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), show that voters who are unsure about the quality of a policy can be swayed by indications of trustworthiness.
August 5th, 2008 - 6:44pm ET
Drew Westen and Mike Lux both have cogent and persuasive posts up that deftly explain — and raise the alarm about — the timidity that's recently settled into Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Sen. John McCain's shooting live rounds now; and, as usual, the Democrats are refusing to fire back. If that doesn't change — this week, before the Olympics starts — this could all too easily turn into Dukakis-all-over-again.
Progressives have been picking at the whys and wherefores of this pattern ever since Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. (One of my favorite explanations came from Paul Rosenberg, who dug into the psychology of both sides in this excellent series last year at Open Left.) But there's one fairly simple and glaring factor that I'm increasingly convinced plays at least some role in this — and since I've never seen it discussed anywhere else, I'm going to propose it here.
So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.
And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.
Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.
There is nothing more terrifying to corporate America than the prospect of dealing with its workforce on an even playing field, and, along with allies on the Right, it's pulling out all the stops to keep that from happening. At stake is much more than the usual tax breaks, trade deals and relentless deregulation; corporations are gearing up for a fight to preserve a status quo in which the largest share of America's national income goes to profits and the smallest share to wages since the Great Depression -- in fact, since the government started tracking those figures.
There will be many heated legislative battles if 2008 shakes out with larger Congressional majorities for Democrats and an Obama White House -- fights over war and peace, energy policy, health care reform and immigration. But it may be a bill that many Americans have never heard of that sparks the most pitched battle Washington has seen since the Civil Rights Act. It's called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) -- a measure that would go a long way toward guaranteeing working people the right to join a union if they so choose -- and it has the potential to reverse more than three decades of painful stagflation, with prices rising and paychecks flat, for America's middle class and working poor.
Nicholas Lemann
August 11, 2008
Pundits like Thomas Frank deplore the role of interest-group lobbying, but aren’t we all part of some interest group or other?
In a year saturated with political conversation, can there be any topic that has not yet been discussed? Well, here’s one: 2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced by an American—“The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures,” by Arthur Fisher Bentley. The reason its big anniversary hasn’t been celebrated is that “The Process of Government” is an ex-classic, now sunk into obscurity. The reason it should be celebrated is not just that it deserved its former place in the canon but also that it is uncannily relevant to this Presidential election.
Arthur Bentley was the son of a Midwestern banker. He was born in 1870 in Freeport, Illinois, graduated from high school in Grand Island, Nebraska, and, after working briefly for his father, attended Johns Hopkins, which was then making itself into one of the first American research universities, on the German model. After graduation, he went to the University of Berlin and studied with Georg Simmel and other late-nineteenth-century giants of political theory. The work he did there became the basis for a Ph.D. from Hopkins.
Berwyn Heights' mayor today asked federal officials to investigate possible civil rights violations stemming from last week's raid of his Prince George's County home by police officers who shot and killed his two dogs, his attorney said.
Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, asked for a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry during a 2 p.m. news conference today outside their Berwyn Heights home, said Timothy Maloney, their attorney.As U.S. military casualties mount in Afghanistan, a retired four-star Army general, who just returned from reviewing the six-plus-year war effort, said the country "is in misery" and describes the war as "a 25-year campaign."
In a memo written for the Social Sciences Dept. at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on July 30, Barry McCaffrey, a division commander during the 1991 Gulf War and drug czar under President Bill Clinton, writes that there is "no unity of command" -- either among U.S. and foreign coalition troops, or even among U.S. troops. Political and economic contributions to nation-building efforts are an additional source of disunity. Unity of command, in which all forces report to a single commander, is a basic principle of military strategy, without which military campaigns are rarely successful. McCaffrey writes that U.S. forces have two regional commands: European Command, which is also the NATO military command, and Central Command, which directs U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia.
WASHINGTON — A top Justice Department official said Wednesday that investigators are confident that government scientist Bruce Ivins, who behaved erratically and was treated for mental illness before committing suicide last week, "was the only person involved" in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people and terrorized the nation.
With the public disclosure of hundreds of pages of documents, the FBI and the Justice Department hoped to quell a week of media speculation about whether Ivins, 62, a former microbiologist at the U.S. Army's biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Md., was the culprit and whether they had sufficient evidence to prove it.
Michael Hirsh
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 4:46 PM ET Aug 6, 2008
The Bush administration needed a big win in the Salim Hamdan case at Guantánamo. It didn't get one. By convicting Osama bin Laden's former driver—the first "terrorist" to be tried under the first U.S. war-crimes tribunal since World War II—only of "material" support for terrorism, and absolving him of conspiracy to commit terrorism, the military judges provoked questions about what Hamdan was doing there in the first place. Is driving a car a war crime? The appeals court may decide not—in which case even this meager verdict could be thrown out.
"I would be very surprised if any of this conviction stands at the end of the day," says Scott Horton, a law professor specializing in human rights at Columbia University. "He was convicted of things that are not war crimes by a tribunal that has the power only to prosecute war crimes."
Touring America’s oil rigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he will produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself. So strongly does his current rhetoric smell of methane, the gas emanating from manure, that he might even qualify for a renewable energy tax incentive.
The former straight talker, who could not help telling the truth, has found the voice of the demagogue within him. As Senator McCain seeks to exploit public anger over the price of gasoline, first with his dubious “gas tax holiday” and now with his campaign for offshore oil drilling, the thoughtful legislator who defied his own party on issues such as global warming and Alaskan oil leasing has been replaced by that much more familiar Congressional figure—a rented mouthpiece for the energy industry.
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Sure, you could start with an open-palmed apology, a profoundly contrite on-your-knees sort of thing, maybe an open letter in your local paper or a heartfelt speech at your next dinner party whereby you stumble though some sort of "I don't know what the hell I was thinking" or "I must've been blind" or "Wow, that mescaline sure was potent" type of defense for your unfortunate and reprehensible choices.
But the fact is, that's not really gonna cut it.
By Robert Fisk
Originally printed in The Independent.
President Bashar al-Assad is once more one of the “triple pillars” of the Middle East. We may not like that. George Bush may curse the day his invasion of Iraq helped to shore up the power of the Caliph of Damascus. But Mr Assad’s latest trip to Tehran—just three weeks after he helped to toast the overthrow of the King of France beside President Nicolas Sarkozy—seals his place in history. Without a shot being fired, Mr Assad has ensured anyone who wants anything in the Middle East has got to talk to Syria. He’s done nothing—and he’s won.
The Europeans like to think—or, at least, M. Sarkozy likes to think—Mr Assad was in Tehran to persuade President Ahmadinejad not to go nuclear. Even Sana, the official Syrian news agency, was almost frank about it. The purpose of the Assad visit was “to consult on the nuclear issue and the right of states to peaceful enrichment” and “exchange ideas aimed at clarifying Iran’s commitment to all international agreements”. Mr Assad was M. Sarkozy’s point-man.
“We’re in a recession, and Washington is doing nothing about it.” According to recent survey research, that’s one of the most powerful arguments progressives can make right now. The White House says “we have avoided a recession.” [Market Watch] But Americans overwhelmingly disagree. They describe the economy as in recession and support an economic growth package—for good reason.
America is rapidly losing jobs. The U.S. Labor Department reported that employers cut 51,000 jobs in July, the seventh straight month in which more jobs were lost than created. Our country has lost 463,000 payroll jobs so far this year. The unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, the worst jobless rate in four years. Nearly 9 million Americans are now unemployed; 1.6 million lost their jobs in the last 12 months. [Bureau of Labor Statistics]
Did FBI cross the line in anthrax probe?
Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.
The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.
For the second time in two years, voters in Kansas have handed a stinging defeat to Phill Kline, an anti-abortion crusader who made his reputation by attempting to prosecute the state's abortion providers, first as state attorney general, and then, after he lost re-election to that post, as a district attorney in suburban Kansas City.
With all of the vote counted, Steve Howe trounced Kline by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent in unofficial returns to select the Republican candidate for district attorney in Johnson County, Kan., a well-off suburb of Kansas City. Howe garnered 33,260 votes to Kline’s 22,188, according to final unofficial returns.
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
Scientists at the University of Sheffield have shown how bacteria could be used as a future fuel. The research, published in the journal Bioinformatics, could have significant implications for the environment and the way we produce sustainable fuels in the future.
Like all living creatures, bacteria sustain themselves through their metabolism, a huge sequence of chemical reactions that transform nutrients into energy and waste.
As Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trekked toward the final Democratic primaries, and it looked inevitable that Obama would be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, conservative pundits and cable television talk-show hosts, a host of blogs, and a number of newly formed organizations began intensifying their attacks on Obama, embarking on the early stages of one of Karl Rove's most effective political strategies: Directly attack the opponent's strengths. In the case of Obama, this means turning his very popularity into a negative, defining him as effete and more interested in celebrity before the Democrat can introduce and define himself to the larger nation.
Survivors of the 2001 anthrax attacks and relatives of those killed by the deadly powder said yesterday that they want a full accounting from the FBI of its investigation to date, and they are not yet convinced that Bruce Ivins, the government scientist who killed himself last week, was responsible. Federal authorities are expected to meet this week with the victims' families in Washington to discuss their investigation, after which the FBI could close its nearly seven-year-old anthrax case and publicly release its findings. But with reports emerging that the case against Ivins is largely circumstantial, some wonder if real closure will ever come.
"I don't know whether this is the right person or not," said Maureen Stevens, the widow of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, who was the first killed in the fall 2001 attacks. Stevens said she has gone to Washington twice before for meetings, but nothing came of them. She said she received an e-mail from the FBI informing her of this week's meeting.
History records that Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, used to present himself as a soul-brother to the American worker. In his heyday he railed against the "elitist upper class" and established his bona fides by saying, "I come from a poor district of working-class people."
Writing in the Washington Times last week, Mr. Weyrich was back in his old rhetorical neighborhood. The subject was Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and Mr. Weyrich was writing to celebrate "the best record of accomplishment of anyone in the Bush administration." Read closely, and you get the impression that Ms. Chao's the best secretary of Labor ever. After all, as Mr. Weyrich notes, she has applied stricter regulations to labor unions and has held the line against card-check unionization, which would allow workers to organize a union by signing cards instead of casting ballots.
When pro-choicers accuse anti-choicers of being anti-contraception they're often taken as crying wolf -- even though no anti-choice organization explicitly endorses birth control and despite the prominent anti-choice role of the Catholic Church, which explicitly bans contraception. After all, goes the complacent point of view, most women, and most couples, use some form of birth control. Opposition to it seems like something out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel whose futuristic vision of women's subjection to rightwing Christian patriarchs no less a shrewd social critic than Mary McCarthy found preposterous when she reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986.
The Bush Administration seems bent on giving Atwood material for a sequel. Last month, Health and Human Services issued a draft of new regulations which would require health-care providers who receive federal funds to accept as employees nurses and other workers who object to abortion and even to most kinds of birth control. This rule would cover some 500,000 hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities-- including family planning clinics, which would, absurdly, legally be bound to hire people who will obstruct their very mission. To refuse to hire them, or to fire them, would be to lose funds for discriminating against people who object to abortion for religious or --get this -- moral beliefs.
By Eric Lotke, Institute for America's Future
August 04th, 2008
An idea to radically change Social Security that has already been soundly rejected by the American people—privatization—is being resurrected. If its proponents succeed, 8.6 million older Americans would lose a safety net that keeps them from falling into poverty, according to research released by the Institute for America's Future.
Three years ago, President Bush declared that Social Security faced a financial crisis, and his solution was privatization — taking payroll taxes we all pay into the system and investing a portion of those funds in private stock market accounts.[...]
However, one particular photograph from the Times story has drawn more attention than anything else. That picture, which has now been widely reproduced at blogs, shows a long-haired man, wearing a Blackwater tshirt and with a pistol at his belt, passing a box marked "DEA Evidence" to other agents participating in the raid.
WASHINGTON — Almost seven years after the energy giant Enron collapsed, a series of court decisions has opened the door to new trials for some of the convicted corporate executives and threatened to hobble the Justice Department's efforts to pursue future corporate-fraud cases.
In the wake of the scandal, prosecutors pursued executives for covering up the company's financial bleeding and unloading millions of dollars in stock. The Bush administration was under pressure to hold the company's executives accountable for what at the time represented the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. More than 4,000 Enron employees lost their jobs, and investors lost billions.
Summary: In its preface, Jerome Corsi compares his new book, The Obama Nation, to his 2004 book Unfit for Command. The comparison seems apt: Just as Unfit for Command contains false attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service, a Media Matters review finds that The Obama Nation similarly contains numerous falsehoods about Sen. Barack Obama.
Misinformation in Freddoso's anti-Obama book comes earlySummary: The introduction and first few pages of David Freddoso's forthcoming book, The Case Against Barack Obama, are marked by false and misleading assertions about Obama, accompanied by dubious citations.
JEFF GOODELL
Posted Aug 07, 2008 11:08 AM
It took Congress more than three decades to consider a major initiative to ward off global warming, but only a few days to kill it. In June, the Senate rejected the Climate Security Act, which would have put America on track to slash greenhouse-gas emissions by 71 percent by 2050. The bill was specifically crafted to soften the blow to the nation's coal industry — coal generates more than a third of all carbon-dioxide pollution — by providing coal-burning power companies with $300 billion in subsidies and outright giveaways. But the lavish incentives did nothing to prevent Big Coal from going all out to defeat the measure; one industry-funded TV ad implied that if Congress passed the bill, "we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life." In the end, virtually every senator from a state where coal is mined or burned voted against the measure.
U.S. mortgage market giant Freddie Mac's chief executive dismissed internal warnings that could have protected the company from some of the financial problems now engulfing it, the New York Times said, citing more than two dozen current and former high-ranking executives and others.
In 2004, Chief Executive Richard Syron received a memo from Freddie Mac's chief risk officer warning him that the firm was financing questionable loans that threatened its financial health, the paper said.
Though the current housing crisis would have undoubtedly caused problems at both companies, Freddie Mac insiders say Syron heightened those perils by ignoring repeated recommendations, the NY Times said.
A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.
Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.
The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.
PORTLAND--"I feel I'm being catapulted into another world, a world I don't really understand," Denis Finley told the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Finley, editor of the Virginian-Pilot, isn't the only newspaper executive who can't come up with a plan for the future. "Only 5 percent of [newspaper editors and publishers]," finds Pew's latest analysis of the nation's 1217 daily newspapers, "said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now."
Newspapers are in trouble. More people read them than ever, but most of them read them online, for free. Unfortunately online advertising rates are too low to make up for declining print circulation. A reader of The New York Times' print edition generates about 170 times as much revenue as someone who surfs NYTimes.com. (This is because print readers spend 47 minutes with the paper. Online browsers visit the paper's website a mere seven minutes--some of which they might not even be sitting in front of their computers.)
A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic," replied the Doctor, "if you can keep it."
—Papers of Dr. James McHenry, describing the scene as they left the Federal Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia
Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.
In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world. These warnings came not just from political opponents, but also from experienced allies, including the British Intelligence Service, the experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI, and, perhaps most surprisingly, from a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administration itself. The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America's ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring.
Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security
by J. Peter Scoblic, Viking, 350 pp., $25.95
Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias, Wiley, 251 pp., $25.95
Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership."
Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism."
A year ago, as the outlines of the current financial crisis were just becoming clear, I suggested that this crisis, unlike a superficially similar crisis in 1998, wouldn’t end quickly.
It hasn’t.
The good news, I guess, is that we’ve been experiencing a sort of slow-motion meltdown, lacking in dramatic Black Fridays and such. The gradual way the crisis has unfolded has led to an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate among economists about whether what we’re suffering really deserves to be called a recession.
The first wave of Americans to default on their home mortgages appears to be cresting, but a second, far larger one is quickly building.
Homeowners with good credit are falling behind on their payments in growing numbers, even as the problems with mortgages made to people with weak, or subprime, credit are showing their first, tentative signs of leveling off after two years of spiraling defaults.
The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.
Congress has stood idly by while states have done the hard work of trying to make electronic voting more reliable. Now the Senate is taking up a dangerous bill introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, that would make things worse in the name of reform. If Congress will not pass a strong bill, it should apply the medical maxim: first, do no harm.
Voters cannot trust the totals reported by electronic voting machines; they are too prone to glitches and too easy to hack. In the last few years, concerned citizens have persuaded states to pass bills requiring electronic voting machines to use paper ballots or produce voter-verifiable paper records of every vote. More than half of the states now have such laws.
Animals stopped vocalizing and foraging for food during marine exercises.
Whales subjected to military sonar will neither dive nor feed, according to an unpublished 2007 report from the UK military, obtained by Nature after a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
The impact of sonar on whales has become an increasingly fraught issue in recent years, with submarine exercises being linked to several high-profile mass strandings. The US Navy has admitted concerns over sonar’s effects on marine mammals, although actual evidence for harm has been in short supply.
There's military slang that seemingly applies to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan today. The operative acronym is FUBAR - Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. That first letter doesn't really stand for "Fouled," and the R sometimes stands for Repair.
One of the sharper military analysts I know has just returned from a tour of that sorrowful nation, which has been at war continuously since the Soviet Army invaded it in late 1979.
Joan S. Williams never talked about the changes that resulted after she sat at Wichita Dockum Drugs store's segregated lunch counter in July 1958. But in those 60 minutes of her life, she helped make history.
Williams said her mother died without knowing that she and other Wichita Branch NAACP youth group members desegregated the Dockum lunch counter and all Rexall drug store lunch counters across Kansas.
To recognize the sit-in's 50th anniversary, national NAACP leaders are planning to come to Wichita on Aug. 9 to march in honor of the event, which is expected to draw national media attention. About 1,500 people are expected to march, according to the local NAACP branch.
BOSTON — Americans are likely to be exposed to unacceptable side effects of FDA-approved drugs such as Vioxx in the future because of fatal flaws in the way new drugs are tested and marketed, according to research to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
"Drug disasters are literally built into the current system of drug testing and approvals in the United States," said Donald Light, the sociologist who authored the study and a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. "Recent changes in the system have only increased the proportion of new drugs with serious risks."
The political landscape is littered with squandered opportunities to avert the $4-a-gallon gasoline mess we find ourselves in now. Americans would be using far less gas — and consumers and the automobile industry would be much better off — if Congress had summoned the wisdom and political courage 20, 10, even five years ago to impose tough fuel economy standards on the nation’s transportation fleet.
Another such opportunity is fast approaching, and it would be foolish to miss it. On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — the federal agency that sets fuel standards — will hold hearings on a timetable that it has proposed for meeting the new fuel economy standards established in the 2007 energy act.
THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
By Jane Mayer.
Illustrated. 392 pp. Doubleday. $27.50.
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.
In fairness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, who could not have imagined the worst and contemplated extraordinary efforts to prevent it? But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.
By Bonnie Azab Powell
01 Aug 2008
One of the most encouraging things about the sustainable-food movement is how effortlessly it crosses traditional political-party, religious, ethnic, and other lines. The right to good, clean, and fair food, to borrow Slow Food's shorthand, seems to unite people who'd never otherwise find themselves chatting at the same party: Home schoolers and dreadlocked hippies, libertarian DIYers and heartland moms.
But there are little pockets of polarization where brawls can break out. One of them is the so-called elitism of such food. The biggest hot-button issue by far, though, is that of transgenic crops. The food movement's Christian wing opposes it for religious reasons, the Berkeley brigade for dogmatic ones, the moms out of health fears. Those with science or technology backgrounds, however, tend to see genetically modified organisms as just another tool in the how-we-are-going-to-feed-the-world toolbox -- and tend to get pretty impatient with those who fear them.
With the American housing market in its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Bush is authorising new legislation to pave the way for massive new government intervention designed to slow the slide.
The intervention would come as a little known quirk of US law threatens to drive down house prices even faster.
This article originally appeared on Health Beat.
Thanks to the unbridled rise in health care prices, Medicare is going broke. As I mentioned in a recent post, four years ago the Medicare trust fund that pays for hospital stays started to run out of money. In 2004 the fund began paying out more than it takes in through payroll taxes.
"Since then, the balance in the fund, combined with interest income on that balance, has kept the fund solvent. But in just 11 years, it will be exhausted," the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) reported in March. "Revenues from payroll taxes collected in that year will cover only 79 percent of projected benefit expenditures." And each year after 2019, the shortfall will grow larger.
Al Gore's heroic speech challenging us to make our electrical system 100 percent renewable promised it would simultaneously address three major crises: the weak economy, catastrophic climate change and the dire national security problems inherent in our dependence on imported oil.
He got two out of three right. A crash renewable electricity initiative would provide an immediate boost to our economy and could slow climate change, since electricity accounts for about a third of our overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Over one million U.S. homeowners have already lost their homes due to foreclosures since the mortgage crisis began last summer. Another one million homeowners are 90 days past due on their mortgages (foreclosure notices usually go out after 90 days) and two million more are 30 days past due, so three million more households may face foreclosure in the months ahead. If current policies do not change, it is estimated that up to five million homeowners would lose their homes due to foreclosure over the next few years. Five million is roughly 10% of the total number of homes with mortgages. This is clearly the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, and will wreck havoc in the lives of millions of families unless something is done. A high foreclosure rate also has a deteriorating effect on surrounding neighborhoods, further depressing housing prices and quality of life.
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.
The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Friday it has warned U.S. store managers in recent weeks about the possible consequences of a labor-friendly bill backed by Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama that would make it easier for workers to form unions.
But the retailer, which has kept its U.S. stores free of unions, stressed it was not telling employees how to vote.
President Bush seems to be slowly turning the nation's massive surveillance apparatus upon its citizens, and some worry that administration assurances to protect civil liberties are nothing but empty promises.
With his update to a decades-old executive order governing the Intelligence Community, Bush is giving the Director of National Intelligence and the 16 agencies of the US Intelligence Community more power to access and share sensitive information on Americans with little to no independent oversight. The update to Executive Order 12333, first issued by former President Ronald Reagan, introduces a more prominent role for the Attorney General in approving intelligence gathering methods, calls for collaboration with local law enforcement agencies, eases limits on how information can be shared and urges cooperation between the IC and private companies.
Recently the Web site The Politico asked Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, why she was blocking attempts to tack offshore drilling amendments onto appropriations bills. “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she replied.
I’m glad to hear it. But I’m still worried about the planet’s prospects.
True, Ms. Pelosi’s remark was a happy reminder that environmental policy is no longer in the hands of crazy people. Remember, less than two years ago Senator James Inhofe — a conspiracy theorist who insists that global warming is a “gigantic hoax” perpetrated by the scientific community — was the chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.
Research published in the American Sociological Review shows presidential approval ratings influenced by personal links to victims of Iraq War, September 11
DAVIS, CALIF. — Those who know someone who died in the Iraq War or 9/11 terrorist attacks are less likely to approve of President Bush’s performance in office than people who have no such connections, according to new research from the University of California, Davis. The pattern holds true for Republicans as well as Democrats, conservatives as well as liberals, and across all races, ages, education levels and incomes.Oil prices ended slightly higher Friday, pushing back above $125 a barrel as the threat of a conflict with Iran rattled energy markets after a week of wild swings.
The gains, however, were limited by lingering beliefs that fuel prices are still too high for cash-strapped Americans who are already cutting back on driving to save money.
In another sign of waning demand for gasoline, U.S. filling stations hungry for business lowered the price of a gallon of regular overnight by just over a penny on average to $3.898, according to auto club AAA, Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express. Gas is down 5.2 percent from record high of $4.114 a gallon reached July 17.
Stores, factories and other businesses large and small showed workers the door last month, sending unemployment to its highest rate in four years and adding to the evidence an economic recovery remains far off.
Employers clamped down on hiring and cut 51,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department said Friday. The economy has shed jobs each month this year — 463,000 in all.
The unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, up from 5.5 percent in June.
The media’s moment of disillusionment with John McCain appears to be at hand. Even Joe Klein has finally noticed that McCain’s profile is beginning to resemble the endomorphic shadow of his backstage advisor, Karl Rove, not one of the faces on Mt. Rushmore.
It’s all very predictable – about as predictable as the media’s abrupt discovery in the summer of 2005, as New Orleans sank beneath the waves, that the president of the United States was, gasp!, an incompetent boob.
But anyone who’s studied McCain’s career with any intellectual detachment at all (as opposed to the hagiographic tendencies of his media cheerleading claque) could have told you: The truth about John McCain is that he'll do just about anything and say just about anything to win. He always has. He's just been more clever (and cynical) than most in how he goes about it.
The forthcoming paperback edition of Scahill's book on Blackwater, which appeared in hardcover in February 2007, will include 100 pages of new material, including a discussion of last September's shooting spree in Baghdad by Blackwater operatives -- which killed 17 Iraqi civilians but for which nobody has ever been charged.
Prince George's County Police said Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo brought a 32-pound package of marijuana into his home that had been delivered by officers posing as delivery men. The Tuesday evening raid was conducted by county police narcotics officers and a sheriff's office SWAT Team.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.
Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.
Two different -- yet ultimately interlinked -- issues relating to the "homosexual agenda" are agitating the folks at the Tupelo, Mississippi-based headquarters of Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) these days. One is your basic AFA-sponsored boycott; the other, according to Wildmon, will determine the final outcome of America's "culture wars."
Wildmon is simultaneously leading an effort to boycott the fast food giant McDonald's, and marshaling the troops in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative that would reverse the state's Supreme Court recent decision in support of gay marriage.
Displaying the startling prescience and unconventional insights that have long been the hallmark of his magazine, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait wrote on June 30:
The best aspect of a McCain presidency is that, while it would probably follow the policies of George W. Bush, it would put an end to the politics of Karl Rove . . . . In Bush’s Washington, critics are enemies to be dismissed rather than engaged. A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.
From The New York Times Editorial Page, yesterday:
On July 3, news reports said Senator John McCain, worried that he might lose the election before it truly started, opened his doors to disciples of Karl Rove from the 2004 campaign and the Bush White House. Less than a month later, the results are on full display. The candidate who started out talking about high-minded, civil debate has wholeheartedly adopted Mr. Rove’s low-minded and uncivil playbook.
WASHINGTON - July 31 - Even though it is already experiencing record profits, the oil and gas industry is set to receive at least $33 billion in handouts from taxpayers over the next five years, according to a new analysis released today by Friends of the Earth.
“This is a tremendous sum for taxpayers to be doling out to the oil and gas industry,” said Friends of the Earth’s Erich Pica, who authored the analysis. “The corporate fat cats at these big oil companies are already earning record profits—they don’t need our tax dollars too. There are far smarter places to use this money, including bringing down energy costs by investing in the clean power sources of the future, such as wind and solar.”
Posted on Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Credit cards, as most people theoretically understand, can turn into the 21 st century equivalent of sharecropping. First, you borrow from The Man to get your cotton planted (or maybe to buy that new flat-screen HDTV ). Comes picking time (or the warranty runs out ) and you’re likely to discover, in the words of an old country song, that you “owe your soul to the company store.” Not to mention late fees and a big jump in the interest rate. Meanwhile, you’re getting letters daily offering you a new card at temptingly low rates for the first six months. Why not double down ? Hey, your 15-year-old’s being offered a platinum card with the logo of his high school’s mascot. Shoot, I’ve got a Charolais calf named Layla who’s probably eligible for EZ-Credit today. Basically, anybody who can walk and chew cud at the same time can end up owing a half-dozen company stores.
We are an odd group, we Unitarians.
Conventional wisdom says that we're soft in all the places our society values toughness. Our refusal to adhere to any dogma must mean that we're soft in our convictions. Our reflexive open-mindedness is often derided as evidence that we're soft in the head. Our persistent and gentle insistence on liberal values is evidence of hearts too soft to set boundaries. And all of this together leads to a public image of a mushy gathering of feckless intellectuals that somehow lacks cohesion, backbone, focus, or purpose.
As I watched the right pour out its rain of fury on Barack Obama after his Berlin speech I couldn't help but think of poor old Wile E. Coyote, raging impotently as the Road Runner zips through one of his carefully prepared snares.
Over the years conservatives have invested considerable capital, and enjoyed considerable success, in making "old Europe" a veritable synonym for all that is effete and snobbish and Chablis-drinking and just plain alien about liberalism. "Europe" was a bit of symbolism they thought they had tarnished beyond redemption; a well they had poisoned for good.
Montreal, July 30, 2008 – Living near city expressways is associated with adverse birth effects on expectant mothers and their newborns, according to a novel study with global implications. In the August edition of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, scientists from the Université de Montréal and the University of South Australia reveal that women living closest to expressways are more vulnerable to highway pollution – especially affluent mothers.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told House members Tuesday that, if he wins the presidency, one of his first acts will be to review every executive order signed by President Bush.
It was one of the few specifics the Illinois senator offered to the House Democratic Caucus in a policy and politics pep rally Tuesday night intended to fire up fellow Democrats for the convention and the fall campaign.
WITH JUST a few months left in office, President Bush is still doing the bidding of social conservatives who oppose women's reproductive freedoms. Under the guise of rules to protect antiabortion nurses and doctors from discrimination in hiring, a proposed new regulation would expand the definition of abortion to include any form of contraception that can work by stopping implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. This can include common birth-control pills, emergency contraception, and the intra-uterine device, or IUD. Doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of personal conscience already are protected by law.
The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation's sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions that took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name.
Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.
Before commencing deliberations, jury foreman Sam Hendrix began each day with his fellow jurors by holding hands and saying a payer. They prayed for the defendants, including former Governor Don Siegelman, who had been indicted for bribery and government corruption. "We didn't want to crucify people," Hendrix told the Auburn Villager, "but we did want to send a message."
As for the jury comprised of five whites and seven blacks, "we were all really good friends," Hendrix told the Montgomery Advertiser in July 2006. "There was a bond between us. It never got personal. I think we were very fortunate that we had a very congenial group of people who respected each other and listened to each other."
SAN DIEGO--There's a debate in the media about the recession. On the right are those who say that the economy has never been better. Not so fast, says the official left: we've (just) started a recession.
Phil Gramm, McCain's former economic advisor, leads the School of Sunny Optimism. "This is a mental recession," said Gramm. "We may have a recession, we haven't had one yet. We have sort of become a nation of whiners." Given his day job, you have to admire his attitude. UBS Investment Bank, which employs Gramm as its vice chairman, was recently forced to write off $38 billion in bad debts because of its exposure to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. All its profits since 2004 have been wiped out.
The price tag will rise if the repairs are delayed, the group said.
"States simply cannot keep up with bridge maintenance," the report warns, adding that 73 percent of U.S. road traffic -- and 90 percent of truck traffic -- travels over state-owned bridges.
The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group's leaders, a new study contends.
"Keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight," said the study by the federally funded Rand research center, an organization that counsels the Pentagon.
Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term "war on terror" and replace it with "counterterrorism."
By absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and from the human use of fossil fuels, the world's seas function as a giant buffer for the Earth's life support system. The chemical balance of the sea has long been regarded as immovable. Today, researchers know that the pH of the sea's surface water has gone down by 0.1, or 25 percent, just since the beginning of industrialisation just over a century ago. Jon Havenhand and Michael Thorndyke, researchers at the University of Gothenburg, along with colleagues in Australia, have studied how this acidification process affects marine animal life.
As part of the study, which is one of the world's first on this subject, they have allowed sea urchins of the species Heliocidaris erythrogramma to fertilise themselves in water where the pH has been lowered from its normal 8.1 to a pH value of 7.7. This means an environment three times as acidic, and corresponds to the change expected by the year 2100. The results are alarming.
HOUSTON -- With a war in Iraq and fighting on the rise in Afghanistan, the struggle to bring in new U.S. Army recruits is heating up again.
And Irving Gonzales, 18, got caught up in it all.
As his family’s oldest male, he feels he has to do whatever it takes to help out his single mom. For him, that means working long hours at his after-school job.
In one disgraceful example, Goodling refused to hire “one of the leading terrorism prosecutors in the country” because his wife was a Democrat:
The question we face in late July, as regulators seize two more banks, is: will we be engulfed by a further collapse in our economy or can the damage be contained, or, even turned around?
We know what goes up must come down but when will what's down go back up?
It isn't looking good -- and, even now, the two presumptive major party presidential candidates are talking about everything but this deepening crisis. They are debating terrorists and Afghanistan and how to meander out of Iraq but not the reality that so many Americans are living with: a squeeze that is leaving so many of us broke, in deeper and deeper debt and disgusted.
by Greg Palast
In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.
In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters.
In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.
In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.By Franklin Paul
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. retail gasoline prices fell sharply in the last two weeks, just below $4 a gallon, in line with retreating crude oil markets, and prices at the pump may slide further, an industry analyst said on Sunday.
The U.S. average retail price for self-serve, regular unleaded gasoline fell to $3.9959, off nearly 12 cents in the past two weeks, according to the Lundberg nationwide survey of about 7,000 gas stations.
